Zao Zuo Shi Guang (2023)

The Crown Prince and his cat

I watched this mainly because I wanted to see Meng Ziyi in a main role and hadn't seen any of her dramas since The Untamed. I also hadn't watched Jeremy Tsui in anything else before other than trying out watching The Journey of Chong Zi not long before, but which I dropped, so this also handily gave me another chance to see what he was like.

This is a light rom-com with lots of fluff and pretty low stakes - which surprised me a little considering the lead actors. Unfortunately, it really is light on the story and mostly fluff. I was pretty sold on the story based on the strength of the MDL synopsis blurb, but unfortunately it seems like the story sold by the blurb was better than the actual plot and execution. (It certainly wouldn't be the first time...)

This is basically a story about the Crown Prince (Ji Yuan Su, played by Jeremy Tsui) chasing a cat (Hua Liu Li, played by Meng Ziyi), and the two of them batting at each other until they get tired of playing and then settling down to cuddle and snooze together. The 'sickly beauty' schtick that HLL pulls from the moment we meet her until the literal end of the show was incredibly annoying and got old super fast - like immediately, mainly because of how absolutely overblown and false it was - and frankly part of the reason I even made an MDL account at all was in part motivated by how annoyed I was by this show that it drove me to wanting to write a review here. The plot was okay, but because there was so little building up or actually showing what events or actual political motivations looked like and meant, etc., nothing felt it had any stakes. For example, the Hua clan is supposed to be the most powerful military power in the kingdom - but you don't actually see what that looks like. They just say that. There's no display of the family's huge army or even their mansion or a scene where you see them fighting on the battlefield in the sand or whatever to back this up; or if there was, it wasn't impressive enough that I remember it and going 'Ah, yup'. The saddest and most interesting part of the plot was probably the character of Yun Han and his relationship with Miss Du/Du Xiu Ying.

I did like the secondary characters (this is becoming a running theme), especially the relationship between Jia Min and the First Prince. The First Prince was Hilarious. I still remember his little nose scrunch and smug facial expression in that one scene where he's talking about how good he is to Jia Min or something like that. Honestly the best comedic character with the best facial expressions I've seen in a long time. Princess Shun An, Jia Min's mother, was also hilarious and I loved her relationship with Jia Min. I also liked Pei Ji Huai, whom I also thought was very funny, and thought it was cute that Yuan Wei, who was really kind of underserved in my opinion, especially given that she was mainly used as a maid but actually had a decent military rank herself, liked him. As mentioned above, Yun Han was an interesting and sad character and I liked his relationship with Du Xiu Ying/Miss Du, but thought his choice at the end was daft. Honestly, I think the relationship the Crown Prince/Ji Yuan Su has with Yun Han and Pei Ji Huai had much more chemistry than he did with HLL. I did not care for the He Yuan Ting character and thought that whole business was daft, but A Wa was kind of funny, even though he was very silly and not very clever at all. Also, they totally did Uncle Song/Song Shu completely dirty. It felt to me like it was absolutely one of those things where they did it just to round the trope because of course that's how it goes, although I get that it was probably how he wanted to go out. I just really think he didn't have to.

I found Jeremy Tsui very weird to watch, there's something about his eyes, I think? - it looks like he's wearing those huge circle lenses or something, which I found extremely distracting, and I didn't really like looking at him very much because of that, and it took me out of the story quite a bit. Which is not a good thing when they're the male lead. Meng Ziyi didn't fare much better for me either in this, I really didn't like her costuming here at all, specifically the hair, besides the gripes I had with her character. This might just be a personal pet peeve thing but I really don't understand it when they have the huadian (decorative ornamentation in the middle of the forehead) when they also have a straight fringe which is kind of blocking it. But anyway. Also, I couldn't stop being aware of the 10-year age gap between them. Nothing necessarily wrong with that, but the whole time I was watching I was thinking "Uh, he's like 37".

Music was fine, nothing really stood out to me, but I'm sure it was pleasant enough. Wouldn't rewatch this for the reasons outlined above, but on the other hand, the First Prince and also Princess Shun An were so funny they add to the rewatch value, so 7 points for that.

The best part of this show was hands-down, without a doubt, the closing short at the end of each episode that always began with the illustrated title card of the royal family members as their representative animals. That was my favourite thing about the show.

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