Reviews

Sorry folks, this show is just dull and poorly written and I honestly don't understand the hype. Yes, the main protagonist is a charming character with an interesting personality, but the way they made her oh-so-clever is very irritating and not believable. This is a textbook case of lazy and poorly written Mary Sue trope. Her "solving" all these contrived "mysteries" every other episode got old very quickly because it's not very believable how she's able to solve them every single time by going with very thin clues. Admittedly I'm not a big fan of detective mysteries, but I think that even if you were, this is just not very good mystery writing because every time the focus is not on the mysteries themselves and how she solves them (because it's always just random guessing and jumping to conclusions that magically happen to be true) but their sole purpose is to highlight what a clever genius the main protagonist is and how stupid everyone else around her is, and this as I said gets old very quickly.

Another problem is the pacing and lack of interesting plot or character development. The characters and their background stories feel very uninteresting and non-relatable because they receive little screentime as new characters are constantly being introduced for a few episodes and then you forget about them after their problem becomes solved. As a result I ended up not really caring about the solution for any of the mysteries because they concern some random Joe that was introduced last episode and he's gonna disappear for the next (nor do I care for all these generic court ladies which are hard to keep track of because they are all the same).

For these two reasons the show felt extremely dull and repetitive. It has no reason to go on for 20+ episodes when there is so little development or verity. There is a hint of romance between the protagonist and the ikemen guy, but it really doesn't go anywhere and the show's almost over by now. Here's a good example of what I'm talking about (warning: spoiler). There's a dramatic episode where the girl uncovers a plot to make the ikemen guy get killed, and she saves his life at the last moment while getting badly hurt. You expect there would be some kind of development in their relationship as a result (because they both clearly show a lot of concern for each other), but nope, next episode things go back to business as usual just like in the beginning, as if nothing happened. So whatever tension or drama the show occasionally manages to create it all goes for nothing.

I finally decided to drop it after 20 episodes and I honestly regret sticking with the show for so long. There are quite a few similar animes about girl empowerment that are much better than this. One of the best of them is Ascendance of a Bookworm which I would highly recommend. Another good one is Arte. "The Saint's Magic Power is Omnipotent" (particularly 1st season) is decent too, and so is "Doctor Elise" from this season and also "Parallel World Pharmacy" (though MC is a boy). There was a recent anime with almost identical setting called "Raven Of The Inner Palace" which was also set in fantasy Chinese imperial court with a very similar female protagonist who solves mysteries (but it's about ghosts and the supernatural rather than medicine). Wasn't the biggest fan of the show but even that was more interesting and engaging than this snooze.