Amarina

It's hinted at the end that MengMeng started the loop somehow (the mom saw MM's figure looking satisfied as she's being hauled away). The FL and ML were both originally asleep which allowed the loop to go into effect for them and give them both a reset point. Essentially the time loop was MM last cry for help since she didn't want to see her parents become murderers.

First, I honestly loved this show though the last couple episodes made me want to throttle the ML and scream at him to just tell her what was going on.

Despite laughing out loud multiple times though I felt the actual story itself was missing some editing maybe? Like how it doesn't show Ke Si Yi being recruited as a spy so when she starts getting text messages it feels like it's from left field. Later when the business storyline picks up in the final several episodes it felt like there should have been more information provided at least to the audience about the stakes at play but we are as much in the dark as the FL.

Lol call me weird but the thing that probably annoyed me most in this short drama was that once again there's a disabled man in a wheelchair who is "magically" cured and has no trouble walking ever again.

It's currently airing 2 episodes daily

Less than 5 minutes in:
LZ: "If you looked prettier you wouldn't have to edit them (misunderstood photos) for so long"

OUCH and BURN 🤣

iQIYI Standard is releasing 2 episodes a day so it can be watched there but can't binge all 24 episodes yet.

Does it hold up 16 years later? Honestly it's still a really solid show overall I think. Lots of crazy antics and Melodrama over-acting but I could still see the overall plot being made again today. Will say I "loved" the number of times a character either forgot their phone or deliberately destroyed it (talking about you cell in fish bowl)... felt like the writer was scratching their head how to allow for the misunderstandings to build and decided just to create weird scenes where phone calls and text messages cant clear things up easily for plot purposes.

She did get punished, you might have missed it but when the two were talking at the grave site a cop car showed up signaling that she was going to be taken in. Previous scene had had the police officer telling the ML to convince her to give up and plead guilty too.

Finished and overall I'm sad. There definitely should have been other ways to demonstrate why they love each other so much that they both pine for 10 years. Sure, I get that I can read the novel to "get" their relationship but watching a drama shouldn't REQUIRE someone to read the original source just in order to get half the story.

In the first half of the show I remember getting vibes of the second part of Lighter and Princess after the time skip. But the reason their push and pull worked so well was the backstop we had between them. I kept waiting and waiting for actual substance to explain why Song Yan and Xu Qin couldn't forget about each other after so many years. It never came and in fact their one major issue between them (the fact that he tries to shield her from every harsh reality and doesn't discuss anything with her) doesn't even get resolved by his own doing, she has to rely and someone else to eventually tell her about what her mother did to him. So even in that aspect we are let down and left with "the past is the past and I got to be a soldier for a little while so it's all good, here's the soldiers oath to prove I'll love you forever...?"

I was convinced they were going to change the story to not even include them being intimate immediately because he's a firefighter so I'll take whatever we can get lol. 🔥

Every part of his being is honed around trying to protect her from being upset. Like others have said, in this scene he wants to assure here that everything is okay and he's not worried about anything so that they can have the "reckoning" moment he knows is coming. This same feeling of part of the reason why in the mid-credits scene SY has DJ punch him back once. At the same time it's important to their relationship progression that every time she discovers DJ "putting on a face" and trying to protect her from something she calls him out on it when she finds out such as the next day mask, when she realizes he lied about going to sleep and continued working, when he doesn't tell her the issues her parents raised, etc.

I'm sorry you're getting hate for posting a very valid feeling. I personally ended up loving the show and STORY as a whole but will concur that episode 1 also gave me the creeps.

For me personally it wasn't even the knowledge that they were going to grow up to be lovers, it was the juxtaposition of the "14" yr old and "16" yr old actresses but she looked 10. It was uncanny valley. The storyline portion wouldn't have even been weird as a 9 year age gap either since at that point (in the drama) it was literally only portrayed as "This guy is nice to me, my real brother is so obnoxious, I wish HE were my brother, then I'd have a handsome brother instead of an annoying one."

It is.... it's only maybe a year based on the text messages. It's cold and bundled up at the airport parting, text messages start in December and they meet up again beginning of November.

