While a treat to the eyes with a pasted toned imagery and wonderful costumes, this manhua simply did not catch my interest. The MC is okay, with a bland personality typical of the shojo genre (luckily she's not a Mary Sue, but i still sometimes unrealistic and acts out of character). The ML, the Emperor, is actually a blockhead and not a typical tyrant - while he did nothing to me and I feel no "passions" for him (and I prefer to feel the whaauza towards the ML; to swoon whenever I see him), he is actually quite realistic, a man out of his depth is a very cutthroat surroundings. But the plot is simply lackluster, not original and there are no interesting side characters. The mystery of how the MC got transmigrated is also badly drawn out. I also did n't get far enough to learn anything about the 2nd ML, o can't say much about him either. Overall, a mid tier shojo, with nothing to really recommend it. Skip.
UPDATE: (Spoilers ahead!!) I Pushed trough and read almost all of the mangua. Oh. The plot ends up much better than I expected, but so many annoying things here! Let's break it one by one:
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THE BEGINNING WAS TOO DRAWN OUT: Yes, the scheming of the concubines in the beginning was long, arduous and frankly ridiculous! This is why I gave up the manhua on first try. Later the plot starts to finally come together, but the first 80 plus chapters were a chore to go trough, with all the petty attempts to take down the empress, paper thin antagonists and so on. When we finally see the real plot beneath this, it does become better, but not all readers will come to this point!
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THE FIRST PRINCE IS A TERRIBLE CHARACTER: I will be frank, I disliked his character so much. True, he's a gentle, nice, level headed person, but I get the impression that all of this was causes by him pretending to be dead and pushing the conniving Empress Dowager to scheme to get him where she wants him. Hellou! Like, if you had handled that better, none of this would have happened. People fly to make him a hero worthy of the FL, but I also find him an idiot of his own making. Plus he's Mary Sueish and boring as heck. Plus he coveted the Empress despite her being married to another man, and his brother at that! Even if she divorced the Emperor, which she did, give her up, nothing good is going to come from such a long, wind up relationship. I didn't find him worthy at all. While he does have some good qualities, he was bottom of the barrel if you ask me.
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THE EX-EMPEROR: He's by far the most intrguing character here. His backstory is tragic as heck, and when you see how he was groomed to be a pawn and thrown out, I could not but understand him, and even understand why he treated the FL like he did. And while he's not the typical dashing ML who will do anything for his FL, he's such a realistic character. Do you really expect that someone who was groomed to be a disposable chess piece could turn his life around without concrete, solid help? Other reviews calling him a trash ML quite disappointed me in this regard, as they don't see that he's probably the biggest victim here. Other chars chose this (the first prince, FL chose to marry him), but he, as a child, had no choice in the matter, and once he fell into it, you can't expect him to simply walk away scat free! Like people don't understand the deep, deep psychological hurt. While I also don't prefer this weak ML and would have liked to see an very capable schemer, he's by far the best written char here. Him and his arc are, IMHO, the reason to read this otherwise not very thrilling harem charade.
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THE FL: While she wasn't a paper thin,one note char, I think the manhua takes too much bias towards her. While he is shown as a compassionate, very kind person, and while she's not a bad person per se and definitely not a malicious one, I don't find her really that positive, I think she was a woman out of her depth, playing games she didn't understand, and behaving, as she also notes, too laissez-faire towards others.
While this concerns the original Yiwen and not the current Yiwen, I do agree that she was put into a very bad position with her ex-husband becoming an Emperor, but I still think all of this could have been prevented if she just acted in a timely manner and didn't let things escalate as far as they did. Where was she when her hubby fought to become an Emperor? Why did she say yes to that? Why didn't she stop him from exiling his brothers after he took the throne? Why didn't she notice that her aunt was a double crosser earlier, since she had seen how she pushed her hubby to be her obedient dog? When you start to look at this from a slightly different perspective, you see that she's not such a shiny goodie two shoes.
Argh, as you can see, I didn't like the chars, but the main plot was very good and saved the day. I won't be reading this even again, but there were times that I was thrilled and enjoyed it. But could have been so much better, if it were more main plot focused, and with better char development.
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