Hime

I thought this would be about a badass female lead getting revenge on the people that caused her sister’s death, while slowly falling in love with her ex-brother-in-law turned fake husband...yeah, I know that last part sounds weird.

Instead we got a lame half-assed attempt at revenge with mediocre romance, barely any plot/character development, a baby that was supposed to be important but that neither of the main leads bothered to spend time with most of the time, and an unrealistic unwanted "redemption". There is more, I just feel like this drama is not worth me writting a long review.

If the first episode started at 0, the last episode finished at -1. The message that we as viewers got is that family is above everything and that weak people have only themselves to blame for not being able to stand up to the people abusing them.

Hopefully, this comment turned review will convince someone to AVOID this one and SAVE their precious time.

Unfortunately, it will. But depending on how much you like the first half, you might think it is worth watching until the end, which is what I did.

Definitely. That is why I was satisfied with the ending.

I wish we could have seen them actually come back. I even thought maybe they would return as Zi Wu and Di Lang Jue babies since they showed her pregnant but then I remembered that Zi Wu is You Qing’s sister so that would make him Ye Tan’s uncle....ewww. I guess after I realized that I was even more ok with the way it ended even if I wanted more.

I guess I just was not ready for it to end and wanted them to be born, grow up, meet them and fall in love again.

Exactly. The Starry Love really put the bar up there for me. Right now, nothing gives me the same feeling.

The drama was done so well that initially I was one of those people that was more interested in the story of one of the sisters (Ye Tan) and skipped a lot of the scenes of the other (Qing Kui), but eventually started enjoying what was happening in the other realm too and got attached to almost all the characters and hated with passion some of them too (looking at you "Heavenly" Emperor).

About the ending, it would be perfect with 10 more minutes so we could see it "blooming". I said it that way so it is not a spoiler but will still be understood by whoever already finished it. But oh well, it was good enough for me.

Now I deal with it being over by listening to the osts. Once I forget enough details I will make sure to re-watch it.

Honestly, I really liked this until a few episodes after the first death. Then it felt like the plot was going in circles and the characters kept doing things that made no sense, their motivations and decisions were not consistent. I would not say to drop it but you might consider skipping a lot while watching the second half of the drama.

This drama was so disappointing that at some point his character was one of the few reasons I kept watching. ^^'

Great recommendation.

I was watching both dramas simultaneously and while this one started to annoy me to no end and I kept skipping scenes, The Starry Love was my favorite wuxia/fantasy drama, and I am not even a fan of the genre. The plot, the characters, the music, everything was great. Even the ending that many complain about, although not perfect, was pretty good, especially when compared to the ending of this one.

Well, that is complicated. Which one of her deaths are you talking about? If it is the first one, then I guess you already got the answer you were looking for from someone else.

I would have to go back to tell you the exact episodes, but let’s just say she does not die just once...or twice. ^^'

I wish there was an extra 5 minutes in the last episode showing what all of us wanted to see, but I am still pretty satisfied with how it ended.

Overall, it was a very nice drama, great plot and characters and beautiful songs that made the scenes more intense. I am not really a fan of wuxia or fantasy, yet I felt this was the best drama in these genres that I have watched. It made me smile, cry, get angry. Definitely one I plan to re-watch in the future.

Technically I did too until a certain point. I turned 29 recently so my childhood was tech free and teenage years had limited access to internet. I bought my first smartphone when I was 17 or 18.

But I do feel that in recent years it has been harder to focus on slower tasks, movies, dramas, ... I used to read a lot of books when I was younger but now I tend to google everything, which is kind of second nature since I am a programmer.

I stay away from tik tok tho, and short length videos so it does not influence me even more. It worries me that this generation only cares about short and fast content instead of quality content. One of these days they might create a short drama that will be the opposite of this one and have the cases solved in 5 minutes.

Yeah. I feel like they would have dragged it less if they went for the 24 episode format instead of 36.

