I had a really fun time with this. We got so many different but all interesting plot lines, one after another within the Luo household between both ShenYuan and YiNing along with the other family members and villains. I didn’t care much for the side plot love triangle with her uncle and cousin, but apart from that I was pretty invested in all that was going on.

I do think it fell off in the last 10 or so episodes.
The lead romance was poorly paced and very rushed on YiNing’s side, which makes sense since it really only had a few episodes to get going when they revealed her true identity to her so late in. I bought ShenYuan’s feelings for her since he knew they weren’t related all along, but her’s seemed to reciprocate very abruptly. She even kept calling him third brother in their romantic scenes which threw it off even more. The wall between sibling love and romantic love was never shown as divided for her to us. I did enjoy their relationship up until the “romance” began. I was really looking forward to how their love story would play out but it ended up just materializing from thin air which was disappointing.

I really appreciate Ci Sha. The simplicity of him using his own hair instead of the wigs like all other men in this shows really stands out. But apart from that, his performance here was phenomenal too! I really wish they explored LiNing’s side to their relationship more. She seemed to brush it under the rug and preferred to pretend it never happened, but it did and she did have feelings back then. To ignore it entirely even after learning of the misunderstanding was a little odd. It would make more sense if they better paced her romantic feelings for ShenYuan so we’d have proof she’s really moved on, but again those never clicked for me due to the last minute appearance of them.

I’m keeping it at an 8 despite the later episodes having let me down, because I did really really enjoy it for well more than half of it. It was a delight and exciting to wake up to new episodes every day.