Zogitt
Australia
This review may contain spoilers
Promising start but went old school tropey and left out the creativity
I was sold on this show by its synopsis. I watched a few episodes and it seemed to delivered on the quirky rom-com setup. Cool crown prince in a arranged marriage to a young, beautiful, fighting bandit queen who was also the Chinese version of MacGyver but pretending to be a noble lady! What can go wrong?
A lot, is the TL;DR answer.
The longer version is that they took the worst of the old school palace intrigue genre and combined it with tons of clichés subplots and draggy storytelling. Where there should be growth and development like the OTP romance was reduced to love at first sight with a lot of teasing and barely any push-pull. Not that it was necessarily a bad thing but what replaced it was endless scheming and nasty business like tortures and killing of innocent people. It was not as if they don't have something to built upon. They could have kept the light hearted tone going as they spent the first few episodes showing us how clever and resourceful the FL was and how she kept turning the table on the schemers. I won't complain if they build the show around that concept as a female Chinese MacGver would be intriguing. However, that mostly faded away and when it do come back later on in the show, she was used as deus ex machina to move the plot along. Typically, she would stand in front of a trap/lock for a couple of seconds and opened the said lock (which haven't been successfully picked ever) in 2 seconds without hesitation. Of course, on the other side of those door were more macguffins.
There were 3 romantic pairings in total but other than the OTP, the other two pairs were marred by sad, melodramatic manipulations that it was hard to ship them. A lighter hand would had been more in tune with the original tone but by ep10, the show had pretty much gone completely to the dark side.
The drama also arrayed a whole host of evil doers before us from episode 1. Unfortunately, they were one dimensional and came out of palace drama central casting. What is worse was that they were also made fun of at the beginning of the show and shown how inept they were and yet by middle of the show, they WERE the show and did all kinds of horrible things (mostly to their own families and innocent people). This just bring on added frustration to an already tropey show.
In terms of acting, there was nothing to write home about. There was minimal growth in the characters. Most actors just did their job so you didn't get much nuance in their presentations. What I did find odd was that sometimes the younger actors seemed to behave as if they were in a contemporary drama but wearing period costumes. The flip side was that the show also used some of the oldest tropes. Ditto the aesthetics. It was nominally ancient China but some of the setting appeared to be borrowed from different dramas so it just felt unanchored.
Honestly, I was going to drop the show a few times around mid show but decided to push through just to see how tropey it can get and they did not disappoint. The fast forward button was a welcome relieve.
This show would have been a decent (maybe even good) wuxia drama if they stick to the original concept and kept it a light hearted rom-com. Unfortunately, it just ended up being tropey, clichéd and draggy. I cannot recommend this drama unless you are following the leads.
A lot, is the TL;DR answer.
The longer version is that they took the worst of the old school palace intrigue genre and combined it with tons of clichés subplots and draggy storytelling. Where there should be growth and development like the OTP romance was reduced to love at first sight with a lot of teasing and barely any push-pull. Not that it was necessarily a bad thing but what replaced it was endless scheming and nasty business like tortures and killing of innocent people. It was not as if they don't have something to built upon. They could have kept the light hearted tone going as they spent the first few episodes showing us how clever and resourceful the FL was and how she kept turning the table on the schemers. I won't complain if they build the show around that concept as a female Chinese MacGver would be intriguing. However, that mostly faded away and when it do come back later on in the show, she was used as deus ex machina to move the plot along. Typically, she would stand in front of a trap/lock for a couple of seconds and opened the said lock (which haven't been successfully picked ever) in 2 seconds without hesitation. Of course, on the other side of those door were more macguffins.
There were 3 romantic pairings in total but other than the OTP, the other two pairs were marred by sad, melodramatic manipulations that it was hard to ship them. A lighter hand would had been more in tune with the original tone but by ep10, the show had pretty much gone completely to the dark side.
The drama also arrayed a whole host of evil doers before us from episode 1. Unfortunately, they were one dimensional and came out of palace drama central casting. What is worse was that they were also made fun of at the beginning of the show and shown how inept they were and yet by middle of the show, they WERE the show and did all kinds of horrible things (mostly to their own families and innocent people). This just bring on added frustration to an already tropey show.
In terms of acting, there was nothing to write home about. There was minimal growth in the characters. Most actors just did their job so you didn't get much nuance in their presentations. What I did find odd was that sometimes the younger actors seemed to behave as if they were in a contemporary drama but wearing period costumes. The flip side was that the show also used some of the oldest tropes. Ditto the aesthetics. It was nominally ancient China but some of the setting appeared to be borrowed from different dramas so it just felt unanchored.
Honestly, I was going to drop the show a few times around mid show but decided to push through just to see how tropey it can get and they did not disappoint. The fast forward button was a welcome relieve.
This show would have been a decent (maybe even good) wuxia drama if they stick to the original concept and kept it a light hearted rom-com. Unfortunately, it just ended up being tropey, clichéd and draggy. I cannot recommend this drama unless you are following the leads.
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