luckz

Here the same is the case as in ADWAD, that the "real" 2025 world is a story and the 1999 world is a published novel.

The very first lines of episode 1 are a story intro, and show the initial 2025 world:
A polished-to-a-shine Maybach is parked under the office.
A suited man pushes the car door open.
An exceptionally handsome and tall man came into view.
He raises an eyebrow.
He's wearing gold-rimmed glasses.
His sharp gaze is hidden behind the lenses.
He glances down. A high bridge nose.

(That car is from 2023, and the novel ML has a specific different car in the 1999 world.)

I suppose it's not clear if the FL is maybe even listening to *this* as an audio-book, or only to Goodbye Wild Weasel. More like the latter.

Oh, I forgot:
There's also the only-mentioned plot of the parents of the "blind girl" Rong Yun Shu, these are my subtitles of episode 24 at 34m 54s onwards (and we are not giving any rebuttal of it from what I could tell):

Rumor has it that back then, Old Madam
asked Third Master Rong to escort the tea products.
As soon as the tea caravan left the city,
Old Madam drove your mother away immediately,
causing her to freeze to death
in severe winter in the Mountain God Temple.
There was even no simple coffin for her burial.
When Third Master Rong got the news,
he rushed back desperately and rode three horses to death,
but he still couldn't make it for his wife's funeral.
He resented Old Madam so deeply
that he built a hut beside his wife's grave
to live there and spent his days drinking.
He passed away in despair within three years.



Then (if the above is true and you assume nobody but the evil grandma is at fault) in episode 28, at 12m 22s, the FL seems to victim-blame really hard:

Your father truly loved your mother.
They were indeed a rare loving couple.
But for his personal desires,
your father abandoned the entire tea caravan.
The entire tea shipment was looted by desert bandits.
More than 10 people died or were injured.



(By conventional drama standards, almost all of the Rong girls are the kind of characters that commit too much evil to be allowed a happy ending.)

3h42m total length (24 episodes)
30 seconds intro, 90 seconds outro = 2 minutes spent on that per episode.
Only watching those once, you're at 2h56m.

There's not much point watching this in pretty 4K resolution.

The modern day GHM in ep1 already knows her, and has to send her into the novel for him to also get to know her (..technically possible to watch it as "he's just a fan of her" but..).

But the GHM that reaches(?) the modern day in ep24 might be a different GHM.
He looks a bit older in the last scene, maybe to make it ambiguous if he had a hard time getting from 1999-novel to the end, or literally sat on his hands for 25 years and is now far older than her.

he cheated in that he was more or less dating another woman while hiding it from his wife(*), and kissed her in public; he claims he actually pushed her away and it was just that one time, but we have no evidence for or against that.

*: and this was just one of the many things he was keeping from her

you could also read more divorce opinions here https://mydramalist.com/760693-ya-xi#comment-24974316


There's no reason to match her up with a random criminal like Pei Zhen ^_^

in MPit90s, ML assembles model jets as commissions because he enjoys working on them as a hobby (basically people can place orders at the model shop / museum)

what in particular is your question about that?

Which do you mean ("very recently released historical"), Serendipity? Or Love in the Clouds, which isn't historical, but kind of recent? Or Perfect Match, which is a tiny bit older than Serendipity?

She's kind of "the emperor that tries to shape the crown prince into a ruthless successor", with the show calling the other family members 'whetstones to sharpen the blade'.

I found it very meh, but I find this plot idea meh in any show that does it.


Anyway, when she is truly super horrible, the show later pretends it was to test the FL's reaction(s), and that the FL successfully passed the test, etc.

Watched 3 episodes -> didn't know whether to continue.
Watched 6 episodes -> still didn't know.
Some more -> maybe it's getting a bit interesting?
Watched 12 episodes -> giving up on caring at this point, too much absurd shit
Watched 18 episodes -> it feels unfilial not to drop this show
Finished all 30 -> I can't say I regret watching it, but I also can't say it was time well spent

The show could easily have half the runtime. Sometimes after an episode I have literally no idea where that time went.

If you like shows like Blossom (2024) or Glory (2026), enjoy dark revenge stories with various twists, have no disbelief suspension issues when the wildest things happen in order to have some sort of twist, don't mind the lack of romance, and don't mind getting some choose-your-own-interpretation end instead of a nice fluffy ending, The Glory might be your kind of tea-making.

For other people it might make as much sense as a random vertical (with some santa claus popping in from nowhere, an evil maid being spawned out of thin air, etc), you have leads with zero chemistry and only Wen Zheng Rong delivering a particularly good performance, almost every character is pointlessly evil and vengeful, etc.

Especially if she is not the actual Zhuan Hanyan in the novel, but some princess or whatever, how does this rebirth even work?

The theories I've seen in other comments are like:
- Yuwen is actually her father
- in the novel she is not the actual Hanyan? that would ruin the drama though wouldn't it, how she changes her definition of "home" from blood relatives to loved ones...
- in the novel there is a rebirth plot
- it's about the purpose she came to the capital (NOT just to find a home)
- the adoptive parents that she killed were actually nice to her https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2cg1v2xNKJg

That ML doesn't want to know reinforces the other core theme of this drama, how trust is more vital than romantic love.

What is the novel rebirth like, is it a do-over like in Blossom or Kunning or Princess Royal?

I thought the concubine's face full of blood was quite explicit enough; though the scene itself was nonsense with the tunnel between mansions suddenly branching in a hundred directions for him to hallucinate his own demons.

What I found very weak was that you never saw how the leads allegedly convinced the emperor of all kinds of things. With all the things that went their way, he's quite the off-screen santa claus character.

The little girl is the only cute and endearing thing here, one could say: needed to keep it watchable.

I think the horse was teleported in (now under someone else's control) just OUTSIDE the duke's residence.

Basically she released the horse at her home, and some random guy caught it, and it fought away from his control just when she needed a horse to escape at the Qi mansion.

For me Chai Jing is an SML / first boyfriend character with a one-sided romantic interest in FL. At other times, it's a master-servant relationship (– as a noble lady and an uneducated pirate orphan, maybe being a female male concubine is the best CJ could hope for).

FL only sees CJ as a (not blood related) sibling, but (selfishly) does not make it clear.


Beyond the minor hints or teasing of it in things like Fangs of Fortune I haven't watched any Chinese GL, or any other GL really, so I dunno what those are typically like, but the CJ character doesn't seem very female to me.

my source (ahem) does not have this in 4K, is this due to how the show is/was released?
=> 4K comes with CN hardsubs and advert interruptions, ok; Tencent exclusive

Is the manhwa much more rom than com?

Watching the similarly titled (CN) The Glory.
Production values are a lot lower though. Feels like sloppy TV by comparison.

It can probably be said to work as "she needs to stay alive to care for her child so that ML doesn't have to stay in that household for that kid" kind of plotting logic, but yeah, while he sure wasn't nice to two specific women he was still more redeemable than some of FL's family members. And he was killed the moment he seemed to be turning onto a better path. Yet all those years, nobody made an attempt to shorten the life of the duke himself, as the source of all issues.