It's best to watch this drama with a split brain

On one hand, it's this disaster Romeo and Juliet romance of angst and will-they-won't-they and conflict and death and "I will literally die for this love" tropey xianxia drama stuff. If you've seen Ten Miles of Peach Blossoms or Love Eternal or the million other massively popular gods and romance Chinese dramas, you've seen this. This is our main couple.

On the other, it's this refined Hamlet of court intrigue, asking interesting moral questions such as "if my father is a genocidal tyrant and I have the ability to overthrow him, do I have the responsibility to do so, despite my filial piety obligations?" and "should I continue to care for a fiancee that has cheated on me with my brother because I still love her?" and "is it really true that to achieve justice in an unjust world one must commit unjust acts?" This is where the second male lead resides.

And yeah, I care very much more about Runyu's storyline than literally anything our main couple of doing, and that's not to mention the fact that those two did extremely shitty things to Runyu while they are pursuing their "forbidden romance." Apparently cheating on your fiancee is okay if it's true love, and asking your brother to annul his engagement because you want his future wife is okay if it's true love, but it's wrong if you want justice when your own mother dies in front of your eyes.

Anyway, the acting from everyone is top notch for such a mainstream blockbuster drama. Yang Zi pulls no punches during her crying scenes (she cries and I'm automatically on her side despite the fact that I don't agree with her side), Leo Luo embodies the ethereal and gentle immortal that has been living in the public Chinese consciousness for eons but has never been able to be brought onto screen until now. Deng Lun needs a lot of work, you can tell in a lot of scenes he is out of it and not acting at all, and his posture is terrible, but he's still okay. Everyone else? Wonderful, keep up the good work. Also, give the VFX team a bonus please, because everything finally looks phenomenal.

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Writing is still the most important thing to a drama

First, the good things. The production quality of this drama is absolutely amazing. From the hairstyles to the dresses to the sets, it's so painstakingly accurate while being astonishingly beautiful. A goldmine for the history buffs to look through and gush over. The acting is also extremely good. Everyone uses their own voice and not a single one of them drops the ball. They all deserve a pay raise for that.

Then, the bad things. Which is mostly everything else. Which is mostly the story. It's, really really hard to get an audience of ordinary people to get behind on the "it's so hard to be king and have all that power and money and no freedom" storyline when you want to tell a story about royalty. It's really hard to be sympathetic on that line of Woe Is Me rhetoric. So it's up to the screenwriters to do the work and show the hardships when it comes to ruling and holding the position of emperor. Show how Song Ren Zong had to stop showing emotions as a young child, abandoning his hobbies and his favorite foods, holding back his own opinions to be a benevolent ruler and let others advise him, marrying someone he doesn't like and doesn't like him back just to bolster his position, can't even cry over his dead children because no weakness can be shown.

And do we get that from this drama? Not really. There's a lot of telling of how hard it is for the emperor of all lands under heaven, and not a lot of showing. Most of the screentime is focused on cramming as many historical persona references in there and have them gush about how perfect an emperor Zhao Zhen is. Which, as there are three different floods that caused three different famines during his reign, is undisputed by anyone. There's no complexity to his character that would be there for any state leader, present or past.

And the most egregious thing was, on the road further down to "Song Ren Zong Is Perfect And Has Done Nothing Wrong Ever", the writers veers into the "Woman Only Gets Abused By Husband Because She Did Something To Deserve It" road with the Princess Hui Rou storyline. Her entire life is a tragedy brought on by her father's need to give glory and good name to his birth mother, she is forced to marry someone she hates, her husband attempts to drug and rape her and ultimately hits her; and when she runs home crying, her father blames her for her abuse, offers no sympathy, and wants her to go back to the man who treated her so horribly. And because the story was so full on Song Ren Zong Can Never Make A Mistake, we are asked to be on the emperor's side, because he is always right. And that's some high class bullshit right there.

If they had just adapted straight from the novel and focused just on Princess Hui Rou, we could've had a story about how women in historical China, no matter how privileged and treasured they were, are still subject to the whims and wishes of the patriarchy (in this case the literal patriarch of all of China), which will always lead them into tragedy. But no, that story is apparently too small and we need a historical epic.

