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.

The Big Boss
( 班长大人 / Ban Zhang Da Ren)
MyDramaList rating (for both seasons): 6.0/10

Hiya! It’s time for a new review! Having more free time has really enabled me to focus on some things I love to do, like drama watching! After such a long and emotional rollercoaster as my last watch, I was looking forward to blowing off some steam with a light comedy and well, this one definitely did that. A bit too much, even. I remember putting it on my list after seeing a clip/trailer of it somewhere and thought it looked cute. The overall reviews on MyDramaList are also quite positive, so I was very curious. In the end, unfortunately, I have to say it wasn’t really my cup of tea. I can understand why people like it, and it’s not that I hated it, but it just didn’t do much for me and rather than enjoying the silliness for 36 episodes straight, I found myself becoming increasingly impatient to finish it so I could move on with my list. I don’t expect this to become a really lengthy review, but anyways, let’s just get on with it, shall we?

The Big Boss is a Chinese drama series which consists of 2 seasons of each 18 episodes, with a duration of about 35 minutes each. Actually, I only discovered it was divided into two seasons when I started it, but in the series itself the episodes count on from 1 to 36, so I don’t really see the point of dividing it into two seasons as it was one continuing story and there also wasn’t a change in opening/ending sequences. I did rank the two seasons separately on MyDramaList.
Anyways, the story is about two childhood friends, or at least, two classmates who grew up together in the same neighborhood, but they’re not really on good terms with each other. Ever since they were little, Liao Dan Yi (played by Huang Jun Jie) has been ‘monitoring’ Ye Mu Xi (played by Eleanor Lee/Li Kai Xin). Mu Xi is very innocent and child-like for her age, and for some reason Dan Yi is bent on teaching her how to become more mature. When the time comes for their middle school to start, Mu Xi is excited to finally be free from Dan Yi’s ever-watching eyes. After all, their classes are ranked from 1 to 10 based on exam performance and since Dan Yi is much better at studying than Mu Xi is, there’s no way they’d end up in the same class. However, SHOCKER, she still finds him in her Class 10 when she enters the classroom. Turns out he missed one exam, which was enough to put him in the lowest class, even though he got top grades in the other exams (it’s a true mystery). Not only that, he also volunteers to become Class 10’s class monitor, and Mu Xi can’t let that happen – she won’t have him monitor her at school too! So she very impulsively decides to also run for class monitor, just to beat him. She wins, much to Dan Yi’s (and everyone’s) surprise, and Mu Xi couldn’t be happier, but then she becomes aware of the responsibilities that now fall on her shoulders. As someone who likes skipping through life without a care in the world, she doesn’t really feel like taking on all that by herself, so she calls in the help of her wide and wild imagination to help her navigate through her school life. She calls on her two imaginary friends (a dinosaur and a horse – personified by two actual men in dino & horse costumes), and manages to gather a group of eccentric classmates to join her in the class committee. As the ‘big boss’, Mu Xi will learn a lot about life and taking responsbility by going through many adventures with her classmates, while still competing with Dan Yi in the background.

I liked the original start of the show, in which it was announced that this series included almost every single genre you could think of, fantasy, action, comedy, costume drama, singing and dancing, etc. It is introduced as something that has a little bit of everything, any kind of genre the viewer might like, but that it’s also fitting as a light show to watch while eating some noodles or something. Also, it’s announced from the start that the one thing that this show is NOT, is a love story. I just want to emphasize this because even at the end of the show, people were complaining in the comments about how there was no romance in it – I mean, we were warned from the very beginning! Anyways, the way it starts out is very unique and interesting, also because from the introduction sequence itself I really had no idea what to expect, there seemed to be so much in it and I was curious as to how they would structure the whole thing.
I know it’s typical for Chinese shows that their opening and ending sequences are filled with actual shots and scenes from the series (which I sort of dislike since it gives away so much of the events from the show and it can be quite spoiler-y). But I still found it a bit of a pity that this show really revealed basically everything in their introduction sequence. In hindsight, I don’t think I was surprised by any event that happened in the show, because everything made me go, ‘oh, I’ve seen this shot in the introduction/opening/ending sequence’. So even though it contained a whole load of Mu Xi’s imagination, it didn’t leave too much for mine, as everything felt like I’d already seen it coming. I guess this also is a part of what I’ll later come back to as ‘lazy editing’, but it felt like they didn’t really make an effort to include any additional scenes/story parts that weren’t already ‘spoilered’ in the intro sequence. If they’d done less of that, I might have been a little more surprised and excited for what was going to happen, but they really already revealed most of it from the start, so that was a bit of a bummer.

