According to data from Maoyan Professional, Spring Of The Blade (一瓯春) starring Xu Kai and Zhou Ye topped the weekly popularity chart for TV series during the 37th week of 2026, its first week. The series has garnered over 164M effective views and has ranked first on Maoyan’s daily popularity chart for web series three times.
Xu Kai and Zhou Ye expressionless? Turn off that subtitle and just focus on their faces when watching and you will notice every hint of expression they are trying to convey. That little smirk, that calculating eyes. They dont need grand gesture to convey that message.
The eyes she made expressed many things the fear for her reputation and her plea for help through the expression. The tear—ah so beautiful! #againstthecurrent
Zhou Ye’s crying scene compilation (A thread)
She always open to criticism, listen, and make changes although she doesn’t often active on social media. So I hope that peoples won’t dismiss her entirely because of one particular point, scene, or show and claimed she can’t act.
She is jealous of Xiuru because the Yuan family betrothed gifts when Xiuru literally saved your stupid ass girl by marrying that old man. Otherwise your girl would have died after what she did with Du Zheng. #againstthecurrent
They actually match perfectly as a couple. Nanke is clever, composed, and reserves he barely talks and is an introvert, while Xiaolian is an extrovert and naive—innocent.
As Zhou Ye fans, we accept criticism; I myself have criticized the scene that everyone is talking about, in this crying scene shes particularly not-so-good and not-so-natural as well as the post-production and dubbing issues resulting from re-write its script line might be to pass the censorship.
However, the situation is different when it comes to malicious smear campaigns aimed solely at bringing her down. I really can’t stand it. There were many crying scenes across those 10 episodes of SOTB—some truly excellent ones that demonstrated a significant improvement in her acting—yet none of them went viral. Why? Because people only care about a single negative aspect if it allows them to tear someone down and ignore all of her potential, especially an actress.
Zhou Ye has constantly found herself in unfortunate situations over the past few years: she was criticized when she was the victim; criticized when she did nothing but got dragged into smear campaigns against other actors; criticized simply for smiling at others; criticized for not smiling and being labeled arrogant; criticized while trying to be a professional actress; criticized for rarely posting on social media and accused of lacking a competitive spirit; criticized for simply having a relationship like any normal human being.
I can’t imagine how suffers it must be to be a public figure who faces criticism for doing something as basic as breathing.