Where'd the plot go?
I was pretty excited about Love O2O. The idea of merging MMO culture with Asian dramas is exciting. The first few episodes focus heavily on two opposing ingame power couples, famous in their generic Chinese MMO and renowned for their prowess in PvP. It also draws parallels to the real world, wherein the main character Bei Wei Wei attends college and struggles with her renown as a campus beauty. It's a pretty awesome premise.But like most Asian dramas that have awesome premises, the show-runners just couldn't resist the temptation to gradually turn Love O2O into every run-of-the-mill rom com. Over time the game is featured much less and more focus is given to real-world character relationships and endless inconsequential scenes where side characters act like toddlers.
And the show couldn't even do that right. Once Wei Wei and her emotionless cardboard cutout of a love interest get together in real life (not really a spoiler since the show screams it at you from the beginning), the plot comes to a screeching halt.
I don't mean "comes to a halt" like most dramas do. We're not dealing with an endless barrage of scenes where nearly-identical Asian actors look constipated in slow motion for five minutes while a power ballad plays loudly about "loving you" and/or "missing you."
I mean the show just comes to a halt. I dropped the show at 18 episodes, so I don't know if it picks up or not, but after 5 episodes of absolutely -NOTHING- happening, I had to drop it.
It doesn't help that Wei Wei isn't an interesting main character. I don't know if the actor playing her just sucks, but Wei Wei doesn't emote much. She sounds friendly, emotes very carefully and very precisely, but there's just nothing beyond that. No character to be seen behind the friendly voice and unchanging face. An endless void lies beyond her eyes.
Her love interest is no different. He has no flaws, no personality, nothing. The relationship between Wei Wei and Forgettable Male Drama Lead No. #75831 is so boring. Nothing happens. Nada. Nothing. Nich! I was questioning whether or not Netflix was looping the same five minutes for five hours. What a complete waste of time.
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Lost it's momentum
The show started incredibly well. The plot revolves around Ha-Won accepting a job from a rich old man to help his four grandsons come together as a family. She receives "missions" from him, and after completing each mission she would receive a bonus to help her get closer to her dream of attending to college and becoming a teacher.The grandsons are the usual, generic kdrama fare. You have the ladies man, the quiet sullen one, the forgettable one and the music one. I wish Seo-Woo (the music one) had more screentime, since as the episodes dragged on he was the only character not tied up in a generic, show-stalling kdrama plotline.
7 or 8 episodes in, I expected the story would continue to be a series of story arcs revolving around each "mission," where the characters learn lessons and improve as people, as well as deepen their bonds and relationships. This, I thought, would be a great format for the series. I was strapped in.
Then, after the (not really a spoiler since every kdrama seems to have this for some reason) vacation arc, the story just stops. There's an entire episode - 1/16th of the damn show - where no one leaves the mansion and everyone keeps going into each other's rooms and enacting the same scene over and over.
Person A walks into person B's room; person A says some dramatic line and leaves the room dramatically; Person B is left in his room looking constipated for five minutes while sad music plays. Then Person B enters Person C's room and the same scene happens. Repeat for about an hour.
Everything I enjoyed about the show just stops. I'm at episode 12 now (and subsequently dropping the show) and for the last 3-4 episodes no-one mentions a "mission." The format of the show changes, like whiplash, into every cruddy Kdrama I've ever dropped.
Everyone spends hours dilly-dallying about who loves who; the main character's IQ drops about 70 points as her laser-sharp wit is dulled; the show just loses its momentum and its focus.
Part of the reason this happens is because the vacation arc changes the focus of the story from Ha-Won to the secondary female lead, Hye-Ji.
Hye-Ji is a great example of how k-drama writers like to add in an emotionless tertiary female character whose only existence is to slow an otherwise good show to a screeching halt. Almost every scene with her ends with her mumbling something, then leaving the scene so one of the two angsty manchildren in the love hexagon can look slightly sad while time slows down, the camera goes crazy, and a loud power ballad plays with the singer screaming "Without you!" 26 times.
