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.

Master Devil Do Not Kiss Me
(恶魔少爷别吻我 / E Mo Shao Ye Bie Wen Wo)
MyDramaList rating (for both seasons): 6.5/10

Hiya! Back with a new review. It actually didn’t take me as long as I’d expected to finish this, but it turned out the episodes were really short and this made it very easy to binge it. I watched the whole thing on YouTube, since the quality was better on there. My first confusion with this one was that I thought the first season alone would be 46 episodes and then there would be another season, so you can imagine my surprise when suddenly at episode 23 it said ‘Final’. xD Anyways! I don’t remember why exactly I put this on my to watch list, but I’m a sucker for romantic comedies so that was probably the biggest reason. I do have to say that it was really different from what I expected, so even though the story itself won’t be so difficult to discuss and analyze, there were some things that I found peculiar or that I didn’t really get at the end, so I’d like to mention those. Also, I didn’t know any of the actors, which doesn’t occur often! I usually know some people from other series by face at least, but this time I didn’t have any reference to use for any of the actors, which was kind of nice, in a way! Really made me able to watch it with a clear and open mind. Well then, let’s get to it, shall we?

Master Devil Do Not Kiss Me is a Chinese drama consisting of two seasons, with a total of 46 episodes (23 per season), every episode about 20 minutes long. I will be talking about the two seasons as one, so I won’t make a big distinction between the first and second season since there really wasn’t a difference in flow of story between the two season. The only things that changed were the opening and ending themes, and several dubs.
The main storyline is about An Chu Xia (played by Xing Fei), who suddenly loses her mother and gets ‘adopted’ into the household of the rich Han family. When Chu Xia’s mother passes, she agrees to donate an organ to Mr. Han, and this saves his life. Mr. Han’s wife visits Chu Xia’s mother to thank her for this, and agrees to take care of Chu Xia and raise her like her own daughter – that’s the final agreement between the two women and so Chu Xia is taken into the Han’s household. Making this whole experience even more unpleasant than it already is, Han’s only son, Han Qi Lu (played by Li Hong Yi), is not very welcome to Chu Xia. They’ve already met once before and that encounter didn’t go very well. And now they have to live in the same house. More than that, Chu Xia has to start going to the same school as Qi Lu, where he publicly announces to everyone that she is his maid. Chu Xia, partly glad since this school is where her mother also studied fashion design, has to deal with a lot of bullying from schoolmates since Qi Lu has quite the reputation – whoever crosses him goes on the blacklist. Besides that, there’s also Mo Xin Wei (played by Zhang Xiao Wei), a girl with a big crush on Qi Lu, who decides to make Chu Xia’s life a living hell together with her faithful sidekick Wan Zi (played by Li You Tong/Sunday Li). The only people on Chu Xia’s side are her best friend Meng Xiao Nan (played by Qie Lu Tong), who even transfers schools with Chu Xia so she won’t be alone, and Feng Shao (played by Li Cen Yi), a guy from Chu Xia’s former neighborhood who is like a big brother to her. Two other people that become her friends are Ling Han Yu (played by Zhang Jiong Min), Qi Lu’s best friend, and Jiang Chen Chuan (played by Fu Long Fei/Jason Fu), who transfers to their school at the end of season 1 and starts pining for Chu Xia’s romantic attention, later revealed to be Xin Wei’s cousin. And then finally there’s Xiang Man Kui (played by Yang Zhi Ying/Katherine Yang), Qi Lu’s ex-girlfriend who returns from abroad suddenly after leaving Qi Lu a year earlier, wanting to get back with him.
The series in its entirety shows how Chu Xia copes with life in her new environment, both at home and at school, while facing many obstacles from petty people who are for some reason determined to ruin her life. In the end, of course, Chu Xia and Qi Lu fall in love with each other.