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This drama had one of the most atrocious costume and set designs I've ever seen in my life. It's as if I've been teleported back to 2010s Chinese period drama era where everything is in contrasted and clashing colors. If I see one more BRIGHT pink curtain overhanging a BRIGHT green door, or a dress of BRIGHT purple and BRIGHT yellow, I will toss myself off a cliff. Everything looks garish and cheap and utterly distracting. I can't even focus on the bland and utterly predictable Mary Sue romance because the Loud everything keeps on distracting me. Also, the king can't afford more than three spots of embroidery on his goddamn wedding attaire, and honestly that's just an insult to Korean culture.

Besides that. Plot was very romance heavy. They took out all the despair and angst over the inherent unfairness of the imperial system our female lead suffers through and replaced it with romance angst. Which made the court intrigue bits extremely juvenile and hard to take seriously. The cheap costumes certainly didn't help with its seriousness.

The one shining spot in this effortful trashfire was the acting. Everyone brought their A game. Especially Lee Joon-Gi. He honestly should've won something. All the idol actors performed way above my expectations, and I was surprised how solid they all were. Which, inevitably, lent the whole production a quality of "they put a lot of effort into it, they tried really hard, but they veered off onto the wrong road in the first place and now there's no way to get them back." Also, all the male actors need to have better posture. You can't have any princely royal gravita if you're slouching all the time.

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Luo Yunxi carried, again

The costuming, set design, cinematography, fight choreography, and the leads’ acting gave an appearance of depth to this show that was not belied by the actuality of the script. The first 27 episodes of the show was a blend of detective mystery, slice of life comedy, and slow-burn romance. And it was all done pretty well. Like a cup of lychee iced tea in summer. Slow burn was properly yearnful and slow, comedy was pretty funny, mystery elements are pretty serviceable for the genre.

However, the script writer is not great at seamlessly blending all those elements together, sometimes the writers forget the overarching Zornia plot in favour of romance sit-com bits of the supporting cast, the show has Luo Yunxi as Jiang Xinbai to wrangle all of them into a tight braid through sheer skill and spite alone. The switch between cute rom-com and mystery is never jarring when he’s there. Luo has fifty never-before-seen microexpressions and an ocean of emotions in his eyes ready to go at any given moment. He made what could’ve been a sugary cordial of a show, no real substance just artificial flavour, into something with depth, something with stakes. He made this world feel real because Jiang Xinbai felt real. And because Jiang Xinbai was the lead, the reactions he gave to other actors’ cookie cutter performances made their characters felt real as well. When he isn’t there to stake down the tarp, the artificiality and the juvenility of the script is revealed in full (Episode 28-36). ((No seriously he appears for an average of 7 minutes in those episodes and the audience gets smacked in the face with a 2010s era Domineering Drug Dealer Bandit and his forceful romance with a white lotus female lead and it’s so old it makes me tired by proxy. The four episodes left Jiang Xinbai gets more screen time and the depth of back again.))

All in all, it’s fine. Perfectly fine. This is a show for people who want to get into c-dramas, people who like more of Luo Yunxi, people who need something mindless to wind down after a ten hour shift, and people who want some pretty screenshots for their Asian inspired moodboards. Could’ve been worse.

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Finally, a Luo Yunxi drama where you can actually feel that the female lead loves the male lead

An above average modern idol drama with all the baggage of the genre, but actually watchable and fun this time. Cheng Xiao, unlike her fellow idols, actually do try to act instead of phoning it in for a quick paycheck. Sometimes it's exhausting to watch her because she's just so close, one more step and she would've gotten the emotional depth required. But still, she gets the basic characteristics of the female lead down and doesn't add anything contrary to that. Su Xieyi is above all, courageous and brave, in both the pursuit of the truth and in love. Cheng Xiao brings the likeability aspect of that trait to the table. Also Su Xieyi is definitely not stupid nor unreasonable, which is a relief. Luo Yunxi, as usual, outclasses his fellow actors to the point where it sometimes feel like he's in a different genre entirely (complimentary). Li Zeliang has that old money feel of an Oxbridge alumni, with the steadiness and intelligence such an aesthetic brings to mind. Luo Yunxi brings out the complixity of Li Zeliang through his acting alone. How Zeliang grappled with his disability, his pride and his envy, his hatred and his love, all were done brilliantly and with a special depth not many would pour into an idol drama. And the best thing about this drama is that the main couple! The main couple actually love each other! They compliment each other! You as the audience feel that these two people actually like each other! That their love is a two way street! That they are actually good for each other! It's rarer these days than you think.

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