Skibbies

There's a female general, Qiu Jiu Shuang and that's about it. The wuxia bits isn't that wuxia-like, it's more to intro characters + establish background and relationship while she travels around.

Wang You Shuo sounds like he might be Yu Wu Yuan, at least I hope so, since i don't think he'd fit Huang Chao, he could play one of the supporting characters though. Xuan Lu I'm guessing would be Hua Chun Ran OR Feng Qi Wu, she'd fit both.

also lol this novel, good luck to people watching subs during the wuxia portion, since the otp have the same name in pinyin.

oh gosh. I actually rather enjoyed the beginning of the drama. Loved ML, and the two bestie's characterisations, I love the second otp so much, SML is so adorable and SFL is cunning and self serving but always supportive. FL have some moments that's very naive but she has enough smart moments + she sync with ML when working together later so I like her okay too. I actually rather like all the business stuff they do, and the whole everything is in control thing, it's nice to actually have otp that actually look like they can do a job and are competent.

Romance-wise , the struggle of ML between revenge and romance is kind of interesting, and I liked his gradual change and development. There were some real weird editing moments though, like ep 19. There's two really good spot to end the story if you just tag on the ending to revenge, at ep 20 and ep 30, I personally would have loved the drama if it ended at ep 30. From then onwards, it just seem to a lot of force misunderstanding, it's not that you can't have separation, but at least make it flow. ALSO don't add the a third male lead who wasn't even relevant till now? What was the point of that? He's not a real competition, and the way several situations were handled broke FL, SFL and sometimes even ML's characterisation.

very late but since you haven't watched the drama, I'll answer anyways. romance is fairly minor in the drama, one of the love triangle is relevant to the plot, and it's not back and forth. There's another one with the other ML which is filler, but I think they dedicate maximum 2 or 3 episodes to it? and you can easily skip those scenes, since there's they jump between the two MLs.

Ni Ni was filming L&D when they were filming this. She would have been cast since ZZY essentially formed half the production, and i also don't think she's suited to play up playfulness for FL, she got lot of criticism for L&D due to that. I think this drama is too close in genre/general feel to tRoP too, even though the FL are fairly different, L&D was a better choice for her.

Zitan's, Hu Yao is nice though. but Wanru was nice in the novel too, so was sister in law (she's not in it much), I liked both Wanru and Hu Yao.

it's a week wait for vvip for A Girl Like Me if you bought the episodes though, it's only four days wait if you jump from vip to vvip.

TRP's vvip is also ahead of vip at any given point? except on wednesday? TRP's leaks have been due to vvip, which is little different from JoL's since theirs were from something else.

i didn't watch them sorry XD tencent's new drama A Girl Like Me also update once a week for vvip though, it's the same schedule of Joy of Life that I mentioned. It'd make more sense for them to space out vvip content like legend of fei, i think tencent did it for fei specifically to keep the buzz going + more prompt for impulsive purchase, since it features two high profile popular actors. but youku barely knows how to market its shows, i just don't expect anything from them. (zzy is well known and high profile, but she doesn't have guaranteed fans that will impulse buy regardless)

If we are talking about dissipating buzz, cnetizens already yelled at tencent for it with Joy of Life. I mention JoL because it's the first big drama that had vvip starting from the middle (previous dramas had it for ending), and with the leaks, you had people watching at 4 different rates. it destroyed drama discussion since you just get bombarded with spoilers everywhere you go. i'll note that even with full drama leak half way through the drama + vvip system, the view counts didn't drop. so you tend to retain viewers once you are 2 or 3 weeks into a drama, the leaks mostly affected new viewers that want to binge before the drama officially ended for vvip (there was a 10 days gap?)

i haven't looked at TRP's view count to see how it's doing, but my drama friends have been dropping it for various reasons (pacing, tropes, lack of ML)

huh didn't hear about that. I only know NRTA donated bunch of dramas to Hubei last year. They are constantly throwing up dramas tbh, it's about the same rate as usual I think, although they might be more likely to throw historical up before potential restrictions on them hits (there's rumour about it AGAIN, it'd be limited regardless come July since it's 100 years of cpc).

vip wait 2 days for episodes you *bought in advance*. vvip is watching ep 41 now, vip will get 41 next wednesday. JoL's (tencent produced, but they also sold it to iqiyi) schedule was like mon - wed vip 2 ep a day, vvip get the weekly 6 ep on monday and then you just sit and wait for a week. but then JoL got leaked on week 1, 2, and 4th week, different kind of leaking every week too lol. it's praying on people's compulsive watching habits, extra effective when the show is nearing the end.

