GOODBYE MY PRINCESS is such a lot of things! It's like SCARLET HEART RYEO, but without a fraction of the maturity, depth, and power of that story. It's that thing where gross dudes will say "I like a woman with spirit" but what they want to do is punish the woman for having spirit until she's beaten into a hollow shell of herself, except on a systemic cultural level. It's how to both-sides the treacherous war of imperialistic aggression. It's a masterclass on how not to write villain romance.

Over and over the heroine is told, "Wars happen somehow, who can say who's to blame lol. Definitely not us, who deceived you and slaughtered everyone you care about. Why can't you set aside these little things (treachery, murder, a little light genocide) for the greater good?" The show agrees that this perspective demands intolerable sacrifices of the individual. Given a choice between living for herself and living for others, between individual peace and healing (I dare not say happiness) at the price of collective suffering, and collective peace and coexistence at the price of individual abuse, the heroine finds herself left with suicide as the only option. The fact that the show expresses sympathy for her predicament, however, feels like adding insult to injury. The show knows full well how intolerable this situation is; it still insists that sacrificing the individual to the collective is the right and good choice. (I'm a both-and person, myself: I believe that it is both possible and optimal to value both individual and collective equally, and to balance their needs and desires).

Part of the reason I watched the show is that it was billed as the ultimate villain romance, and I'm a sucker for those. What I found, in my opinion, was a masterclass on how NOT to write villain romance.

Some big ways that the romance fell down, IMO:

- from the very beginning to the very end, the male lead is incapable of seeing where he went wrong and blames other people, especially the heroine, for making life hard for him. To me, this indicates somebody totally incapable of either repentance or growth. The ending, in which Chengyin becomes a heartbroken and lonely, but decent king, rang utterly false to me because I didn't believe him capable of changing. I believed the same ending in SCARLET HEART RYEO because we saw that Wang So had a conscience and the ability to see the error of his ways, but we never see that from Li Chengyin. It would have worked on someone who's supposed to be a, irredeemable villain, but for someone who's supposed to change at the end, as well as someone who is supposed to be capable of love, it's a deathblow to the characterisation.

- in addition to his inability to feel guilt or experience repentance, Li Chengyin's whole arc is from bad to worse. This is fun in the final ten episodes when he finally goes absolutely unhinged, so that he becomes an obvious villain instead of a two-faced schemer. But, it felt ultimately meaningless to me. It's tricky but possible to do a tragic character arc in a villain romance and sell it to the audience. I loved the tragic arc in WUTHERING HEIGHTS because I could see that Heathcliff could have been a better person and that his story didn't need to end that way: I cared about what happened to him. I didn't care about Li Chengyin past the first ten episodes, because he was so despicable in blaming everyone else for his own problems.

- the story also tries another thing that's really hard but theoretically possible to do well, which is that Li Chengyin is a wolf in sheep's clothing, aka the Smooth Hypocrite. Most villain romances wisely stick to a lead who's a Sheep in Wolf's Clothing (Tantai Jin from TILL THE END OF THE MOON) or a Wolf in Wolf's Clothing (like Kylo Ren in THE LAST JEDI) - someone who represents himself to be every bit as bad or worse than he actually is. But, Li Chengyin is so much worse than he represents himself, which puts him in the same box as Bluebeard from the fairy tale or Angelo from MEASURE FOR MEASURE or Scarpia from TOSCA, and friends, while I'd like to see it done GMP did NOT manage to make this worst of all villain types work as a romantic lead.

- another things that's difficult but possible in an enemies to lovers story is a match between somebody who's genuinely good and sweet and somebody who's Just Terrible. I think enemies to lovers and villain romance tends to work best when both characters are a little bit dreadful and equally matched in power - this is something that TILL THE END OF THE MOON did brilliantly well, giving Li Susu her own vindictive darkness and her own power. Even LOVE BETWEEN FAIRY AND DEVIL managed to take a ridiculously naive and sweet heroine and give her some genuine power over the far cleverer and more ruthless love interest, which balances things out nicely. But Xiaofeng is not just sweet and naive, she's also powerless. Her natural shrewdness is not negligible, but it's no match for Chengyin's absolute rat-level cunning and ruthlessness. For most of the show he keeps her in the dark with no idea what's going on, or why he's gaslighting her and throwing her under literally every passing bus. It's the worst possible scenario, and nothing in other aspects of the show can save it.

- finally, the romance lacks a key ingredient, which is trust/vulnerability. Chengyin is someone who wants power and will sacrifice everyone around him to get it, foremost the heroine. I don't object to the show doing this: it was very realistic. What I object to is the show trying to convince me that despite all this the leads are nevertheless falling for each other. How can they, when he never once makes himself vulnerable for her, either by letting her see the truth about him or by putting himself at any risk for her? I was frustrated because the story kept demanding I believe that these two had learned to care about one another, but it felt wholly unearned. Again, this works in SCARLET HEART RYEO because we see Wang So's vulnerability to Hae Soo being expressed ("I am yours") and then exploited by others, long before he starts pushing her away to conserve power. There wasn't even much to show that the two leads are attracted to each other (like the shipboard dance scene in TILL THE END OF THE MOON, from which I may never recover). As far as I could tell, Xiafeng and Chengyin had about as much chemistry as two Ming vases inhabiting different ends of the same mantelpiece.

tl;dr: I love a good murder puppy of a love interest but this was IMO resoundingly the wrong way to go about it. GMP is a perfect storm of a) things that are difficult but possible to play well, IF they are handled carefully and not thrown into a blender; and b) a couple of things that are absolutely death to any romance. In this sense I can understand why this was recommended to me as "the ultimate villain romance", in that at every point the writers have picked absolutely the worst possible option from the many available, and then have gone as hard as possible. There are viewers who enjoy this, I acknowledge; some of them recommended the show to me. For me, it's a completely hamfisted and inelegant attempt at something that requires careful handling.

The things I DID like? I enjoyed the melodramatic Mess of the first 10 and last 10 episodes. I loved Xiaofeng who deserved so much better than these writers, these themes, and this love interest - she was genuinely a sweet and lovely person with very relatable desires and an AMAZING bevy of female friends. I loved that the show does let the male lead get called out for how outrageously messed up he is - Xiaofeng in particular gets out some great zingers. But this is ultimately only the more enraging, because the show STILL punishes her for her "sins" (wanting a life she can live for herself) SO MUCH more horribly than it punishes him for his (lies, murder, rape, abuse).

I'm not sorry that I stuck the show out, because it had some moments of awesome, and because it made me think HARD about all the reasons why I thought it failed at nearly everything it tried. But otherwise, I would not recommend the drama at all.