Acrobit12

The novel is VERY different. Xia Jing Shi is a much more positive character.

Yes to the first question. I am not sure about the second.

Yes, but we find out later that her master asked her to.

Yes

The first arc was so good that it was really hard for the second and third arcs to live up to it. Although I have to say, the third arc really grew on me towards the end. Overall, a great watch. 9.5/10

That's why I said the Cultural Revolution is likely more relevant, since that is when the purges of the communist party elite really started happening. The age of Wen's son looks correct for that time too. I didn't mean to imply they started at the same time, sorry if I wasn't being clear.

I think we have to keep in mind that this drama is aimed at Chinese viewers who know that bad things are coming and that nothing good will happen to anybody in the next 20+ years.

As far as I understood it, Yang just collapsed from overwork/was so stressed he couldn't sleep and she was told to visit him on behalf of the youth committee or the party organization or whatever it was called.

Cultural Revolution may be more to the point, Great Leap Forward was more of an economic reform movement.

The Cultural Revolution/Great Leap Forward started. A lot of people denounced their parents. Many had to do it simply as a matter of survival.

I think Wen simply died of old age/associated ailments. He wasn't young to begin with.

As awful as I feel saying this, I think a lot of the cast members in the second arc are too old (by 10 or so years) for the characters they are supposed to portray and because of that the story isn't working well.

True, except that until the last moment I was expecting to be told something a long the lines that they worked for the underground and were executed by the Japanese, and could only relax and fully enjoy everything when it didn't happen.

How it ended? They lived, which is enough to ask in WWII Shanghai. The narrator just tells you they emigrated after the war and then the time jumps into the next arc.

Agreed. I really did love each and every second. It was absolutely the best of the 3 dramas.

Really enjoyed the first arc, both Cheng Lei and Jelly Lin were fantastic (and I very rarely watch Republican-era c-dramas). And I am glad it ended well (I kept bracing myself for a bad ending given the context and the times in which the story was taking place). Jury is out if the subsequent arcs can measure up.

This was great, I really needed that ending.

Possibly. As a viewer, I personally did not. To each their own.

I like both of these stories. Just not at the expense of the main couple/main storyline, which is what happened here.

I have enjoyed this, it was well done. The cast did a great job and the OST was nice. My only complaint, if you can even call it that, is that while I generally like ensemble cast shows, I would have liked to have seen a lot more of the mains, and this one had too much of the Evil Book Guy in the beginning/middle and too much of Mei Si/Liu Taizhen in the end. This is not a complaint about the actors - they were wonderful - it just wasn't the portion of the story I was interested in and the performance of the mains was still better and I wanted to see more of them.

That I would like to see.

She is great, I was shocked to learn that she is only 22.