Let me say right from the start that the first episode was a MESS. It doesn’t happen often that after just the first episode I was like, ‘What the heck did I just watch?!’. First of all, to the end I never understood the whole getup that Chu Xia and Feng Shao were donning in their old neighborhood, with their weird wigs and all that. We see Chu Xia leave for a milk delivery, but then she bumps into Qi Lu (their first accidental kiss) and her pendant slips into his bag. Qi Lu and Han Yu are on their way to their school bus, since their class has a military training field trip. Chu Xia goes after them on her scooter to get her pendant back, but then gets involved in a whole hostage situation – the school bus is hijacked. In the meantime, Chu Xia’s mom gets a phone call that customers are not getting their milk delivered and she can’t reach Chu Xia because her phone was confiscated by the ‘hijackers’ and when she runs out into the street to search for her daughter, she is hit by a car. Chu Xia doesn’t find out what happened to her mom until she gets back from the fake hijacking incident. Because, yeah, the hijacking is fake. It’s part of the military training, which already explained why the hijackers were not being very intimidating despite the fact that they were pointing weapons at their students (seriously though, what kind of a messed up military training is that?!). Plus the hijackers were making a big deal about Chu Xia being the milk delivery person, and they let her go quite easily. Anyways, it was a BIG mess. There was already SO many dramatic things happening from the start, and it took a while for things to settle down. Like, I know they had to create a situation in which Chu Xia would be forced to start lodging at Qi Lu’s house, but this premise was quite extreme and far-fetched in my opinion. Especially when later in the series, things tone down a lot and the craziness from the beginning really disappears to make way for just Chu Xia’s storyline of surviving her new life. But really, the hostage situation AND her mom dying, all in the same first episode… I can’t lie because it did draw me in, in a strange way, but I still found it pretty extreme.

For me, this series was a kind of messy combination version of Hana Yori Dango and Itazura na Kiss, even though they still managed to not copy everything from those classics. But they combined the ‘enemies to lovers’ trope with the ‘FL ends up living at ML’s house’ trope, so a lot of things happening felt kind of familiar to those prior series. Chu Xia comes from a poor background, she’s been living with her mother ever since her father ‘disappeared’ when she was a baby. Even though her mom had been a genius fashion designer, she ended up owning a milk delivery business in a backstreet neighborhood called ‘Cat Ear Alley’. This is where Chu Xia grew up, between the hoodlums and street people. She grew up with Feng Shao as they both had to learn how to fend for themselves, and Chu Xia helped her mom deliver milk. After her mom’s accident, Chu Xia is suddenly pushed into this rich household, where she gets to wear fancy dresses and where she’s fed and cleaned and where she’s allowed to follow her dream to become a designer herself. It’s a really big turning point and she’s constantly struggling with it, because she doesn’t have a background to be ‘proud’ of like most other students, and certainly not like Xin Wei, who’s constantly out to make her feel bad about that. But she keeps going, continues to be proud of where she came from and where she’s headed, constantly positive and looking forward, and that’s really admirable.
Honestly, I was so glad with Chu Xia as the female lead. She wasn’t a pushover, she stood up for herself and for things that went against her justice, even when everyone else turned a blind eye to it. Even though her classmates betrayed her time and time again, she never held a grudge, and she really saw people for who they were based on her instinct. It was so satisying to see her look at all the BS that was happening around her and be all like, ‘People, honestly, aren’t you tired of this?’ I think, in all the Chinese series I’ve seen so far, Chu Xia was by far one of my favorite main characters. She just responded so logically and realistically to everything around her while a lot of other characters were kind of stuck in their stereotypical ways of responding to situations.