In summary, the story is about friendship, and it’s also about both main leads’ development in becoming more mature. Dan Yi and Mu Xi aren’t the typical type of childhood friends we’re familiar with – in stories like this, there’s always a hint of budding romance or something, but I actually found it kind of refreshing that that wasn’t the case in The Big Boss. It’s about their friendship and coming to terms with their honest feelings for each other as friends. I guess what disappointed many viewers the most is that there may have been a tiny hint of romantic interest at the very end of season two. Admittedly, it was like being given a crumb, and then having it taken away because then suddenly the show was over before anything ‘real’ happened.
Admittedly, the promotion of Season 2 is quite misleading. As you can see from the picture I added above for S2, it shows Mu Xi as a kind of Cupid, with Dan Yi and Xiao Dong beneath her, suggesting a potential love triangle. The summary on DramaCool for S2 also mentions a story about both Dan Yi and Xiao Dong confessing their love to Mu Xi on her 18th birthday. I don’t know where this summary came from, because it never happens (Mu Xi’s 18th birthday doesn’t even happen), but I guess that’s why people are still hopefully waiting for a season three in which this will come to pass. I don’t know man, it’s been 6 years now. I don’t see it happen. And even if it did, it’d be kind of random to suddenly turn it into a love story after emphasizing so strongly from the start that this wouldn’t be a love story. So I don’t know, I’m not waiting for it.

Apart from the bond between Dan Yi and Mu Xi, there’s the group of friends that plays a big role, as everyone seems to just go along with Mu Xi’s fantasies and everyone seems to be more on her side than on Dan Yi’s, who wants to focus on studying most of all. Dan Yi often finds himself reluctantly being involved in Mu Xi’s antics, and I guess he secretly likes it, but he always keeps a stern attitude. At the end, he decides that it might be better if he transfers to Class 1 after all, that maybe that will help Mu Xi become more independent rather than him constantly watching over her. It ends with the two finally coming to terms with each other, and they make up and Dan Yi is revealed to transfer back to Class 10 because he somehow ‘again’ managed to miss an exam.

Let me give a quick introduction of the Class 10 committee members. In S1, each character gets a short introductory arc that ends in them becoming friends with Mu Xi and joining the committee. I really liked the sequence in the first episode when Mu Xi goes to her first day of school, and there’s a one-take of the school courtyard in which all the characters are briefly introduced with a sentence or two. I thought that was a really nice way to give a brief and powerful introduction to all the characters in school, and then to further introduce each of them one by one throughout the story. All in all, the character types that were introduced made the show seem very anime-like to me, everyone had a specific role and quirk to them that really defined their persona.
Mu Xi’s first assignment as class monitor is to bring two students to school that didn’t show up for registration on the first day. With the help of Dan Yi, who is now the committee member in charge of studies, they each go after one student.
Dan Yi goes after Xue Xiao Dong (played by Dai Jing Yao), a popular idol who didn’t get to register because he was followed by a group of fans. Mu Xi goes after Zhu Shan Qi (played by Lu Yan Qi). It takes her some time to win her trust, as Shan Qi genuinely doesn’t like the idea of going to school (although I don’t remember a solid reason for it). It turns out that Shan Qi is a big fan of Xiao Dong, so she agrees to register after hearing he’s in their class. Shan Qi’s infatuation with Xiao Dong becomes a running gag throughout the show, even though at times it seems like Xiao Dong is more interested in Mu Xi – although Mu Xi friendzones him time and time again. It turns out that Mu Xi knew Xiao Dong from when he was little, and that he used to be quite fat, and he really wants to let go of that past now that he’s managed to get into shape and gained such popularity as an idol.

