Disclaimer: this is a review, and as such it contains spoilers of the whole series. Please proceed to read at your own risk if you still plan on watching this show or if you haven’t finished it yet. You have been warned.

My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend
(我女朋友的男朋友 – Wǒ nǚ péngyǒu de nán péngyǒu)
MyDramaList rating: 7.0/10

I started watching this drama because I saw a trailer of it and thought it looked kind of funny. Also the story seemed like it wouldn’t be too standard -like, not a Chinese version of Absolute Boyfriend or something like that- so I decided to give it a go.
I have to say foremost that I don’t watch a lot of Taiwanese/Chinese dramas, there’s only one that I’ve recently seen which I really thought was good (When a Snail Falls in Love), but the way of acting just isn’t really my thing most of the time. The way in which the voices are dubbed over the actors makes all the sound effects (like crying, sighing, just little sounds people make in-between the talking) sound really fake and they tend to over-act a lot. Also I have a problem with the Chinese language, since I can never hear where a sentence starts and where it ends, it’s all just waves of gibberish in the same tone to me.

However, I started watching this as a comedy relief break after Duel and I have different things to say about it. I will start with the positive parts. First of all, the camera shots and the way all the sets were laid out was beautiful. They made all the backgrounds, from the street where the main character lives to his izakaya restaurant home to the anime club in his school really colorful and cute and it just made me want to actually be there to check it out. They did a great job in decorating all the sets and backgrounds. I love colors a lot, so just looking at all the shots made me cheerful. And I wouldn’t mind living in that guy’s house, and hang around that pub restaurant although I can’t cook for the life of me. It just looked really nice, overall. It was nice to look at just for the settings and backdrops they used for filming. Of course I don’t know if they used an actual house or they build the whole thing, but everything looked very nice and bright. I really liked how they played with colors, the series was a canvas in itself.
One major thing that I liked is that they made everything look really anime-ish, considering the main character is a huge anime and manga fan, and so his whole surroundings and even the people he’s surrounded by all look like they came straight from an anime. It was nice to see how they played with these things.

I don’t really know any Chinese actors so I wasn’t familiar with any of the actors playing in the series. The first shot was hilarious, it was of the main character waking up with seemingly a hangover and he just looked straight into the camera with a face that suggested he’d had lived 100 years in hell, after which his narrated self-introduction started. What a way to introduce the main character. That set the tone for me from the start. In the beginning I was a bit confused because they started off just like each episode from Duel started with a flashforward of something that would happen later on, so I didn’t really get it at first and afterwards it also seemed like not that necessary to put that particular scene as the flashforward. However, it all started to make sense from there on.

Short summary of the story: Ah Zhai (played by Bai Shu) is an otaku* (very fanatic and almost obsessive fan of Japanese anime and manga culture) and university engineering student, who has an immense crush on his so-proclaimed goddess and the most popular girl in school, Xiao Pei Ni (played by Cai Wen Jing/Elvira Cai). When she travels to Japan to study overseas, he follows her without hesitation but finds out she is seeing someone. Heartbroken, he takes to the sake and being completely drunk, he stumbles across a suspicious looking store, which turns out to sell love robots. There he blanks out until the next morning, when he wakes up in his Japanese hotel and finds a mysterious box in the garden, addressed to him. The box says ‘Adam’. When he opens the box, inside he finds a really handsome male robot (played by Li Chuan) who connects with him the moment their eyes meet and acknowledges Ah Zhai as his master and lover. Ah Zhai, completely not okay with this, tries many things to get rid of him and even eventually goes back to the store to ask if he can return Adam, because he spend all of his money on it while he was drunk. The store manager, hiding in a pink bunny suit, tells him it’s impossible to return the product. He also tells him that he is from the future, where a 100 otakus have helped build these love robots so that they would still have someone to love. In the end, Ah Zhai manages to persuade the manager to buy another robot from him, a female one this time, and that she has to look exactly the same as his love Pei Ni.
But things of course don’t go as planned, when he goes back to China to receive his package, due to unfortunate circumstances (created by himself), the first person his female robot sees is Adam, and not him. She connects with Adam and therefore acknowledges Adam as her master and lover.
So: in short, Ah Zhai is in love with Eve, the female robot. Eve is in love with Adam. Adam is in love with Ah Zhai. The most awkward love triangle ever. What follows is a long series of happenings in which Ah Zhai gets annoyed at Adam and tries to make Eve fall in love with him. At a certain point, he tries to reset Eve’s settings in his desperation to be the first one she looks at. But in this, he creates an error in her system and she starts transforming to four different personalities that she had while she was owned by previous owners.

Honestly, while the story unfolded itself I was thinking that the perfect ending would be for Ah Zhai to fall in love with Adam. I wanted that so badly to happen. I’ve never shipped a male couple like this before, haha. No, but I really did think that Ah Zhai was treating Adam very unfairly. Adam was honestly the sweetest boyfriend ever, he did everything for Ah Zhai and Ah Zhai never appreciated it once.
I don’t have to sugarcoat that Ah Zhai annoyed me a lot. Not only his character -he was an orphan who’d lived with his grandfather his whole life and after his rich gramps died he inherited this huge house and never was short on money so he has always been very selfish and only thinks about himself. Even the few friends that he has, he doesn’t seem to fully appreciate them and is always the first to blame them even though he himself makes most of the trouble.
For example, Ah Zhai’s best friend, Wang Fu Gui (played by Liang Hao). Wang Fu Gui was the best friend Ah Zhai could’ve ever wished for. He shared his interests, they were a great team, and even though he didn’t want to, he always ended up helping him out, whether he was risking his own skin or not. He was the one who resetted Eve’s settings (naturally he didn’t know that she would react to it like that), but did he ever get one compliment or acknowledgement or an ‘thanks for helping me’ or a ‘you did your best’ or a ‘it wasn’t your fault, it was mine’? Nope. So in that respect Ah Zhai really annoyed me for not valuing his friends in the beginning and literally only caring about himself. Another part had to do with the acting. As mentioned before, one of the things I dislike about Chinese dramas is how the actors tend to over-act a lot. In Ah Zhai’s case this was definitely so. And the thing that bothered me most was that he actually ruined several scenes which were really good and touching if they’d been acted out normally. There were scenes where Ah Zhai was sincerely sad or felt really bad otherwise and his face would just cloud over and I would be like ‘Uh-oh, now it’s coming. The true acting skills of this actor who’s shown us only comedy up until now.’ But no. He would just start crying in such an exaggerated way, even pulling really weird faces that I just couldn’t take the scene seriously anymore. And I mean it, they could’ve been really touching scenes if he’d toned it down.

