The real life shenanigans around this C-drama is better than anything seen on the reel screen, the drama is just THAT BAD. Fantasy period romance Thousand Years for You is a dog of first order, so bad from beginning to the very end in an order of magnitude that makes me want to headdesk nonstop. The drama started with a terribly unappealing female lead character and zero chemistry between leads Li Qin and Allen Ren onscreen. Like, zilch. Apparently it then veered into random plot elements and weird tonal toggling between comedy that wasn’t comedic and then later wild melodrama. The ending had the male lead sacrifice himself for the female lead, giving her back her spiritual core hence she was saved but he died/vanished. But the drama is not done as the female lead spends 50 minutes!! of additional screen time wandering the world looking for him. Like, buh?

Oh, and there was not a single kiss between the so-called thousands of years fated lovers, boy do I love (snark) when writers write a romance drama and then forget the actual romancing. The drama sits at a low 6.3 on Douban but this year there was the ignominious Gentlemen of East 8th which has the lowest domestic drama ratings ever of 2.1 so anything else looks way better even if its a crap drama like this one. With the ending came the in-fighting between Allen and Li Qin’s fandom – his complained that she angled and got way more screen time and by the end he had less screen time then the second male lead and hers complained that she filming and promotion schedule during the drama filming was the same so there was no adding screen time and plus his bad acting is the problem in this drama. Mwahaha, go at it peeps. I did like hearing Allen’s own voice here even if he can improve diction and projection but he totally sleepwalked through this drama in terms of bland acting.