PeachBlossomGoddess

The tea scene is a classic lesson of how a policy of strategic ambiguity should be practiced!

I long ago outgrew goody goody characters and don't need them to be that likeable or perfect either. They just need to be interesting and make me empathise with them. So I am going to miss the Lady in Red! Sad to say, I think her arc is over. Enter the next love rival (I think) who by comparison does not seem interesting at all.

Most drama watchers are women. So production companies invest more in female centric dramas.

They live in a dangerous world with a paranoid emperor capable of great cruelty to his own subjects. You can't be too good or principled and have slightly ruthless to survive that kind of monarch. And 6 years ago, he was young and naive enough to want to try to save the Shens. But his father and grandfather refused because their own situation was so shaky they couldn't even save themselves without Old Master Zhao's help. He never met the FL and thought she was dead and besides, theirs was not a love match. So he married to save his family and seemed to be genuinely excited about Zhao Xingtang - she was a great beauty after all. But she rejected him so high handedly and absolutely he must have suspected she loved someone else. She is as much to blame for their marriage's failure. And its not like she remained faithful to her first lover, she went on to have an affair with someone else. So yeah it was very utilitarian of him to use her family's influence until he no longer needed it and then discard her. But I think people that are so toxic together should divorce and it is completely normal to want to have kids so I can't really hold that part against him. As for why the FL chooses him, isn't that by definition? In any case, their story hasn't even begun yet so its too early anyway to say he is not the right guy for her.

Apparently the director is allowing the actors to tell their own character's story.

She was laughing at the plum blossoms in the snow because her mother's name was 雪梅/Xuemei or Snow Plum. She saw it as a sign her mother was still with her.

There is a wide variety of Chinese pastries I am not sure which ones you are referring to.It is common to make them with lard and flour, rice flour or mung bean flour and filled with red beans, lotus paste, mung bean paste, meat, scallions, hawthorne, osmanthus - basically ingredients that are indigenous to China.

No feet binding was not that prevalent during Ming dynasty, esp at the highest levels of nobility and among the royalty. It was only during Qing dynasty that it was widely practiced even among the royalty - largely bc they were just dumb peasants trying to prove they were noble.

Oh what big feet you have Cinderella!!!
Poker face Lanxiang! Poker face!!!

He is the emperor's trusted confidante and emperors can and have been known to elevate officials skipping ranks. Besides, this emperor was killing his political enemies left and right - down to 9 or 10 clans of execution - that leaves vast numbers of empty positions to fill.

Lol... for sure a soul swap would have led me to a show swap!

Lol - those themes that don't age well - one of my favorite Jin Yong novels, a widely regarded masterpiece The Duke of Mount Deer has the anti-hero protagonist collecting a bevy of women over the course of his adventures. No recent adaptation can do it justice bc all the harem parts which are core to the spirit of the story gets watered down or outright erased. In the novel Joy of Life, Fan Xian who died a virgin in his first life makes it his mission is to have sex with as many women as possible the second time around. Of course that part didn't make it into the drama although he has tons of platonic relationships with women!!!

Not to mention the Xu couple just wandering in carrying their dead child and then wandering off with the FL is just OTT impossible. I guess we were too disturbed and heartbroken by the content to really look at the entire setup critically.
https://www.163.com/dy/article/L6NI082H05565Y4V.html

The first episode was widely bashed by Chinese netizens for being full of holes. In reality the women would have been watched every minute and would not have had the privacy to to do what they did.

Yes of course she also wanted to be surrounded by her own spies. And the ML of course wouldn't want to sleep with one of her spies even though you are right, technically he can if he wants to. It is hinted that he may have slept with one of his maids that she married off to an idiot son of some shopkeeper. It was common during that time for young men of his social class to experiment with the chamber maids.

Yeah it was part of the legal code - for commoners it was only at age 40 when a childless man can take a concubine. And tbh outside of the rich merchant class, the ordinary peasant can't afford a concubine anyway. There were special rules for the nobility depending on their rank, like I think for princes they could have up to 10 concubines. The men can't exactly do whatever they want, esp if their wife is rich or also part of the nobility. As they keep their dowry and control over it and they have powerful families to protect them. That's why the ML and his family still does have to treat his wife with some basic curtesy/respect her rights even though he despises her.

That should be Du Zheng's sister - the squad leader who saved the ML's life and the one he wants to move into the empty rooms in his mansion. As per @sony-t below, her name should be Du Cuique but she hasn't appeared yet.

I believe the ML's mom mentioned that the Zhao family only rose to prominence after Old Master Zhao/Xingtang's grandpa entered officialdom - meaning they are new nobility and probably didn't have the long tradition of older noble families that educated their daughters.

Quite sure this is not live recorded. Bian Jiang is credited as the dubbing director and many known voice actors are in the credits. But Tan Songyun and Liu Xueyi are both dubbing themselves and it is possible some portions of their dialogue was live recorded but not enough for this to be considered a live recorded production. There are also obvious moments where the dialogue doesn't match the lip sync which is a dead giveaway.
https://weibo.com/2/detail/5342053475291041?utm_source=tv
I believe LLTG was live recorded - Zhao Lusi's voice was so faint she could barely be heard for large chunks of the time and you could hear the difference in the actor's voice volumes. It was amateur hour and a real chore for me to watch as I had to read subtitles bc I couldn't hear her dialogue most of the time. TROP was also live recorded but much better movie level actors in the cast that are used to performing live pulling it off like pros.
Liu Xueyi's lines are very good - in many of his dramas, he is clear enough to be recorded live in his solo scenes and they have been used without the need for dubbing over.

During Ming dynasty, if a legitimate wife of a nobleman has no children by age 25, two concubines can be selected, increasing to four if childless by age 30. The MIL sent in maids to attract him first with the plan only to give them official status as concubines after they get pregnant. That's why when the ML was away at war, Xingtang systematically got rid of the Lin family maids and surrounded herself with her own Zhao family maids. Who presumably would not sleep with the ML. And they are the only ones allowed to approach him or be in his presence. Whereas all the new MIL maids were third rank and were not allowed to even be seen in front of the master.