Skibbies

first ep: hu jingjing buying the kiwis
hu jingjing falling for lin rui + buying a gift for confession
lin rui introduce qiao xichen as his girlfriend
hu jingjing slice of life bits with boyfriend
hu jingjing getting upset at bf picking up her phone call + breaking up
ou yang's pov of first meeting with nanjia
jian yifan chatting with saiwen, he lowered the staff reduction from half to a third
ou yang applied to be a dog walker to talk with nanjia
ou yang convincing qiao xichen to give him the chance to work with nanjia
jian yifan's interview with lin rui
ou yang proclaim he'll win nanjia's heart and hangs around her office by napping
lin rui gets awkward phone from his parents about hu jingjing
lin rui's negotiation with ex-worker to get lower price for coffee beans
qiao xichen and jian yifan kiss while raining
shen zichang's friends telling him he should think about getting married
jian yifan's friend in yunan convincing him to work together
jian yifan struggling with what to do with his future and some guy consoles him
the guy goes to console ou yang on his struggle with nanjia not liking him
the guy consoles shen zichen on his relationship issue too (dude keep changing occupation LOL? ultimate deus ex machina)
jian yifan breaks up using coffee beans


second ep: qiao xichen's coworker who got fired was actually super rich
qiao xichen chiding xu yan for buying expensive bag
xu yan's terrible experience of sharing a taxi with 3 other strangers
ji nanjia's difficult expereince of getting money back from a rich lady
qiao xichen and miaomiao talking about buying stuff to deter danger as a single lady + suspicious person not actually suspecious
qiao xichen's parents console her on uncle & aunt coming over
xu yan's mum gives her 300k for down payment
xu yan got coupons for an expensive restaurant and invited qiao xichen + school friend who's there for honeymoon
qiao xichen and her uncle and aunt apologise to each other and make up
xu yan + school friend talk about how hard it is to live in beijing
ji nanjia's aunt defend her against her mum's pressure to marry
lin rui admits he has lot to learn and shouldn't take shortcuts to qiao xichen and she consoles him
ou yang's mum trying to get him to hurry up and get married to nanjia
qiao xichen's reunion with jian yifan
ou yang resigning and "going to make coffee for his loved one"
hu jingjing's boyfriend sings jingjing ver of twinkle twinkle little star

yeah the first two episodes are pretty depressing, but it's less so after that, the tone of the drama is uplifting + heartwarming. The drama is fairly down to earth and relatable, take breaks if you need to! It's my favourite of this year, hope you like it too :)

Yeah I saw that! It was actually sort of lucky, because the drama had literally just finished the gaming portion when they did that LOL. They didn't really have to watch the episodes to advance the game, it was just one of the daily task you could do that get you a chance of getting a skin (you can play the game without skins, and it's not super awesome one either. they made it better skins in second week iirc, but older players will just ignore it) Should have promoted aerospace bit more :P They also had 1 yuan vip and a ping duo duo like thing, where you get enough people to watch the drama through your shared link (?), you get 10 yuan, which is real wild. (I swear I actually like YAMG lol)

Heads up for future viewers, there are two special episodes for this drama, they consist of some deleted scenes from the dramas, one is 52mins long, one is 46mins long, IDK where you'd find them subbed though. I summarised all the bits that appeared in post below, I think they are worth watching!

suicide of one the characters.

Oh oh Qin Lan also have We Are All Alone on iqiyi if you haven't seen that. *piles onto your to watch* hahaha. but yeah Rational Life is jiejie romance!

I literally sat on it till it was half way through before starting, then caught up too fast and sat on it again, will start now before all the spoilers bombards me. You can just leave it till later lol, I don't think it's must watch NOW drama.

It's been interesting watching crime crackdown blow up though, especially compared to you are my glory that tencent really really want to do well (and used all kinds of tactics to get people to watch), since it'd plays into their ip development plan. YAMG is doing pretty great, but it had fair amount of help.

