The thing is with transmigration or self-aware character meta dramas is that you have so much room to explore when it comes to within-drama vs. meta explanations for character actions. You can have self-aware characters roll their eyes at the cheesy lines or mock plots for being too dramatic or cliche. In Extraordinary You, one self-aware character suggests that other characters keep waking up because the author is so unoriginal in reusing plots, characters, and lines. On the human side, you feel so much for the characters as they struggle to retain their souls as the writer drags them through plots unwillingly. The Romance of Tiger and Rose is explicitly framed as a poorly written script and the drama shows time and time again that the writer had not thought enough about the choices she made in world-building and character development. How well would your imaginary world hold up if it suddenly became real? Another example of this is the most iconic scene in W: Two Worlds, where the author refuses to see his creation as a human with choices, even though he's shown up in the flesh, and gets shot for it. Lazy writing comes back to haunt that author as well when his sloppy set-up for the story forces itself to becomes real.
On the other hand, but still enjoyable, you have the transmigration plots like The First Night with the Duke and (I'm only 12 episodes in) Love Game in Eastern Fantasy that are less meta and something more like, "Girl gets to be the heroine of her favourite novel" which is also fun because it's kind of like the same joy as reading fan fiction. The transmigrator knows these characters and already loves and hates them; what is often interesting is her beginning to see them as real people and not just story characters.
In a failure to realize any of these interesting meta aspects, A Dream Within a Dream (I gave up at ep 24) refused to let their heroine enjoy the story, did not explore the tension between forced writer action and free will in any meaningful way; and, for far too long, did not show the heroine understanding the characters as real people. In this essay I will...
