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.

Sweet Combat
(甜蜜暴击 / Tian Mi Bao Ji)
MyDramaList rating: 7.5/10

Hi everyone! Back with a new review!
You may wonder how I finished this series so fast since it’s 37 episodes, and it’s less than a month since my previous review, but I went through it quite fast because of the pace and more reasons I will explain in this review. The entire series can be found on YouTube in high quality with English subtitles, which was really convenient as well.
As I watched it, there were so many thoughts and opinions that came to mind and I really want to express them as well as I can here, but since I took a short break around episode 30 to watch some Netflix series before I went back to it, some details from the first half of the series may have faded a little. I’ll do my best to remember everything I wanted to say about this drama!

First of all, this series has been on my list for a long time, I remember seeing some clips and trailers around the time it came out and I thought it looked really cute. I finally got around to watch it 3 years later, haha. Overall, I really enjoyed it. It was bright, colorful, sweet, light, but still with a good story and I really liked how everything was balanced and wrapped up in the end. It definitely stood apart from other Chinese dramas I’ve watched, but vibe-wise it did remind me a little of how I felt while watching my most recent Chinese drama, Love O2O. Except this drama was a bit more animated character-wise and used some more tropes.

Sweet Combat is about the love story between Ming Tian (played by Lu Han) and Fang Yu (played by Guan Xiao Tong). Ming Tian is initially living in Macau with his two younger siblings, Ming Zhu and Ming Lang. They are on their own – their father passed away and their mother abandoned them when Zhu and Lang were still babies. Ming Tian has been looking after them by himself ever since, taking a break from education to take on multiple jobs to fend for their family. Ming Tian’s father used to be a boxer, but ever since accidentally killing someone in the ring and literally drowning himself in alcohol to run away from his guilt, Ming Tian has become very hostile towards anything related to fighting or violence, even though he used to train boxing with his father. He moves with his siblings back to China, to the big city, after being accepted into Zhengze University. Even though this is a sports university that focusses mostly on different kinds of martial arts, Ming Tian really needs the scholarship an education there provides.
Fang Yu is the complete opposite of Ming Tian. She’s from a wealthy family and has been raised under very strict supervision of her grandfather after her parents passed away in a car accident. Until she was six years old, her parents raised her as a boy, keeping her away from anything ‘pink and girly’. Only when her younger brother Fang Zhou was born, was she allowed to be a girl again and this made her a bit of an outcast at school, since she suddenly started wearing dresses to school. The only person who was there to cheer her up was Uncle Ji. (I’m not sure if he was her actual uncle, but he was an uncle-like figure to her, anyways.) Uncle Ji was a boxer as well, but he was killed in the ring one time by his opponent.
In the meantime, Fang Yu goes to Zhengze University and is the #1 in MMA (mixed martial arts), even competing in competitions outside of China. Her nickname is ‘Queen’.
Ming Tian and Fang Yu meet for the first time in Macau, when Fang Yu is there for a competition, and they don’t get along in the beginning. Fang Yu is very anti-social, she doesn’t have any people skills and when she does something to offend someone (which she does quite often), she just waves money in their faces as ‘compensation’. Ming Tian, on the other hand, is a real family person and has a lot of empathy for others. He is very easy-going and mellow, while Fang Yu will twist someone’s arm if he as much as touches her shoulder.

In the first episode, even though we know that they will eventually end up together, it really seems like it’s still a far far far way away. They really loathe each other in the beginning. Ming Tian dislikes Fang Yu for her violent tendencies, and in turn Fang Yu dislikes Ming Tian for his weakness and dismissal of self-defense. Truthfully, both of them were very stuck in their own ways and views in the beginning, they both had their own kind of tunnel vision. And I had to admit that for Ming Tian, I kind of agreed that while it wasn’t bad in itself that he avoided violence, he didn’t even try to defend himself. I mean, fighting / violence is one thing, but defending yourself, just by grabbing someone’s arm or pushing someone away when they are bothering you – I don’t see those as violence. But Ming Tian even refused to do that. When it came to defending his little brother, he actually went down on his knees because he ‘couldn’t’ even slap the bully’s hand away. However, after this incident, he does become very frustrated with not being able to stand up for his siblings, it makes him feel very powerless, so then he changes his mind to actually start putting in more effort at learning to fight – or at least, learning how to defend himself – at school.

