Small mid-plot spoilers sprinkled here, nothing too major. Nothing you wouldn't find out from watching the trailers.

This was a bit of a gotcha, for me. Which might be why it left such a profound impact. I absolutely believed I was tucking in for a fairly ordinary but entertaining wuxia drama, with a light feel and colorful costumes and a bit of intrigue, for flavor. I was deeply, woefully, violently unprepared for what this drama had in store for me.

There were multiple overarching stories present here and to be honest they weren't all as interesting as these characters deserved.

That said, these characters were so exceptional that despite the story's shortcomings, Heroes will forever remain among my all-time favorite dramas.

Very few people will ever speak positively about this drama without mentioning Bai Choufei. And, by extension, Liu Yuning. The impressiveness of Bai Choufei, frankly, cannot be overstated. This was a dangerous, uncomfortable character to watch. Liu Yuning condensed an entire personality into a needle-fine point of unrelenting tension. If Bai Choufei was on screen, the viewer was nervous. This character's persistent internal battle was conveyed in every sentence he spoke, every sigh, every cringe, every difficult smile. From the moment we meet him we want him to be good, we can't help but root for him even though there's a thread of something there that makes us anxious. Liu Yuning made sure we were always aware that Bai Choufei was holding some part of himself in check through great and constant effort. Curiously, this feeling of tension and held breath is lessened when he pulls out his blades, which was telling... In his portrayal of Bai Choufei, Liu Yuning showed us a type of hero that could exist only by tightly gripping the leash of his own hostile sense of justice. This self-control was worsened by a bloody awareness of his own abilities; a kind of might-makes-right mentality. He wanted to be good but knew deep down that even if he wasn't good, he likely couldn't be challenged. His unwillingness to ruthlessly use his talents for his own ambitious desires could arguably have been the influence of his sworn brothers or it could have been an innate sense of morality he was never actually willing to compromise. When his character developed into a darkness from which there seemed no escape, he could have easily portrayed a Bai Choufei who was plainly and flatly villainous. You could say that he could have portrayed him as having given up, or given in.  But he chose a different interpretation. It was like he wanted to make sure we could still see the leash around his wrist as he was being dragged across jagged stone by the sheer relentless momentum of his own broken mind. We could still hope that he or someone else would arrest that momentum... Don't misunderstand, Bai Choufei went down a horrific path. He did many, many things that were hard to watch, that horrified me, even. What made him exceptional, however, was that he was also horrified. What could have been a simple shift into villainy was instead a heartbreaking descent for a would-be hero, and there's such a fine line between these two depictions. The character depth of Bai Choufei reminded me in some ways of Joaquin Phoenix's Commodus in Gladiator. Except there was arguably more of an arc, more evolution for Bai Choufei, but the layers upon layers of nuance were definitely similar.

Depending on the reasons you watch dramas it's possible Bai Choufei could wholly overshadow a stellar cast of wonderful characters. And it needs to be said that there was a host of really wonderful characters present here. Baron Chen's Su Mengzhen, for instance, was the original reason I decided to watch this drama. His character, the grimly elegant and vividly impressive young master of a powerful martial sect, was more or less fully realized from the moment we met him. He is noble, cold and untouchable, like a statue of marble behind a wall of glass. He is also deathly ill. The distance he keeps even from his sworn brothers is a fascinating bit of character that could be interpreted as a fatal flaw. His own awareness of his impending doom acted as a kind of imposed fatalism that he accidentally projected outward, forgetting that not everyone else in his world would see death as a kind of freedom.

Wang Xiaoshi was portrayed with a sense of innocence that managed to sidestep naivete somehow. Instead we see a boy who is walking the path to manhood along a road of broken glass. He was in no way prepared for the tribulations of his lot, nor for the pain he was doomed to endure and it could have made him intolerably self-righteous or bitter or indignant. But that innocence of his seemed very hard to kill, despite everyone's insistence that it was a weakness. Maybe it was weakness. Maybe it was his chief strength. At times it even seemed like impenetrable armor.  Whatever victories he experienced were pyrrhic. And it's hard to determine how he truly fared, even for those of us who've seen the end.

There are several other characters of note. Di Fei Jing was wonderfully unique. I could watch a hundred episodes about him alone.

The female characters left a little to be desired in this drama. The unfortunate reality of romance-heavy writing is that the presence of any woman seems to necessitate a coupling with one or more of the men. (A Jane Austen quote comes to mind...) And in your typical romance such a plot works well alongside the romantic coupling arc. But when a romance is shoehorned into a story like this it will feel forced and out of place if it isn't done with background restraint.  Either of the two main women would have had a more interesting storyline if it hadn't been so hinged on a romance. Particularly Lei Chun, who had a more than capable actress and a wonderfully tragic arc with a lot of available space for fascinating exploration. I feel they lost track of her character threads and ended up with a knot of motivations and traumas any one of which would have been better on its own. Too, I believe her character, Bai Choufei's, and Su Mengzhen's would have all benefitted from avoiding the very forced love triangle. Although, admittedly, it was done in a way that had less to do with love and more to do with madness and hate. But that, too, muddled otherwise crisply-drawn characters. Which is what I mean when I say that the story for this drama was not the best. It could have been; they had all the pieces. But things got a bit too jostled. They stuck the landing, though, in my opinion.

The bottom line here is that if you crave expertly wrought characters with bold, risky developments deftly handled by skilled actors then even with the disappointing story this drama will satisfy you. If, however, you're looking for romance-centric plots with a lighter, sweeter feel and generally happy endings, this one is decidedly not for you. Too, if a good strong story is more important to you than the characters, then this one will probably be a bit disappointing.

I enjoyed Heroes, if "enjoy" is even the right word. Given that I was so unprepared for the devastation that was to come, it left a deeper mark in me than something with a poster like that has any right to do. But I really, really enjoyed the characters, and characters are, to me, by far the most important part of any story of any medium.