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Love & the Emperor chinese drama review
Completed
Love & the Emperor
3 people found this review helpful
by labcat
Apr 22, 2021
24 of 24 episodes seen
Completed
Overall 7.5
Story 7.5
Acting/Cast 7.5
Music 7.5
Rewatch Value 7.5
This review may contain spoilers

The potential could have been fulfilled if this had been a time travel drama instead

I find the story fairly interesting though I also find it more difficult to suspend my disbelief compared to when I watch dramas in a similar genre.

This is not a time travel drama though it is similar to one. The protagonist simply tests out a newly developed VR game. How a bug in the game could cause her to be unable to simply exit the game by simply removing the VR device is possibly one of the first questions we may ask, but we can possibly assume that the technology is so advanced that the human-device connection is something much more complex than we can imagine today.

For a number of episodes, the game premise disappears and it seems no different from a time travel drama. I think this is the best part of the series. Unfortunately, the game premise returns with a vengeance, which makes things a little odd. For selfish interests, the bad guy (or the closest to one), who is the boss of the company creating the game, wants to end the game by letting one of the fictional game characters die. The protagonist (of the series) is against this, but the bad guy actually has a fairly convincing argument: nothing in the game is real, including the characters, so one should have no qualms letting the characters die. The behaviors of the game characters are determined by algorithms. (Yeah, I guess falling in love with one of the game characters is like falling in love with a chat bot.)

The only argument I can imagine using to support the protagonist of the series is that the game characters are sentient and have a mind of their own--perhaps they can even comprehend the idea that they are game characters in a computer program. (It's like if we one day find out the entire world we live in is a sort of simulation. Would our lives not matter then?) It does feel like this in some ways, but the series does not really push his point of view. This issue marred my enjoyment of the series at least a little.

The characterization of the game characters does not always help. I like the two generals in the game, but the emperor and the princess he is supposed to marry are less compelling. The princess is, at first, interesting because she's not the clear-cut villain (of the game) I had guessed she would be. However, her descent into complete villainy isn't convincing. Because of the portrayal of the game characters, I end up being reminded that they really are just game characters, as the boss of the game company says.

I suspect that the story would have been much better if it had simply been a time travel drama, so perhaps we have yet another potentially excellent series compromised by the need to comply with censorship laws.
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