When he arrives at Zhengze for the first time, he immediately meets the two secondary female leads, Cheng Ya Nan and Song Xiao Mi. Cheng Ya Nan (played by Li Meng Meng) is Fang Yu’s best (and only) friend. Because of her tomboyish behaviour and short hair, she is often mistaken for a boy. Ming Tian initally also mistakes her for a boy. However, Ya Nan is the well-respected captain of the Boxing club at the University. I found the friendship between Fang Yu and Ya Nan very easy to understand – having to pretend to be a boy for six years and still trying to figure out her own femininity, Fang Yu must have related to Ya Nan in regards to the gender stereotypes she was facing. While Ya Nan may act very cool, she is actually quite insecure about her lack of femininity (again, according to the gender stereotypes), especially in contrast to Xiao Mi.
Song Xiao Mi (played by Ivy Shao) is the complete opposite of Ya Nan. She is girly, bubbly, sexy and very aggressive when it comes to getting what she wants – which is, initially, Ming Tian. She always teases Ya Nan for not being a girly girl. She is the captain of the Taekwondo club at the university.
The friendship dynamic between Fang Yu, Ya Nan and Xiao Mi was one of the most interesting aspects of the series for me. Because even though the three of them appeared together all the time, Fang Yu and Ya Nan were friends, and Xiao Mi was kind of… a frenemy? I mean, they all got along well, and Ya Nan and Xiao Mi had the bickering love-hate thing going on, but in some points it became clear that Xiao Mi wasn’t actually really their friend. Of course, this changes throughout the series. Xiao Mi is never sulking or pathetic about not having friends, it’s never really indicated that she’s alone, she always has many people around her. But it’s more that she herself kept telling Fang Yu and Ya Nan that they weren’t friends, haha. She was quite the tsundere – and this was something all three girls had in common.
While I’m talking about terms like ‘tsundere’, I’d like to point out that this series really felt like an anime to me. Not just in storyline or design, but mostly in characters. All the characters were so animated and they all behaved so anime-like! I don’t know how to explain this, haha. But it really felt like watching a live action anime. Especially when Ming Tian came to the school and he was the only boy at first (because Zhengze had just started letting boys enroll for the first time), so it started off with that typical harem anime feeling of one new cute boy in a school full of girls who were all pining for him. Luckily, this didn’t turn out to be the case – only Xiao Mi and Fang Yu ended up falling for Ming Tian. I have to say I’m really glad Ya Nan stayed on the friends path, because I was a bit scared she’d start falling for Ming Tian in the beginning as well. But Xiao Mi and Ya Nan got their own separate love stories so that was nice.

To elaborate a little on the ‘gender stereotype’ thing, this was actually something that bothered me a little in the beginning, but at the same time I’m really glad this series shone a light on this very issue. Of course, in Asian dramas, the norm is that the main couple is a man and a woman. The main story is always about a man and a woman. There are dramas (particularly modern ones) that already make the female leads more independent and not just some passive little lamb being swept off her feet by some guy. I really liked how this drama turned the tables and made the women the strong characters who protected the men. Not in all cases, of course, but it really showed some serious fragile masculinity versus strong female power, both physically and mentally.
Naturally, I couldn’t help but facepalm when things were being said like ‘Only girly girls eat strawberry ice cream’, or ‘You don’t like pink so you can’t be a real girl’. But at the same time this made the characters that struggled with those gender stereotypes come out even stronger because of how different they were. It takes them a while, but they figure it out in the end.

I really liked this one scene where Fang Yu is sitting in her office, and then when everyone is gone she kicks off her heels and does some stretching and boxing and kicking exercises. I think this scene really captured Fang Yu’s essence, because she was literally trapped in her role as heiress, and she had to keep her passion for martial arts to a minimum, at least in front of her grandfather.

