What it does to the How Dare You story setup is quite imaginative and some of the writing is really excellent. It feels like the writers of this transmigrated from a time where they already saw the 2025 vertical and the 2026 drama and have opinions on both. Unfortunately it has a lot of these "evil side characters torture main lead for no reason at all" scenes though that murkier short dramas use to fill their running time. After a strong start, there's a lot of repetitive plots that essentially take up the bulk of the show. After a strong start, plot holes and anti-logic appear in a worse-than-vertical way. What is established in one minute is already forgotten in the next minute.
The production is primarily incredibly bad. Costumes are chaos, scene lighting is wrong, camerawork ain't good, there are many trashy AI-generated establishing shots. Where Fan Jing's sword strikes land is just amateurish. Speaking of her, the role doesn't exactly play to her strengths. Her character is more of a generic transmigration romcom FL.
Palace protocol is probably the worst I've ever seen in a drama, with characters constantly calling the emperor by his full name to his face with nobody batting an eye.
Overall, a cute adaptation. The FL in particular is good, and her "one outfit" is better than you'd expect a vertical to have. 20-30% of the plot is so rushed, it doesn't make sense if you're not familiar with the full story. Set pieces just get teleported into place without explanation. Chemistry wasn't really there that much. Unlike other commenters, I found Zhong Zheng meh as Xiahou Po. He CongRui is okay, but nothing special.
So, what about the sword? I feel like the sword doesn't have any other purpose?? I thought it was so special to…
Forgotten; other than very mildly injuring evil Miles once and "fixing" the character of Wu Sheng Liu (General Wu) early on, it did more or less nothing.
Like others wrote below, it's a bit of a cheap Princess Royal (thankfully without the unbearable Su Rong Qing hogging all the screentime).
Compared to the same director's (much shorter) https://mydramalist.com/754131-zhao-ge-fu , production aspects like lighting seem unnecessarily poor. Another unfavorable comparison is that this show's 10 minute episodes often don't feel like there's more story than in the 2–3 minute episodes of Song of the Dynasty.
For me the start was bad, the middle was surprisingly much better (except for the pretty random FL development), the overarching plot was kind of unresolved in very many ways (villains/rebellion/..), and the ending is just something totally random bolted on.
I love Richard Li, but this drama to me felt kind of empty. There were some good scenes in it, chemistry-wise.…
Something about the lighting was really off, like it's overexposed to the point of there not being any shadows. This director's shorter & cheaper works don't seem to have that problem.
There's some weird comments here, for example ones mentioning a "crown prince" character. There's no crown prince in this show from what I saw (if you dig really deep: a potential crown prince is killed offscreen and only mentioned in passing).
The story itself is unnecessarily hard to follow, partially it's jumpy on account of the 2–3 minute episode length and partially it does weird things with the runtime.
Richard Li / Li Fei does a very good job. Like other comments wrote before, the FL's attending maid is really great.
The FL is really good here. ML is far more wooden than in https://mydramalist.com/753285-yue-shang-dong-gong (and that's unfortunate). The OST... well there's not really any OST. The production is somewhat good, but fight scenes are meh (and the intro makes it look like there'd be a lot of them).
https://mydramalist.com/778182-this-is-ridiculous
vert https://mydramalist.com/792092-cheng-he-ti-tong
short https://mydramalist.com/794810-shi-chong
vert My love with the villain both on and off screen / The Villain and I Show Off Our Love—On and Off-Screen / 我和反派剧里剧外秀恩爱 (2026)
vert https://mydramalist.com/804776-zui-wo-mei-ren-xi « this
https://mydramalist.com/778182-this-is-ridiculous
vert https://mydramalist.com/792092-cheng-he-ti-tong
short https://mydramalist.com/794810-shi-chong « this
vert My love with the villain both on and off screen / The Villain and I Show Off Our Love—On and Off-Screen / 我和反派剧里剧外秀恩爱 (2026)
vert https://mydramalist.com/804776-zui-wo-mei-ren-xi
https://mydramalist.com/778182-this-is-ridiculous
vert https://mydramalist.com/792092-cheng-he-ti-tong « this
short https://mydramalist.com/794810-shi-chong
vert My love with the villain both on and off screen / The Villain and I Show Off Our Love—On and Off-Screen / 我和反派剧里剧外秀恩爱 (2026)
vert https://mydramalist.com/804776-zui-wo-mei-ren-xi
The start is really good, and after that it's fairly decent.
The child actor in it is great btw.
watched video on YT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXR3NGKPa7g DM
with audio from DM https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xa48rpe https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xa48soo
What it does to the How Dare You story setup is quite imaginative and some of the writing is really excellent. It feels like the writers of this transmigrated from a time where they already saw the 2025 vertical and the 2026 drama and have opinions on both. Unfortunately it has a lot of these "evil side characters torture main lead for no reason at all" scenes though that murkier short dramas use to fill their running time. After a strong start, there's a lot of repetitive plots that essentially take up the bulk of the show.
After a strong start, plot holes and anti-logic appear in a worse-than-vertical way. What is established in one minute is already forgotten in the next minute.
The production is primarily incredibly bad. Costumes are chaos, scene lighting is wrong, camerawork ain't good, there are many trashy AI-generated establishing shots. Where Fan Jing's sword strikes land is just amateurish.
Speaking of her, the role doesn't exactly play to her strengths. Her character is more of a generic transmigration romcom FL.
Palace protocol is probably the worst I've ever seen in a drama, with characters constantly calling the emperor by his full name to his face with nobody batting an eye.
P.S.: It's really weird that the ML is recycling the https://mydramalist.com/photos/eYjddQ_3 https://mydramalist.com/photos/2wXvYE_3 headband almost all of the time. Is it just his personal accessory that he likes to wear?
20-30% of the plot is so rushed, it doesn't make sense if you're not familiar with the full story. Set pieces just get teleported into place without explanation.
Chemistry wasn't really there that much. Unlike other commenters, I found Zhong Zheng meh as Xiahou Po. He CongRui is okay, but nothing special.
In other words, it's already in the name.
Compared to the same director's (much shorter) https://mydramalist.com/754131-zhao-ge-fu , production aspects like lighting seem unnecessarily poor. Another unfavorable comparison is that this show's 10 minute episodes often don't feel like there's more story than in the 2–3 minute episodes of Song of the Dynasty.
For me the start was bad, the middle was surprisingly much better (except for the pretty random FL development), the overarching plot was kind of unresolved in very many ways (villains/rebellion/..), and the ending is just something totally random bolted on.
There's no crown prince in this show from what I saw (if you dig really deep: a potential crown prince is killed offscreen and only mentioned in passing).
The story itself is unnecessarily hard to follow, partially it's jumpy on account of the 2–3 minute episode length and partially it does weird things with the runtime.
Richard Li / Li Fei does a very good job. Like other comments wrote before, the FL's attending maid is really great.
ML is far more wooden than in https://mydramalist.com/753285-yue-shang-dong-gong (and that's unfortunate).
The OST... well there's not really any OST.
The production is somewhat good, but fight scenes are meh (and the intro makes it look like there'd be a lot of them).
P.S.: I watched it with https://mydramalist.com/759221-phoenix-lands-in-the-world due to plot similarities