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Unfortunately there are not many female leads that fit into your and my personal preferences and the few I have seen were from dramas I have watched some time ago. Haven’t seen many female leads like that recently, Ming Lan being an exception. But if I do remember any I will let you know. What kind of dramas do you watch?

I have already watched Dong Yi a few years ago but thank you for recommending it. It was a pretty good drama. I like it when the female lead is not the typical type. I like strong, smart, calm female leads since they are so rare. Ming Lan is all this but that does not make her boring. In fact she is one of the best female leads I have seen. Her character is really interesting. Wish we got more female leads like her in other dramas.

Which trailer, cause the one here on MDL only shows his wife.

This could have been quite a nice drama if it was not for the clichés and annoying/frustrating plot devices of the second half of the drama. And as usual supporting characters getting more screen time than they should, together with the bad subs on youtube that are not properly synchronized and are missing in some parts....I was not able to enjoy it as much as I could have. The premise and first half were pretty good so it is a shame that yet again a drama is ruined in the second half. And let’s not even talk about the ending. They used one of the most annoying and most common clichés in dramas with romance. Sigh - . -

Like BikiLee said it comes down to personal preferences. True, I felt bored most of the time while watching it. True, I think it is overrated if you think about all the aspects of it. I honestly could not give it a high rating like most people because I did not enjoy it enough for that. That does not mean the drama is not good tho. And of course the main leads chosen and the fact that they got married and this is their first drama together as main leads might influence the ratings but I believe some people might have honestly enjoyed it despite the slow pace because of the female lead.

She is completely different from most female leads out there. When a female lead is kind she tends to be naive and even dumb, a crybaby sometimes and gets everyone in trouble. When a female lead is smart or strong she tends to lack in human relationships being quite rude and sometimes even insensible or just not knowing how to interact with other people. Ming Lan is neither of those.

She is kind but not dumb, she is smart but not indifferent to other people’s situations. She does not cause problems to others, yell like a crazy person or cry all the time. She is composed, always planing things carefully and doing things in benefit of her and people around her. She does not let people step all over her and knows how to stand up for herself and make them get their punishment, but she is not ruthless or vindictive about it. That makes her one of the easiest to like female leads out there.

You mentioned Nirvana in Fire. A lot of people say good things about it. But when I tried to watch it I ended up dropping it. Does that mean it is not a good drama? No. I recognize all their strategy and planing was quite smart but it was just not what I was looking for at the time. Maybe someday I will try to watch it again and think WOW, this is so good, but for now it is still a drama that I was not able to finish because I was not in the mood to watch that kind of drama.

So I guess this was either not your kind of drama or you were just not in the mood to watch it. Also, I don’t know if you watched it until the end or not but the first 20 episodes or so are the slowest and most boring, so if you dropped it before reaching the better part I would understand why you feel that way about this drama.

Like I said, I was bored most of the time and did not have much enjoyment from watching it but that does not mean the drama is not good. Is it overrated? Maybe. But I never trusted MDL’s ratings anyway. Some of the dramas I liked were rated below 7 and there were several rated 9 and above that I dropped without giving it a second thought.

Which FB group? If you are talking about the one Vietgal505 mentioned, it is revealed in his spoiler comment.

Which FB group? If you are talking about the one Vietgal505 mentioned, it is revealed in his spoiler comment.

Although the story is different, yes. The fact that they go there together but her friend gets stuck there while she is able to go back and forth, the fact that they meet again later but to her friend it has been a long time, ... These things all remind me of Fushigi Yugi, one of my all time favourite animes. Have re-watched it countless times. Of course this story is nowhere as good as the one in Fushigi Yugi and these details are the only things they have in common.

Yeah, I know. At first it was supposed to be 76, then 79 and then it ended up being even less with 73. I only watched when I checked MDL and saw it had updated to 73 so I knew the episodes on Viki were all there and that there would not be new episodes so I could watch it anytime.

