Man, I wish this news was all rainbows and roses but alas it’s mostly that but still has some negativity. The premiere of A Journey to Love has been nearly all praised by critics and netizens alike so yay for the cast and crew. Liu Shi Shi as Ren Ru Yi returns to the small screen in her first period drama in 6 years with her usual elegance and in point performance. But it’s male lead Liu Yu Ning that is getting a wee bit more buzz as Ning Yuan Zhou, spymaster with a marshmallow heart, a mega sweet tooth, and wuxia skillz to take on entire armies alone. A good character paired with the right actor/actress is that holy grail in Chinese proverbs known as “one can only come across serendipitously” 可遇不可求 (i.e. it cannot be sought or and can only happen with luck), and that is totally Liu Yu Ning as Ning Yuan Zhou.
He’s on fire in this drama despite being the solid flowing water core of goodness, intelligence, and patience. He tops the VLinkage character chart this week already just one day after the premiere of the drama (followed by Bai Lu‘s character in Story of Kunning Palace and Dylan Wang in Only for Love). Thank god Shi Shi’s fandom are lovely sane people because crazy actress fandoms would be trying to drag him down and already his anti-fans are trolling by putting different male actor faces AI’d into his character stills. I am sooooo happy for him especially after The Prisoner of Beauty will likely never air thanks to Song Zu Er‘s scandal and getting cancelled.
Money is so great. You throw it at all these lists and suddenly you are the top of the world…in fakery.
Who hurt you? Lol
LOLOLOL Thinking the same! Bad Thanksgiving turkey LOLOLOL
Pingback: Liu Yu Ning's Male Lead Ning Yuan Zhou Rockets As much as Prime VLinkage Character Buzz Chart Instantly Upon Premiere of A Journey to Love -
Good for him 👏🏻
Very happy for him!
Forget the haters… Ride the waves man.
I would love to watch the Prsoner of Beauty too if it ever get released. Don’t think I have seen the actress’ work yet.
He does look like less make up? More masculine? Rather different look. Voices all original?
Sighs, The Prisoner of Beauty was one of my anticipated dramas to watch too. Sad that it’ll never see the light. Other than that, super happy for LYN, knew that guy had it in him! Shi Shi definitely needs to rank higher though; same with Zhang Ling He’s Xie Wei.
This is the only drama of LYN that I’ve ever watched. He deserves the buzz per his performance in this drama alone. If he can show acting range through different genres and characters, then I’ll be his fan. Not there yet!
The pace of AJtL slows down after a few eps and that also weakened the intensity of the plot, as many C dramas tended to. Therefore, I’d say this is gonna be a solid drama but could end up being underwhelming midway through. I’m still following it but found it not as addictive as the get-go and was even tempted to fast forward some scenes. Are they gonna plod through 40 eps as most C drama did? C drama has got too many eps without attention grabbing tropes but many irrelevant arcs to fill the time slots of 40 eps. Very few Chinese scripts and directors made it a success with that many eps. I hope AJtL will end up differently.
Song Zuer’s cancellation has really taken me aback….I am still in shock. I really dont understand how can she being considered a senior in the industry since she started as a kiddo will commit such risky act of fraud and tax evasion. How is it worth doing so? Did she really knowingly do it willingly? This cancellation came so rapidly, there must be more story behind the back. Does any of her fans know more details?
Usually child actors are managed by their family so maybe it’s that? She never know about financial things since kid, and let her family do it for her, and then bam the family got tempted with money and evade taxes
I do feel that may be one of the reasons but to be cancelled so dramatically, I feel there may be more to this story. But having greedy parents is so common. Kris Wu’s mum is another infamous case but he is a sh*t too. Zheng Shuang’s parents are another but she has her bigger problems.
My conspiracy theory is that her old management company waited for when she exited to kill her career. Think about it… ALL her productions were CRAP, except for her in them! Lol. And then she lands these huuuuge sweeping dramas with worthy leading men, and BAM!! News is out that her managements and/or parents screwed her by evading taxes. Sigh!!! I will forever lament her talent and the productions we’ll never see that were going to be amazing!
I do hope we can watch her elsewhere. I really feel for this actress.
I am loving this drama thus far – 7 episodes in. Both leads deserve all the praises. I have no strong complaints for this drama at this stage at all. happy for both Liu Shi Shi and Liu Yi Ning – they really bought their characters to life lol.
I am one of those who fell in love with Ning Yuan Zhou
They look great together, it’s so comfortable to watch them mainly because they match each other AND THEIR CHARACTERS age-wise.
Second this! They compliment each other so well!
Do you know what is the only thing I don’t like about Journey to Love so far (besides the corny title)? Liu Yu Ning is a very tall man. The rest of the cast is normally quite shorter. But they get them on platforms for close-up duo scenes which means that you get one scene where someone visibly shorter approaches LYN, next scene that same person is on the same level with LYN. But we can still see by the neck, hands, shoulders, general built that those two people cannot be on the same level. I really don’t get what is the point of doing that. So many times in the show people comment how tall the ML is, which would easily explain why he is towering over everyone.
LOL. C drama does these faking up height dumb tricks all the time. In the Untamed, they made Wang Yibo look taller by putting ugly hair crown over him since he’s obviously shorter than Xiao Zhan and it should be reversed in the novel. I also read quite a few complaints about LYN’s posture from Taiwanese viewers, bitching about his slouching shoulders because he’s too tall. LOL. His towering height and slightly slouching posture do not bother me. But the plot going stale with disjointed arcs about secondary characters is losing me. I’m not as motivated as the beginning to follow the drama and simply switched back to Kdrama. It’s rare to see in C drama that logical connections and hints from scene to scene, camera to camera while it’s supposedly a very basic principle to make a story flow smoothly. I’ve seen this basic principle skillfully employed in most of the Western films and popular Kdrama, but very rare in Cdrama. Journey to Love has this problem too and therefore is gradually looking disjointed from scene to scene. That’s the problem of the director. If JtL continues with this disjointed pattern telling the boring arcs, then I’ll drop it and switch back to Wonderland of Love. The good directing of C drama I recommend is Nirvana in Fire, The Untamed, The Youth Memories, and even Wonderland of Love. There’re some fundamental issues in C-ent culture that make it harder to produce truly critically acclaimed dramas with world-class directing that deserves praises.
Mmm idk if it’s LYN, but I just can’t get psyched about the drama. I’m on episode 7. LSS is great with the wuxia choreography; she’s slim, she’s exact, and graceful. She actually looks like she has meat on her body (her body isn’t built like a stick.) Her characterization is very fitting for an assassin.
LYN, on the other hand, I think maybe Nicky Wu picked him out cus he’s not that handsome lol. His acting is okay. My issues from him stems primarily from aesthetics. If he played a funny, underdog character and not a powerful but slothy assassin, I think it’s worth a shot.
So far the drama isn’t really holding my attention. I find HK’s Queen News so much more fun and entertaining. But not everything can be someone’s cup of tea.