cashew | Saturday, November 9th, 2024

Previously:

Ep 1-5 | Ep 6-14 | Ep 15-18 | Ep 19-25 | Ep 26-30 | Ep 30-35

Final thoughts:

OK, well, I guess we're going back to the shitty politicking in the last two episodes. Siiiiigh. The conclusion is so dumb, my brain is leaking out of my ears.
To be fair to the story, it tried to give emotional pay off to all the plot threads. Unfortunately, the pay off was deeply unsatisfying because there's simply not enough time to actually build any real emotional connection to anyone. The main story constantly getting distracted by a bunch of subplots did not help.
Being faithful to the novel was clearly a bad idea. There are simply too many things, all of which should have been developed in a dedicated emotional arc, but because the show has only 40 episodes to conclude the damn story, it has to keep abridging emotional development.
I would've cut out the entire subplot of "princes fighting over the throne" bit and focused instead on "evil royal brainwashing a friend and we have to go save him" plot. But that's like...on an editorial level. It would necessitate so much re-writing.
The lack of an editor to reign in the writer's id is so blatantly obvious. There's just not enough focus. Feels like I'm reading a hastily thrown together NaNoWriMo draft rather than a well thought out story.

I was going to say this is it, I'm so done with silly period dramas. But then I found 《成化十四年》. The first ten minutes made me roll my eyes at the over-the-top attempts at comedy, and "genius detective simultaneously listens to 10 different cases at once" was just...ugh. Ugh. But, once I managed to push past the ham-fisted attempt at appealing to "the young'uns", the show seemed to be not that bad. At least I'm deeply amused that the poor civil officer has to write shitty novels to supplement his puny government salary. Because, y'know, it's the Ming dynasty, when novels exploded in the Chinese market.

Anyway, we'll see how well this show does at satisfying my cravings.