The showrunners could have replaced Hye-Ji with a cardboard cutout of a girl with a speakerphone attached and her actress' robotic performance might have actually been better.
Now the show is adding a bunch of side-storylines to muddy the already-slowed-down show into an icicle's pace. The show started amazingly, built up a great format for its story, then hit a wall and never recovered. Out of the 12 episodes I watched, 4 of them should have been cut. I'm not going to dare wasting my time on the other four.
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Grating FL.
This show has the worst female lead I've ever had the displeasure of watching for 18 long, ardruous episodes before dropping this show out of sheer exhaustion.Anything good about this drama doesn't really matter if it exists only to profilerate more scenes involving this screeching female Caillou. Every scene with her is grating to no end.
I read online that the show's supposed to get better. Its been TWELVE. HOURS. The show isn't getting better. I'm not putting myself through any more torture.
I understand the k/cdrama community have an exceptionally low bar for enjoyment so I'm not surprised this trainwreck is getting a great score on MDL. Becoming accustomed to grating trope characters like this seems like a requirement to becoming a longterm drama fan. But I can't do that. I don't want to do that.
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Gets very boring midway
If you've been watching dramas for a while, you've experienced this many, many times before: New drama comes out with high production values during the first 3-4 episodes, then the show settles in.Side storylines are quickly introduced to pad things out. It's not a generic drama without lots of filler. For King the Land, that would be the stories of the main character's friends, Airline Lady and Mall Lady. They probably have names. I honestly don't remember which one had a divorce plot that's going nowhere, but that's a thing. Scenes involving the two are good for bathroom breaks, phone breaks, or spamming the skip button on your phone until the environment changes.
Eventually, shows like these dip into immense tedium and the plot slows to a halt. There's 16 episodes and 4 episodes worth of writing, so they have to pad out the runtime. The main lead Rich Mannington has since become as bland and uninteresting as the female lead. The acting isn't terrible and the actors have damn good chemistry given the tripe they have to work with, but good actors don't make a show good alone.
Oh. The villain sucks, too.
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What a waste of time.
Even Lee Min-ho couldn't carry this show on his incredibly talented, exhausted, typecast backside.The breeding pair's meet cute in Hollywood was alright, but the show fell apart the minute they returned to Korea. The only time the FL worked proactively toward a concrete goal was during that first story arc. After that she was only capable of reacting to things that happened to her. Through crying.
In stark contrast to shows like Boys Over Flowers and Cinderella and the Four Princes, Heirs' poor female lead doesn't make the gradual switch from an excitable ball of infinite optimism to a damp rag. Cha Eun-Sang starts off as a damp rag and only gets sadder and damper as the show progresses. It just gets tiring over time.
Sometimes a show with weak leads are carried by funny or charming side characters. That is not the case here. The schoolkids are the usual group of identical pop idols, released from the same vat of Retinol they were brewed from and given the order to "act cute." The older actors are obviously only there to get a paycheck.
Like a lot of shows of its kind, Heirs spends a lot of time with the characters' gaudy and obnoxious family members. These meandering plotlines completely bogged down the show's very thin plot.
Don't bother.
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This review may contain spoilers
Very refreshing
Shows like 2019's A Little Thing Called First Love are what keep me kicking and screaming in the Drama community's cast iron grip. The acting is superb. The leads are superb. The side characters are hilarious. Wang Yi Miao steals the show as the feisty Lin Xia. The show's main theme is a BOP.The storytelling is refreshing. It's a cute story about how a FL's crush turns into journey of self-improvement and self-discovery.
One thing did irk me, though: I was surprised that after spending the majority of the show watching Xia Miao Miao blossom into a respected artist, in spite of her looks, suddenly she couldn't complete her transformation into a successful careerwoman until she adhered to the suffocating Asian standards of beauty. I think 99% of the show's budget was provided by advertising from those few episodes. Numerous brands of cosmetics bombarded the screen as the FL was transformed... and her skin whitened.
