Sinasina

Every year I'm worried that tightening censorship & by association genre specific mandatory content will permanently prevent me from enjoying new cdramas. While hopefully we are not quite there yet, to me it feels like Genius Girlfriend is skirting that line. There is so much educational content & social engineering in this show that it's crazy. I think the first 18 high school episodes are largely poisoned by this & were barely enjoyable to me. It's not just the endless messaging about what high school students should be doing / focusing on, but also the entire setting feels super fake, written -or perhaps rather rewritten- by adults that have long forgotten what their high school life had been like. I'm okay with an unrealistic fantasy high school setting, but the fun police hit these kids a wee bit too hard & they were not really allowed to do anything other than the one off forming of a temporary band called Class Break of all things.

17 out of 28 episodes is high school, so I'll keep referring to this as a high school cdrama. It's technically only 60% of the show, but there are flashbacks & the adult life is also based on the high school friend group. Though it's certainly one positive aspect of the drama that we left the teen years behind earlier than average in this genre.

It's rare that the ML is the dumber, less assertive one in a high school setting, despite all the negative sentiments that can be found in this overly verbose review, this makes me curious about the novel.

Unlike in most prior high school cdramas I've seen, there is basically no romance in the high school era. The boys have crushes & their own small rivalries, but there is no slow burn, since there is no burn at all. It's friends forever spam until the time skip, not even mutual attraction is allowed now I suppose. Romance is not mandatory in a drama's high school part, I get that, it's just super unrealistic that the girls wouldn't even have crushes that they would've discussed among themselves and let's not forget the title is Genius Girlfriend, not Genius Friend Girl. Nonetheless even if I completely ignored the lack of romance & tried to enjoy bro/sis-mances, it wouldn't be great, since most events & dialog in the high school era were rather bland & filled with educational purpose. Tian Xi Wei's own earlier drama `Lovely Us` is a great example to demonstrate how to make a good vibe drama in a high school setting, or we could look at how much more vibrant & livelier `A Love So Beautiful` is & could come up with at least 10 more examples.

Turns out Hu Yi Tian is too old to pull off a high school tenth / eleventh grader. Not only is this immersion breaking by itself, he also has a lot of awkward body language that makes this even worse.
Anyway mostly the cast is very talented, doing a brilliant job, but it's not quite enough. The sibling

Let me address the adult life part of the show. This by itself in a vacuum would be a solid 8 maybe even 9 out of 10. There are some minor issues here and there, like they wasted an entire epi on the twenty something FL not understanding why her heart is beating so fast in ML's vicinity, which imo is one of the stupidest tropes in Asian dramas, because while sometimes adult women can be unsure about romantic feelings, they are never unsure about being turned on, or being attracted to someone, shocking info I know. FL's post grad? plot is also really weird & filled with propaganda content. I suppose it's important messaging that even geniuses should know their place for the greater good or whatever.
Anyway I went a bit off tangent here, what I really wanted to say is that the adult era is enjoyable to watch. There are many touching scenes & the happy ending is decently long & overall quite well thought out.

Though I have to say I found the Jin Bai Hui X Lin Ze Qiu couple way more interesting than the main one. Of course it's a minor gripe that the toxic parents had a mini redemption scene. Suppose should be at least happy that they were allowed to register their marriage without approval.

Finally let's talk about AI. I'm very pro AI compared to the average population. I think it can be an amazing tool if used well with patience and restraint. In this drama however AI is used really sloppily without any tact. The quality of image / video generation is low, but that could be a budget issue, I'm alright with low quality special effects too, I consider myself very understanding in this regard, but some really awful AI imagery made it into the drama. No self respecting director / producer should have allowed these, since it wouldn't have been difficult to keep prompting for better results. Right away the entire intro is completely AI generated & mostly it's quite fine, but there are two scenes in it that are garbage, one is an abomination featuring LP records & the other is the mechanical device with rotating elements, scary stuff really..

I think 7 out of 10 is fair, though I cannot believe what a bloated review I ended up writing about a 7/10, food for thought, ha!