GLAD I WATCHED IT ONCE/CHINESE

  This is by far the most brutal and sad series I have watched...it was emotionally draining.    The writing, casting, acting and visual production of this series are brilliant.  

I enjoyed this the first time when I was very new to any form of Asian drama and had no expectations.  I've just tried to watch it again, but I can't.  I love the female lead as an actress...BUT...I have six kids and nine grandkids...some of them are the sweetest, kindest, funniest and happiest people I know and every one of them was considerably less naïve than the female lead character by the time they were 10, her character is what 15, 16?  This is a 'me' thing so despite how I feel,  I will still highly recommend it to other viewers because the story itself is not awful and the acting is quite good.

This production is very slow-paced and mostly passes by quietly...this usually annoys the hell out of me, but for some reason, it made the series watchable and mostly enjoyable.  

It was juvenile in spots but it was written for that demographic, so it is what it is.

It was worth a once through.  

Just loved this series at the beginning, but the further on I got, the less enthralled I became....so, very sad.  
For me,  Ning Que, Fu Zi, Yan Se, most of the disciples, the Ichthyosaur (dragon) Gang and Sang Sang are the characters that made this series worth watching.  Everyone else was nauseatingly cliche.  Seven stars count as 10 for everyone/thing BUT writing and whomever allowed it to drag down this series.

SPOILER ALERT!

1. Ning Que found Sang Sang as an infant, making him 8 to 10 years old at the time, given the size and agility of the child that played his younger self.  Yet  when Ning Que is 18, Sang Sang is 16 ?  Math people, math!

2. Ye Hong Yu...be-ach Dao addict.  She  takes a lot of liberties with anyone she chooses to  and no one says or does a damn thing, including Ning Que...bit of a stretch.

3. Qu Ni  of the Yue Lun state's character  annoyed me right from one end to the other.

4. Prince Hun Yuan.  Is it even remotely believable that the heir to the thrown was ever allowed to become a tyrannical spoilt brat who never got punished for anything??  Is it even remotely believable that a parent (whom we are lead to believe actually cares about his children) would be okay with his adult son constantly tormenting his 6 year old son to the point of almost killing him????  What about the Empress and her bad ass brother?

We are led to believe that Li Yu is intelligent, yet she keeps on supporting her spoilt rotten, juvenile, tyrannical adult brother?

I love my siblings and I would take a bullet for them,  HOWEVER,  if they behaved like that bastard does, they'd stumble away from me a lot more bruised than when they walked toward me.

5. Sang Sang's parents...OMG, I thought I'd fallen into a 1980's soap opera, gag.

I have a lot more, but only allowed 2000 characters, which you have to guess at because there is no counter, fun stuff.

This is a cute, sweet, very slow burn about the lives of university aged humans and how they grow and adapt to that ever illusive creature called maturity.  

I enjoyed it because it was a nice and much needed change from the tyrannical CEO, the velociraptor mother-in-law,  or the spoilt brat rich kid...as well as their period drama counterparts. 

Right now I say I won't watch it again, but who knows, maybe 5 years from now I'll need again as an escape from the usual cliche tripe.

It wasn't awful, nor was it exemplary.   It is simply a story about life divided equally between the trivial and trying parts of it.

Full stars for casting and acting but stars off for writing and whomever okayed it.   Every C-drama does NOT need the controlling, overbearing mom that only cares about her own happiness so will go all out to destroy her child's happiness if she can't have what she wants...so stop it.  The sets were well designed, for the most part but as a seamstress, I took issue with some of the set ups they had for the designers because they were impractical.  Impracticality at their level is ridiculous.

A lot of reviewers were annoyed with what they deemed was an excessive amount of product placement,  I didn't see any of it.   I'm not saying it isn't there, just that it was placed in a way that didn't draw my attention away from the story.   It could also be that I'm not familiar with the brands that were placed.  

I do understand that a lot of productions depend on these placements in order to fund their projects and I support this completely, but do it naturally.  I just wandered through my house, product placement everywhere, strewn about haphazardly, as they should be; I was still able to recognize each of them...because I have eyes and a brain capable of memory.

 Generally in North American productions, product placement is blatant; they have the actors hold the product so the viewer can clearly see the brand logo. This is visually awkward and annoying making me far less inclined to purchase those brands.  The production company is required to place products in the manner the brand decides,  so my ire is justifiably directed at the brand rather than the production company.

I gets a 10 for acting, presentation and lack of the usual exhausting length.  It has comedy, but it is NOT a comedy, that label is very misleading.  

Even though I enjoyed the brevity of this series, I think this story, in the hands of intelligent writers, could be re-made into 20 episodes allowing it to give insightful back stories to the main characters without turning it into a soap opera filled with cliches and other 'mandatory' tripe.

This story is a VERY slow burn but you can't skip episodes and fully understand what going on in the one you've skipped to...sigh.

The acting is great, kudos to casting, it's just the writing that gets a little off the path and or heads to a different path completely, leaving me scratching my head as to the why of things.

I rather enjoyed the sets, they were raw and real.

If in the final episode, you wonder if this is based on a true story...like I did...I jumped into the Google rabbit hole and found nothing to indicate that it was even loosely based on a true story.

Very dark.   You will come away from this feeling like you are the only survivor of everyone you know and love.

I'm not sure how I feel about the story itself.

I will not watch it again...

This was interestingly good.  This is my first encounter with the ML, well done...I've seen the FL before, in Rise of the Phoenixes, again, well done.

I will give a hardy kudos to everyone involved in this production...except whomever was responsible for okaying the backstory for the worlds.   I was left scratching my head too often for a series this long.   There were plenty of opportunities to build a solid path between 'how it all began' and 'here we are now'....plenty of missed opportunities....sigh.

That aside, the CGI was obvious, but not brutal, so well done for stepping higher than so many other C-productions.  

I thoroughly enjoyed the interaction between the leads, not for it's romantic value (gag) but for the comfortable familiarity they portrayed throughout...it in no way felt 'acted'.   I don't care how good you are at your craft, that is something incredibly difficult to mimic.

I won't watch this again, but I thoroughly recommend watching it once.