I really like how valid the main characters’ reasons were for some things. I mentioned before how the friendship between Fang Yu and Ya Nan just made sense because of Fang Yu’s past experiences. There is also the reason that Fang Yu likes fighting so much: she has been told what to do, how to make decisions ever since she was a child. Heck, her parents even decided whether she would be a boy or a girl. In the ring, all her decisions were her own. I really liked that reasoning.
Honestly, seeing how her grandfather treated her even as a child, I couldn’t blame Fang Yu for being slightly traumatized. Even when she was like six years old, crying because her classmates bullied her for suddenly wearing a dress to school, her grandfather was lecturing her on how she needed to be an example for her little brother. Like, dude, she was a little child who just had been told she was a girl and who had to completely figure out who she was. AT SIX YEARS OLD.
As expected, her grandfather didn’t appreciate her fighting aspirations because it wasn’t suitable to 1. a girl and 2. someone of her background – he wanted her to take over their family company. Seeing his sister’s determination, little bro Fang Zhou (played by Ding Cheng Xin) offered to take over the company and became the acting CEO. AT FIFTEEN YEARS OLD. While his sister went off learning how to do martial arts. And he never blamed her for anything. Honestly, if there was one hero in this series, it was Fang Zhou. He was the best little brother ever.

Let’s move on to some male characters, shall we?
As an essential part of the group of friends Ming Tian becomes a part of at college, Sun Hao (played by Pei Zi Tian) is the second guy to enter Zhengze University, and they immediately become buddies. Sun Hao is introduced as a tough guy who is actually not that smart, but he’s a good street fighter and also loves animals very much. His mother (MAMA HAO <3) runs a food stall in a food quarter and she makes really good chow mein. He has been consistently kicked out of schools and just when his mother is starting to get worried about his future and education, there is an advertisement for more male students at Zhengze and he is accepted immediately. Initially kind of the clown, and in contrast to Ming Tian, Sun Hao is very eager to start at a school with only girls in it. He becomes a very loyal friend, even though he first forms a sort of obstacle since he initially likes Fang Yu, but as soon as he finds out Fang Yu likes Ming Tian, he suddenly becomes super mature and is all like ‘I don’t need her to like me back, I just want her to be happy’. This stands in stark contrast with Xiao Mi. Xiao Mi falls for Ming Tian more and more, and when he eventually rejects her, she becomes the heart-broken whiny girl. She keeps asking herself why Ming Tian would like Fang Yu over her and she can’t seem to accept it.
Personally, this was the part where Xiao Mi annoyed me the most, because she was just so self-absorbed at that point – she just couldn’t fathom the idea that not all guys would consider her their type. And it took her a while longer to get over herself and be okay with Yu and Tian as a couple, but not before she acted like a child who had been denied the piece of cake she wanted the most.
In the end, I really liked that Sun Hao and Xiao Mi were paired up. They spent the most time together after Xiao Mi got over Ming Tian, and even though she treated him like a lackey most of the time, she noticed how much she got used to him being around. I was really happy with Sun Hao’s behavior at the end as well, he became much sharper in picking up everyone’s vibes and he really started walking away from Xiao Mi when she didn’t appreciate him enough, just to test her feelings towards him.
They ultimately made a very cute couple.

And then, possibly my favorite male character in the series: Luo Guan Yan (played by Zhao Yue). This guy was just perfect. He was the most just, most gentle, most open-minded person. And he had liked Ya Nan from the first moment he saw her train. And his intentions towards her were nothing but good. He gave her all the time and space she needed to come to him, he never pushed anything. And as the captain of his own boxing team, he was really just and fair. Even though there was this hostile rivalry between their schools, he seemed to be the only one not to take that rivalry personal.
He was just so nice and good. And he and Ya Nan were so adorable. They were the only couple who didn’t get a kiss in the end, but the scene where Ya Nan jumped into his arms and they rubbed their noses together was so adorable.

