Wen Zan (2024)

A watchable and decent, but somewhat bland, historical mini drama spin on Flower of Evil

Shadows of You is like a historical mini drama spin on the K-drama Flower of Evil. Overall, it was surprisingly not bad for a mini drama and the production values were pretty decent too. It was refreshing to have a C-drama where the main couple was already married from the start. Like FoE, behind the mystery and intrigue, it's a story about trust. How well do you know the person you love most? Unfortunately, that's where the similarities end. For a fairly angsty story premise and title, Shadows of You didn't feel very angsty. While the acting was fine, it somehow lacked the passion and chemistry found in many other mini dramas, let alone FoE.

My biggest quibble, however, was the "low budget" music -- the music itself was fine, but it was the same soothing, sleepy melody (like those calm work/study music found on YouTube) throughout almost the entire series regardless of the context, scene, mood, opening or closing credits. Once I noticed it, it was hard to ignore, and I believe it hampered some of the dramatic tension that Flower of Evil did so well. (Granted, it's silly to compare a low budget mini C-drama with a high profile K-drama production!)

Overall, an easy background watch that deserves higher than the current 6.8, but also nothing to get excited about.

(Warning for those who rely on English subs -- unfortunately they are hilariously bad and confusing. :( It seems like they ran it through an audio transcriber, so words that sound similar are mistranslated, like "hua" for example -- which was meant to be "painting" (4th tone) in the drama, but kept getting translated to "flower" (first tone) instead.

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This drama combines aspects of mystery, romance, and wuxia, but fails at all of them.

I really liked this drama at the beginning, but by the end it felt underwhelming. It combines aspects of mystery, romance, and wuxia, but it doesn't end up delivering on any of these aspects.

At the beginning, they have you thinking it's a detective drama, but soon the investigation aspect is pushed aside in favour of romance. At the end, the bad guys die, but as far as I can tell, there's no closure for the murder cases from a legal perspective because there's no evidence. I don't see how she could've gotten away with killing her boss when she doesn't have evidence that he's the killer's father, or that the son is the serial killer, for that matter. If she was able to resolve the case, they never showed it on screen. So it completely fails as a detective drama.

Instead, it seems like the director was trying to make a romance drama. But as a romance it doesn't really work either; there's no chemistry between the leads, and their interactions seem forced, with extremely cheesy, poorly written lines that border on cringe-worthy. The secondary couple did seem to have more chemistry, at least.

The wuxia aspect is lacklustre as well. Yes, it's a super low budget drama, but clearly none of the budget went into fight choreography whatsoever.

So why would you watch this drama at all? Well, because the leads are beautiful. The ML is handsome, admittedly, and he stars in lots of these short dramas. But while he never has great chemistry with any of the FLs, in this drama they have the least chemistry of all. The FL was super cute back in the day in Princess Weiyoung, and she's only gotten more gorgeous as she gets older. Her acting, on the other hand, is not amazing, but only adequate. If you don't care about story or chemistry, and only want to stare at pretty faces, here you go.

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