Live Up to Your Youth (2026)

Live up to disappointment

From the synopsis and even the trailer, you'd think this would be a drama about people going to Beijing to follow their dreams. And in retrospect, it did start off that way in the first quarter of the drama. So of course, I was intrigued. I wasn't expecting them to all to actually get their dream bby the end of the drama but I was fully content with watching their drive and the motivation the characters had to reach it. But unfortunately, the writer didn't have the same idea as me.

Throughout the drama, there was a common theme that became redundant and ridiculous after a while. One of the characters would get a chance to live out their dream, be it singing, acting, writing....and the writer would snatch it away and then repeat the same thing over a few episodes later. It's like letting the characters get a taste of success and then stripping it from them to prolong the story. It made it so the characters would do jobs outside of their ideal profession to earn money. That's understandable but after a while I started to notice that it was steering away from the core reason of them coming to Beijing in the first place and the premise of the story was diminishing from my eyes. But I don't even know why I was surprised because they jumped the shark numerous times with all the gang violence that didn't even fit the scope of the drama at all.

This next part is a spoiler and why I hate this drama and would never recommend it to anyone. So, don't read the next part if you don't care for spoilers.

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The way the screenwriter wrote Jelly Lin's character and the 2ML's characters to be miserable was infuriating. Those two were the happiest at the start of the drama and became miserable by the middle and had the worst ending possible. Jelly Lin's character out of everyone grinded the hardest to reach her dream as an actress. We watched her get her second fl taken away from her then she got the third FL role and that was taken from her as well. Then the writer had her sleep with an investor to get acting jobs, the same investor (an old disgusting guy) ended up getting her pregnant, she had to quit acting because of the disgust she was getting from her costars and special treatment she got from production, her mother disowned her; until finally she got some semblence of happiness when she married the guy who always loved her (2ML), they moved to Paris, and a couple of years passed and they were happy and in love only for the writer to give her husband a tumor and six months to live.

As one would expect. Her husband died, and she ended up alone in Paris for 20 years until coming back to China. And what makes it even crazier is that the ML actually got to become a screenwriter (He was the only one out six that got his dream) and produce movies, but somehow getting Jelly Lin's character to be an actress in one of his movies wasn't an option? Even in the drama the ML said if his scripts where able to beome movies or dramas that he'd cast her and that never happened. I'm so annoyed.

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