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Charlotte

Canada

Charlotte

Canada
Love and Destiny chinese drama review
Completed
Love and Destiny
0 people found this review helpful
by Charlotte
Apr 7, 2022
60 of 60 episodes seen
Completed
Overall 10
Story 9.5
Acting/Cast 10.0
Music 10.0
Rewatch Value 10.0

When 'Love and Destiny' run our lives... Gods become human too...

Add this one in alongside another classic Wuxian Drama: Eternal Love/Ten Thousand Miles of Peach Blossoms. These stories are both so mesmerizing, and the Gods and Goddesses so human. They can be just as principled or as petty as the people below them in the mortal world. Happily, in Love and Destiny, we get to see both. The love story works well because the length of this series allows us to see the ups and downs and watch as the small flame that kindles between two opposites fans into a blaze of enduring, passionate love. There are others who fall for each other too...and many who try to keep them apart, but it's wonderful to watch how the 'lazy Fairy' and the disciplined God of War, work out their differences.

PROS: Amazing costumes , hair design and outstanding acting talent (how could the bragging, full-of-himself God of Thunder make me smile so much whenever he tried to out-do Jiuchen?😂). Ni Ni who plays our Fairy, is such a beautiful woman and she manages to wring her face into impish smiles & haughty pouts without being clichéd. Excellent actress. As for our God of War, I haven't seen him before, but Chang Chen didn't quite have fun with his part until the last third, when he'd learned to smile and savour life & love...all for Ling Xi.
Also liked the world the writer created. There were rules in the heavens which made it easier to understand the characters' motivations when they followed them...or how serious it was when they broke them.

CONS: Just one. I really did appreciate the subtitlers on the streaming site who offered us some backstory about customs or objects we might not understand. For example 'the 'Shwuanxi Double Happiness Lamp' for engagements. However, I did have a problem throughout the series with the non-immortal language that kept popping up. Here we are in the Heavenly Realms where the Gods have self-cultivated to a 'higher order of being' and then suddenly, their words are translated into our own no-so-high modern american speech. The subbers gave us : "done deal", "Little brat", "A pain in the ass", "long time no see", "Do your thing" and.... coming from the mouth of a Princess: "Is that bitch here?" Even The Immortal and very ladylike Doctor Quinhao tells her brother to "Shut up!". Totally out of character. For me, this breaks a wall somewhere between the viewer and the characters. I am immersed, enjoying and believing the story of our Gods and Goddesses, where time is in thousands of years, and then, when I hear modern-day slang, my brain trips a bit and takes me outside the story , reminding me that this moment isn't real. It breaks the trust we have in the storyteller and the tone of the drama suddenly drops. We are not in the high heavens anymore but on the lower-east side of New York.
A small point maybe...but this show in particular would have been much better without the intrusion. But all in all I absolutely LOVED this series. Brava!
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