The Legends

The Legends

Episodes: 56

Synopsis:

After the betrayal of her "good" mentor, Lu Zhao Yao (Bai Lu) loses faith in the "good" and fully embraces her demonic side (she was born a demon). She establishes the Wan Lu Sect and finally takes revenge on her mentor by killing him. Right when she thought she was at her peak and was only a step away from gaining one of the most powerful swords in the world, the Wan Jun Sword, her old friend, Li Chen Lan (Xu Kai), the demon king's son, takes the Wan Jun sword. She dies during her battle to retrieve the sword. Five years later, Li Chen Lan has taken over her position as sect leader, and magically revived, Lu Zhao Yao's body becomes linked to Qin Zhi Yan's body (Xiao Yan). The two have separate bodies but they share the same face and they share the same physical injuries. Lu Zhao Yao takes the opportunity to take revenge on Li Chen Lan, who she believes plotted against her to steal the Wan Jun Sword, and reclaim her rightful position as sect leader. She joins the Wan Lu sect under Qin Zhi Yan's names and manages to become Li Chen Lan's disciple. The problem is that after eating an Empty Empty Pill, she becomes transparent in the day and can only be seen by others during the night. While plotting her revenge, she learns many secrets about the other sects. These good sects may not seem as great as they claim and these demonic sects are not as bad as one might think. She also tries to figure out how she was magically resurrected and how to continue to stay in the living world.

I kind of have a love-hate relationship with this drama. I will break down my review into a couple categories to explain my previous statement.

Characters

In terms of leads, the leads here are great. Finally, our female lead is someone who can save herself and think for herself. She went from an innocent girl who had literally never been outside her town and was oblivious to the good and evil in the world to a person with clear values and a go-getter. Lu Zhao Yao is a very lovable character. She has very clear morals and values and will not let anyone sideways her. She sets a goal and does everything she can to achieve it, rarely regretting her decisions. Though she appears cold-hearted, she actually does whatever she can to protect what she loves. At her peak, she was basically invincible and feared by all. In a market full of wishy-washy female characters that need others to save them, Lu Zhao Yao stands out as a rare gem. 

Our male lead, Li Chen Lan, also called Mo Qing by Zhao Yao, is known as the demon king's son. Almost killed, he was saved by Lu Zhao Yao and fell in love then. From then, he vowed to love the only person that he ever trusted that he is good. Our male lead's greatest qualities are his kindness and loyalty. Though extremely powerful, our male lead is very humble about his powers and does not like to use them to harm others. He is extremely loyal to Lu Zhao Yao and continued to love her even after her death. 

My other favorite characters include Gu Han Guang (Xiang Hao), a talented doctor in the Wan Lu Sect; Jiang Wu (Dai Xu), a demonic sect leader who falls for Zhao Yao; and Lu Shi Qi, a cute, innocent leader in the Wan Lu Sect. 

Then we have characters that I dislike. That list is super long as I dislike like 60% of the characters in this drama. I will only mention a few of the characters that I dislike the most.

Luo Ming Xuan (Leo Liu)

You know those people that act like they are all that and think they are better than others? Yea, he is one of them. As a member of one of the Immortal Sects, he has the highest cultivation compared to most of the other characters. He was somewhat of a mentor to Lu Zhao Yao after she saved him. He told her about the world outside of her town and taught her about being a good person and explained that she had the potential to become good despite being born a demon. Heeding his advice, Lu Zhao Yao left her town and was determined to do good. The first "good" thing she did was save Li Chen Lan who she believed was a good person. Liu Ming Xuan and the rest of the immortal sects refused to understand her and set out to persecute her for saving the demon king's son. In an attempt to kill her, Luo Ming Xuan killed her only relative, her grandfather. After the event, she fully embraced her demonic side and set out to do evil but also some good when she feels it is necessary. She finally took her revenge and killed him. This is not really a spoiler because this all happened within the first 5 episodes. I dislike him because he blames everything on others. He's over here complaining that Zhao Yao saved the demon king's son but he was the one who caused him to break free. He claims that he is a good person but all he is doing is killing an innocent boy who happens to have demonic powers. He only sees one side of things. He thinks he is right so everyone against him is wrong. 

