Drama Ranter

You should watch A Splendid Match then if you haven’t watched it

I just discovered this, and it was so good and sweet. And oh so mature. Where can I watch something like this? And the OSTs were so…🥹 What a rare, unexpected find ❤️

Must I watch the prequel to understand this?

In a sea of angsty, serious dramas, this was so refreshing. And quite good. Just two adults falling in love, being genuine with each other, possessing relatable weaknesses, and genuinely trying to make their relationship work. This became a really mature workplace romance while still being entertaining enough.

A good watch in all. In as much as I would like to, I won’t be seeing you at work tomorrow. Signing off now 🥹❤️

Seems the scriptwriter initially wrote a 24 episode quality drama only for the production team to shake their head and say, ‘nay, ain’t gotta happen…Raise it by ten more episodes’, then finally settled for this 32 episode mess that was once something akin to epic but now has me watching a 40 minute episode in 2 minutes.

Never knew that was possible, but I’m beginning to discover new things about my watching abilities.

Ke Ying is here? She’s quite the understated gem given I enjoyed her performance in Perfect Match and A Familiar Stranger. Makes me more excited for this one.

Missing the wheelchair already. RIP 💔

Did you just throw a shade at our WuWu couple? Wow.

Gotta give the shaman her flowers. In this crazy world, she’s the only one who takes Seo-Ri’s ‘craziness’ with quite the stride. And their bond is quite cute.

Lol… love the sarcasm with POJ. You captured my thoughts on that drama. And I respect your thoughts although you got me wrong. I am well aware that Li Zhen super powers feel earned. That I respect. And I’m not here for the romance. Far be it. But as a story teller myself, I get super finicky with over-recycled plot armor, not like I expect you to understand that. Compared to POJ, please, The Heir is far better in terms of FL’s character development. I’m almost rage baited at the comparison. However I have watched Florished Peony amongst the many business dramas you mentioned, and compared to the ML/other supporting character developments in those dramas, The Heir is indeed lacking. The corrupt minister/ML in FP was a side dish, but still a well cooked one. Even his guard seems to have more character development than our ML here. I’m yet to see that here. Where did the plot with gathering funds for the army go to? Something that is a far serious matter? But yes, I respect and understand your perspective. Although you spoiled me with the tribute ink result (haven’t reached there yet.

I love this drama. At least at the beginning, I believed I loved it a lot. But now? Something seems off. And without repeating all the rants made by previous commenters, let me just say this drama has unfortunately ended up as the prime result of what happens when you push the FL to be so ‘unrealistically’ strong with enough plot armor to raise an army all at the cost of the underdevelopment of other promising characters.

Our writers gave us “The Heir” who knows so much about ink making, has a natural flair for it, can run and manage an ink shop, and now, can even run and manage an entire ancient family of ink makers—in fact, she is now the promised messiah of the LI family. In CDrama Land, that I can understand. But what happened to the ML? And the grandfather (YeYe)? And the Tian family (I was expecting some tough villainity/rivalry)? It was if the writer got to a point and forgot that they are other characters beyond Li Zhen. So she is shoved suffocatingly to our face until all we see and hear is her and honestly, that is tiring.

Especially when we were promised a buffet and now all we get is French toast. It might be made with egg and milk, but the end product is still one meal. Variety is lost unfortunately and that is what happened here. At the beginning we had the Lou family (Luo Ming Song the mad ink maker) and their theatrical demise that promised something sinister but juicy for the future episodes, the Tian Family that promised treachery and shaking up the ink industry. The ML (the Luo manchild who was supposed to go through an amazing character arc and grow up—(oh, we got the character, but the arc flew out of the window). And guess what?

All we have now is Li Zhen. And don’t get me started on the fact that she’s the FL/main character because I’m pretty I ordered a rich buffet spread, so what is this? I like French toast but where is the tea? I suppose the evil aunt drowned in it. Never have I seen so much screen time being wasted on recycled cheap plot of FL proving herself through trials and tribulations again and again while the plot remains stale. Yeah, exactly like stale French toast.

I am still watching it though. I still like it though. Doesn’t make me any less scammed than I am…Though.

Then you might consider watching The Tale Of Lady Ok. She was absolutely amazing there, and it’s under the Historical genre (Sageuk) which is one of my favorite genre. K-Dramas hardly do the genre justice as much as Chinese dramas, but The Tale of Lady Ok was surprisingly really good and the FL carried the role with finesse.

Wow. You’ve said it all. The world building wasn’t landing as well as it should have and that I could forgive. But the storyline? The supposed buildup to every situation? It fell so flat it was quite shocking considering the cast ensemble and budget. The storytelling here is quite weak. It’s like they slapped all these situations that we are supposed to ‘awwww’ at yet we’re out of place.

Why is he abolishing the monarchy? What’s the motive? The pain point? Where the hell did the foreshadowing go to? Why in the hell do the producers believe they can suddenly slap that to our face and we will just take and gobble it up like that? Lol. And the PM’s villainy? What the…? This drama was trying to do so much and yet it ended up achieving nothing. And it has nothing to do with the number of episodes, no. This is evidence of what poor writing can do even the most exciting storylines. This one had -10 depth. The depth level ended up so shallow they now owe all the audience they baited into watching this delicious mess.

At episode 10, I was prepared to finish this and call it a day despite its shortcomings. That was until episode 11 happened. The way I shut my laptop hard when they began to yap about abolishing the monarchy. Fine. I will still finish this. But it’s now a 7.5 at most. 5 goes to the cast and 2.5 to whatever will remain of this mess after E12 airs.

When ML first proposed to the FL, I could remember screaming soundlessly on my bed while kicking my feet because that direction was so unexpected and in the best way. Now that they have kissed (Or in Qinpu’s language; 👉👈) I am so speechless and I’m just swooning. Who knew we would get such an assertive, understanding ML! And the FL’s response! The finger movements that shocked both I and the ML 🫣, Then the ML’s finger movement response in kind! Just how many shot did it take?!

Such great acting of conveying the most minuscule yet profound expressions of likeness now morphed to love! I really love the maturity in this one… and then the carriage scene happened! The blushing of the FL! The ML’s eye expressions and beautiful smiles! Remember when ML said “You can now start thinking of it” doing the first proposal? In the carriage scene, from FL’s body language it was clear that she was more than thinking of it! Even if she won’t admit it! Okay, I’m so sat for this drama. I actually thought this would be one of the dramas I would skip for this year, so glad I didn’t. So far, it sits in my top 20%

Oh, but I’m not triggered. And I believe I said I don’t know about the novel.

Ye Xian is extremely intelligent? Are we watching the same drama. I don’t know what is in the novel, but here we have a bratty boy who can’t even tell ML was saving him when the whole stuff with removing the crown prince companion happened. Lol, the audacity to even pretend he was smart and say the ML was scared of him in that situation had me rolling

So you counted the number of sentences? For a very intelligent creature you’ve a lot of spare time. But I rest my case here, bye. 😂

I thought it was going to happen earlier at the hotel room, duh. We have 2 adults who have the hots for each other. This is no blush-me- I blush you back kdrama where the kiss is pretty timed and dragged till episode 8,9,10 because it’s industry standard. Our leads here didn’t sign up for an idol project if that’s what you are looking for.

I had to rewatch again to see that sharp glare Lu QianQiao cut A’Sheng during that last hug 😂. If that ‘little girl’ is not careful enough, that glare could have almost incinerated her at the spot.

Just came here to scream, “Sifeng!”