Not Today

 Finished Tale of Twin Cities last night and...no complaints really. Generally satisfying. I won't spoil the ending, but it's pretty predictable if you've been paying attention. I wasn't all that affected by it tbh. These days I'm just happy to encounter a drama that doesn't rile me up right before the ending and the ending doesn't feel rushed or forced or is just unnecessarily tragic or something. Things I found super refreshing about this drama include:

- The fact that Su Mo was extremely powerful and intelligent and never overly emotional. He was respected by pretty much everyone he came in contact with. And those who didn't respect him, well, they usually regretted it later lol. I really dislike struggling, weak, emotional, or dense male leads. Su Mo very perfectly fit the heroic ideal and it was a nice change. I will also give kudos to Li Yifeng too bc his visual and the calm collected way of his acting extremely helped complete the picture. 

- The OST was pretty nice. There were the usual soppy insert songs, but the instrumentals were varied and memorable. I liked the opening so much that i never skipped it.

- Emotionally, the drama stayed on a very even keel throughout. I didn't feel like anything was unnecessarily dramatic or put there for additional dramatic effect. There were sort of three tiers of villains: Cangliu in general, Zhi Zhe, and Yu Huan. They all had different goals, and none were what I would call cartoonish. Unfortunately, despite their villainous tendencies, none of them trusted each other (which makes sense) and so they never teamed up very effectively against Kongsang or Su Mo.  HOwever, all three of them were VERY hateable for different reasons.

- There were plenty of morally gray characters. Not everyone was straight up good or evil. I like the realism of this.

- The CGI was super good.  All the magic and the dragon and whatnot was super cool and definitely gave you that fantasy realness.

There was nothing I didn't like tbh. There wasn't much romance per se, but I didn't really go into it for that. I never felt much about the main relationship, but I think that had a lot to do with the FL's acting. It was very stiff and cold and I just never felt her supposedly strong affection for Su Mo. However, the side couple of Yan Xi and Na Sheng was pretty cute. 

So yeah. I'm not really saying this is a sensational drama and everyone should watch it, but it was very absorbing to me as a fantasy story and satisfying as a whole. 

Now I'm down mainly to finishing Last Cinderella, which has 3 eps left and I honestly am not sure who the FL will end up with. Her relationship with Hiroto seems so shallow but her relationship with Tachibana is so comfortable and buddy buddy that it's like, wait, if you have a relationship like that with a guy, like HELLO??? 

Then there's Cambrian Period which is fffffffffffffffffff.  Such a pain to watch. I have to watch shitty quality vids on DramaCool or whatever for the subs, then pause and go through the subless HQ YT vids whenever Jian Zi is in the picture. I refuse to miss out on HQ Minghao is mainly the problem. That's the only reason i'm not done with it yet. I really ought to be by now bc it's not like it's uninteresting.