I mean, the characters were pretty stereotypical, in general. Chu Xia was the strong and independent girl from a poor background who fights her way through the social class system to prove her worth (reminiscent of Makino from HYD). Qi Lu is the cold and mean son of a rich household, until we find out this was caused by his ex leaving him heartbroken and he has a hard time getting back to normally express his feelings again when he falls for someone new, so he’s the typical cold on the outside, warm on the inside type of person. Xiao Nan is the typical best friend who’s a complete romantic and falls in love every day with another guy, until Chen Chuan appears and she settles on him. Even when she finds out Chen Chuan likes Chu Xia, she never turns on her friend, she’s the most loyal person Chu Xia has by her side, although she’s kind of a ditz. Xin Wei is the classic bitch character, and even to the very end she doesn’t show any kind of reflection on her actions, even when her friend Wan Zi finally exposes her at the end. I had the least understanding for her, she was just rotten to the core. Of course, she must have had a lot of insecurities, she constantly felt like she had to use backhanded tricks to humiliate Chu Xia in front of everyone in order to win from her, but I never once had a shred of empathy for her. She just went about it the wrong way, making herself a worse and worse person with every step. Chen Chuan is the second male lead of whom everyone knows he’ll never stand a chance, but we still kind of support him. He was just a very likable character, even though he was very competitive when it came to Chu Xia and sometimes he didn’t know how to leave her alone, when he saw that Chu Xia and Qi Lu were really going for each other, he took a step back and left them alone. Same went for Han Yu, even though he was also romantically interested in Chu Xia, he kept making way for Qi Lu when it became clear that his friend liked her as well. He never passed on a chance to tell Qi Lu off for treating Chu Xia badly though, at one point he really went more to her side than to his, but he was a loyal friend to both of them to the end.
Man Kui is the initially mysterious ex-girlfriend who comes back and keeps her intentions a bit ambiguous for a while. In season 1 she only appears in Qi Lu’s flashbacks up to the point where she leaves him after winning a designing competition and being offered a chance to go to study fashion design in France. She returns at the end of season 1, and then we first don’t really know what to think of her. She seems nice enough to Chu Xia at first, but then she does become a little petty because she also wants Chu Xia gone from Qi Lu’s side. She teams up with Xin Wei for a while, but then ditches her and Xin Wei responds to this by trying to frame both Man Kui and Chu Xia, and this finally puts things in perspective for Man Kui. I think that, even though Man Kui only really appeared in season 2, she still had a lot of character development because at least she was able to reflect on herself and decided not to stay selfish like Xin Wei. Even though I didn’t really like her character that much, that much I could respect about her. What was funny to me was that the adult characters were all the most animated characters, like the young people were the ones going through real things, but the adults were mostly there for comic relief, especially the teachers. They just showed how frustrating it could be for students to go their own way, even if that meant going against school rules, for the sake of expressing their creativity and personal skills. There was this one teacher, the one everyone hated, who kept treating Chu Xia like a bad student, accusing her of cheating and stuff, just because she thought outside of the box a little, and that was really frustrating.
Something that kept happening which I felt really uncomfortable with was the ‘adults’ around Chu Xia making decisions about her life, and then I primarily mean in terms of marriage. First of all, while Qi Lu’s mother, fondly called Sister Yuan (played by Hao Yang) was the best substitute mom Chu Xia could wish for, reminding me also of the mom from Itazura na Kiss, she decided that Chu Xia would be Qi Lu’s fiancée without asking either of them for approval. It was in a protest against this that Qi Lu started going around telling people Chu Xia was his maid instead. Afterwards, when Han Yu’s grandfather discovers her as he also knew her mom, he basically already starts preparing her marriage to Han Yu. At the same time, Chen Chuan is going around telling everyone Chu Xia is going to marry him. That scene where those three people were discussing who Chu Xia was going to marry and she was just standing there, blank-faced, it was SO uncomfortable! It’s so weird to think that it still goes like this in some cultures, that young girls really have no say in what their future is going to be like because the older people will arrange everything for them. I don’t know, that part just really pissed me off. Just, any part in which people started talking on behalf of Chu Xia, I was like ‘SHE CAN SPEAK FOR HERSELF THANK YOU VERY MUCH’. -__-”