I do think they started vvip too early, usually you do it half way through the drama, not 1/3 way through, but they did give 3 more ep per week, and dropped the price of vvip.

oh yeah i think i've seen the site before, but i can't remember from where. Minning Town is pretty well received iirc, and short! I'll probably watch it after Like a Flowing River.

I think she's meant to be like that though LOL. this story have a lot of classic tropes.

having it under tencent/iqyi wouldn't really make it update faster though, they both do vvip and in my experience, they also update once a week. youku is actually the only one that increase update days i think?

yeah sorry, I typo'ed, meant to say in the novel :P

I think it's a combination of things for general song, he's fairly capable.

Thanks for sharing! definitely pretty interesting look on how media/masses view Ying Zheng, I should get around to watching Hero and Emperor & Assassin sometime as well.

1. the novel has XQ as emperor in the end, but the drama might be different.
2. Song betrays XQ
3. He had concubines before in the novel, it's unclear if he slept with them, it'd be unrealistic if he didn't, but kind of odd if he didn't since he was like almost 30 when he married. But once he married Awu, they were kicked out.

Happy ending till the epilogue, drama might have changed the epilogue/trajectory of the ending according to rumours (author seem to have imply so on weibo)

The douban score is lower than what i'd expect, but it's not actually that terrible, i expect it to be low 7 (Minglan while it was airing), but high 6 (Serenade of Peaceful Joy while it was airing) would make sense too. tRoP's issue is pacing (and not buying tv ratings lmao), its big story problem doesn't pop up till later, so people bothered by pacing will drop it early and not rate it, or they rate it on initial impression and never changed it. RN I skipped because I didn't like the novel, but the drama grab you pretty fast, and if you can get into it, you'll really like it. so both tRoP & RN are essentially niche dramas that happen to hit specific audience. I believe all these dramas started at 7ish.

Anyways, the score should rise when the drama finish, since a lot of people rate after they finish the drama, but I think there's complaints about pacing issues (or lack of ML) as well as usual criticism about simplistic schemes and plot holes and dumb tropes. It probably won't get very high though since romance focused historical rarely get too high, and the level of expectation for this drama was too high to begin with so people end up rating the drama lower than they might if this featured two nobodies.

there's a new update schedule, so tomorrow's vvip will get 10 ep dump, as will all subsequent thursdays. vip got 2 more update days, sat and sun, 2 ep/day, 5 days a week.

i think zzy should have picked a story about kickass empress tbh, like wu zetian, but could totally be fictional so it's easier to air. ahhh such a shame.

yeah having young kids make some of the story more believable and more heartbreaking. i keep thinking the drama is downplaying the tragedy of political marriages (not just otp's, everyone around her. like it's present, but it's cover up by all the messy relationship)

probably talking about the epilogue extra chapters.

Huang Xiaoming gets hate for picking CEO roles lol, largely due to the massive amount of bad dramas he end up doing and his affinity to CEO roles where he's too over the top. I haven't watched ANY of them, and liked him in NiF2, but he was the one reason a lot of people skipped NiF2.

Most tsundere MLs and CEO dramas that's being produced aren't played by A-listers, and they do get mocked. They are also held to less expectations because they are produced for an audience that just want some fluff after hard day of work. If it's TOO tropey and TOO stupid, it'll get complaints, otherwise you just click pass it if you don't care for it.

No doubt cnetizens are sexist and cdramas are hella sexist, god i have such a hard time finding a drama with a FL that isn't damseled and dumb for no reason, even rarer would be female supporting characters that aren't just stock archetypes. But people are aware of and do criticise dramas for Gary Stu/Jack Sue. case in point, NiF is super beloved, but its biggest criticism over and over again is how easily he overcomes his obstacles and that he's wee bit Jack Sue. JoL also get similar criticism (even though I think that world is more like aftermath of a Mary Sue). Web novels often come across sue'ish because protag halo is too strong, because that's how WN get popular, most people don't want down to earth realistic painful depiction of life, they want kickass stories.