***** a review for part 2 only******

I was unexpectedly taken with Part 1, especially with the refreshing performance of Shaoshang's mother and Consort Yue both of whom I still adore. Thus Part 2 really disappointed me.

The main reason is that Part 2 is mostly filler. Primarily, a lot of driving force behind Ling Buyi's revenge was resolved early on in Part 1, so we kind of lost the 'bigger plot' and began to introduce random plot lines that were not foreshadowed in the previous part. Unfortunately this means that there was a huge focus on the romance. Which is a very cliche cdrama romance where Ling Buyi is manly and overbearing and defeats all the 'bad guys', and random plot points are invented as new points of conflict.

The biggest issue with this is that Ling Buyi starts to show us who he really is. And if you think about what he's done... he's not the hero. He's basically a villain disguised as a troubled good guy.

Let's just compare him to the first 'enemy' that he vanquishes in Part 2, which is the Third Princess. What is she guilty of? She pushed Shaoshang into a river and got a snake to bite her, and she said brainless things like 'it's just a human life, nothing more'. She's very cut and dried case of 'stupid and evil'. A 2d villain.

But what does Ling Buyi do in retaliation? There's a reason we have laws and a justice system in civil society. But Ling Buyi takes the law in his own hands, he is both judge and executioner. He kills all the male consorts of the Third Princess. He parades her friends tied up in the streets because of their role as a bystander. He hangs the father of one of the friends up in front of his house for hours, berating him. Is this 'justice'? Maybe this is what Shaoshang means when she says that if someone hurts her, she'll "get thousand fold revenge" later in the show, because she certainly seems to completely support what he's done.

We know he's never been a law abiding kind of guy and in Part 1 it was foreshadowed that he was feared for his brutality by prisoners of war (something which boosts his manly image, I suppose). But it's really hypocritical for him to condemn the 'evil' and 'law breaking' bad guys in Part 2 and then turn around and do things that are just as bad, or worse. Who in the story has murdered more people directly than Ling Buyi? We can count those masterminds on one hand.

There are other faults with Part 2, but this is the greatest one imo: Ling Buyi (and Shaoshang by association) basically abide by the law when it suits them and defy the law when they wish to take "thousand fold revenge". They are not some 'good guys' in this story, but we are expected to pretend they are, and even to root for them. Rules for thee but not for me.