While I found the series in itself enjoyable enough, it lacked a lot in structure and build-up. One of the biggest example of this was the build-up in Chu Xia and Qi Lu’s relationship. Of course, we know, that the enemies will become lovers eventually. But their build-up was so confusing at times that in the end, I’m even wondering about the drama’s title, because it didn’t really make sense to me anymore. I thought that it was because Qi Lu told Chu Xia to call him ‘Young Master Han’ as she was his maid, and even though she refuses this she does call him that occasionally as a joke. In the summary on DramaWiki it says that Qi Lu’s nickname at school is ‘Master Devil’ because no one dares to oppose him, but I can’t remember that being explained clearly in the series. But okay, that explains the ‘Master Devil’ part, also because he is very unpleasant to Chu Xia in the beginning. But I don’t really get the ‘Do Not Kiss Me’ part, even after finishing the series.
They have two accidental kisses, where they literally bump into each other and their lips accidentally touch. When this happens in the first episode when they first meet, Qi Lu immediately finds it strange that he doesn’t have an allergic reaction to being ‘kissed’ like that, since apparently he’s not been able to take that kind of intimacy ever since Man Kui left him. Anyways, so there’s two accidental kisses, one time Chu Xia kisses Qi Lu in a game of truth or dare (which was super weird because their lips were kept out of the shot?! Like you only saw their eyes which made the ‘kiss’ look really fake), Qi Lu kisses her one time in a fit of passionate rage but this was just really bad timing because they were fighting and it was not consented (Chu Xia also pushed him away immediately). And then there are multiple scenes where it’s just the two of them and they’re about to kiss but are interrupted at the last moment. Even when they finally officially ‘confess’ to each other, there is not a single mutually consented, both on the same page, romantic kiss between them. It literally ends with him hugging her after dramatically telling her he likes her, which we all already knew because he’d already told her that several times before. So yeah, bit of an anticlimax. And it was such a pity! Because they had a really nice chemistry! I was constantly excited when they had scenes together because I felt like their feelings would just be piling and piling up until they’d finally have that long-awaited kiss…. and then it didn’t happen.
Also, the timing between them was kind of off. Qi Lu is the first one to realize his feelings for Chu Xia, and then he immediately starts preparing to confess, even though Chu Xia really isn’t there yet. Like, at one point, he tells her this whole confession (the one where she’s in the shower and doesn’t hear it), but I was really like… even if she did hear that confession, I figure her reaction would be a legit ‘what the fuck’. Because at that point, even when he wanted to publicly tell her through a megaphone at the end of season 1 that he liked her, Chu Xia at that point was not looking at him romantically yet AT ALL. She only really decided she liked him when she found out he was the person who’d been rooting for her through messages on that wall back in Cat Ear Alley. He took one of the stray cats home and she discovered this and, recognizing the cat, she knew it had been him. Only then I felt like she finally realized her honest feelings for him, before that, it would’ve just been awkward if he’d confessed, because she just would’ve said no. So yeah, even though it happens a lot when one lead character realizes their feelings before the other one does, it felt like Qi Lu really didn’t think about how Chu Xia would feel if he suddenly told her his feelings out of the blue like that. Like, when he first asked her to date, it just felt so awkward because it was kind of ‘Hey, who are we kidding, we know this is happening, let’s date already’ and Chu Xia was like ‘???the heck you talking about bro???’
What I really found really shitty of Qi Lu was that he just started flirting with Man Kui in front of Chu Xia, like he’d suddenly bring her into the house to cook and make comments about how happy he was to have Man Kui because Chu Xia couldn’t cook for the life of her, and all that was just really mean of him. And then they’d go out for dinners with the three of us, while Chu Xia knew she was going to be a third wheel, and they’d just reminisce about their past together and Chu Xia was just like CAN I LEAVE PLEASE?! Especially because this was when she was actually finally starting to like him. This just made her really confused, for good reason. Like, first he tells her he likes her, pushes her to be his girlfriend, and then this?
I was SO happy when she told him off for acting like a jerk there I even wrote down what she actually told him because it was so spot-on. xD She said, “Don’t speak to me in that tone, like I did something unforgiveable to you. What do I know? I only know that you and Man Kui are being all lovey-dovey and that you’re treating me like air. I also know that you two had a candle-lit dinner in which you burned me like a candle to lighten your mood. Han Qi Lu, face your inner heart already. If you like her, then get back together. Don’t eat from your bowl while looking at the pot. I am not a buy-one-get-one-for-free item in your relationship.”
After this quote I applauded. I was so happy she saw how he treated her for the exact BS that it was instead of acting all pitiful and butt-hurt about it.
The second shitty thing he did was to reject her so heartlessly when she was finally ready to confess back to him. She finally gathered the courage to tell him she liked him back, and he was like ‘nahh I don’t want to be in a relationship right now’ and I legit went BITCH WHAT. Even when he ‘justified’ himself because he wanted to let her go follow her dream and he didn’t want to cause her to miss out on that, he gave up on his own selfishness when it came to her, the way he told her was just mean and not okay. He made her CRY, I can’t forgive him for that. Team Chu Xia all the way!
So yeah, even though I like the enemies to lovers trope because it always adds in that little spice and aggressiveness which I secretly kind of dig, this series made a bit of a mess of how their feelings were communicated to each other.

