monstersnroses

Just not top-shelf goods.

Ladies and gentlemen, let me be frank.

It's mid.

God knows it tried. And god knows I tried. The vibe is pretty good. Not as good as My Journey to You, but better than (pick literally any Aaron Deng drama).

But for the god-tier levels of complexity this plot has, there should be moar vibe. It starts off engaging, and then by the middle I feel like I'm getting flashbacks to Mr. Kenning's 8th grade world history class, like goddddd staring at the ceiling and waiting for the bell to ring listening to him drone on and on about Beowulf or Medieval banking or some sh*t.

Then you get a snow sequence for maybe 2 episodes, where ML gets brutally frame mogged by this guy dressed all in white who looks like Ling He in SoKP but with white hair, and a dragon egg appears. And it's like YAS finally something fun to watch. But then the dragon egg hatches, and out pops this absolute facepalm cgi dragon whelp with maxed out cringe stats that looks like it was created by the ccp entertainment division to be the cartoon mascot for the next CCTV spring festival gala. Fortunately this little cringelet gets ditched with the hot white-haired babysitter, and neither of them are ever seen again (goodbye sexy white haired snow hottie! *sobs in justwhy*). The whole thing was so random. But it's only a brief vacation, and then it's right back to plotslogging.

This is the kind of drama you normally would give to Kai Soso because of his Herculean ability to pull a heaping cart of bullsh*t across the finish line all by himself. The ML we do get is good, but he's fighting against a weak script and an existentially confused director and he just doesn't quite have the visuals or the charisma to contend with that level of adversity. ML is sexy as hell and way good at fight scenes, and this drama did not bring out his best, and it's NOT his fault.

And all the main actors' performances are occasionally marred by the bgm being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Not to a criminal degree, but all I'm sayin is someone in the sound dept needed to be fired. They got this bigass bird right, I mean a HUGE bird, and when he flaps his wings in the sky, it sounds like a large silk fan. Bi@tch, that bird is enormous, the sound effects when his wings flap should be like a big deep LoTR booming noise. Or someone giving a straight and subtle performance, and here comes the whimsical music like wot.

Now I know I just bashed the drama pretty hard, but despite that I still say: "Give it a try."

That's because it will vibe with some of you. Kind of like how Lost You Forever or A Journey To Love really did it for some people. and for others it totally did not. By no means is the show bad, in an overall sense. So it can't hurt to try it out and see if it grabs your attention or puts you to sleep.

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Mind-numbingly predictable CEO romance with hideous aggressive OST and no chemistry.

First let me say that the best part of this drama BY FAR, was He Rui Xian's incredible performance as the 2FL. She's so amazing and deserves high caliber 1FL roles.

The rest of this was, to put it bluntly, total crap.

While it would take a dissertation to fully enumerate the ways in which this was crap, I will do my best to keep it brief.

*No ML/FL chemistry. I dont know where the problem lies. Maybe Kai keeps getting handed FLs that dont mesh well with him. Maybe he has a really hard time letting go in front of the camera. Maybe hes RL gay. But whatever it is, this is another flat Kai Soso performance, lacking sexual chemistry, passion, and depth.

*Flat ML performance. Kai is good in some situations and dramas, but this isnt one of those dramas. Its impossible to distinguish the difference between his "straight man" character, or just his limited acting ability.

*FL is not sexy and has a bad haircut and boring clothes. Shes cute. And she is a good actress. But shes not sexy. She should be playing roles other than romance FLs

*Kiss scenes are tame

*Moderately high cringe-factor

*Slow slowwwww pacing. This should have 10 episodes shaved off

*Tired, cliche storyline. The actual business story is good. But every other aspect of it is insultingly cliche.

*Mediocre dialogue all the way from beginning to end.

*Background music is stupid and out of touch

*OST is so aggressive it should be arrested and tried for assault.

*Characters are simplistic and too perfect, like a teens dream of what life is like and what people are like, and a teen's dream fantasy.

