![]() She never steps out of his shadow, and her supposed love for him feels like puppy love rather than the deep-rooted affection and mutual respect one would expect from such a drama (or any solid romance, really). On top of that, even when she grows up, Haishi remains submissive to her master, behaving like a student or an adoptive daughter and never his equal. Why in the world did they decide to keep adult actors for the two male leads when the female lead of the show was played by such a young girl! How do they expect people to feel comfortable with that, and to believe them when they try, later on, to make up for the confusion by explaining that there’s only a few years between Haishi and her love interest Fang Zhu? It makes no sense. Indeed, the show manages to make its audience uncomfortable from its very beginning, when Fang Zhu, played by actor William Chan (36), takes in young Ye Haishi, played by Liu Qi Qi (13). Yes, because the characters themselves, apart from the emperor, have all the consistency of soup, and so do their relationships. This much laziness should not be allowed, and I threw in the towel. Especially since the poor man had no other attribute than being in love with her, talented and gorgeous. There are allusions here and there to suspicious people, but the show would rather linger on the main six gazing longingly at each other and daydreaming of marital bliss while tearful music plays in the background rather than elaborate on the actual plot.Īfter clinging to it desperately for 28 episodes, I ended up dropping this show when they introduced that one character I liked which I mentioned before, only to write him an unrequited love line with Haishi which is so thoroughly useless I don’t even know why they bothered. By that point, the bad guy had been allotted a grand total of 20 minutes of screentime if that, which hardly makes him menacing (he’s barely mentioned anyway). ![]() They couldn’t bring me to truly care for any of those characters except for one who’d been there for half an episode. It’s slow, it’s tedious, and it almost seems like it was purposely written to be as bland as possible. ![]() In addition, Novoland: Pearl Eclipse is incredibly slow. ![]() It’s just so boring on all accounts, really. Haishi keeps parrotting “Shifu, Shifu, Shifu” (reminds me of “Sifeng! Sifeng! Sifeng!”, that), Zhuoying bats his eyelashes at his belle, the emperor keeps playing “he loves me, he loves me not” with his concubine, and Fang Zhu remains as inexpressive as ever. ![]() In the end, I realized, as I reached the two-thirds mark, that pretty much all the characters were still at the same point that they were when the show began. We do get a couple of battle scenes, but the first one is shamalessly plagiarized from the Battle of Helm’s Deep, and once it’s done copying it, the stunts and choreographies devolve into utter nonsense. The characters have no goals whatsoever, no desires, no wants. Indeed, all it ever deals with is three different love stories, two of which are toxic, and which hardly ever make any progress at all. Unfortunately, that’s pretty much all the good that this show has to offer, because the plot resembles an empty shell: there’s absolutely nothing inside.Īfter dramas such as Joy of Life or Nirvana in Fire, which remain captivating from beginning to end with a similar episode count to Novoland: Pearl Eclipse, the plot of the latter, or lack thereof, seems like a very poor attempt at filling time. ![]()
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