Yeah last year they made jiejie (sister who makes waves, a variety show) and it was I think THE hit of the year? It was more popular than any of the dramas on any platform honestly. Oh they do heavy promos for their variety shows lol, I guess cos their dramas are usually low budget, the bigger budget ones air on tv and that sort of counts as promo.

ahhh for mango's dramas this year, I rec Rational Life (netflix? not sure if it is for your region though) and Remembrance of Things Past (12 ep x70mins, so it's like 20 ep?). Both slice of life-ish dramas about women, both pretty well done and down to earth, definitely would make it to my fav of the year list. The latter starts off bit depressing, but I swear it's pretty uplifting and heartwarming in tone in general.

they are doing really well with crime crackdown at least! the last 7 ep was leaked online but it just prompt more people to buy vip/fast track cos the episodes were incomplete LMAO.

when i was watching the day of becoming you, they had a share the link and watch the episodes for free for the fast track ep, I'm not sure if they were subbed though, and idk if they'd do it for this drama either, since i haven't followed iqiyi dramas since.

I think it's harder to get solid evidence (non-testimonials) to charge people that helped him =/ I do hope this whole thing means people that might do similar things would stop doing it, and other people become more aware of sexual assault.

I'd lower hopes for bl dramas in general, they slammed bl dramas yesterday in states media again. I hope they quietly airs, but promo would probably be rough.

I care about the drugs largely cos it means heavier sentence for him, and bigger trouble for everyone involved. Sexual assault charge unfortunately have way too low of a sentence usually.

I'm looking at the viewcounts, I think they underperformed, that doesn't mean they lost money though, fair amount did really well in sponsorship, and the views are still decent. I just think tencent expected more from most of these dramas.

iQiyi also underperformed by the way, this year's drama market have been abysmal if you are looking at tv ratings and viewcounts.

Yeah, I was really surprised when I found out 2 or 3 years ago!

Mango actually profits because it relies heavily on Hunan TV, which is a states-owned company. Hunan TV literally gave couple of its good variety shows to it, Hunan was the most popular station and tend to be forerunners in trend setting when it comes to young viewers. Mango is also interesting in that it doesn't buy massive amount of dramas, they only have in-house productions I think, so that saves huge amount of money. Its drama promotion is also rather minimal.

Bilibili actually surpassed Mango and Youku recently in daily visitor and became third most visited longform video platform. Bilibili users and content are little different, there's limited amount of dramas, limited culture for dramas on the platform and low hit for dramas for it to be really included when talking about platforms though.

oh boy, they confirmed the drugs thing? it's been in rumour mills for ages, this year is serious earthquake for c-ent.

she's not really the reason, it's Sun Honglei lol, he has several wildly popular hit dramas

they aren't really rushing it so much as all the platforms fast track their dramas these days, because they are all desperate to stop losing money (the big three have been in the reds every year since the start, mango is the only one that makes money). vip is still going to end right before the modern version airs. Plus, ending this week means it ends before school starts.

Iqiyi is actually the most friendly to drama viewers for fast track, if you want to watch the ending, you can get it in one go. (tencent would make you wait a week more, youku starts fast track too early, and mango is utterly crazy and can start fast track on second day of a drama airing :P)

as far as promotion goes, it's actually alright for iqiyi dramas, they simply don't spend much on promotions. sometimes production companies are responsible for them, also they might be spending it on places you don't see (not really the case for this drama but generally speaking)

i recommend watching the last 8 episodes after 30th (when ep 28 gets fasttracked), because the version you watched is probably the one they sent to NRTA (27 ep), apparently there are fair amount missing scenes? (they did reshoots i think)

it has the highest tv rating this year so far (excluding cctv, because that's a different playfield) despite airing at 9:30pm and only 1 ep at a time. (primetime is from 7:30 till 10pm, 9:30pm is on the late side for older audience who are main contributors to tv ratings)

viewcount per ep looks like it's going to be no.1 for tencent soon, (it's not there yet, it's about no.4 even if you count all the fast track episodes, 2 if you count vip, 1 if you count only non-vip) no.1 overall might be bit tough since my heroic husband was pretty strong, different platform and different way of counting viewcounts though.