*They take an indoor cat, in a cat carrier, to the park for its birthday. They lay out a blanket, and put a TINY HAT ON THE CAT. The kind with an elastic chin strap. Then they let the cat out of the carrier. And the cat stays on the blanket. It stays on the blanket, and just... sits there. Mkay. This is the kind of show we are dealing with here. If any one scene could sum up how I feel about the show, its that one.

I would recc this to mushy romantic sentimental people whose favorite color is fuscia/magenta/hot pink, and who still have at least one stuffed animal on their bed.

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Deng Kai in this is like Niki Lauda riding around in a 1989 Ford Fiesta.

Deng Kai.

We know he has charisma to burn. He has star power. But his range and depth - while improving all the time - can only get better with practice. He needs to keep working, keep working, keep taking new roles. No job is too small or too large for Deng Kai. But in a bad production, he's about as inconspicuous as a giant tiger trying to hide behind a fake palm tree.

The discerning reader such as yourself has probably already ascertained that I'm calling this a bad production. And indeed I am. That 7 is plus about 2 points just for Deng Kai alone.

What's wrong with this thing.

First off, the story is A) just dumb and B) it doesn't follow an emotionally logical chain of events. And therefore, it's not emotionally believable. That right there is the death knell for a romance drama. So you can just close the book on it before you even start.

But there's more. We got a few good outfits, but there's also a lot of drab clothes. And there's nothing lyrical, profound, poetic, or elevated about the dialogue at all. Not even during confessions. Daisy Li was unable to keep up with the demands of the FL's character, and **honestly who can blame her**. They ask too much of her, and of the viewer. So the performance came out looking passable at best. And same goes for the extras who apparently were chosen because they all just happen to be nearby that day and were just pulled off the lighting and sound crews and the food truck or somethin. 2ML ---aishhhhhhh idk. He's young, and needs experience, but --- let's just say he's not attention grabbing and he has to overcome the mid-tier face card the Creator bestowed him with. And the bgm/ost volume vs dubbing is way way out of whack, some of the notes the female singer hits sound like a cat yowling and your ears are like WHOA, bring it down.

Makeup.

On the good side. This stylist was working with the philosophy that you should enhance a person's NATURAL beauty. And I do like that very much.

But on the bad side. This entire drama looked like a BB cream sales convention. I have no idea how much BB cream was used in the production of this drama, but somebody should have taken a credit card and scraped it off everyone's face at the end of the day and put it in a big pile and then sent it to Guinness world records to have it officially weighed. And this stylist likes to pat - not lightly dust, but pat - powder into the surface of the BB cream. The effect is not great. The lighting and rez are unforgiving to the makeup techniques that were used.

Between that and the stupid hairstyles, they managed to age Deng Kai for the screen by like 10-15 years. Good job, guys.

Without Deng Kai in this drama, there is nothing to watch it for. So I'd recc it ONLY to people interested in following his career. Even as a red-flag romance, there's dozens of dramas that have done the same thing, only with far more style and sophistication.

Do you want a ride in an old piece of sh*t Ford Fiesta? No. Do you want a ride in an old piece of sh*t Ford Fiesta but only Deng Kai is driving it?

That's the only question you have to ask yourself here.

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Epic yandere romance disguised as heartbreaking tale of dysfunctional love.

This story brings yandere love down to a street-level, where it doesn't feel like the mythical obsessive character of anime, but rather like someone you might brush with in real life. It tones it down and explains it, without attempting to justify it. This is - at least to my mind - a heartbreaking tale of 3 people who are all to one degree or another yandere. It all seems so innocuous at first, but by the time the movie is over, you can see the outline of an epic, twisted tale lying beneath it that was never really shown, and yet there it is.

I say 'a heartbreaking tale' because I have a fairly healthy psyche, and it just pains me to see victims of child abuse grow up into such confused people with so much pain, trying to cope with no one to rely on. It's not that the story itself is heartbreaking, just that the characters are.

There is a lot more going on psychologically than what the movie shows you, and you have to infer or extrapolate it. For instance someone is talking to cops, and they are describing a violent act that occurred. But the movie never shows it. In this sense, there are deeper inferences in this story than just what you get on the surface, and some pieces you have to put together yourself. Other things are shown in greater detail, such as piercings, fights, or certain intimate scenes. But though there are several intimate moments between the characters throughout the story, you aren't shown all of them like a smut film. You are only shown certain moments, so it's not as gratuitous as it seems at first. The explicit nature of some intimate scenes are done in a way to portray sensuality and pain being two sides of the same coin.

