in other to suppress my frustrations with this drama i ll start with what i liked about it; omg male lead is the most beautiful man ever, like he looks like he came straight out of a disney comic book, some prince charming coming to life. the general was an awesome actor, i hated and loved him at the same time, and emperor Qi a.k.a night lord was exceptional in his approximately 6 scenes lol. the baby emperor was a huge highlight for me and the actor did good. FL was great with her acting, i could appreciate that she was a fighter and smart lead (but was she though o.0). i appreciate that eventually somewhere around the 31st episode, all form of back and forth that is common with the lead couple ended (i mean typical plotting and framing that makes one of the partners believe a lie and separate leaving viewers in a spiral of episodes awaiting their eventual reconciliation). i appreciate the loyalty of the couple to each other in the second half. i appreciate that some of the evil characters were redeemed and we were able to sympathize with most of the characters and that’s it people……..

with all this being said there is something that isn’t right with the story telling and directing that turned a potential awesome story/ drama into a disjointed ride that can only be survived with the help of the skip button (in its defense i binge watch dramas and once they are over 25 episodes i can’t help but skip unnecessary stuff) but the degree of skipping in this drama was really high ’_’ this drama had a lot of potential interesting characters that were absolutely under utilized. emperor Qi for example was a mysterious character and viewers were dying to know his story but we got less than two episodes of an underwhelming reveal of his back story lol at least he got one, Agent wu and wang yu were there the whole time and only got 2 mins explanation of who they were (family killed, wanting revenge, was the lazy excuse of a backstory of all the side characters) , prince Qian yi story line was weird, it couldn’t really connect his motives and his switch from good to bad. The empress fu yuan didn’t even get a full back story to give a better understanding of her mission to revenge. hearing the story from the maid’s narration to the general was mediocre at best considering there were 58 episodes in this drama and one could have been devoted to flashback the story of what happened in the past. the birth story of the FL and why her family was killed wasn’t clear at all. how come the old emperor did that to a woman he loved (ML’s mother); yes we figured it as poison but who did the plotting, why did they do that? all of this could have been explained with a few good episodes of flashbacks. even the book that was the core of the plot at some point turned out to be useless to the story. so you are wandering if all of this didn’t reflect in the drama, then what did lol. the writer spent a 16 strong initial episodes introducing the characters and the mysterious plot then suddenly we are in the cliche love triangle situation which isn’t bad….. until it lasts a whole 15 episodes. the FL was supposed to be smart and strong but the writer couldn’t decide i guess, because sometimes she was strong other times she was a damsel in distress slipping and falling 22 times o_0. her decisions sometimes will have you like WTF !!! there was a lot of time to gradually unravel the mysteries in this show but they decided to dump it all in the last 3 episodes. i went from being curious about the mysteries to just wanting it to end because it dragged in the center and wore me out. they focused on the wrong stories to tell and ignored the plots that would have carried the show.


some skip ideas
*interactions between wu yu/prince chen and everyone literally
*interactions between crown prince and anyone apart from the king, the general and prince li. that dude is useless
*all ya li’s scenes till the second half lol (she had a serious case of hero worship syndrome)
*pricess zhao yun till the last 20 episodes