cashew | Sunday, November 3rd, 2024

I'm so close to finishing this series. So close. Once I've made it past the politicking arc, things have gone back to interpersonal relationships and it got so much better. From what I understand, the TV series is actually fairly faithful to the original novel, so like...some people are just not equipped to deal with sociological storytelling.

The story seriously has no sense of scale. Moving an army of 200k men seems to require zero preparation; no food, no water, no housing, and no monetary investment.
You can apparently march an army from the border to the capital within three days. Three days. On foot. Modernity have completely thrown off people's concept of time. (Like, ok, maybe if you're Lichtenstein this is doable. But we're supposedly talking about alternate universe Ancient China...no. Just no.)
Also, according to this show, if you are a general planning a military coup, you'll be sitting inside the capital planning said coup, ride your horse to the border outpost after you decided you'll do the coup for reals, then proceed to march back with said outpost troops (of two hundred thousand strong) to initiate the coup. With zero intervention from any other division in the military. There's no other military officials left in this "empire".
A coup requires just one person saying, "fuck it." What coalition? What logistics? All you need is to have a private army. People will totally back your violent coup to overthrow a reasonably popular emperor. Of course.
Also, you can somehow convince two hundred thousand soldiers who are ready to stage a coup to back down with an apology. That's all it took to convince these soldiers, who have breached the imperial palace, to back down from their coup. These are toy soldiers. WTF.
As soon as the story moved onto interpersonal grudges, it got so much better. I'm just going to pretend the last 15 episodes didn't happen.
The two main romances are actually pretty sweet. As in, it takes up very little oxygen, progresses without much drama, the couples are very cute with no distraught confession scenes. Just two people being concerned about each other without jealousy and under going only very brief bouts of insecurity. Like, wow, a healthy approach to relationships. Color me surprised.
One of the main couple has the woman being older than the man and it's perfectly healthy. And normal. And no one makes any comments about it. Other than being "d'aww, look, so cute". This deserves a special mention. In addition, the actors' ages also matches the character's age difference (none of this younger woman playing an older woman nonsense that Hollywood popularized). This is so satisfying.
The main character shield is like a fucking multi-layered wall. This got immensely annoying during the last 15-ish episodes, but has gone back to being less annoying now that the politics stuff is over.
By episode 36, I'm finally starting to get behind 雷萧 ship. 无萧 is a ship that runs mostly on surface level baiting, while 雷萧 is an actual friendship with genuine emotions and feels like it has far more content behind it.
I really find 无心's friendship with the main character to be very, very poorly developed. Shocking this is going to drive the climax of the story. Really should've spent the last 15 episodes building up this relationship more if this is going to be the emotional core of the story's conclusion. I honestly thought MC's uncle issues was going to be the climax, but given how it was handled...ugh...
It's a bad sign that I'm rooting for the end of the show so I can move onto other things...