#like this is not one of those situations u could solve with an ot3

[silviakundera]

really enjoying your posts about the royal princess and also boarding the li rong defense train...i really don't get why people are so upset about when her continued character development and feelings are so clear even as she struggles with them

aw thank you for actually liking all my deranged rambling! 😘😘

I think some viewers simply aren't ever going to be comfortable with the complexity of the interrelationships in this story. The love and fear and blood between Li Rong and her relatives. Li Rong's inability to purely hate SRQ and eliminate all emotions about him.

Now, the actor for SRQ is not the best so I 100% understand when people find him dull and an annoyance because the performance is poor. 👌 What I'm referencing here is that a segment of viewers are automatically uncomfortable with a FL who has a past ties to another man and would prefer explicit black & white lines to be drawn, no grey areas in human relationships between people who have known each other for decades. These things make her faithless and heartless!

I myself obviously enjoy the unusual dynamic between her, PWX, and SRQ - who have a strange bond of being the only persons who lived a certain dark future and learned very different lessons from it; who all 3 want this life to be a better one than the first attempt. The fact that, if the Pei Wenxuan&Li Rong couple and Su Rongqing could achieve their goals AND leave the other party well & alive -- they'd do it. That makes the story more interesting to me, because their conflict is less predictable. (Every escalating move is like... Yes, they might go that far. But will they? Can they, will they pull back?) (Why did you give up the Xie minister of justice? He tried to kill you, you think I'd let that stand?)

We get the three of them having the weirdest possible moments. Like, what do u and your husband say to your ex-paramour who is culpable in both your murders (which u are being very mature & reasonable about!) when you're all like 19 again and have to make small talk in banquets and carriage trips? 🤔 Especially when you are only 70% sure it's him.

PWX making a passive aggressive dig about if SRQ would kill his beloved for the sake of his family, and SRQ refusing to play, too intensely saying this is not something to make fun of... while the beloved in question measures him carefully with her eyes. (is this an apology? no. an explanation? no. but is she and her tragic end a joke to him? also no.)

I'm glad that episode 21 included the flashback from the novel of LR first encountering the Su family, to keep beating the allegations that her faith in them is out of romantic naivety and biased by feelings for Su Rongqing. The novel actually circles back around to this very conversation in a later confrontation between her & SRQ, to show how her perspective has become open to new ideas over the years while he's lost the ability to question himself. (He narratively operates as her foil, more than a love rival.) Prayer circle we get all the big LR vs SRQ showdowns in the drama. I love when the girls are fighting. 💅💁

IMO it's a much richer 3 dimensional story, that Li Rong is self-examining and changing because of what she's experienced. And she's allowed to have very complicated feelings about the people in her life, then & now.