But that didn't ruin the show for me. I'm going into this with an American ethnocentric lens, and this show was primarily developed for teens and young adults living in China. The ML is a pop idol and this show did the job of sustaining his fame so he can join a second pop idol group... Sub-group. There are so many idols they have subgroups now. Good grief.
Regardless, it was a banger show. Give it a watch.
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This review may contain spoilers
It wasn't great, but I had fun
There was this moment early on when this show clicked for me. Ko Mi Nyeo had already broken into Hwang Tae Kyung's room and destroyed a bunch of stuff, and got yelled at about it. Feeling sorry for what she did but lacking object permanence, she proceeded to take a U-turn back to Tae Kyung's room to destroy it even more. Because of course she would. I knew I found a gem here.Jang Geun Suk carried this show on his waifish blouse-covered back. His facial expressions and comedic timing were fantastic. I loved every spat he had with Villainina. He elevated every dramatic and emotional scene, too. I'll admit to tearing up along with him during some of the scenes. I want to watch more kdramas with him in it.
Everyone else wasn't so good. Park Shin Hye's bad acting really stood out. When the twin brother character returned, Park Shin Hye had to try playing a sly smirking bad boy. Boy did she... try. Those scenes were hilarious, and had me cackling every time the character was on-screen. Moments of pure joy here.
This is the usual flower boy fare. Department Store Jan Di must contend with musical twinks three: the mean one, the quiet one, and the other one. Rich and spoiled Villainina gets really invested in this boy band's inner workings and wants to claim ownership of Hwang Tae Kyung for... no reason, actually. They're not childhood friends or anything. She just kind of dropped in and started wreaking havoc. Lee Hong Gi elevates vestigial flower boy Kang On Yu by way of pure charm. The glossily lit flashback to him as "Jeremy" dressed in an all-white marching band uniform holding hands with Generic European Girl in Castle Place was hilarious.
Compared to other dramas of its time, this show has very good pacing. It only took eleven episodes for the writers to realize they ran out of plot and direct our plastic starlets to chew the scenery in a supermarket for a quarter of an episode. 11 episodes of well-paced kdrama isn't bad, though.
The boy band thing is just set dressing for the melodrama. All of the side characters related to the music industry - the fans, the bombastic main producer guy, the comedy relief manager guy, the fashion chick who only exists to feed plot-relevant info to Villainina, and the fans - don't have anything to do. They shoot a high school music video, record a single, and the old rich chick really wants Hwang Tae Kyung to record a song. But it never feels that important.
Over time, the show settles into the usual 00s' era kdrama schlock, and doesn't really leave. The female lead finishes her transition into Late Drama Depression and looks sad with her eyes bulging out 99% of the time. That One Dramatic Love Song plays on loop at this point, becoming a toxic earworm I have to mentally swat away for a while. The femboys admit their love to heterina and snap at each other's wigs. The boring B plot, which has been dragging its feet the entire show, takes center stage. In this case, more scenes with the boring rich lady and the least interesting birth mystery plotline I've seen from Asian media.
A kdrama doesn't settle into the schlock quickly. It takes time to settle, and for the viewer to realize they're waist-deep in the schlock with the main cast. Upon realizing this, a decision has to be made. Has the show been good enough to justify trudging through the shlock enough to see how it ends? For me it was. Barely. Though my finger got sore from tapping the screen to skip forward.
This is one of those shows I had fun watching, but it's just junk food. Thinking about it too critically ruined any chance to actually earnestly engage with the media. Instead I watched it like one would watch The Room. My entertainment came in part from knowledge about romantic kdrama tropes, and how this show met every single one with the subtlety of cannonfire. I don't think I can watch these shows earnestly anymore. I think this is it. I think I'm done now.
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Bored Out Of My Wits
One day I will have watched more CDramas with good pacing than I can count on one hand. That day is not today, as Royal Rumors abandons its plot midway so the main breeding pair can listlessly visit each other's mansions while the rest of the straights pair off. Gone is the focus on the female lead's secret mastery of martial arts. Her "uwu I'm so weak and delicate" charade became boring hours ago. I don't know nor care where the plot is going.I guess some people will dig this stuff. Not me, though.
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