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A Masterclass in Character Regression and Viewer Fatigue
This played out more like a messy, modern soap opera rather than a disciplined wuxia epic.
I started this drama thrilled to see Liu Shishi step away from her infamous "tragic, elegant, tearful heroine" trope to play a ruthless, hardened assassin. How wrong I was! The director leaned heavily into her beautiful teary-eyed face, completely sacrificing the logical restraint of a legendary assassin for melodramatic tears.
As for the ML, his acting reminded me ge was an idol first. Every time Ning Yuanzhou was supposed to be deeply moved or devastated, his emotional delivery felt entirely manufactured. There was no real weight to his emotions. His classical acting training for period dramas shows its limitations here. Navigating intense, layered historical suspense & grief requires subtle physical & facial changes that he didn't quite land, whuch left me completely detached.
The narrative choices in the latter half completely ruined the momentum for me. The mission to rescue that utterly unworthy Emperor dragged on for so long that I couldn't care less whether he lived or died at the Palace before being rescued!
Meanwhile, the storyline between Ruyi and Jiu (Li Tongguang) was just pathetic. She went from giving him fierce reality checks to enabling his manic, obsessive behaviour. When he literally told her he would wait around until she got tired of the ML, she didn't even reject him. And what was wuth letting him give her a back hug?! Some of tge editing was jagged and off.
While their actual love story had great chemistry, I have never heard a wuxia couple yap so much! Their endless relationship debriefs felt like a modern couple's therapy session rather than a historical martial arts epic. By the end, I suffered from such severe viewer fatigue that I genuinely stopped caring about their survival and just wanted them dead 😆
Ironically, the final ending itself was perfect for me, but getting there was such a draining slog that it almost wasn't worth the exhaustion.
I started this drama thrilled to see Liu Shishi step away from her infamous "tragic, elegant, tearful heroine" trope to play a ruthless, hardened assassin. How wrong I was! The director leaned heavily into her beautiful teary-eyed face, completely sacrificing the logical restraint of a legendary assassin for melodramatic tears.
As for the ML, his acting reminded me ge was an idol first. Every time Ning Yuanzhou was supposed to be deeply moved or devastated, his emotional delivery felt entirely manufactured. There was no real weight to his emotions. His classical acting training for period dramas shows its limitations here. Navigating intense, layered historical suspense & grief requires subtle physical & facial changes that he didn't quite land, whuch left me completely detached.
The narrative choices in the latter half completely ruined the momentum for me. The mission to rescue that utterly unworthy Emperor dragged on for so long that I couldn't care less whether he lived or died at the Palace before being rescued!
Meanwhile, the storyline between Ruyi and Jiu (Li Tongguang) was just pathetic. She went from giving him fierce reality checks to enabling his manic, obsessive behaviour. When he literally told her he would wait around until she got tired of the ML, she didn't even reject him. And what was wuth letting him give her a back hug?! Some of tge editing was jagged and off.
While their actual love story had great chemistry, I have never heard a wuxia couple yap so much! Their endless relationship debriefs felt like a modern couple's therapy session rather than a historical martial arts epic. By the end, I suffered from such severe viewer fatigue that I genuinely stopped caring about their survival and just wanted them dead 😆
Ironically, the final ending itself was perfect for me, but getting there was such a draining slog that it almost wasn't worth the exhaustion.
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