Yeah. I have also noticed that your experience in watching dramas and your mood can also influence the way you feel about a drama. For example, when I first started watching dramas I liked some dramas that I now think are extremely cringy. That was because then everything was new, I had not experienced clichés yet and no story seemed slow paced. Also, the mood is important. Sometimes I am in the mood for historical so I end up only watching historical dramas for a while. Sometimes I am in the mood for family dramas, other times in the mood for rom-coms, action and crime investigation, and so on.

I started watching Ming Lan when I was in the mood for a historical but mainly in the mood for romance. And although there is no doubt this has romance, it is not the main focus. The main leads took a long time as adults to properly meet and talk and even longer to fall in love. I was also expecting them to marry way earlier than they did, it took more than half of the drama (about 40 episodes) for them to finally marry. And before that there were not that many romantic scenes with them. That might have been one of the reasons I did not enjoy it as much as I should have. :(

So, about half of the drama (the first half) was nice and all. We had our two main couples: Yun Ye and the Princess and the Crown Prince with Xinyue (I think that’s her name, I will just call her X).

Except suddenly X is in a situation of near execution and the only way both male lead’s can think of saving her from death is for Yun Ye to ask the Emperor for her hand in marriage. Just a few days before he had asked the Princess to marry him so when she heard he had come to the Palace to ask for a marriage, she thought he came to ask the Emperor to give him the Princess. Imagine how hurt she felt when she found out he was actually marrying her brother’s (the Crown Prince) lover.

Until the last moment I was hopping something would happen to stop that marriage, like the Crown Prince kidnapping her and eloping with her or something. But no, the marriage happened, making 4 people that were initially happy with their love interests now feel all miserable.

To make matters worse, the Crown Prince gets drunk on the night of Yun Ye and X’s wedding and gets caught in a trap and ends up sleeping with the daughter of a man that will later bring even more trouble because he thought it was X. (alcohol is not the solution, just another way to bring yourself even more problems)

Later on he ends up marrying another woman that he had never even met, because you know, he is the Crown Prince. Meanwhile we find out that the lady he slept with by mistake is pregnant.

Anyway, as you can see, things started going down before it even reached half of the drama. Yun Ye and the Princess kinda get together later but it cannot even be revealed to others since he is a married man, also the Princess was never able to marry him because of this. All this trouble to save a woman than in the last episode kills herself so they cant trade her for the Crown Prince.

If that was not enough, Yun Ye, the main lead, dies and wakes up in the tomb we see in the first episode before he travels to Tang Dynasty. He finds out that the tomb was originally his (something we all had already guessed in the first few episodes). The end shows him getting locked in his tomb and in the past we see the Princess is now part of his family.

So, I am not sure if there will be a second season or not (probably not). But even if there was one, they would only be able to fix the mess of him being locked in his tomb. They could start the second season by having people finding him and getting him out of there, since there should be people looking for him. But even that would not erase the bitter-sweet feeling of having both of the main couples that we were forced to watch being all lovey dovey in the beginning ending up miserably with the Princess and Crown Prince being alive but their lovers dead. And in the present day, if the main lead gets rescued, then he is alive, but the Princess has long been dead.

Conclusion: Everything took a turn for the worse before it even reached half way and I am sure the ending was not what we all wanted. So be prepared for some heartache. Also, I felt the story itself had a lot of potential but they did not use it to the fullest. So in ended up being an ok drama, but nothing special. If memorable, it might be for the way it ended (and it is not for a good a reason).

Like someone already said, it was smart of the channel to air all 36 episodes in the same week. People would probably be very angry had they waited several weeks to get this ending. I will explain the rest in the spoiler below.

True. I thought so too at the time. And surprisingly the 4 episodes that focus on Ming Lan’s childhood were some of the ones I enjoyed the most.