As an S&M romance this isn't my cup of tea. But as an occasional student of abnormal psych, I can at least understand it. However, aside from being a romance, this is also a sort of mystery plot (I suppose you could say?), and that part was fun to me. The story needed a great deal of depth coming from the characters for it to work, and these actors did a really great job. With lesser actors this probably would have been unwatchable.

And then there's the ending. For some people who are really really in love with truly yandere ML, this might be seen as an HE. Other people are only going to see the OE that it shows you on the surface. Or think that the HE is just way too sinister and mentally back away from actually calling it an HE or seeing it as one. I personally didn't like the ending because I view the idea of penning some poetic/mysterious/vague lines and slapping an OE on a story a copout. I really do. I know it's a distinctly 'Japanese' thing to do and is not that uncommon an ending in a Japanese tale, but I'm sorry I don't like it. I find it very low-effort and too simplistic. But that is what they did here, and I was mildly displeased with it.

This IS worth a one-time watch at minimum, so I gave it a 7.5 because it's decent. The direction and production were spot on, the styling was great, the actors were excellent.

The basic story is awesome af, but I don't like the way that story was fleshed out by the original novel author. The novel did win awards and receive critical acclaim, but it was written by a very very young adult and to me that shows. I think the story would have been a stronger one if it had had a stronger author with more experience and weight. But the fact remains that the plot itself - which is truly artistically awesome af - was penned by that very same author so it's a take it or leave it situation. I think this story would absolutely SLAY with a good solid rewrite.

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Not spectacular but highly watchable, with awesome breakout performance by Wu Bo Wei

The strengths of this drama:

❤️ Brisk pacing and good story flow makes it highly binge-able. Direction, camerawork, production value all of higher caliber than most stories of similar episode-length.

❤️ Actors and actresses brought their A-game to this. Some performances are stronger than others, but no one was actually bad in their role, there is no "weak link" that ruins the continuity of the drama. I'm really impressed by the cast that they were all fully invested and tried to make this story shine.

❤️ Absolutely AWESOME performance by Wu Bo Wei (the "villain" ML). I tend to shy away from comparing actors to other actors, but Wu Bo Wei is the chinese Zo In Sung, and I mean that as a compliment. He has those sexy deep eyes, strong handsome facial features, onscreen confidence, and most importantly imo... he has this "shimmery" quality to his acting where he's not just acting, he's acting down to the level of microexpressions where you can see huge range of emotion coming through from just his facial reactions.... and he has FIREY chemistry with his female love interest, like burn down the whole drama level fire. With the right career breaks and the right directors, he could be a huge powerhouse actor that could easily co-star or lead in a major production drama.

❤️ Styling is often a c-drama's weak point, but not here. Here the styling fits the story very well and helps build some of that "seamless watch" energy it has going for it. It could be better, but hey. Budget restraints are a thing. At least no one had truly crappy hair. I could see the care that went into styling each character, and appreciated it.


The weaknesses:

💥The ending. Super disjointed and confused, ruins the sense of continuity they had built up through the whole drama and just drops the ball. Big cop-out energy.... (and speaking of cop-out energy, the way they wrapped up the "villain's" character arc was so absolutely AWFUL it was laughable)

💥The lack of depth. Much of the story is cliche and trope. There are creative and refreshing aspects to the drama, but those threads aren't really pulled on and teased out like they would have been in a winning script. The emotional depth is sounded out a little bit with some of the characters, but there is not the masterful depth of human understanding some Chinese writers have, so the final product is a little bit flat-feeling.

💥Some are gonna disagree with me but OST/BGM was a net negative for me. The mood of the songs was fine, I didn't think the musical direction was tone-deaf, it matched the storyline. But it was intrusive and persistent, and all in all I think it would have been better without an OST at all if they're gonna be so aggressive about it. Somebody thought this production was a good opportunity to showcase some musicians and singers. But I wanted to watch a romance drama, not a music video. I get that that whole folk-indie-pop-Mazzy-Star sound might be just what some people like. But I listen to EDM and speed/thrash metal and hiphop. So for me sitting through this OST was like a form of torture, and ruined many scenes for me.

