This isn’t a revelation or anything, but I think some people watch dramas just for the “shuang” factor and anything that makes them slightly uncomfortable or needs time to marinate and reveal itself is deemed bad. So the complaint I see most often about Zhan Zhao Adventures is that Zhan Zhao always insists on capturing villains alive instead of just offing them on the spot, even when it means they have a chance of escaping and causing more deaths, like with the case of Hua Chong.
(Actually I saw a post of someone complaining the fight scenes are bad because Zhan Zhao kept hitting people with the blunt end of his swords instead of killing them...and I'm like, are we watching the same scenes? That fight scene in the rain of Zhan Zhao taking out 30+ guys using the blunt end of his sword and not even killing them is one of the best fight sequences I've ever seen.)
Anyway, back to the lack of killing of villains who obviously deserve it. I get the frustration, but if you use that reason to dismiss the drama as bad, then you’re also dismissing the actually important central thesis of the drama. Which is, due process and procedural justice are important and worth fighting for.
(I get that it's a "boring" principle but it's actually pretty damn important especially in real life.)
The drama actually spends a lot of time deconstructing this, and making its point on this over and over again. If Zhan Zhao kills the Yicheng magistrate or Jin Zhenping, sure, they’re dead and as the audience we’re satisfied, but the effect is they’ll just be turned into martyrs. A good official or a good healer being randomly killed by a high ranking imperial guard for unknown reasons. At best, Zhan Zhao would be accused of using the emperor's imperial decree to kill for his own gains, at worst, the emperor's integrity is questioned.
And even if no one questions the deaths, killing these guys doesn't actually solve any problem. Killing Hua Chong really only satisfies Bai Yutang’s rage in the moment, but other than that, what good did it do? No one knows who he was, what crimes he had committed, what hurt he had caused and what his death was supposed to atone for. As much as I love that Ding Yuehua got to kill Jing Yiming, his death like that could have also jeopardised the case. Other than satisfaction for the drama’s audience and the person doing the killing, no one else in universe actually gets any satisfaction in killing these villains in this way.
In this case, without Hua Chong and Jing Yiming, they still had the magistrate and Fan Yulian as witnesses in the sex trafficking case, but if they hadn’t taken all that time to gather all the evidence and extra witnesses, and just focused on killing the bad guys to satisfy the audience instead, they wouldn’t have been able to achieve any actual justice for the victims. The trafficked girls would have died in vain, or still be trapped. The sex trafficking ring might not be totally dismantled and could be taken over by someone else, harming even more people. More pointedly, without putting Jin Zhenping on trial, Jin Xuewen will always be falsely accused, and the rotten facade of the whole Jin family still remains and who knows what harm that entire family will continue to do to protect their reputation?
Yes, as a government official, Zhan Zhao can’t kill, but the conflict in the drama has always been about much more than the constraints he has to operate under. Even when he’s clashing with Bai Yutang about ways to get justice, the drama never actually strays from the argument that procedural justice is still what they need to be fighting for. The reveal about Zhan Zhao’s past as Yaksha shows quite painfully how it can get twisted not just by bad faith actors like Zhou Jiliang but also by the people who benefit from vigilante justice. The people of Wanshan practically worship Hu Xiaochen, but the moment it looks like he was killed by Yaksha, they immediately turn on him and there’s no doubt in their minds that he must be evil. In this case, it’s true, but what if it hadn’t been? Zhou Jiliang was totally intending to kill Ming Zhu’er’s parents after all. Without procedural justice, there's the danger of condemning innocent people based on hearsay and prejudice, and even in the cases where you condemn people who have actually done evils, just killing them doesn’t actually bring closure to the victims in any way.
There are two conversations that basically sums up the central debate of this drama.
And the answer to that is that the magistrate is actually wrong, because not seeking public justice is always going to be worse.
