hi! i've seen you mentioned some criticism before the release of woh but i'm a relatively recent fan, if you don't mind could you explain what happened?
WOH's casting was not well received, basically.
People are always dissatisfied with castings tbh, but the reaction to WOH's was especially negative. Simply put, people thought the two of them were "too manly" to star in dangai. Because GJ and ZZH are "too manly", they must be "too straight", and because they're "too straight" it must mean that acting in a love story with another man would be too difficult for them. Based on that very flawed assumption, people believed they would be too awkward to act out a proper romance with each other and so their chemistry would be nonexistent.
People were especially dissatisfied with ZZH because his image was very stereotypically manly (this is a "problem" because Zhou Zishu is a shou/bottom), he's had at least two girlfriends before and he's known for not performing fanservice with his costars.
GJ has actually starred in a BL before (an actual one, not censored) but it wasn't aired in China, so people only knew him through his het dramas. Like ZZH, his appearance did not fit fans' image of the character he was casted as.
It's not that people were particularly angry (TYK is one of priest's older and less popular books, so it doesn't have a dedicated fandom that would care enough to get angry) it's just that people took one look at the casting and immediately thought "there's no way that's going to work" and promptly noped out.
The show had only one scriptwriter (in cdramas, it's common to have at least two or three working on one script together) and she was a newbie, on top of that. When leaks came out, people thought the costumes were ugly which further solidified the "this will definitely flop" opinion about the show. The low funding and lack of sponsors did not help improve the show's reputation. People saw the early leaks and promotional stuff and said that it looked like GJ and ZZH didn't get along and secretly hated each other.
Only eight or so fanstations were set up for WOH at that time, while the other productions had at least twenty. I think h/yx had around sixty? And in polls conducted on weibo, WOH was almost always voted as the least anticipated dangai drama and the most likely to fail. No one paid attention to it. It seemed pretty chill on the outside because nobody cared, but the situation within the fandom was...messy.
It's very, VERY lucky that no one cared about them, because there were quite a few bad incidents involving toxic solo fans during filming. Simply put, GJ and ZZH's solo fans thought that the two of them seemed way too close. There was a GJ fangroup that ended up disbanding because the fans running it were so pissed (one of them apparently came up to GJ and argued with him over ZZH). There was also the incident of ZZH's fans saying really horrible things to him on weibo because his studio uploaded pics of him with GJ (one "fan" told him to go see a psychiatrist) that he ended up arguing with them before eventually deleting his weibo app. I remember at that time being super thankful whenever I see h/yx trending on weibo, because that means all the attention was still on it and not at whatever tf was going on with GJ and ZZH. The lack of attention was a blessing.
Anyway, things worked out in the end. The script ended up being one of the best in recent years, everyone fawned over the quality of the costumes, and people were quick to change their minds about the casting once they started watching. The lack of sponsors meant there were less greedy businessmen dipping their slimy, uncultured fingers into the production (that's why a lot of high budget cdramas are shit) and the production team had complete control of the creative process. And of course, the funniest thing has to be that the actors that people thought secretly hated each other ended up being the only popular dangai actors so far to support and protect each other instead of competing for fans and money.