I really liked the story they added in season 1 about their teacher You Tian and his hidden desire to pursue a career in art. The part where they made the whole exhibition from all his work for him and all that. You Tian (played by Feng Xiao Tong) was the nicest teacher in school, and I also liked his relationship with the school nurse Maria who kind of disappeared at some point. In season 2, when he comes back to teach after finishing his art school classes, they suddenly added this weird and unnecessary part where he suddenly had a foreign fiancée and that caused more tension between him and Maria because they were obviously into each other. But then the fiancée found out about You Tian and Maria and ran out crying and bumped into the other teacher and suddenly told him he was very handsome — and that was it. After that, both Maria and the fiancée completely disappeared from the story! Which was a shame because Maria was kind of an important side character who helped Chu Xia out a couple of times as well.
(By the way, I can’t seem find any information about the actress who played Maria, she’s not added in any cast lists on DramaWiki or MyDramaList, and I can’t even find this series on AsianWiki, so if anyone has any info on this, please let me know so I can at least credit the actress!)

In the last part of season 2, Chu Xia gets to participate in the same designing contest as Man Kui a year earlier, which will give her a chance to study in France. It is during this already tense period that the final big plot twist is revealed: Chu Xia’s father. Worst of all: he is also Xin Wei’s father. Which means that not only Chu Xia and Xin Wei are half sisters, but Chen Chuan and Chu Xia are also cousins. Chu Xia of course wants nothing do it with him anyway, she’s never had a father and even though she’s been curious about his disappearance, she doesn’t want to joing the Jiang family. When Xin Wei finds out, she loses it. Feeling like Chu Xia is now even trying to take away her family from her after stealing Qi Lu away from her, she puts in motion her most extreme plan. Frame both Chu Xia and Man Kui during the final round of the competition, by having Man Kui kidnapped so she can’t come to prove Chu Xia’s innocence. This is where it just got really messy and even her friend Wan Zi decides that she’s going too far. In the end, everything is solved, luckily, but it still was a really nasty event. And all Xin Wei could do was just scream at Chu Xia, calling everyone a liar and she even repeatedly badmouthed Chu Xia’s mother. She was just being SO disrespectful that I actually didn’t flinch when her dad slapped her because honestly, she deserved that at the least. She was completely crazy. And then it was like ‘Okay, well, I guess it was a misunderstanding, in that case Chu Xia is the winner!! :D’ and everyone went like ‘Yaaayyy’ and Chu Xia was like ‘Hello?! That’s it?! Anyone care to explain wtf just happened?!’ Like, the transitions between happenings and scenes was really weird and unnatural sometimes.

