Too Confusing and Out of Place

I couldn't keep watching this as the pacing, the dialogue/writing, the music, and the acting felt misplaced.

While I lasted only 7 episodes out of 30, there were just too many things that confused me enough not to be able to watch any further.

I'm not sure how much they were trying to "immerse" the viewers in this period piece but I felt like some of the bass music in the background was so out of place for its timeline setting. A lot of the time, the music just didn't fit. There was so much bass pumping out in the background, I was practically expecting some kind of dance to break out all of a sudden.

Other things that minutely bothered me were things like the storyline and plot. They would add these stupid clichés at the most inappropriate times. For example, the FL gets poisoned and of course, she acts all funny due to the "hallucinogens" in the poison which leads her to kiss the ML. But then she's later so sick that she's near death. One minute we're supposed to find it funny and "cute" and then they expect the audience to feel the gravity of her almost dying? I was just scratching my head. There was another scene where she fights off 4 assassins, gets a cut on her leg, and just when you think she's done for, some mysterious old man comes with a stick to beat them off and then disappears. Then she goes home limping and her father is barely enraged or concerned, so it downplays the seriousness of what almost happened. She also brags about it in class. Every time they have a serious scene, there's something that just makes a joke of it almost.

Another thing is Zhao Lusi... don't get me wrong, I like her and all but I think she's falling into the small kind of roles over and over again. I'm getting tired of her doing the same kind of cliché acting... her slo-mo looking at the male lead, falling into his lap, overly smiling, and let's not talk about her fake laughs. It was so bad here. Then every time they showed a close-up of her, I was just so distracted by her brown-highlighted hair that I felt like I was watching a very modern actress acting in a period timepiece. I was like, "Wow, they had brown highlights back then..."

No matter what period it was in, they can't fool some of us who know it's really about a teacher and a student falling in love. The long title really had nothing to do with her being the first female to enter an Imperial College. 7 episodes were enough for me.

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