Using my personal rating system of "loved," "liked," "meh," & "nah," this is a “liked”/ cheerful “meh”.

The deets*:

Noble family gets framed and betrayed, tons of folks die leaving only a daughter to avenge them. The only thing that saved the daughter was her engagement to the crown prince who, despite being an preteen, apparently had already met the love of his life and couldn’t bear to see her killed. Daughter gets banished to a temple, crown prince grows up and declares he won’t marry anyone but our female lead (the daughter of the framed/destroyed family). Jump forward many years and a brash, outspoken pirate shows up on the scene and declares her undying love for the crown prince. Crown prince tries desperately to be faithful to his lost love, but finds himself falling for the pirate instead. A woman claiming to be the long-lost daughter of the framed family shows up, but she is so incredibly different from what our male lead remembers that he mourns the fact that he must marry her (due to his promise) and not the pirate who reminds him so much of his childhood sweetheart. Hijinks ensue…

*I know it says not to do this, but how else is someone who doesn’t know if they want to watch this understand the rest of the review?—those descriptions on the main page aren’t always accurate.

What I liked:
At first, I was put off by the trailers. I’ll freely admit that I have some implicit bias against pushy female leads (for example, the female lead in “The Legends”) but I force myself to put it aside because I realize that just that: implicit bias. But in reality, the story is much more complex, and the female lead is far less shallow than she seems. There is some decent depth to the plot, the leads are all nice to look at (I think our SML is actually 6’2” if my metric-to-imperial conversion is correct!?), and there were some impactful scenes (like when the FL exposes the royal family’s treachery against her own family). The leads’ chemistry was believable, and their relationship did not set of any red flags of toxicity. It has a happy ending which, if I’m wasting all those hours of my life on a drama instead of what I should be doing (my dissertation), a happy ending alleviates my guilt somewhat. Lol.

What I did not like so much:
It kinda bogged down in the middle. I think the “truth” was revealed a bit too early and the show kind of lost steam afterwards. The CGI was wretched, especially during the sea battles. There were some pretty unbelievable parts like, for example, a female lead who has the unswerving loyalty of 40,000 troops yet never actually spends any time with them and the trope of falling off a cliff and surviving (seriously, if someone falls off a cliff in ANY Chinese or Korean drama its almost a guarantee of survival. Note: if you ever find yourself in a fictional universe and your life is threatened, go jump off a cliff. You’ll be fine). The whole enemy prince and princess ark turned about to be pointless because they didn’t exploit it like they could have and in the end the prince just sort of turned himself in (dude, if you’ve just been threatened with being heinously tortured to death, don’t just walk off calmly with the guards, fight to the death!—at least that would be a better end!). That could have been a great cruel romance, but they failed to take advantage of that plot line.

Should you watch this?
I started this at the same time I started season 1 of “Lost You Forever” and it kept me from gobbling down all of those episodes at once. It never pissed me off so badly that I had to stay away or drop it. I guess it depends on your level of tolerance—my standards are relatively low for period/costume dramas that are not placed in any historical reality.