By making them the most boring part of the show. Quite honestly I found every aspect of the show more interesting than the leads, their individual stories and their romance.

As always, the biggest issue is the fact nothing was truly well established for them. We barely know who they are before their journey starts, they fall in love with each other out of the blue with no real reasoning either. They don’t have any real flaws they need to overcome, there is nothing to improve, nothing to change. They were painfully stagnant.

On the other hand, there were quite a lot of supporting characters with more interesting personalities and plots. Yu Shi San with his playboy, but good nature persona mixing goofy and surprisingly mature takes in an excellent manner. Yuan Lu, the loyal boy whom you just love and care for - the only one who had well established real stakes that made you worried. Li Tong Guang with his unhinged psycho motivations, who had to learn how to control his feelings and desire and mature for the role he was supposed to take. Even the Empress Wu and Prince Danyang who had barely any scenes were more interesting than the lead couple.

And then we have the true queen and main characters of the story - Princess Yang Ying. This is how you are supposed to write your characters! Having a lot of strengths and good points, but also flaws that need to be worked on. A character that develops with the plot, whose motivation changes as they gather more information. One that slowly establishes their goals and needs to fight many different setbacks and accept sacrifices to reach them.

Putting aside poorly written leads, the second crime this drama committed was not doing a good job presenting the danger and the stakes. Even when shit started to hit the fan by the end of the show, I felt nothing. Everyone miraculously survived too many times, now I actually just wanted everyone to die. You cannot make the drama feel like there are no real threats and then expect me to care when something actually goes wrong. They filled the show with fluffy flirty dates of Ru Yi and Ning Yuan Zhou instead of putting some effort into adding more details to the story and the characters.

The acting was good. I don’t think Liu Yu Ning is the strongest actor out there and putting that with mediocre character, it’s a fail for me. Liu Shi Shi is amazing and extremely beautiful, acing the role for both the badass and the vulnerable scenes. At the end of the day though, He Lan Dou did steal the show in all aspects. The character was cute, funny, moving, badass, desperate, motivated, devastated, brave, scared, angry, sad, happy - you name it and she gave it.

The production quality was fine. I did enjoy a lot of fighting scenes, I enjoyed less at times excessive slow motion. The editing in the first few episodes was trash though - I felt borderline motion sickness, but it did get better as the drama progressed. I don’t remember one song - nothing memorable I guess.

Overall, at least 50% of the drama was a whole bunch of nothing that felt like filler scenes. I wish they spent more screen time on the Wu court plot, because the final shenanigans just felt flat. Less cute bickering and flirting, more character development. They had 40 episodes and they did not use them wisely.