After a strong start, the momentum for Imperial Doctress continues through increased interactions between the characters and their stories fleshed out for our full enjoyment. At this point, I’ve decided that I’m in it for the long haul (yep, all 50 episodes) regardless of who gets the girl.
Her backstory is tragic because what protagonist doesn’t have one. As a little girl, she was fooled into poisoning the current Empress Dowager leading to the deaths of her grandfather and older brother. Despite carrying the burden her entire life, she maintains a positive attitude and pursues her goal to become a doctor in her brother’s stead.
Unfortunately, the road she chooses is is riddled with difficulties not only because social conventions would never allow it but also because her father who already blames her for being the black sheep forbids anyone in the family from practicing medicine. Yun Xian repeatedly gets into trouble, is reprimanded and even whipped but she preserves a never-give-up attitude by coming up with ingenious workarounds to secretly practice.
Nevertheless, Zhu Qi Yu as an all-around good guy is very likable and the actor is slowly growing on me. His bromance with Qi Zhen, his older half-brother, is a heartwarming display of unwavering trust from years of friendship and I’d really hate to see the fallout, which is likely going to be because of Yun Xian or the Empress Dowager who is hell bent on turning the brothers against each other.
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Imperial Doctress spares no time setting up the love story from the first moment Yun Xian saves Qi Yu to the moment he saves her in return. It is a case of young love meets Prince Charming and I find myself smiling at their giddiness. Imagine my facepalm moment when Yun Xian’s father wants to disown her for rejecting Official Xu’s marriage proposal. To Yun Xian’s father, she should be with royalty for goodness sake!
The catch 22 is that the drama spends an equal or actually more time building up the other leg of the triangle in the form of a budding friendship between Qi Zhen and Yun Xian. Even though he often leans towards acting like a douche thereby ruining the moment, Yun Xian is perceptive enough to be aware of Qi Zhen’s good intentions even during times when he deliberately tries to mask his kindness.
The two powerful men in her life are naturally rushing to the rescue but Emperor Qi Zhen beats Prince Qi Yu to the punch in the most rewarding resolution to the entire debacle. It’s always a treat to see big bad put other baddies in their place because they do it so incredibly well fervently basking in the glory of a takedown. I also like how the drama comes full circle by showing that good things comes to those who do good deeds.
Though I gotta admit, the baddies have been extremely helpful so far other than their occasional roles in the widening the rift between stepmother and son. Dong Chang’s head eunuch Wang Zhen and his lackeys are a plot device to mislead the Emperor and Duke Wang and his daughter Princess Wang add fuel to the fire by spouting lies to the Empress Dowager. Somehow, the Emperor and Empress Dowager helplessly fall right into their manipulative hands and it’s odd that the seemingly intelligent Emperor can be so easily deceived.
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Anonymous
I love your site and your posts, but if you make things a bit easier to read, like change up formatting or rearrange some points. It would help out a lot. The way you have a complete, witty, and conclusive opening paragraph is great though.
Like your guide to Wuxia for newbies could have a "clickbait" title or first sentence and a short and simple article (using simple english and a few more simple sentences as well, since many fans have english as a second language), then a read more button that gives more info. I know it would be a lot of work, but also something you could do in the future is add more tags by actor, stereotypical genre terms or really anything to get more people on the site. The lists where you rate "top dramas" the format of them, ESPECIALLY TITLES, are really hard to read. That confusion is a problem as well, because those rating and best of posts probably attract the most people who are searching for dramas on google and other search engines. Like it is hard to tell which words go with which pics go with which drama, yes if you read over it a bit and scroll up and down a bit, you can understand it, but I feel like making it more obvious and clear to read will keep more people on the site and clicking on other pages. I hate to criticize the site, because it is awesome, but I would love to see it gain in popularity so in turn it can just get better and most important thing is you enjoy it and can share your passion for drama with more people! I know you are having ad and layout problems, so I hope you can get some help and figure it all out, and make enough revenue to keep the site up and active with great content. Well good luck and hope it all goes well, Ill keep visiting! I'll have to look up places where the community meet, talk, and discuss!
Anne J
Hi hi, it may sound cliche but I really appreciate your comments. Been wanting to get feedback but don't know where to ask since my blog is somewhat of a guilty pleasure – workerbee by day, blogger by night:)
As for the titles, I really want to fix it but can you elaborate on how it is confusing? or what I could do about it? I've been slowly working on it actually so the latest lists (2016 dramas) are the ones that have already been 'fixed' ie. added horizontal lines to separate the dramas. Should i make the lines even thicker?
Will think about your other suggestions and yes, hopefully I get someone to help me with the ads. Thanks again.
Anne J
Also your suggestion about the actors is actually an idea I've been toying with for a while but still visualizing how it would even work. Maybe add labels so that people can filter by label since blogger doesn't really work with tags. Could get messy though if I end up writing about a lot of actors but I guess it's a problem for later.