Don’t Leave After School (Chinese Drama, Viki)

Failing the college entrance test, our heroine is forced/convinced by her family to repeat the last year of high school. Put in a class with all the other students who are in similar situations, our heroine can’t help but feel the path to a good college is filled with obstacles. Also repeating the last year of high school, our hero’s situation is, however, drastically different from our heroine’s. Despite having been accepted into an elite school, our hero nonetheless resolutely decides to go back to high school to re-take the college entrance exam in hopes that this time around, he will be able to choose a career path that is of his own liking and not his father’s. (When you take the college exam in China, I believe you have to declare if you will go with a bachelor of art or science. I am assuming the hero’s father probably forced him to go with science when he would rather go with a bachelor of art.)

On paper, this one looks like your standard coming of age high school drama…and I guess it is that but the drama somehow feels different and refreshing. I don’t usually care for bumbling heroines but the show has done a good job with setting up the heroine’s character here that instead of reacting with impatience, I am amused.

Lost Promise (Chinese Drama, Youtube Eng Sub)

Two things happened on the day our hero became the leader of the whole martial arts world: 1. The most feared villain of the martial arts world, the one who had been chained up in his family’s dungeon for the last 11 years has disappeared. 2. Our hero was wounded and lost the use of his internal energy. Promising everyone that he will do his utmost to make sure to recapture the escaped prisoner, our hero goes back to his room only to find the prisoner waiting for him. Knowing full well that the big bad villain is his only hope of ever regaining control of his internal energy, our hero starts down a slippery slope of cooperating with the old man…that is until the “old man” turns out to be a beautiful woman.

I will just warn you all that this one is a low budget production which means the acting is cringe worthy at some parts and the editing is especially horrendous. In fact, I am wondering if they just hired some first year film student to do their editing because there were a few episodes where the story hardly made any sense. Still, even though the show is a train wreck, it is one of those addicting train wreck that you complain while watching it the whole time. In case some of you guys are brave enough to check it out, here are few things to know that could help clarify the story up for you:

  1. The heroine, the super baddie who has been chained up by the hero’s family, doesn’t age because she had taken a really rare pill that allows her to not age.
  2. The heroine is a girl biologically but since she was raised by her master with all boys and the specific kind of martial art she practices suppresses her body’s feminine traits, so she herself has actually always thought of herself as a boy.
  3. The heroine ended up in the hands of some genius physician who “changed” her before she was given back to the heroine. In the drama, it really wasn’t obvious what exactly the physician did since our heroine’s “big transformation” physically was just that she put on more feminine clothes. In the novel, the transformation was supposed to be huge since this is how our heroine was able to go from being male looking (without feminine physical traits) to being obviously female and very beautiful. The “change” also caused so that our heroine could only ingest flower pill given by the physician and would throw up whenever she tried to eat real food.
  4. There was some extremely poor editing done between the end of episode 9 and the beginning of episode 10. What we can piece together is that at the end of ep 9, our hero father did something that made the female second lead realize her life is nothing to her in-laws. From what was said in ep. 10 by other characters, it looks like our heroine probably did something to rescue the female second lead.

Truth or Dare (Chinese Drama, Viki)

A street performer with super-strength, our heroine tearfully resigned herself to be sold off to marry some mountain robber in order to save her father’s life. Also being forced into a marriage is our other female lead, a princess who has been ordered by the emperor to marry a young general whose eyes have been blinded in a battle and is said to have no hope of recovering. In an accidental mix-up, our two female leads ended up going home with the wrong groom and started their unexpected journey to their respective happily ever after.

This one is cute and fairly light. Nothing to write home about but it has a cute premise with a decent storyline.

Youth Should Be Early (Chinese Drama, Youtube) 

On the receiving end of a marriage proposal by his college girlfriend on the day of graduation, our hero could’ve taken the shortcut to a bright successful future most of his peers could only dream of if he was willing to utilize his girlfriend’s rich background. Yet, our hero dreams of obtaining success through his own hard work and convinces our heroine to wait for him as he works to realize his entrepreneurial dream. Of course, the path to success is never easy and our two leads will have to prove that their love can withstand the storms that come their way. 

Hmm… I am not really feeling this one but that’s probably mostly because I feel like I have filled my quota of young entrepreneur type of stories lately. It was refreshing though to see our two leads starting out in the drama as a couple already.  

The Day of Becoming You (Chinese Drama, iQIYI)

The supernatural romance between an entertainment reporter and the leader of a boy band who ended up switching bodies. 

I will be honest that the body switching trope caused me to lose most of my interest in this show since I assumed that the story would be stale and predictable. The first episode really didn’t change my opinion but once the body switching happened in the second episode then I promptly realized how mistaken I was. The body switching comedy is hilarious! Kudos to Steven Zhang and Liang Jie who both did an outstanding job portraying their roles. I was thoroughly impressed by both actors’ attention to details while they were acting as the other person. 

Never Say Goodbye (Chinese Drama, iQIYI)

After tragically losing his fiancée three years ago while they were both working on a case, our hero disappeared from the police force. Unbeknownst to his old friends, our hero is actually now an undercover cop on an assignment to infiltrate a drug cartel led by the infamous “Mr. O”. While struggling to find a way to break into Mr. O’s inner circle, our hero found an unexpected path in the manner of Mr. O’s only daughter who has just come home from France and has taken a decisive interest in him. 

I don’t think I would ever think to pair Allen Ren with Janine Chang but surprisingly, it works and I am liking their chemistry thus far. On the first glance Janine Chang’s character might come off like a spoiled naive princess but there are a few hints dropped along the way to assure us that our heroine might not be everything she appears on the surface. I am about two episodes in and I am really liking it thus far. I was especially pleasantly surprised that the show actually managed to keep the story somewhat light despite the heavy topic. Going by the trailer I was really expecting the show to be super serious and epic so it was such a relief that the show has done an excellent job (at least in the first couple episodes) in breaking up the seriousness of the subject with some comedic moments. 

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