The main plot centers around the romance between Lin Xingzhu and Bai Xiying, the procoess of Bai Xiying being healed and growing thanks to Lin Xingzhu, and preventing the original other female leads' possessiveness from hurting Bai Xiying once again. The romance feels like it was executed well, but due to relatively lacking support from other elements, fails to excel. Bai Xiying taking interest in Lin Xingzhu due to wanting to satisfy her curiosity about her sudden changes after transmigration was a good starting point. The process of their feelings growing was also mostly well done, and while not exceptionally written, the clash of mindgames between the two as they try to probe each other's secrets was enjoyable. The way that they confirmed their relationship was also consistent with the characters.

However, there are issues with the character arcs and exploration tied to the romance that holds it back. Given Bai Xiying's backstory and mindset, it feels like she should've been given at least one full dedicated scene to reconciling and recognizing her feelings for Lin Xingzhu. There's also a general issue with her character arc; as the story goes on, Bai Xiyang slowly changes in response to the warmth and morality Lin Xingzhu brings. However, while individual elements of this arc can be identified, with there being moments that can be pointed to as pre and post arc growth, it never quite coaleses into a smooth arc; rather, it feels jagged, as if the character jumps from point to point in the arc without the inbetween being properly filled. This also leads to some issues with the morality of the story, where you would expect based on the overall thematic thrust of the narrative for something to be considered bad, but because Bai Xiyang's character arc is so rough, it's hard to tell what was intended.

Lin Xingzhu's problems, on the other hand, tend to just be missed potential that's never followed up on. The mentions of her past life ended up being rather awkward after they ended up contributing nothing to the plot, especially after Wen Lin was revealed to know her from her past life and still nothing came of it. Awkwardly, Lin Xingzhu fully believes that her new world is 'real' and questions the nature of her family bond with her father, but this is also dropped. The extras go a bit more into depth with her past, enough to make the subject feel organically overshadowed rather than forgotten about, but it does also make her past feel like there's a bit of potential that could've been explored that never did. Instantly stepping out of her role as the Qin family's daughter starts feeling a bit less well-adjusted of an action, and it feels like there was setup for an arc that never really happened. She's also generally a much more static character, but that's fine.

The rest of the main plot was done okay. It never felt like it overshadowed the relationship building to an unreasonable extent, and overall did its part. However, for a plot founded on and reiterative of Lin Xingzhu's positive morality in a book based around dubious consent, some of the messaging ends up a bit confused from the aforementioned hard to fully identify character arc of Bai Xiyang, plus a very briefly mentioned husband and wife pair in the background of the story. The easiest way to fix this probably would've been to add a redemptive factor to the themes as well.

From a plot perspective, the ending was also a bit odd structurally. Subverting expectations by having Wen Lin, the hidden 'gong si' that was being searched for by Lin Xingzhu for most of the story, turn out to have already been transmigrated into by the indulgent original author and thus neutralized in advance, was fine. This also represented the second climax of the relationship storyline, which helped fill in that gap. However, having Wen Lin be someone from the same world as Lin Xingzhu who also knows of her and suspects the relation between the original and new Lin Xingzhus, while also having the threat of the Lin family collapsing from the original work, feels like it should have then led into a climactic conclusion. However, the past life simply never became relevant, and the Moonlit bar and Wen family essentially collapsed with the FLs barely doing anything, resulting in an odd lack of finality for the story.

Side character arcs ranged from ok but rushed like Chu Tiantian's realization of her actions being wrong, to somewhat bland plot villains like Mu Muqing, to the odd ones like Shang Zengrou who seems to get solely pulled out as a plot device and Wen Lin who kind of just vanishes into the background, never to have her morality properly challenged or interrogated beyond just being sent to jail offscreen.