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Typical cliché lacorn-style...
When it begins with "but I'm a man..." I'm already categorize such a series as BS. Of course this is a lacorn-style series which means we have a bitchy wanna be wife and a witch-like wanna be mother in law. The so called "hetero" guy which of course has feminine traits, kissed a rich guy first to escape the loan sharks. The rich guy recognizes the opportunity to make a deal to escape a forced marriage and marries the "hetero" guy for money. And that's the BS story.Production quality is good, but the audio is lacking. As it is with vertical series, if you watch this as one "movie" the cuts are sometimes rough. Overall a BS series with over-acting, silly sound-effects, some cringy moments and an overly dramatic finale. If there is nothing else to watch, you could do worse, but on the other hand, if you skip it, you save two hours of your life.
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This review may contain spoilers
rich boy and poor boy vertical series
Overall: I rated this against other verticals of a similar genre. 50 short episodes. Aired on iQIYI.Content Warnings: non con kisses, slap, coercion, workplace bullying, manipulation, punch
What I Liked
- chuckled at the push up part
- the dads (except for a couple of lines below)
- avoided the noble idiot trope
- visuals
Room For Improvement
- cliche wannabe wife
- love rival/jealousy
- comedy sound effects/music
- dad said teach your wife a lesson...make her submit
- gay for you trope
- hobbled around the next morning
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Fake dating to real love
Pretend Lover doesn't reinvent the wheel, but it takes beloved tropes—fake dating, forced proximity, and the grumpy-meets-sunshine dynamic—and executes them with brilliant chemistry and emotional payoff. By the time both fathers finally grant their blessings, you'll be cheering for how far Nawin and Metha have come. An addictive, feel-good watch that delivers on every romantic promise.Was this review helpful to you?
Zero budget but lots of heart
This was a fairly basic drama hitting more or less all the tropes you expect to see, and you wouldn’t think it’d be all that memorable. It’s saved, however, by the actors, and for that it gets a solid rating from me.There is no budget for almost anything so even the story gets ropey in the later parts, but you can forgive it a lot just to watch the two male leads doing their thing. They have a ton of chemistry together and they’re not afraid to go nuts with the intimate scenes. Metha in particular likes to ham it up a LOT and honestly? Give him more work based on that alone because he would be good as a melodramatic villain.
Navin (Nawin?) is less extreme but he plays well off Metha, and the scenes where they’re just sitting around talking feel natural. There’s hints of greatness in here somewhere underneath the vertical drama schlocky-ness that deserve recognition, so I definitely want to see these two again.
The most jarring/annoying part of it were the constant voice-overs of characters’ internal monologues. If they’d somehow reworked the script to take that out while still keeping the plot moving, it would have instantly been a better series, but again: zero budget, so it is what it is.
It’s not the best BL you’ve ever seen, and vertical dramas lean on the side of being cringey, but go into it with the right expectations and it’s absolutely worth it.
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This review may contain spoilers
Achei as atuações bem medianas, principalmente a do ator que faz o personagem Metha. Já o Aomstin, que interpreta o Nawin, não me convenceu ao retratar seu personagem. A história em si segue os clichês que tanto vemos em BLs e até mesmo em dramas curtos chineses, então não me surpreendeu e também não me incomodou muito. Was this review helpful to you?
