YMMV / Ruyi's Royal Love in the Palace

• Angst Aversion: A frequent complaint is that the series is incredibly depressing. Things go from bad to worse for Ruyi and in the end she dies.
• Awesome Music: "沉香流年/Chén Xiāng Liú Nián/Incense and Fleeting Years", the first opening theme.
• Cry for the Devil:
  • Xiyue is a despicable person, but it's hard not to feel sorry for her when she's poisoned by the person she supported and trusted.
  • Ruiji attempts to kill a pregnant woman, but she did it to avenge her own dead baby and is horrified to discover she targeted an innocent woman. It's hard not to feel sorry for her as well when she's happy to die so she can finally see her baby.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: A lot of fans like Yuyan even though (or because) she's an awful person.
• Fan Nickname: Evil!Xiao Yan Zi - Fans of both this and Princess Returning Pearl call Hu Yunjiao this both for a very similar romance with the fifth prince, Yongqi, albeit with a vastly different outcome and for a particular scene where Hu and Yongqi catch and release a baby swallow^note The name Xiao Yan Zi means "Little Swallow", which some fans take as a nod to the latter.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Ruyi/Hailan is by far the most popular ship in the fandom. Ruyi/Yunche also has some fans. The canon pairing of Ruyi/Hongli has absolutely no fans, for very good reasons.
• Friendly Fandoms: With Story Of Yanxi Palace. Both series are set during Hongli's reign and feature many of the same characters. In fact, although the series are unrelated, Yanxi is almost a Perspective Flip of Ruyi: a character based on Empress Nara is a villain (named Hoifa-Nara Shushen) in Yanxi and the protagonist (named Ulanara Ruyi) in Ruyi, while a character based on Noble Consort Ling is the protagonist (named Wei Yingluo) in Yanxi and a villain (named Wei Yanwan) in Ruyi.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Ruyi and Hongli's estranged marriage and their eventual separation are harder to watch after Zhou Xun divorced her husband in 2020.
  • During the talk to convince Langhua to marry Jingse off to the Khorchin Khanate, Ruyi mentions she is grateful that she doesn't know the pain of parting with one's offsprings, unlike Langhua. She later loses two of her children.
• Jerkass Woobie: Langhua, Yuyan, Xiyue, and the other consorts who plot against Ruyi are thoroughly unpleasant people, and at least one is willing to poison pregnant women. But they're also married to a man who couldn't care less about them, are unable to leave, and the only way they can improve their situation is by trying to win the emperor's favor.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Xiyue crosses it when she reveals she poisoned two pregnant women, causing their babies' deaths.
  • Hongli came pretty damn close to it before several times, but he definitely crosses it when he blames Ruyi for their newborn son's death.
  • Yanwan crosses it time and again. Examples include, but not limited to: Attempted rape, 4 counts of child murder (although 3 were accidental), attempted child murder (not once, but 4 times, to the same person!), 9 counts of murder alongside one count of attempting to murder Chunchan, and possibly causing Yihuan to commit suicide considering she knowingly smiled when Yihuan ran after knowing what her fetus-perserving medicine was.
• Narm:
  • Deliberately hitting your head, and not even hitting it that hard, is a reliable way to commit suicide in this series. In spite of how serious the situation is, it can be hard not to laugh when someone taps their head against something and immediately drops dead.
  • Ruyi and Hongli are played by the same actors throughout the series. This works fine when they're adults, but not so much in the first episode when the characters are fifteen and the actors are more than twice that age.
• Retroactive Recognition: Xuan Lu has a minor role as Heng Chuo, Grand Princess Duan Shu. A year later, she became famous for playing Jiang Yanli in The Untamed.
• Squick:
  • Some of the concubines married into the harem in their early teens, despite the fact that Hongli is at least in his late 20s to early 30s in the beginning of the series.
  • Yanwan intended to join Yonghuang’s harem when he grows up to secure her future. Yonghuang is most likely 12 when she started being his maid, and in the novel this is less of an issue considering she’s 14, but in the series she’s 16, so it can be jarring to see her thinking about marrying the child she’s taking care of as soon as he grows up.
  • Ruiji’s baby is born extremely deformed, with the only unharmed part being his chubby face. The series omits showing his body on-screen (most likely to prevent breaking any laws that ban children being harmed on television), but Xiyue jumping back in fright when she sees his body is enough to show how bad it is.
• The Woobie:
  • Ruyi is initially unwilling to marry Hongli, and after she marries him, she becomes the target of his other wives' schemes because of his constant favoritism over her.
  • Hailan is raped, then forced to marry her rapist.
  • Yihuan gets married to Hongli in the hopes that she can get closer to the man she’s been in love with for years, but then he starts ignoring her, and she spends years drinking conception medicine in the hopes that she can bear at least one child. Her wish comes true, but her son is born extremely weak (Predicted by the astrologists, but really caused by her constant intake of contraceptives and Yanwan slipping poison into her food to weaken her kidneys and cause her to lose favor) and he is sent away from the palace so he can be taken care of by the duke and duchess of Xiangqin. She begs Ruyi to convince the emperor to let her see her baby, but Ruyi regretfully tells her that the emperor will only let her see him on holidays. And then she finds out that her already weak baby died from a cold that dragged on for too long. And then she discovers that Hongli deliberately gave her anti-pregnancy medicines because he found out that Zhenhuan sent her to spy on him, and he never actually loved her. By the end of it all, Yihuan is so deep in despair that she burns down her palace while remembering the same poem she sang the first time she entered the palace.
  • A young Yonghuang is neglected and physically abused by his servants. When Suoxin gives him a snack, he's afraid he'll be punished if he takes it.
  • Xiangjian loses her fiancé and is forced to become part of Hongli's harem. Then he constantly harasses her, tries to force her to sleep with him, and ignores her when she says no repeatedly.
  • Ling Yunche. His love interest breaks up with him because she wants to climb up the ranks, he is beaten up by guards hired by Yuyan because he saved Ruyi from poisonous snakes, rekindles his relationship with Yanwan after getting a promotion only to find out later she became a concubine, and she tells him to forget her, is falsely accused of stealing Yuyan’s underwear and is sent to be a slave working at a hunting ground that’s only visited once or twice a year, then is accused of adultery with Ruyi and is castrated as punishment. Then he's executed, and one of his friends is forced to kill him.

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