Another storyline that was introduced but then completely ignored again was the one about Gao Gan and his crazy girlfriend. Gao Gan was a very unpleasant classmate of Qi Lu’s, also from a rich background, with a big grudge towards Qi Lu and, consequently, Chu Xia. The girl that he was in love with was obsessed with Qi Lu, and she was kicked out of school by him just before Chu Xia came. The crazy girl even came back to school once to threaten Chu Xia with a knife, she was nuts. Anyways, we find out that Gao Gan (played by Bai Cheng Jun) loves her and wants to get back at Qi Lu for driving his girl nuts, even though she just really had some serious issues. But hey, petty people be petty, and they blame everything on someone they can actually blame and hurt. So he even kidnaps Chu Xia in the beginning of season 2, and he helps Xin Wei in her final scheme by kidnapping Man Kui before she can get to the competition to vouch for Chu Xia. I called him crap-bag in my head for the entire series, because he was just such a lame douchebag. And yeah, he only showed up one more time, all bad-guy like, look I’m cool because I’m kidnapping girls now. But there really wasn’t anything more to his character besides that, they just made him come back when they needed a bad guy. And the crazy girlfriend also didn’t appear anymore after making such a dramatic scene.
Wan Zi was also a character that I deeply disliked, even though she did come around in the end when she found out Xin Wei’s plan to frame Chu Xia like that, then she finally got a conscience. But honestly, Xin Wei had been treating her like trash as well, so I can understand. What bothered me mostly about Wan Zi was the actress though, and in particular her acting. She was like a robot doll, completely not communicating with other actors while she was doing a scene with them, she just said her words straight ahead while pulling the continuously same startled facial expression. She was just as petty as Xin Wei in the beginning, until Xin Wei took over with her madness. They kind of reminded me of the bad girls from Love O2O, even though there the ‘friend’ was worse than the ‘bitch character’.

I’ve seen this comment a lot while watching the series, and I have to agree it’s kind of funny and that they should’ve called the series ‘High School Gossip Please Don’t Kill Me’ or something like that. It was CRAZY how the gossip escalated. They made it funny to include this same flow of rumours being spread by the same group of people, and with each person the story was pulled more and more out of context until it became pure nonsense. Like, Chu Xia is in school for 1 day and there’s a rumor that she’s pregnant with Qi Lu’s baby. This also reminded me a lot of how Makino was bullied in HYD. Like, I get people can be petty, but you know it’s serious when they start putting tacks on your chair, that just goes too far. I was so proud of Chu Xia how she kept herself going through all that. And I love that at least she had Xiao Nan with her in class. That time when she came into class and her books were all shredded and ripped up and then Xiao Nan came in and just calmly replaced all her books because she’d already gone to the bookstore to buy new ones for her… Friendship goals, to be sure. And there were these three people in their class who also called themselves Chu Xia’s friends but whenever she was facing new rumors, they just shut her out again because they were too scared to stand up for her and get in trouble themselves. Those were not friends, they were only nice to her when they figured Chu Xia actually stood a chance against the higher power, then they suddenly started flocking to her side. Before that, they really only wanted her to help them out but they never did so in return.
So I guess you could say ‘friendship’ is a very important theme in this series. Chu Xia certainly found out who her real friends were, and in the end they really had a nice group of people who would always help each other out.

I would like to make some character and cast comments now before I move on to my conclusion.
As I mentioned before, I really didn’t know any of the actors from other series before, so I’m basing my opinions purely on what I saw from them in this drama. I’m not going to pay too much attention to the cringe-worthy dubbing in this, only that I believe they actually changed some of the voices for season 2. I remember wondering why Chu Xia and Xiao Nan suddenly had completely different voices. Honestly, is it too much to ask to just let the actors act with their own voices? What’s the point in always adding this over-extreme mismatched dubbing to it? Anyways.

To start with my favorite girl, Chu Xia. I really liked Xing Fei’s performance. She made me really feel for her character, all the more because she seemed to be the only character that just responded normally to the weird situations around her. She had a really natural attraction to her, like, she seemed really fun to hang around with and that’s probably what attracted all these guys to her as well, even though that was never her intention. It was just impossible to hate her, unless you were Xin Wei and you just looked for reasons to blame her for literally anything bad that was happening in your own life. Even though she was kind of over the top in the first episode, as soon as she took that weird wig off, she became a really likeable person. She had really good views on what was right and wrong, she didn’t hold grudges, she knew how to mind her own business and just couldn’t understand what made it so hard for other people to do the same thing. She thought outside of the box, knew how to apply her knowledge instead of just following the rules in how to use it. She showed everyone how strong she was in her mind and soul, and that was really nice to see. I can’t emphasize enough how happy I was with a female lead like her.