Liu Su Ruo

Like husband, like wife, as Luo Ming Xuan's fiancee, she is lowkey psycho. Similar to Luo Ming Xuan, she thinks that she is the only one in the right and that she is good and all demons are bad. After Luo Ming Xuan died, she lowkey went psycho. She started to practice demonic powers, harming even her own relatives. She also thinks she's entitled to things, which is super annoying. I do not want to go in-depth about her because that means spoilers, but you will see.

Half the side characters are also annoying. Lots of annoying people that have too many scenes in the drama. I am here for my leads, not you guys. Stop hogging all the screentime already!

Plot

The plot is interesting. We see Zhao Yao traveling from the dead to the living. The world of the dead seems very realistic and believable. I loved seeing this clash between the "good" and the "bad" to make viewers question what is "good" and what is "bad." I will say that the linking of the two bodies between the two female lead characters is not unique; we've seen it in other dramas. I think the plot progressed fine until the second half where the drama just felt dragged out. There were many episodes that I just felt like nothing happened. I see a lot of plotting but no actions.

Editing

This drama tries to slowly reveal more and more details about the drama. If executed properly, it should end up like Nirvana In Fire. Sadly, I felt like they failed terribly. I feel like they could have executed this better. I feel like they could have given us more details about everything. Throughout the drama, I kept asking questions. Like why did Zhao Yao and Zhi Yan share a body. The two characters basically stopped caring about this after a couple episodes. This was never directly addressed in the drama. You had to piece ideas together and figure it out yourself. Things like this make it extremely hard to understand what and why scenes are happening. Also, there are many mysterious scenes and plot gaps that are revealed very late in the drama. These plot gaps are extremely confusing because you feel like you missed an entire episode. 

The editing, in general, is terrible. There are many moments that feel like you missed an entire episode. Also, the start of the episode is a preview of the episode but once in a while, the scene in the preview is cut from the episode, so you have to reimagine the scene by mentally inserting the preview back into the episode. They also like to recycle scenes A LOT. I have seen the same scene of Li Chen Lan's inner thoughts at least 30 times. Literally around once every episode or two.

The worst editing was at the end. For anyone who has heard anything about this drama probably knows that there is a sad ending. I would say not quite. The ending is not necessarily a sad ending more so than a BAD ending. The editing takes all the blame. Kind of spoiler alert so do not read the rest of this paragraph unless you want to know the spoiler. The ending is terribly hard to understand because of the choppy ending. It is literally a couple of scenes, some recycled from previous episodes, cut together to form an incomprehensible ending. After trying really hard to understand what the fu** happened, the following is what I think happened. In the book that this drama is based on, the ending is a happy ending. In the drama, I think they wanted to change it to a sad ending and even ended up filming a sad ending, only to regret it last minute. To change the ending from a sad ending to a happy ending, the editors did the worst job possible in chopping up some previous scenes, dubbing over it, and flushed out a terrible ending that no one understood. To be honest, I would have preferred a sad ending compared to whatever this is.  

One of the most annoying things in this drama is the overuse of flashbacks. Somehow all the side characters are related in one way or another and they drama uses a million flashback to show us how. It should be illegal to abuse the use of flashbacks. Near around twenty episodes in or so, you literally get a flashback or more per episode. 80% of the flashbacks are not even about our leads. Like I can see why some of the flashbacks may be important, but half of the flashbacks are just extra flashbacks to reinforce something we already know. Like I just need one flashback to help me understand the plot. Any more is overkill.

Romance

When watching this drama, I just remember the meerkat's part in "Can You Feel the Love Tonight." Everyone is in a relationship. EVERYONE. This drama spends way more time developing or describing the side characters' romance than the main leads. Don't get me wrong. I do quite like some of the side couples, but we are here for the main leads so please can we just focus on them the majority of the time. The two lead's relationship seemed a bit rushed and just thrown at me. I totally understand Li Chen Lan's love for Zhao Yao, but I wish the viewers could see more of how and why Zhao Yao fell for our male lead. 

In conclusion, I truly think this drama had potential. Our female lead is very charming. Our main couple has strong chemistry but I do wish that their relationship would have been developed more. Our male lead is desperately in love with our female lead. His love for her is truly heartwarming to watch. The acting was great for all characters. I quite like the second male lead. If only this drama was edited properly (I am looking mainly at you, ending), the flashbacks were drastically cut back at least 60%, and we cut half the scenes about the side characters, we would have had a pretty great drama.