Pull Strings was not on the radar until it was everywhere. A 5.9 on Douban and a 7.4 on IMDb is a gap that tells you something right away, specifically that the people who found this show loved it considerably more than the critical consensus suggested they should.
Thirty episodes, one terminally ill man reborn as a cultivator, and a lead performance that turned at least one viewer into an Ao Ruipeng fan against their will. Here is where it actually lands.
Ao Ruipeng Is the Whole Show and He Knows It
Li Chang Shou dies after falling out of a hospital bed and getting hit by his own comic books at 37, which is genuinely one of the more undignified ways to exit a drama, and wakes up reborn inside the Primordial World as a cultivator with one goal. Stay alive. Stay out of trouble. Do not become important.
The universe ignores this completely.
What makes Chang Shou work as a protagonist is the contradiction sitting underneath the cowardice. On the surface he is perpetually alarmed, overly cautious, and constantly trying to avoid karmic repercussions from things that have not happened yet.
Underneath that he is calculating every angle, training constantly, and ensuring he has a backup plan for his backup plan. He is not trying to be the strongest person in the room. He is trying to not die in it. And he ends up becoming one of the smartest people there anyway.
Ao Ruipeng playing this character felt less like acting and more like someone dropped a naturally goofy person into a cultivation drama and pointed a camera at the results. His comic timing is genuinely exceptional.
The expressions, the mannerisms, the way he handles physical comedy without pushing it into desperation, all of it lands because it reads as natural rather than performed. The scenes where Chang Shou applies modern logic to ancient situations are the funniest moments in the show precisely because the humor comes from the situation rather than the drama trying to construct a joke. He turns his shoe into something resembling Siri. He makes a firefly-shaped phone out of hay straw. He is consistently delightful in the first half.
The female lead being more powerful than Chang Shou is a detail worth noting specifically because the show does not make a thing of it. She is not the helpless girl constantly needing rescue and the drama is better for it from the first episode.
Where the Show Lost the Thread
Pull Strings is a genuinely good watch until it decides to become a different drama around the midpoint and that shift is where it starts losing people.
The romance becoming more prominent and the stakes getting heavier turned Chang Shou into someone gradually unrecognizable from the character the first half built. He became serious. Emotional. Distant from the goofy disaster energy that made him compelling in the first place.
The counterargument is that this is character development and technically it is. The problem is that the specific quality that made him interesting, that contradiction between apparent incompetence and hidden capability, was his personality not just his situation. Taking that away as the drama got heavier removed the thing worth watching.
The vampire subplot in a Primordial World setting is the moment that breaks the suspension of disbelief cleanest. In a show where the humor worked because the absurdity fit the world, this one did not fit and the show did not do enough to make it fit. Something like turning people into puppets would have served the same narrative purpose without pulling you out of the setting.
The last few episodes are clearly a compression problem. A 700-chapter novel going into 30 episodes was always going to leave visible seams and the final stretch has all of them at once. The Chaos Bell situation is unresolved. The Demon King is still alive. Chang Shou still has to save Fairy Yunxiao. Season 2 is the obvious answer and the signs point toward it happening. Whether it preserves enough of what worked in Season 1 is the question worth watching.
Pull Strings is worth it for the first half alone and Ao Ruipeng specifically. The second half asks for patience but the journey getting there is entertaining enough to earn that. Just maybe go in knowing the shift is coming so it does not catch you off guard the way it caught everyone else.
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