Updated Review: I was really enjoying this, until the writers betrayed the characters in the worst possible way. Update at the end.

Episodes 1-17:

A really crazy, emotionally confusing coming-of-age story featuring a beautiful orphaned outsider and her cousin best friend. This drama series doesn't really know what it wants to be. One minute, we'll see quite realistic depictions of war, and then the next, the characters are serving up broad comedy. As a result, I have no idea what to feel about the storyline. This drama series wants to be a drama just as much as it wants to be a comedy, but it just fails at holding itself as either genre, nor a balanced mixture of both.

The FL, is absolutely beautiful, cheerful, optimistic, intelligent, and everything you would expect from an Asian Anne of Green Gables. Does she act a bit too flighty/ immature at times like just about all the FL in Chinese costume dramas? Yes, she does. However, I found her incredibly charming despite this, mainly on account of her sharp wit and bravery.

The story is both predictable and unpredictable at the same time. I really don't know what to make of it all. But I do know that I'm hooked on this drama, as messy as it is, and won't be dropping it. The character I can't stand in this series is the SFL. She's an educated half-wit Mary Sue who is always getting herself and by default others into trouble. I already know she is going to get the ML, or.... the character that I consider to be the ML. Her whole Mary Sue role is written just so she will end up with the best male character in the drama. I was actually enjoying the fact that romance was taking a back seat to the story of the two women living life on their own terms, but it looks like that might come to an end in future episodes. Both MLs are very interesting characters which I look forward to watching more from.

One very interesting character is Wu Yin, who is a male character, pretending to be a female, played by a very beautiful actress. I'm not saying that this actress does a bad job of pretending to be a man, but I could think of many male actors who could play a young man pretending to be a woman just as well, and I do feel that it's so obvious that the character is being portrait by a woman, that even with her face covered and in all black clothes like a ninja, I could still tell the character was being played by a woman. It just isn't plausible to imagine the character is a man, so it takes away from my enjoyment of the story.

The way our young romantic FL lets us into her imagined expectations of romance was a really nice component to the storytelling, and this also informs us of the main message of this drama:

That life isn't fantasy. It's as unpredictable as it is indifferent to our wishes, hopes, and dreams.
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Update with some SPOILERS:..... Where do I even begin?!!! The writers took a beautiful story featuring great actors, and have just thrown everything into the mud.

From ep 21 onwards, the SFL, who has no brain nor beauty of her own, instead of doing the right thing, she profits off of the FL's love for both herself by stealing the SML, not even asking him how he feels about marrying her now that he has survived war. The FL accidently gives away her love to the SFL out of perverse loyalty. The SFL could have gone and been a nun, as the SML suggested, but no, that's not good enough for her.... despite her having no IQ or looks, she is too good for this... somehow.

The FL gets kidnapped and held for ransom by the actual ML (wish he was the SML, unfortunately, he isn't). The ML even attempts to rape her at one point, meanwhile our FL has Stockholm Syndrome, so of course she is developing feelings for the ML, because that's human nature, and I completely understand it, but our ML, no matter his sob story background, is a brute with multiple wives, who threatens his way through life and into our FL's heart, and it is disgusting to watch. This ML is really the worst. And his subordinates are telling the FL how she needs to be nice to the ML after all he's done to her?!! This is the same ML that forced her to get engaged with him, and then forced her to marry him! He literally ruined her life! The FL's love for the SFL also ruined her life, but in a passive way, whereas the ML straight-up took a wrecking-ball to all her hopes and dreams and her future. I can't even.... aughhhh! I don't know if I can keep watching.