The short answer is: yes, it is that bad.

Now, I do have an explanation, of course. So welcome to a rant about something that you would probably like to forget. But in all fairness, how could we?

And let’s be very clear about this: this drama is exceptional in everyway. Acting, story, plot, characters. Up until that last ten episodes where you feel like the writer just quit and left the job to costume department instead.

*SPOILERS ahead.

So, we all remember what happens, right? As everything comes to an end, the drama’s protagonist Ning Yi becomes the emperor, the female protagonist Feng Zhiwei eliminates herself from his life, and many likable characters become the craziest versions of themselves.

To comprehend why this ending is pretty much incomprehensible, especially for the protagonists, it is helpful to go back and look at…

 Ning Yi and Feng Zhiwei as Individual Characters

From the very first time Ning Yi appears on the screen, we can see that he’s a character with clear motives who never waits for things to happen. He’s there to take revenge for his brother and become a leader he believes his people need.

Throughout the drama, Ning Yi battles his enemies and makes sacrifices to achieve this end. On top of it all, he has to balance these ambitions with his desire to protect the love of his life. (Not, not Xin Ziyan. The other love of his life.)

Just like Ning Yi, Feng Zhiwei is the kind of protagonist that’s very easy to root for. She’s witty, she’s confident, kind-hearted, and most importantly: she’s ahead of her time. As the drama unfolds, we learn more and more about Feng Zhiwei’s capabilities and dreams. The central theme of her character revolves around independence.

She yearns to be in control of her own fate and, hopefully, make use of her skills to serve the kingdom.

Now, combine Feng Zhiwei’s characterization with Ning Yi’s and you get something extremely promising and unique, both in terms of dynamic and story.

They are two people who look to the future, who don’t deny traditional values, but are also not afraid to challenge them.

However, about sixty episodes in, the drama decides to stop pursuing what they have built up.

Ning Yi’s clear motives that are the main driving force of the story come to a gradual stop after the death of Feng Zhiwei’s mother, and an abrupt one after the reappearance of his own mother. His priorities are erased, his intelligence is reduced by more than half; and suddenly, the plot begins driving him, not the other way around anymore.

Is his character still consistent? Yes. But there is, at this point, a serious lack of material to back up what has been introduced in the beginning, to emphasize Ning Yi’s capabilities and why he deserves the throne more than anyone.

Zhiwei, on the other hand, is turned into a passive victim of political forces. Ning Yi, Helian Zheng, and her brother become the cause of her struggle. And Ning Yi ultimately is used as justification for her melodramatic exit.

The Purpose Problem

Towards the end, the drama aims to strip Ning Yi of everything he loves to push across the idea that power requires sacrifice.

And they do this by having his mother be dragged down a cliff by a group of people you don’t care about, driving a wedge between him and Zhiwei, a plan made by some emo guy — you know, the “brother” — you also don’t care about, who repeatedly makes Zhiwei feel guilty about more people who belong to this previous dynasty you have never seen her interact with and ultimately don’t care about.

The later episodes have Zhiwei stare at Ning Yi and say, “You have never asked me what I want.”

And you can see it. You can see that they try hard to pin the crime of “not knowing what Feng Zhiwei wants” on Ning Yi, while in fact, it’s the writing that fails to remain consistent about what she wants.

Ning Yi then understandably asks her what she wants. This gesture is framed as failure because apparently he should already know what she wants.

No, drama. No, he should not. Not when Zhiwei’s goalposts keep being moved for plot twists and shock value.

And You Know What

We have Ning Sheng and Ning Qi, we have the Prince of An, we have the emperor, we have a whole vault of compelling antagonists waiting to be used properly, yet Feng Zhiwei dives down a cliff because of the involvement of this “brother” whose identity she never bothers to investigate, who cares about her far less than Feng Hao did, who sells himself as this tortured prince of a fallen dynasty yet has no redeeming qualities and not even half the honor Ning Qi has.

And we all know that Ning Qi’s bar of honor is pretty much on the floor.

So to have Zhiwei end up doing exactly what her mother and her previous mentor want her to do all along is a complete contradiction to everything her character represents.

Her intelligence and the progress she makes with other characters are no longer the focus; it is now her identity, her being alive that’s the conflict. Kind of a confession from the writers that they have no idea what her personality is anymore so, hey, let’s just make trouble out of her existence.

That is the problem, not the actual cliff-diving.

Bottom Line

As Zhiwei cliff-dives, her internal monologue is about something along the line of “if we meet again in the next life, let’s be ordinary and be away from the burden of royalty.”

You know… the drama itself has never been about the burden of being royalty.

It is about Ning Yi having a vision and Zhiwei proving her intelligence to the world.

In the end, as Ning Yi is forced to accept this mess as part of his “kingly destiny”, we the viewers are left feeling exactly the way Xin Ziyan feels when Ning Yi suddenly wants to retire after years of fighting for the throne: an infinite urge to smash our laptops and hate all period dramas forever.