Fantasy Romance with all the pretty and all the emotions but one big flaw

I was fully prepared to drop this after one episode, the overly literal title, the fact that it was Xianxia, which almost never clicks with me. I expected a messy storyline, cringey costumes and bad cgi. Well, there is some bad cgi and there are definitely cringey costumes, but a lot of the time this drama is really, really pretty to the point that you sometimes feel like you look at a painting. The costume and the scenery department went all in on this one and the results are very hit or miss and always over the top, but there is a real cohesive aesthetic, that I actually liked.

The star of this show for me is the cast. I feel like they really found the perfect person or at least a very good choice for each and every main and supportive role. Both, Esther Yu and Dylan Wang handle the numerous personality shifts of their characters really well, especially Dylan Wang impressed me. See, I think male leads are often overrated, people see a pretty boy and are like “He is such a good actor! What? Hey, his character is meant to have no emotions!” Dylan Wang not only has emotions, the stuff he is able to say with a straight face is downright impressive, and he really carries a show that is so extra sometimes that it could have gone terribly wrong. And if you start this drama and you are annoyed by another squeaky, dumb female lead, stay strong. If a female lead ever had a right to be naïve and squeaky, it is that one, and she has a good amount of growth to a point, where she does some pretty badass things.

So how is the writing? This is maybe the most surprising part of this drama. The story actually had very good pacing until the last 6 or 7 episodes. There was always something relevant and engaging happening, there was character development, even the side characters where surprisingly fleshed out, and it is one of the rare dramas that actually succeeds in building up a relationship from “I want to kill you” to greatest love of all time, with all the various stages of companionship to a love that is hard to accept but too strong to ignore. When done right this is a beautiful process that a lot of dramas still mess up, but this one does it right and I think it is worth a watch for that alone.

So why only 8 points will you ask. So, while I just praised the writing I also have to say, that there definitely are messy parts, where things don’t add up, established rules are forgotten or not mentioned again, new rules are made up out of nowhere and just a lot of general “Oh, there is this person/artefact/exception that I just remembered that can help us” to the point of: “Stuff just happens! Tadaaaa!” And while I still would have given the drama a 9, it is that last part that made it into an 8.
I already mentioned the pacing problem towards the end (which might not be a writing but an editing problem), some scenes where drawn out to the point where I had to skip ahead a few minutes, other things that were worth exploring stayed underdeveloped. There was definitely one “I will sacrifice myself for you/the world”-loop too many and I wish the story would have ended a few episodes earlier. But the gravest sin of this drama is the fact that after putting us through an amazing emotional wringer for 36 episodes, it gives us the most half-assed, rushed and anticlimactic ending of all time (see: “Stuff happens! Tadaaa!”). I don’t know what happened. Was the editing team rushed? Did they have to stop filming early? Ran out of ideas? Was the drama supposed to have another ending and they just had to scramble something together? I don’t know. All I know is that it feels awful. You know that feeling when you ride out the last waves of a drama you really enjoyed? Yeah, not here. All the love and emotion I had for a flawed but still lovely drama just hung there, unresolved.

I still think it is worth watching, especially if you like the aesthetic of the promo pics, because at the very least your eyes will get a feast. It’s a fun and engaging Fantasy Romance. Just brace yourself a little for the end.

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Watch the cute and skip the rest ... or don't watch at all

I picked this drama up because I saw that it's the screenwriter of "Lost Romance", which had a dense and smart narrative that is rare for romantic comedies. So I went into this one and found that it was the absolute opposite.
The main couple here is cute, and the way it starts out makes you excited for them. Very early on there is a scene where he (a hairdresser) washes her hair and she closes her eyes and dreams about being caressed and tenderly kissed and that was such a beautiful scene. But in the end it all fizzles out by a ton of back and forth in a sea of the same tropes and the continued und mostly uninteresting drama in the female lead's company that seems to be the worst dating agency on earth. At some point you just start skipping and stop caring.

There are two other couples. An older one which I loved because dramas so rarely features older romances, and it was cute. But that was it. It was cute. It was not enough to carry this drama.
And then there is a gay couple. I enjoyed those two, the actors did a great job, but in the end it was the same old: "Homophobic womanizer turns gay for you" trope. I have seen that a million times 10 years ago, when I was very much into BL/yaoi. And I see we are still not able to call it bi or pan? "I like women, but I also like him." What a shame.
I feel like this pairing if explored beyond the trope could have helped carry those 18 episodes that the main couple could not fill. The potential was absolutely there but the execution wasn't, so all that is left is again: They were cute.

And now to the part that made me drop the drama instead of just skipping to the end. Warning: Spoiler ahead.
The female lead has an amazing best friend who is a confident, independant and carefree woman who loves partying and hooking up. At some point she has an affair with our womanizer turning gay. She becomes pregnant and decides to get an abbortion. And then the womanizer's boyfriend barges in, when she is already on the table and forcefully carries her out, because he wants a baby from the person he loves (a guy he's been with for like a week). Nope. Just nope. This crosses so many damn lines that I can't even.
That part did not have to be written this way. If you want to feature a modern family, you can have your characters talk to each other, find an arrangement they are all happy with, but a guy forcefully dragging a woman out of a clinic after she made a healthcare decision for herself because he wants a baby is not even close to romantic. And that is when I dropped the drama, because nothing that could come from this will ever give me a fuzzy feeling.

It's a shame, really. There are good things, the cute, the intimacy that would be unthinkable in a chinese drama, gay characters that are more than a goofy sidekick, but it is mostly ruined by a dragging storyline and problematic stuff like the above mentioned and the fat shaming I haven't even talked about. So yeah, watch for the cute and make good use of the fast forward button or skip this one all along.

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