On the other hand, I was a bit more impressed by Adam and Eve’s acting. Because Pei Ni was initially introduced as the super pretty cute girl, I was afraid that Eve would be just that: just the cutesy innocent pretty girl. So I really liked it when they added the part when her system glitched and she went full domination mode. It also really explored the versatility of the actress and I could see that she was so much more than just a pretty face. It’s always nice when actors get a chance to show more of their acting abilities than just one emotionless character for example. She went from a yankee to a bitch to an angel to a femme fatale within a couple of episodes.
The guy playing Adam had it a bit more difficult since he had to remain in his calm and almost blank-expression state for most of the series. The way he acted was more robot-like than Eve, I thought. But the way he would then suddenly show a worried expression or you actually see that he was processing an emotion was really good.
I think that it’s really difficult to play a robot, since you can’t allow your face -which is naturally full of emotion- to show all those emotions. So I think that he did a really good job there. You could even see that sometimes he was teasing Ah Zhai by trying to be intimate with him and that he was actually enjoying that. In the end, the relationship between Ah Zhai and Adam was what grew the most in the series and even though Eve was the prospective ideal partner, in the end Eve was the one who became the extra.
When Ah Zhai was about to lose Adam for real and he said ‘I don’t want to bind with Eve anymore. I want Adam back.’, you could hear me cheering in the background.

Besides that, there were a couple of interesting side characters as well that sometimes even interested me more than the main ones (as regularly happens). For example, the before mentioned Wang Fu Gui and the president of the anime club, Meng Shan. They shared this weird but really sweet bond and I really liked the parts where their relationship was explored further. They could’ve treated the side characters as just that, but they didn’t completely abandon them, fortunately. Apart from that, there were some other typical people, the handsome but cold and jerky student council president, the girl with the princess syndrome who just assumed every boy on the planet was in love with her, the sheepish muscly sports guy, the girl and the guy who were cross-dressing all the time… a wide variety of characters, again reminding of an anime, in my opinion.

The series had 32 episodes, but they were all about half an hour (minus the opening and ending themes which for some reason are always extremely long in Chinese dramas and always show most of the show’s content so I always skip them in fear of spoilers), so it was a light series and easy to watch. The director of the series even made a guest appearance as the LUV Robot store manager (the pink rabbit, yep) and later the man in black who came to teleport Adam and Eve back to the future (which was the same character in the series, sorry if that wasn’t clear).
At the end of episode 29, Ah Zhai, whose memories have been wiped by the ‘creator’, gets into a car accident and the episode ends with the anime club members taking a group photo with him while he’s in the hospital and still unconscious. Then the screen froze and it said something like ‘Well now, the hero’s dead so I guess the story’s over… or who knows, maybe there will be a major plottwist in the last three episodes, I wouldn’t know… You can decide for yourself whether to watch more’. I really liked that, it just seemed like they pulled a lot of things to interact with the viewers. Ah Zhai also regularly spoke into the camera, as if he was literally narrating his own life to the viewers. I like these kind of signals, it makes it more fun to watch.

Just one more thing, I was really curious as to how it would end, but I found the ending a bit random. He was just suddenly okay with sharing his life with both Adam and Eve, the three of them as friends forever, even though he would still feel like a third wheel to them sometimes. And then it ended with the real Pei Ni returning from Japan and paying him a visit and the three of them just stood there like …’Hi~’… and that was the end.
Which I found a bit odd and I wanted to know more concretely what everyone was thinking. And of course I was a bit sad that he didn’t choose Adam over Eve in the end, haha.

Overall, a comedy relief watch, there’s some hilarious stuff in there, some really awkward stuff as well, but it was a sweet story. And if I were to think of a moral, I think they needed to make Ah Zhai more aware of his surroundings, that he wasn’t alone and that he had friends and that there was so much to experience if he would leave his house and go out and see more of the outside. Adam and Eve were responsible for getting him out, out of the house, out of his shell, out of his comfort zone (special thanks to Adam for that). In the end, of course, I wouldn’t say that living with two robot friends for the rest of your life is the healthiest thing to do, so that was a bit weird. But at least they all got to be together in the end and that was ultimately what they all wanted and needed.
The story wasn’t the best or deepest ever, but it was definitely original in its own weird way and like I said, the amazingly colored sets and backgrounds and just the fact that the whole series looked really cute contributed greatly to the pleasure of watching it.
And of course, if you like anime, you’ll enjoy the references and the cosplay and especially how they decorated the anime club. Man, if I’d had a clubroom like that in my university, I would become a member just to be able to hang out in that room, lol.
It was funny because I saw a little part of a behind the scenes clip and it seemed like Bai Shu didn’t know anything about anime and manga and cosplay and all that. I can only imagine how they made him prepare for this character and this show, haha.
Next on my list is another Chinese series, so I’m really curious as to if I’ll get used to them more. Until then!