I just found out that there’s actually a 5-year age difference between Xing Fei and Li Hong Yi! Xing Fei was 23 at the time this series came out and Li Hong Yi was 19. I see on his DramaWiki page that he’s been doing a LOT lately, so maybe I’ll get to see some of his other more recents series in the future. Even though his character was kind of stereotypical in that he was supposed to be the cool and jerkish guy who actually had a tiny heart and just wanted to be loved, I did enjoy his performance. I really loved his eyes, especially in the way he looked at Chu Xia, he really showed his emotions through his gaze very well. He really was like a little child sometimes, getting all petty when he couldn’t immediately get what he wanted. And this also made him a bit endearing, despite the fact that he kept saying really insensitive things to people. I’d actually expected his character to be way more predatory, for some reason. I thought he would be this kind of dangerous guy who would really constantly treat her as his maid and claim her to be his possession. But maybe that’s because when someone is called ‘Devil’ in a Chinese drama, I always think of ‘Devil Beside Me’, and Qi Lu really wasn’t as bad as Mike He’s character there. Anyways, I’m kind of curious to see more of him now that I see he’s doing a lot of dramas lately.

Qie Lu Tong was really good as Xiao Nan, I really loved her character, even though she was kind of ditzy in the whole romance thing. She was the daydreamer who would just create romantic scenarios out of nothing, which was in complete opposite to Chu Xia, but still they were like sisters. I loved how she just transferred to Chu Xia’s new school, how she just got her dad to do that, plainly so Chu Xia wouldn’t have to be alone. And even though she pouted a lot through rather than take action by herself, she was the most loyal person to Chu Xia, up to the very end. Even when Chen Chuan didn’t like her back and she had to watch him make advances on Chu Xia, she never started envying her friend, she never turned bitter. She still tried to be a good friend to Chen Chuan, and in the end it rewarded her when he finally started noticing all the things she’d been doing for him ever since he found out Chu Xia was his cousin. So yeah, I see that she hasn’t done a lot of dramas, but I hope to see more of her, because she played a very likeable character.

In the end, Han Yu didn’t have as big a role as I’d expected, because in the beginning I thought he and Qi Lu would be like the two friends from Love till The End of Summer. But he kind of disappeared for a while, and then when he came back his place as the second male lead was kind of taken over by Chen Chuan. But anyways, he was a really likeable character. Even when he didn’t hide his true feelings for Chu Xia, he never forced himself on to her, he always respected her feelings and stepped back immediately when Qi Lu started showing interest in her, even though he didn’t like it. He was a real good friend, and I felt like he actually became more Chu Xia’s friend than Qi Lu’s, as it seemed that he and Qi Lu got out of touch a little when he went away. But I liked that, even when his grandfather started pushing them together, he never seriously went along with it and he really didn’t want Chu Xia to be bothered by it, either. I see on DramaWiki that Master Devil was the first show he did, and that he’s also in some more recent dramas, so I hope that I can watch something with him again!

I don’t know why exactly, but Li Cen Yi gave me Kim Young Kwang vibes! I really liked his character, he was like the big brother-type of friend that you could always depend upon. It did seem in the beginning as if he also had a crush on Chu Xia, but then all of a sudden he had a girlfriend, and it looked like this was a big relief to Chu Xia. I think she would’ve been worried how to face him after she heard someone imply that he liked her. Anyways, he was a really cool guy, always jumping in to help Chu Xia out. I liked how him, Chu Xia and Xiao Nan were already friends from before Chu Xia transferred to that school. Even though Feng Shao couldn’t attend school with her like Xiao Nan, he did find other ways to stay close, like for example he was suddenly helping out with gym classes and stuff? And I also liked how Chen Chuan and he got their sort of bromance bond. Feng Shao really tried to think about what would be best for Chu Xia, and that’s why he support Chen Chuan in his pursuing of her, because he didn’t like Qi Lu (with good reason). But yeah, in the end it was all up to Chu Xia, no matter his good intentions. He was a good friend throughout, and just a very likeable character to have in the series. I liked his performance a lot, how calm and casual he always was, but still oozing that subtle ‘don’t mess with me or my fam’ coolness.

