Welcome to my weekly blog post where I give thoughts on dramas I’m watching but not recapping.
Posted my final thoughts on Oh No! Here Comes Trouble! and am getting ready to start recapping Japanese found-family BL Our Dining Table next week. It’s a great drama to watch if you need something with lower stakes that still takes you on an emotional journey with the characters.
This week I finished:
The Legend of Zhuohua – 灼灼风流 – 2023
A recently aired Chinese historical drama with 40 episodes.
An ambitious young woman seeks to be an official of the court and meets a general seeking the truth about a battle that went wrong.
Here’s a link to my initial review.
And if you follow that link above you’ll notice I was pretty enthusiastic about the first half. Truthfully though, the real test of a long Chinese drama is the second half. So how was this one?
It was fine.
It wasn’t terrible, but it lost a lot of its charm as it moved into the familiar, censorship-required ending arc. If you’ve watched more than a few semi-recent Chinese historical-ish dramas then you’ll notice the same basic ending across many of them. This basically eliminates all suspense from them.
The other problem is that the last arc of the story really focuses on the villain. There were some interesting scenes involving that character and the people they were involved with. As far as villains go, I found them interesting and multi-dimensional.
But I wasn’t watching the show for them. As they took center stage, our heroine and her love interest had less to do. The second half didn’t have the same fun scenes of her navigating the court and being clever or finding herself in trouble and having to get out of it while her love interest watched with admiration and delight. Since that’s why I was here, I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much.
The problem is that this is such a typical problem with Chinese historical dramas. If I said not to watch it because of the boring, predictable ending, I’m not sure what shows in this genre I can recommend. For that reason, I’ll say that I still enjoyed enough of the show to recommend it with the caveat that you know how it’ll work out in the end.