Fang Yu keeps telling herself she’s only concerned for Ming Tian’s situation, she doesn’t allow herself to have feelings for him and their timing is constantly bad. Honestly, the relationship between Fang Yu and Ming Tian takes a long time to develop. It doesn’t even take that long for them to start liking each other, but their confession doesn’t happen any sooner than episode 21 because they keep missing and misunderstanding each other.
Despite his initial dislike of her, Ming Tian discovers a completely different, cute and sweet side of Fang Yu when she helps him during a part-time job when he is wearing a bunny costume. So she doesn’t know it’s him inside the suit, but he can see her and she’s suddenly all smiley and kind and he’s like ??? Who is this person ??? and when she starts helping him out with his training (after he decides to take his Zhengze education seriously and has to participate in a traditional school tournament), they gradually become closer.
Even when they become a couple, we as viewers all know that the worst is yet to come, because at that point it already became clear that Ming Tian’s father had been the one to kill Fang Yu’s uncle in the ring. When they discover this, it has the expected repercussions on their relationship, Fang Yu pushes Ming Tian away etcetera. But what is revealed later is that Ming Tian’s father wasn’t even completely guilty, he was victimized as well. As it turns out, Uncle Ji and his wife had been trying to commit insurance fraud and since Uncle Ji was already sick and knew he would not survive the fight, they were able to blame everything on Ming Tian’s father while Auntie Ji was able to get her insurance and provide a comfortable future for her child. In the meantime, Ming Tian’s whole family fell apart. His father started drinking, his mother couldn’t take being ‘a murderer’s wife’ anymore and left them. (Honestly though, what kind of mother leaves her three children, of which two are infants, without even attempting to make any contact, even after their father passed away? I really wondered how she would be able to live with herself after doing that.)
In the end, fixing the relationship between Ming Tian and Fang Yu, gathering the whole truth was the most tedious thing. Because their break-up was based on a lie. Fang Yu’s grandfather was in cahoots with Auntie Ji and he kept sending her money so she would tell Fang Yu lies about what happened to Uncle Ji and how Ming Tian’s father had deliberately killed him.
But even after finding out the whole truth, Fang Yu still didn’t go back to Ming Tian so easily. The last few episodes were just basically waiting until they finally confronted each other and they finally decided it was okay to get back together.
The grandfather really sucked, he interfered with so many things, he tried to break them up in so many ways, even resorting to the classical Hana Yori Dango ‘I will make all your parttime jobs shut down and kick you out of your house if you don’t stop seeing my granddaughter’ tropes. While in front of Fang Yu, he would suddenly act like the super-concerned-for-her-wellbeing grandpa (which I didn’t buy for a second because he hadn’t acted like that ever before in the whole series), but in the meantime he would still call people behind her back to make sure she and Ming Tian would not get together. Even when Ming Tian was knocked out at a hospital and the fear was that he wouldn’t wake up, he suddenly took all control of sending him to a convalescent hospital and sending his younger siblings to boarding school, like — who gave this guy the right to interfere with Ming Tian’s family like that?
It pissed me off in so many ways.

Speaking of pissing off, let me quickly go over my least favorite characters of the story. Apart from one, they are all guys (typical).
Of course, in the beginning I hated Ma Yi Chen’s guts. Ma Yi Chen (played by Bu Kang) was a bully from Ming Tian’s past in Macau who had somehow also transferred to China and he was now enrolled in the rivalling school Zhiying’s boxing club, in Luo Guan Yan’s team. He starts off as the typical bully, just wanting to mess Ming Tian up at every opportunity he got. He was the one who harrassed his little brother to make him go to his knees. And he kept acting like a really fragile guy, always hiding behind others and pointing fingers. He had no reason to bother Ming Tian, other than that Ming Tian had always been his victim and he was sure he wouldn’t stand up against him. However, he did change in the end. I really liked the scene where Ming Tian became stronger and told him that he thought God may have put Yi Chen in his life to test him and make him stronger. And how in the end, Yi Chen turned his life around and acknowledged Ming Tian might have been put in his life for the same reason.
At least he turned out okay.