First, I keep seeing 2 years no contact. Maybe in the novel but it doesn't seem to be that way in the show based on the text messages she didn't respond to. She went to see him at the airport and then put away her things when it was cold out and needed a coat, after a few months of climbing the ranks in order to get into university. We see unresponsive texts from December 2016 onward to Sept 2017 and they meet again beginning of November 2017.

She does explain that at first her phone was taken away after their first meeting and he says he found that out which was why he was still hurt when she still didn't contact him after getting it back then dropped the subject.

The continued messages and gifts were explained later because in his life of misery there was this pure person who knew little about how the world actually worked but made him feel like he was still wanted. He wanted to protect that person no matter what which was why he came running to the airport even though he was sick at the time and needed someone to drive him. He's also someone that, once he makes a promise, fulfills it no matter what, hence the gifts continued despite there being no communication between them.
The way the story is told I truly think he only thought of her in a, to his understanding, sisterly way. At the same time though his history and protectivness have all the markings of someone who, if he were the SML, when the FL grows up and finally meets someone who she also shows the same protective, caring instinct towards he would wake up to realize he feels jealous and NOT brotherly all of a sudden. But we didn't get that story thankfully.

The younger actress was definitely a choice but she only only sees him as someone she idolizes and wished was her brother. Might help to watch on a faster speed if you're having a lot of trouble with those scenes, there aren't a lot.

I feel like a ton of people dropped it because it wasn't a fluffy RomCom which is silly because it was never advertised as one. And the number of comments I've seen complaining about "filler rescues" and "boring dialog" makes me think we're watching two different shows 🙃

Part of me is happy that there are people out there saying this family and ZQ are written unrealistically because it means they've never had to go through it themselves or known anyone who's gone through something similar.

I too think it's been portrayed pretty realistically so far. And while you can say "she is now an adult with a career", it's only true to a certain degree. The mother has already been shown multiple times meeting with hospital supervisors to ensure her daughter is getting along well under the guise of being concerned; all the while making subtle remarks to her daughter about not liking her current career choice and shouldn't she think about changing it so she has more time etc. She's most likely going to try and flex her muscles soon to have her daughter removed which is why we had the subtle scene in ep 17 where SY has the camera crew interview her instead of him since she led the medical team. He knows she can have her position taken away at any point with a call from her family but if the world gets to see her competency isn't family connections it will be harder for it to be justified.

While Im fully caught up ill give an answer strictly from an episode 5 standpoint here's how I read the scene. Either way I still think the answer is the same, there's just more information now from later episodes.When she said that she would still make the same choice she was affirming to him that she understood that it wasn't the answer he wanted to hear but rather the truthful answer. The dynamic between the two up until ep. 5 showed the past flashback with some of the details showing her being taken away by her mother. So in this sense she chose her family "over" him. She is letting him know that essentially that deep down she is still the same person right now and that, if pushed against a wall, would HAVE to choose her family. So WHY say she wants to reconcile if you're going to start off with that? Some will need to be inferred from later episodes but essentially, she sees that he is now a "reapected" member of the community as the Fire Captain and she is building her career as an ER doctor. With their lives the way they are now she has a small hope that her family will be able to eventually accept him and she WON'T be forced to make that decision again.

When you're constantly at one to two minutes of fast forwarding skipping through looooong drawn out scenes on people staring at each other and not talking almost every episode the show needed to be cut by at least an episode or two for that alone. Story flow means little apparently so hopefully you don't watch this show for any character development between GFM and QiQi's relationship built on a lie and never shown resolved. Or how ML is Herman and a famous streamer who regularly has over a million viewers on his stream but when they go public they don't announce his status as Hermon, just normal name, but she still outs him later on a live stream but nothing ever comes of it...
Too much more comes to mind.

I think you missed some of the subtext here. He wasn't actually borrowing money from someone when he paid her back, he was finally given access to his money again by his dad who had cut him off when he insisted on coming back to China and becoming a professional Go player. Word had gotten back to his dad about all the hard work he'd been doing at the restaurant and that he when he mentioned he had a girl he liked his dad was basically like "don't disgrace us, here's your money, use it".