True. That is why I said this was my view. I can see from the comments and reviews that a lot of people really liked it. I really like historical dramas too and have watched some that focused a lot in the family and politics that I liked. I think what made me feel more conflicted was the pace really, especially those 20 episodes or so after their childhood. I also had some high expectations and imagined the drama would be very different from what it actually was because of the previous summary. For sure, and I want to make this clear, this is a great drama. But I cannot ignore the fact I did not get as much enjoyment from it as I did from other dramas I have watched in the past. One thing I will remember is Ming Lan. She was one of the most interesting female leads I have seen. She was nowhere near the typical naive female lead but was still kind and used her intelligence not only for her own advantage but for others too and that made her easy to like.

It was the last episode I think. Both MDL and Viki have updated it and show 73 episodes. Also, the way the episode ends seems like the ending to me.

It is a good drama but very slow paced, which is expected since it is 73 episodes long. If you don’t want to feel like you’re losing something by not watching it, then my advice as someone who watched it is that you watch only a few episodes a day. Don’t try to binge-watch it or you might feel like you are forcing yourself to watch it and end up dropping it before it gets to the better episodes. And keep in mind that the first 20 episodes or so after their childhood (which is the first 4 episodes) are probably the hardest to watch. You need to watch them to get to know all the characters and understand what is going on but they are extremely slow paced and it is easy to feel bored while watching them. After that it gets better.

I feel conflicted. If I add up the episodes that I liked and the episodes that made me feel extremely bored because nothing was happening, and then compare them, it is about 50-50. I liked the first few episodes where they showed their childhood, then the next 20 episodes or so I had to almost force myself to keep watching as they were extremely slow paced. Then around the middle I had about 5-10 episodes I enjoyed.

I think I liked the second half better but I was still yawning way too often. The story is good, the characters and actors chosen to play them too, but there was almost nothing exciting happening that would make me want to watch the next episode. The drama as a whole was very slow-paced and some episodes made me feel like nothing was really happening.

It is a shame since I had some expectations when I started it and had it in my plan to watch list for years before I even knew when it was going to air. I really liked Ming Lan’s character and the male lead’s character too (most of the time) but that alone did not make it interesting enough for me.

There is no doubt that the story is good, although I personally felt bored way too often, but I have to say that the rating might be biased at the moment. I am not sure if it is because of the actors, because they are married in real life and are the main leads in this drama or because people rated it without even finishing it (yeah some people even go to the point of giving 9s and 10s to dramas when they have aired 1 episode and they haven’t even watched it yet, lol), but I think that we should not rate a drama just based on the actors or story, but also the enjoyment we have while watching it.

I liked the actors, liked the characters (especially Ming Lan) and felt the story was good but it was extremely slow paced, so my overall enjoyment was not that high as to give this a 9, much less a 10.

Of course these are my personal feelings. I believe a person who watches only 1 or 2 episodes a day will be able to enjoy it more. This is definitely not the kind of drama you feel like binge-watching. It is way too long and slow paced to keep you motivated and excited for the next episode.

At first I was really into it. I especially liked the relationship between the main leads. The female lead was so kind and caring that you could completely understand why and how he falls in love with her. And I can also understand why the female lead would act that way when the male lead had those puppy eyes that seemed to yell: I need your full attention and love.

The whole face "surgery" thing looked kinda cool in a weird way but it seemed like that was not important later on in the story. I also started to lose interest in the drama as a whole around episode 10 or so. From then on I kept skipping scenes and also felt the interactions between the main leads were not only less frequent but also less interesting. At some point I just gave up and skipped to the last episode to know the ending.

It is a shame that so many cdramas have this problem. They have way too many episodes with way too many characters, flashbacks, fights, and boring plotlines just to drag the story. If you want to make a drama 54 episodes long, make sure you have enough content and know how to give it a natural pace so things do not look rushed nor draggy.

I watched the short version. I understand that means a lot of things were missing from the story but I was still able to understand most things and get the big picture. I am actually glad this short version was made since I have watched way too many palace dramas and I don’t think I would have been able to sit through 76 episodes of this.

I am not saying the original version is not good. I could not judge that without watching it. But personally, the short version was just what I needed or I would have either not given this a try or would have dropped it midway.

What do you meant when you said "That's such a pity for the subs !"?
Is it because you were not able to find it subbed or is it because they were bad?