He Xiao Feng (played by He Mei Xuan) was not only from the rivalling school, she was also a rival in other ways to several other characters. She is a rival to Fang Yu in terms of fighting – she’s the first person we see fighting Fang Yu in Macau and losing to her. She’s always determined to beat Fang Yu, her biggest opponent. She is a rival in love to Ya Nan, since she is Guan Yan’s partner and has an unrequited crush on him. When Guan Yan keeps going after Ya Nan, Xiao Feng starts using Ya Nan’s weakness against her – Xiao Feng also keeps confronting her with her lack of femininity (but in a more hostile way than Xiao Mi, who is just teasing her) and she also plants the seed of doubt in Ya Nan’s head regarding Guan Yan’s reason for pursuing her.
There’s this one fighting tactic that Guan Yan wants to learn from Ya Nan’s father, but her father only wants to teach him if he starts dating Ya Nan. However, this has never ever been any direct reason for Guan Yan to pursue Ya Nan since he already liked her from the beginning. But Ya Nan really starts to doubt him.
By the way, I found this super weird. Ya Nan and Xiao Feng were not on good terms at all. The scenes they have together are just Xiao Feng trying to bring Ya Nan down with condescending comments about her appearance. Plus it was obviously clear that Xiao Feng had feelings for Guan Yan. Ya Nan should have known that whatever Xiao Feng told her would not be in her best interest.
And even though Ya Nan was all like ‘I won’t believe a word you say’, she believed her IMMEDIATELY when she told her Guan Yan was only pursuing her because he wanted to learn that tactic. She IMMEDIATELY believed Xiao Feng, so much that she didn’t even give Guan Yan a chance to explain anything. I was really disappointed in Ya Nan’s insecurity here and it really felt like she was just holding onto any reason she could find that proved he wasn’t seriously interested in her.
This was the only thing/part that bothered me about Ya Nan, for the rest I think she might actually be my favorite character of the series.
Xiao Feng reminded me a little of the Nana character in Love O2O in the sense that I was constantly thinking ‘why the hell are you constantly butting into other people’s businesses?’, but she wasn’t as bad as Nana in the end. She eventually gave up when she saw how Guan Yan kept worrying about Ya Nan even after the latter had pushed him away and she let him go.

Wang Shi Wei, or as I like to call him ‘Mr. Douchebag’. Wang Shi Wei (played by Wang Jia) is the son of another rich company and Grandpa Fang wants to pair him up with Fang Yu. However, he is one of the kids from Fang Yu’s past who called her a freak when she finally got to be a girl, so she never really warmed up to him (#understatement). He isn’t interested in her either, but he keeps using his family’s ties to her grandfather as a way to keep her from formally rejecting him. He keeps showing up, even though Fang Yu actively tries to avoid him, and he even goes out of his way to bother Ming Tian at his parttime job. He’s the kind of guy who will ask dangerous people to rough people he has a problem with up, which is exactly what he does.

