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This review may contain spoilers
The main romance in this drama is pretty good, so is the chill moody atmosphere, but everything is else is very strange.
Review over, thanks for reading!
Since there is a minimum word count on MDL for reviews, let me elaborate a little bit what I mean by strange. For starters this show has an incredible amount of social engineering / agendas in it. These only become really jarring around e13, but they can be felt from early on. There is also the sister character, she has an incredibly hard to tolerate trashy personality (don't mean to criticize her for being promiscuous or anything like that) in the first half of the show, but then she becomes a much better person out of nowhere & gets together with a young guy, well *inserts shrug emoji* alright. Then there are a bunch of incredibly crappy people at work that also transform, getting "very well deserved" redemption arks.
The writing is also super weird in the sense that the show has several -perhaps even many- brilliantly written and really cool scenes, but these are not integrated very organically into the show, the flow of the story is just really odd. For all I know it could be that actually brilliant writers failed to properly navigate the maze of written and unwritten Chinese censorship rules & my feeling of strong dissonance is a direct result of that, I don't know. I just think that trying to justify -even malicious- authority- with all those redemption arks I mentioned earlier could also be explained by trying to please the censorship body.
Despite these issues, `Fake It Till You Make It` is still quite entertaining & most Chinese dramas with the business tag are usually far far worse than this one, because at least I never felt very annoyed in this one. Had some minor frustrations with Da Wang early on, but even that is nothing compared to what usually happens in this genre.
Review over, thanks for reading!
Since there is a minimum word count on MDL for reviews, let me elaborate a little bit what I mean by strange. For starters this show has an incredible amount of social engineering / agendas in it. These only become really jarring around e13, but they can be felt from early on. There is also the sister character, she has an incredibly hard to tolerate trashy personality (don't mean to criticize her for being promiscuous or anything like that) in the first half of the show, but then she becomes a much better person out of nowhere & gets together with a young guy, well *inserts shrug emoji* alright. Then there are a bunch of incredibly crappy people at work that also transform, getting "very well deserved" redemption arks.
The writing is also super weird in the sense that the show has several -perhaps even many- brilliantly written and really cool scenes, but these are not integrated very organically into the show, the flow of the story is just really odd. For all I know it could be that actually brilliant writers failed to properly navigate the maze of written and unwritten Chinese censorship rules & my feeling of strong dissonance is a direct result of that, I don't know. I just think that trying to justify -even malicious- authority- with all those redemption arks I mentioned earlier could also be explained by trying to please the censorship body.
Despite these issues, `Fake It Till You Make It` is still quite entertaining & most Chinese dramas with the business tag are usually far far worse than this one, because at least I never felt very annoyed in this one. Had some minor frustrations with Da Wang early on, but even that is nothing compared to what usually happens in this genre.
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