I'm not going to sugar coat this. I'm one of those fans who just came off of the high of finishing watching 'The Untamed' and decided to search out another Xiao Zhan series, so this review is obviously going to be of little value to a lot of people. I apologize, because I know that the rest of the cast is doing their best, but they are not Xiao Zhan or Zhao Lusi, and I CAN be that shallow.

Upfront, I'm going to admit that I finally decided to watch this series because of Zhao Lusi and Xiao Zhan (and I need these two in a series together as the main CP, preferably another historical or similar). Previously, I'd seen some video clips of this series and was slightly interested because of Zhao Lusi--I became of fan of hers before I became a fan of Xiao Zhan, by the way. But a lot of those video clips seemed kind of strangely cringe-worthy, and the story line felt a bit unappealing.

Then I watched 'The Untamed' and fell for Xiao Zhan... and that made my decision.

Back to this series, I only have a few minor things to say:

1) After finishing this first season of 'Oh! My Emperor', I now realized again why I'd decided not to pick it up in the first place. A lot of the acting was stiff, editing was bad towards the end of this season, and some of the sound effects were a bit slapdash.

2) So really, it's all because of Xiao Zhan that I even bothered--yes, I can be that biased.

3) Again, the acting was rather stiff and the only person I liked in the entire series so far is Zhao Lusi's Luo Feifei--she was fun, spunky, and all sorts of cute and cool.

4) I don't think I understood at all why Luo Feifei fell for the emperor instead of the royal uncle. Beitang Yi was a jackass throughout the entire series. Beitang Moran was the typical good man who treated our female lead really well and any sane woman would fall for. Even the little brother, Beitang Tang would have been a better pick. I really feel like this trend of the female lead falling for the jackass main male lead needs revisiting--just stop doing this, please.

5) So even though everyone's acting except for Zhao Lusi seemed rather stiff, I still wished that Feifei would have fallen for the royal uncle instead. Yes, even Xiao Zhan's acting was pretty stiff, but you can see that he's got potential.

6) I will give props to positive female relationships--Feifei and Yanran were great together as friends and broke all the tropes in typical idol romances. I loved that even though the two of them were set up to be love rivals, they still remained friends. Yanran's talk about how Feifei is her friend and would never betray her trust was wonderful.

7) The story actually started off pretty interesting and I was intrigued most of the way, so I can't say that I disliked the series completely. I was hooked and was interested in the big mystery behind the Ophiuchus people. The editing and some of the execution of scenes was just kind of choppy and stiff.

8) I will definitely finish watching the rest of this in season 2... even though we all know that Xiao Zhan doesn't end up getting the girl, which is a bit of a bummer for me, but oh well. Maybe in another life he'll get to partner with Zhao Lusi again.