Which brings me to Wu Ji (played by Tan Bo Lin). Man oh man, if he wasn’t the most infuriating character ever. He was supposed to be this super intimidating guy who was only interesting in fighting Fang Yu. He wasn’t even from their school or anything, we don’t know where the heck he came from, but suddenly he was there and he just randomly beats people up. All he did was just stand there with his deadglare gaze, being all ‘look at me being super strong and badass’ and I just found him so incredibly lame. Like, he didn’t even have a real reason for wanting to fight Fang Yu, he just wanted to win or be #1 or whatever. Nothing gave him any legit reason to beat up all these people along the way. He beat up Xiao Mi, Ya Nan, Ming Tian, even Ma Yi Chen for no reason. But the most infuriating thing was his lack of humanity. He just beat people up for no reason. That was his role. It’s like he wasn’t capable of thinking or feeling or being even remotely aware that fighting in a public place (even in close proximity to young children?!) was bad manners at the least. I just found him so extremely unrelatable. It was like he was a machine. Which again, made his character feel like a one-dimensional anime character to me. In contrast to the others, he didn’t have any background or motivation – he was just there to have no conscience about beating people up. He was responsible for Ming Tian slipping into a coma, for God’s sake. And he never even took any kind of responsibility for his bad deeds (I bet he just saw them as victories / more people he was able to beat). And especially when he fought Xiao Mi, Ya Nan and Fang Yu at the end – being like that was one thing, but actively beating up girls like that? I was just going like ‘What the hell is this guy’s problem?!’ every time he came on screen.
One scene I really liked was when Fang Yu finally agreed to fight him and ultimately beat his ass with the help of Ming Tian’s coaching by copying the fighting styles of other people, even Xiao Feng. It was a nice way to show that she had actually paid really good attention to other people’s fighting styles and it did feel a little like she was showing Xiao Feng some respect as well, by using her fighting style which saved her in the end.
I haven’t mentioned this before, but Ming Tian discovers coaching suits him better than fighting since he is very perceptive and keeps on surprising everyone when he makes really sharp remarks about people’s fighting styles during matches. I think this really suited him, to still be involved in fighting, his father’s legacy, but keeping a little distance from it. It really suited his personality, so good choice!

I found the additional storyline of Ya Nan’s dad and Sun Hao’s mom entertaining, but it could have done without. It was just to fill up some parts and add a little more comedy relief, I suppose, but it didn’t really have to do with the story. Ya Nan’s dad was important because he was linked to Ming Tian’s father (they were both apprentice boxers under the same master) and that he had his own boxing school. Sun Hao’s mom was important because she was MAMA HAO. I have nothing but love and adoration for this woman, she was the best mom ever. But they didn’t necessarily have to be paired up together in my opinion, let alone have a child together, lol. It was entertaining though, the whole thing with the seven birth marks. But it gave Ya Nan’s dad more screentime than I deemed necessary. He was good as a supporting character and I loved how he shipped his daughter with Guan Yana.

Also, can I just say that the kids playing Ming Tian’s siblings, Ming Zhu (Zhang Wan Er) and Ming Lang (Xu Wei Luo) were amazing?! They were both 8 years old at the time this drama came out but they were so adorable and such good actors? I particularly really loved Ming Lang, the little brother, because he was the most expressive in his emotions. He had such a fierce deadglare to anyone bullying Ming Tian, haha. They were both really great, I was impressed.

As I mentioned in the beginning, I went through this series quite fast because it was so nicely paced. Each episode was like 45 minutes long, but the story was consistently interesting and fun. The cinematography was really good as well, the shots looked good, the actors all looked good. Honestly, apart from a few minor characters, it sounded to me as if no one else was being dubbed over. The energy with which the actors performed was infectious, and even though they were very animated, it never became awkward because they really embraced their own acting. They embraced how silly they sometimes needed to be. There would be freeze shots in which the main characters would look like actual game characters, frozen in a fighting pose that isn’t humanely possible as far as I know. I really liked how playful the style of the series was. And the story was very good. It gave me a lot of things to think about. After Tree in the River, this is probaby the first Chinese series I’ve seen where the women took the stage and where the women were the ones who protected the men. It was nice to see a Chinese series (which are usually the most conservative ones when it comes to male-female gender roles) to switch it around and show how powerful the girls could be. I really appreciated that. The story was well balanced, there was no storyline that felt rushed or forced, everything was played out in a nice pace and in the end, everything was wrapped up nicely. The truth was revealed, the main characters came together, all the others were paired up in their own love stories, happy ending. It was really nice how Ya Nan and Xiao Mi also got their moments to shine, even though their backgrounds weren’t elaborated on as much as Ming Tian and Fang Yu’s. But that wasn’t necessary. It’s so refreshing to have a bunch of uncomplicated characters every once in a while, haha. The acting was good, the story was solid…
Despite some tiny minor things I really enjoyed watching this.