Although I did find Chen Chuan a little bit annoying at times, there would always be a moment where he corrected himself and always made me go ‘Ahh, okay, now that was nice of him’. He is initially attracted to Chu Xia because she treats him like no other girl has treated him before, and he gets reeled in by her gutsiness and determination. He does tend to be a bit clingy, especially starting from season 2 when he’s just determined to stay by her side, but Chu Xia makes it very clear to him that she doesn’t like that. I think he knew from the start that she wasn’t into him, but he still believed that if he’d put in effort, he could make her look at him. In the end, the plan failed mainly because he finds out they’re actually related, but she’s still really important to him and he finally pushes Qi Lu to her, in his own words ‘I just want to support my cousin’. I would’ve liked to see him noticing Xiao Nan more, though! She stuck by him whenever he was in a ditch, I secretly hoped that they’d start dating when Chu Xia went to France, but then the series was suddenly already over. xD Anyways, he was a likeable character, without a doubt, even though he could’ve been a little more respectful at times, especially in moments where he was just really greedy for Chu Xia’s attention. I thought it was really mature of him to help Chu Xia and Qi Lu out in the end, even though it hurt.

Even though I hated Mo Xin Wei, I can’t deny that Zhang Xiao Wei is really pretty. I almost found it a waste that they casted someone so pretty as such an unlikeable character. I’d really hoped to see some maturity from her in the end, like in Love O2O and Love till the End of Summer where the bitchy girl characters all came around in the end to apologize for their immature behavior to the female lead. None of that here. I really tried to get some understanding for her character, but she really was a lost case.
The actress did a great job portraying her like that though! It’s a whole different kind of challenge to portray a character that the viewers will have to hate. She really lost the right to any kind of redemption with her last scheme, that just went too far. And all I could think was how little she must actually think of herself, that she felt like the only way she could ‘win’ from Chu Xia was to use these kinds of tricks to make her feel bad. All in all, I’d have to compliment the actress for portraying the character so well. Let’s not forget that the actors are not their characters, haha.

I personally found it kind of a pity what they did with Man Kui. I mean, she was established to be this amazing girlfriend to Qi Lu in the past, but then when they found it necessary to suddenly bring her back and act like nothing had happened between them, they suddenly started making her really pitiful and kind of petty at times as well. She would fake being in pain in order to get Qi Lu to pay attention to her, and then she took advantage of the fact that people were starting to speculate about them dating again by making Chu Xia feel like the third wheel. I’m glad she came around eventually after what Xin Wei did at the end, because just before that she’d also still been determined to hurt Chu Xia. Her character was just really ambiguous to me, like even though I wanted to like her, I couldn’t because she was being so fake. I was glad Chu Xia started noticing this at well, realizing that the pot lid that had supposedly burned Man Kui’s hand wasn’t hot at all, etcetera.
But anyways, I can’t deny that her character was interesting, even though I was really confused as to how much she was exaggerating about being sick and in pain. In the end it all just became kind of unimportant, and this also took away from the credibility of her character, so that was a pity.

It was really nice to watch this after finishing such an emotional cookie like Move to Heaven. Agreed, as I said, this wasn’t a very ‘good’ series in terms of structure and storyline build-up, but I found it very enjoyable nonetheless. Sometimes you’re just in the mood for something light and weird, that just makes you laugh out loud and make you forget about the weight of the real world.
I’m glad I gave it a shot, and I also saw that they have a lot of Chinese dramas on YouTube, so that makes it very easy to watch. I have several more Chinese dramas of similar genres on my to watch list, for a fact I know some are also with Xing Fei, so I’m looking forward to those! I’m also glad I took the time to write a serious review on this, even though I went through it so swiftly and there wasn’t a lot to really take seriously in the story. I actually liked that it was a mixture of all kinds of classic romance stories combined because I really like those, no matter how cliché they are. Even if it’s just for light entertainment, it will do.

I’m going back to some K-Dramas now that I’ve also really been looking forward to. I hope to be able to finish my batch of 10 dramas in 5 months before the end of this year and still write some worthwhile reviews as I go through my neverending list. 🙂
Bye-bee~! ^^