Oh, you read detective novels, my mother does too. That explains why you were more patient than me while watching the investigations slowly developing. I do not have that kind of patience anymore. ^^'

True, but it was the way they wrote the investigation and how long it took to solve some cases.

Cases can take years, even decades to solve, but if a documentary or series is made about the case, they are not going to make us watch the whole investigation process including the clues that led nowhere and make us sit through hundreds of episodes. One of the cases in this drama took somewhere between 10-15 episodes out of the 36 episodes to solve. There was no need to drag it for that long.

I grew up watching crime series and documentaries, I follow several true crime channels and have watched quite a few dramas with investigation, and this one had some of the most boring cases I have ever seen.

The drama itself was not bad, I liked the acting and the characters and the idea of the Qi and Qian races, but I felt that they could have made the plot so much more interesting. The romance was not the main focus so I was expecting to have some interesting cases and smart killers to make the experience more entertaining. Instead I found most of the cases and killers lame. :(

Just my opinion. I do not mean to offend anyone that enjoyed the cases.

I have watched other historical dramas with investigation and I felt the cases on this one dragged for too many episodes and most cases were not even interesting. The investigation itself was also very weird. Sometimes they would not see what was right in front them and other times they would think of stuff out of nowhere, more like they were guessing rather than actually investigating clues.

They would make"progress" and then go back to zero, not because the killer was smarter, but because they kept jumping into conclusions and later on figuring out they were wrong. It gave me the feeling the writer did not know what he was doing.

I am pretty sure the drama would have been a lot better if they had kept it at 24 episodes instead of going for 36.

I use deepL sometimes too. I am a programmer and AI can be very helpful. It is boring to add detailed comments to my code so lately I have been sending my code to chatGPT and asking it to add comments explaining what my code is doing. The AI knows how to explain better how the code works than I who wrote it myself. ^^'

I understand that. I worked in anime fansubbing many years ago and know how much work is put into subbing. Which is why I just have this drama on my on hold list and check from time to time to see if there are any updates.

I already know from experience that with japanese and thai dramas it is never a good idea to start watching while a fansub is still subbing because when real life gets in the way, sometimes it can take months or even years for them to finish subbing, when they do finish.

I think the ML needs to realize that getting him paranoid and unable to trust anyone is exactly what the person behind the whole plot wants. He really needs to decide who he wants to trust and who is not trustworthy and stop going back and forth. I myself do not trust people easily, but when you let that lack of trust impair your judgement, then it becomes stupidity.

I need the ML and FL to work together to find the culprit and until the ML stops doubting her it will be hard for them to accomplish anything. I am suspicious of a certain character but whoever the culprit is, he is pretty smart.

I have watched a LOT of dramas in the past 12 years and have seen a good share of slow burn romances, but my problem with this drama is that every time the ml acts like a jerk, I completely forget about the good moments they had together. And while the romance is slowly developing there should be another element keeping us invested in the drama which here would be the investigation part, but even that is painfully slow and boring so far.

Also, the SML is convinced she is innocent but it feels more like he does not want to believe she is guilty because he loves her and still has some hope things will somehow workout between them. Not because of the logical reasoning of "it does not make sense that she would kill her own family".

I‘m hanging on here because there are not that many historical dramas coming out these days and it has 2 of my favorite genres - romance and investigation, but so far it has not been easy, it is not meeting my expectations. Hopefully it will get better.

Yeah, but I keep checking and it has been 3 months since episode 2 was uploaded and no new episodes so far.

In 8 episodes there was barely any romance. Most of the time it was just the male lead not trusting her and calling her a liar.

Like is there no one in this drama with a working brain that would question why a woman would kill her entire family and leave a bunch of evidence behind, and we are talking about a woman who is supposed to be super smart and good at investigating things. Someone who is good at finding evidence would also be good at hiding evidence. The overwhelming amount of evidence is evidence itself that she is not the one behind the murders of her OWN family.

They really need to pick up the pace because so far nothing major happened and I keep prioritizing other dramas because I just don’t feel the need to watch the episodes of this one as soon as they come out. :(