DramaloverPanda

The Glory tries to create a world of danger, conspiracy, and deception with beautiful costume design, attractive casting, and the promise of a slow burn romance. What it delivers however is a nonsensical plot, wooden acting, and nonexistent romance. The beginning of the drama has the ability to hook your interest with its cunning female lead and ruthless male lead as they outsmart everyone around them but the latter half has both a tonal and idealogical shift that feels disjointed from the previous half of the story often leaning heavily into feminist view points and offering even less believable schemes. While the first half can be suspenseful the second half is frequently boring.

Zhuang Hanyan, a woman doomed at her birth who is cast out to be abused through her youth, returns in hopes to find a home and a family but is met with a world of unimaginable peril and cruelty. Fiercely intelligent and unmovingly determined Hanyan navigates her new family dynamics and their dangers like a fish through water just to find some kind of warmth and love to call her own. Fu Yun Xi is methodical and exacting. The pair, somewhere between allies and enemies, navigate the treacherous schemes in the Capital and outmaneuver in order to protect those they hold dear.

This show has its gripping parts especially in the first half but there are some glaring flaws in the story and execution. The logic in this requires you to suspend belief quite a lot and not look closely at anything. Hanyan was constantly abused but portrayed as highly intelligent and is able to thwart and anticipate all the schemes thrown at her with only one line of dialogue trying to explain her intelligence. Things like secret meetings that aren't ensured to be secret, time lines to get things done, connections and influence that aren't really explained, showing up in places at just the right times, being somewhere and not being seen without any actual show of effort to be secretive, etc. The further you get into this drama the more it relies on pushing the story forward through threadbare schemes and convenient timing. Very little is explained about what, how, and why something is happening with the low budget becoming obvious in the quality of storytelling the further the story progresses.

The acting in this drama is the other glaring flaw in that it is lackluster and emotionless. The main leads are good at cold indifference but lack the chemistry and emotional scenes to truly sell a love story. In fact the acting across the board is painfully wooden with many delivering lines in the same monotone way and only giving one facial expression for the entirety of the drama. There are two characters specifically that I actually find to be acted exceptionally poorly. Zhuang Yushan is the typical one dimensional half sister that is spoiled, mean spirited and obsessed with a man she can never have. From the poor styling for this character to the unconvincing performance from the actress any screen time with her leaves me in annoyance. There are scenes where she is angry and her violent outburst that should show her selfishness ends up instead being portrayed more like a toddler throwing a tantrum. Her movements are not smooth or natural, taking you out of the immersion of the story. The other is Zhuang Shi Yang, Hanyan's father. Constructed to be a master manipulator that wears sheeps clothing his performance is wooden and hollow. The whisper raspy way of speaking and how the actor carries himself to try and portray weakness is distracting and uncompelling. In contrast, Hanyan's mother is acted on a much larger emotional scope with her insanity and hatred well depicted as well as Zhou Ruyin, her father's concubine, while unlikeable still gives a more rounded performance.

I would mostly classify this as a revenge drama and would advise you tamper any expectations for a love story but also be wary of the second half of the drama which can feel like a slog to get through after the first half.