The concept of a university specializing in mixed martial arts, and particularly one that’s initially only for women, was very interesting. As I’ve said many times before, I like it when series depict a certain field that I don’t know a lot about. Seeing all these women pursue martial arts was very inspiring. I also thought it created some kind of equality that girls and boys were also matched together in competitions at some point, so it wouldn’t just be girls fighting girls, but also the other way around.
I really liked how the school and campus looked, with people training everywhere on the grounds, cartwheeling on one hand, flipping huge truck tires along the path… I’ve never seen anything like that in real life. Are there actually schools in the world that do this, or is this really all fiction? I’m curious. It looked like a really fun atmosphere!

I liked how the series played with contrasts and opposites. As I’ve already pointed out in the above texts, there were very stark contrasts between all the characters, some people were literally each other’s opposites and this created a very nice balance. There was a clear distinction between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ people, even though not all initially ‘bad’ people stayed ‘bad’. But all these things just emphasized the animatic nature of the series for me. In anime, you always have really distinctive characters, both in appearance and personality. It kept it interesting to watch, since you never knew how people would react to things, and I was always curious as to how each character would respond to different situations. Not just the ‘girly’ versus ‘boyish’ contrasts, but even the simplest things, such as Ya Nan representing Boxing (arm-work) and Xiao Mi representing Taekwondo (leg-work). The dynamics between all the characters were really fun and interesting.

So I read that Lu Han and Guan Xiao Tong are actually a couple in real life, that’s really sweet. I think they were very sweet in this drama. Lu Han was shooting hearts out of his eyes when he was looking at Xiao Tong, I guess that wasn’t just acting, haha. Well done to the two of them. I really admired Xiao Tong’s eye acting, in particular. She acted so well with her eyes. I started appreciating her acting more and more throughout the series, especially in the latter half, when she starts opening up and showing more emotions. The scenes where she cried her eyes out in front of Ya Nan were really impressive, and their friendship was so precious.
I only know Lu Han is a former EXO member, but I actually don’t know him from anything else. I think Ming Tian was quite a layered character, his front is so calm and mellow and gentle, but there’s actually some real fierceness hidden behind that. There were some scenes where he finally stood up for himself and in those scenes I was all like YES GO GET THEM BOY, haha. Compared to how he is in the beginning of the series, his character makes a lot of progress, as does Fang Yu’s.
One more thing I wanted to comment on: I found it interesting how at some point, it felt like Fang Yu became the main character. In the beginning, we saw everything through Ming Tian’s eyes, we followed him home and we saw his daily life. But at some point, Fang Yu became more present than him. There were episodes where at a certain point I would be like ‘Hey, what happened to Ming Tian, I haven’t seen him in a while’. I also felt like sometimes people were talking a lot about Ming Tian or making a lot of decisions for Ming Tian without him actually being there. When Xiao Mi was pursuing Ming Tian, she was very aggressive in her approach. She had convinced herself Ming Tian must like her back, and she was basically already picturing their future together. Even though Ming Tian’s rejection may have been a bit harsh, I agreed with it because it literally wouldn’t get through to her. He had already rejected her before, after she kissed him once and he was like ‘Okay I should probably clear things up with her’ and she was like ‘Okay, I’ll back off!’ and then she didn’t. He had to tell her harshly that way, otherwise she just wouldn’t stop. She was so self-absorbed the thought he might not be feeling the same way didn’t even occur to her. She was just living in her own fantasy, which at some point became a little painful to watch. When Fang Yu found out the ‘truth’ about her uncle, it also seemed like she didn’t even consider how this must be for him. But then she had this weird logic of not telling him because she didn’t want to hurt him, even though it was about his father and he had every right in the world to know. And then at some point he made this very point himself and I was like THANK YOU.

Anyhow, I can cross another enjoyable Chinese drama off my list. As someone who likes Chinese series probably the least out of the other Asian Drama categories, If found it very refreshing and entertaining. And I even jotted down some other romantic comedy C-Dramas which are also on YouTube with English subtitles. For future watch purposes 😉

I will now first move on to some K-Dramas that are on Netflix, because I just feel like I can’t hold off on the currently trending series any longer. When I’m up-to-date with the latest hypes, I’ll go back to my list.
See you then! Bye-bye~