All in all, I think worth a one-time watch. Fast paced, major eye candy factor, great acting by the whole cast. But to me, not really "rewatch" caliber.

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Excellent drama to pass the time as you wait for something better to watch.

I cant rate this any higher than a 7.5 because imo it lacked any profound depth, and lacked romantic chemistry. I find it dissappointing - yet somewhat understandable - that a show where the main AND secondary couples are toeing a line of incestuous taboo, is so very very devoid of spicy magnetism between leads!

I can't rate it lower than a 7.5 because I DID have fun watching it, despite its flaws. The story flow was excellent. The acting performances, while not stellar, were very passable.

I would recc this to someone who is profoundly bored and waiting for something truly GOOD to come out. It passes the time nicely.

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I love Richard Li, and I almost never drop a drama halfway, but the story is just too heavy.

Started this drama for the ML, and because I have nothing left to watch rn.

I liked the ML and FLs performances. The story pacing was brisk and smooth, it had a nice spicy kick, and I thought I was going to love it....

....but then theres some r*pe scenes, and thats not something I enjoy in my entertainment. Im not talking about some red flag ML feistiness, I mean 2FL actually gets tragically r*ped. She also has a beloved whos off in the army, so it impacts them both that this happens to her. And I'm like okay.... Ill just try to overlook that....

....until 2FL gets pregnant with a r*pe baby. Her beloved is totally distraught. She is trapped in a forced marriage with her r*pist, and the r*pist forces 2FL's beloved to live as her servant to shove his face in it. And I'm like, well maybe it gets better. So I continue....

But then the FL has to cut 2FL's baby out of her belly because of a dangerous labor. And then the 2FL dies in her arms, leaving her beloved a haunted, tortured, ruined soul.

So yeah.... I'm done here. This is just way way too heavy for a romance. Dropped at ep 18.

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It's not great or anything, but it is GOOD.

Y'know how if you're watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you're like really into it and having fun watching it, but at the same time you know it's not like fine cinema or some mindblowing acting...? This is good like that.

The plot and story are really not anything new. The dialogue is not transcendent. The acting is not stellar. Settings and costumes are not extravagant, but they give "cool" vibes... also great hair stylist for this one. Lots of good hair and good dresses good makeup and ML wears armor a lot so that's all like overall a plus. Not hi-budget but made the most of what they had for sure.

Anyways I digress, what I was saying was there's nothing that groundbreaking about this. AND YET. Something about it feels fresh, and the plot moves at a very nice pace, the story is stripped of "all that boring shit" many of us 2x through, and consists only of conversations and interactions that capture your attention.

The acting is not great. Not by a longshot. But it's GOOD. The interesting thing here is that the script is actually better than the actors, meaning... there are scenes that are powerful, and I could actually see a lot of actors doing a better job of acting out those scenes. So I guess what I'm saying is, the script demanded a lot of the actors playing the parts, and the actors who are actually playing those parts are doing their best to get the emotions across, and their insufficiency as actors is showing.

Does that mean the acting was bad? Well.... yes? And also... no? Because they are making it fun to watch. Even their shortcomings as actors is fun to watch, just like Buffy is also kickass and fun to watch even though the acting is not the best.

Honestly, I think romance is one of the hardest genres for actors. Many actors can act a lot of emotions, but they can't act "in love". Well, after seeing both the ML and FL in other projects, I'd say that's a weak point for both of them... however I like watching them really put effort into their roles, and they are both gaining experience and maybe someday they will be able to tap into that "in love" magic. But that day isn't today, lol.

That, and the somewhat conventional vibe the story gives off, are the weakest parts of this drama. Even so, it's a really good watch (at least for a one-time binge) because something about it is a little bit addictive and fun and interesting. If you have an interest in the career of either of the leads, this is a good watch. If you are bored, this is a good watch. If you're between heavier shows, this is a good watch. If you need a fluff-break, this is a good watch.

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