A drama that hooked you in and never let go

I am super lazy at writing reviews in general, but I will give the honour of my first review on this drama, which easily became one of my most favourites.

I would say nearly everything in this drama is perfect:

The cast and acting:
This is the gateway of Luo Yunxi obsession for me. I saw him in Ashes of Love, which showed his excellent skills, but TTEOTM really showcased his potentials. I am so amazed by how he can portray the characters even without spoken words. His movement and mannerisms.. Truly talented actor, and I’d say he was born to play lead in costume dramas.

The story:
Spoiler alert! The ending is not exactly happy ending. You could sort of predict it from the last few episodes anyway. I took 0.5 points for the story because I found that the ending is tragically inconsistent with the novel. I only found out about it because someone translated the last 5 chapters of the novel here on MDL and it sort of healed my broken heart.
Putting aside the ending, the story itself was perfect to me. It was dark at times and full of angst, but also a lot of romance and fluff moments.

Excellent music & rewatch value.
I rarely rewatch things, but somehow I keep wanting to revisit their story, just to get the fluff & fuzzy feelings again. I kept listening to the beautiful soundtrack as well, even weeks after my first watch.

To be fair, there are some flaws that annoyed me a bit:
- There are a lot of blood-spitting. By a lot, I mean amazingly excessive, not just the leads but nearly all characters. In a way, it was kind of funny.. though I wonder if there are some other way to show that someone is hurt, you know.
- Misunderstanding tropes. A lot of them. Thankfully, they were all resolved in timely-ish manner. I'd imagine some people might hate this trope, though.

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Intriguing story, multicultural settings

Initially, I picked this show because of Yamapi. It turned out to be good, so much better than I anticipated.

It is an adaptation of a manga with the same title, but if you read the manga you'd probably be disappointed because the characters and story in the show are quite different from the manga.
In terms of the story, there are some manga-like tropes that are unescapable here. I mean, if you've read a lot of manga or watched a lot of anime, you could probably guess the outcome of each tests in the story. Still, it is quite an entertaining and heart-warming story overall.

Acting and cast are excellent. I think the multi-language and accents are quite additional charms to this series.

I don't think there is any notable OST that clings to my mind, and while it was enjoyable, one-time watching is quite enough for me----nothing quite appealing for a rewatch.

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