Now here I’d like to present my first criticism. I read that Xiao Dong’s actor Dai Jing Yao participated in an idol surviving program AKA he has an actual idol training background, and that this was his drama acting debut. However. If you cast an actual aspiring idol as an idol in a drama series, wouldn’t you at least give him a chance to showcase his abilities a little bit? Seriously, what was up with those lipsynching sequences?? Whenever Xiao Dong had a scene in which he performed a song, they just put some random soundtrack over it. And like, putting on a soundtrack is one thing, but they could’ve at least made it LOOK like he was performing that song?! Every single time, he was lipsynching to something completely different than the soundtrack and it looked really lame. Why couldn’t they have just let him sing something for real, why hide it with such lame editing? And they did it later on as well, with that English song competition! I really didn’t understand why they’d come up with that idea and then just botch it like that. It just looked like lazy writing and editing to me. Also, in the scenes where he performed a dance with his crew, it just looked like a morning gymnastics routine to me, they didn’t even fully show him doing a real dance. They tried to create the vibe, the suggestion of him putting on this great performance, but the editing was really fragmented. Honestly, from what I saw in this show, it just looked like someone pretending to be an idol. I mean, come on, the guy was training to be an idol in real life, why not give him the chance to perform one song or dance live? I really don’t understand why they chose to do that. In the end Xiao Dong was more of an idol in words than in deeds to me.

Shan Qi becomes Mu Xi’s best friend, although she doesn’t really seem to be that empathic to others most of the time. She is often shown sneaking snaps of Xiao Dong sitting behind her in class, and her one trait is that she likes eating spicy strip snacks. Other than that, she didn’t really seem to have any special personality traits. As I mentioned before, her running gag was that she kept trying to stick to Xiao Dong in whatever event the group participated in, she was a typical fangirl, but I didn’t really see a lot of interesting aspects about her character other than that.

Moving on with the character introductions, there are the two brothers Huang Nan and Huang Yi (respectively played by Ge Qiu Gu and Gao Kai). They reminded me a little of Fred and George from the Harry Potter series, except they aren’t twins. They are constantly making trouble, pulling mischief, mainly angering the school director. They are mostly in charge of the comic relief, I guess, but it was a little too ‘in your face slapstick’ for my taste. Anyways, they are always first in line when Mu Xi announces a new activity, and after Mu Xi decides to ‘grow up’ and start studying after Dan Yi leaves Class 10, they are the first to speak up about the fact that they prefer the happy, fun-loving and carefree Mu Xi to the more ‘mature’ one.

Then there’s Shen Wei (played by Jin Di), the astrology lover. She is known for her predictions that usually come true, she loves everything that has to do with fortune-telling, horoscopes and such. Throughout the show it also seems like her predictions are always correct in one way or another. I liked her character, her quirk was a bit more solid than others and she also was a very loyal friend throughout everything that happened.

Yuan Ke Er (played by Zuo Yi Fan) is the artistic girl, she’s great at drawing and painting and continously feels the urge to spray graffiti art whenever she sees a white clean wall. To bring her into the committee, Mu Xi and the others have to face a gang that she’s briefly joined after Mu Xi unintentionally discourages her from drawing on the school bulletin board (or something). Anyways, she joins the committee as the person in charge of art after Mu Xi manages to persuade her to participate in the blackboard art competition, even though they lose. I thought that was a nice moment in which Mu Xi for once realized that winning wasn’t the most important thing, and she genuinely praised Ke Er for doing such a great job and encouraged her that she was still the winner to them. It was nice seeing Mu Xi mature subtly in her own way, through tiny little things.

Then there’s Xiong Tian Cheng (played by Guo Jia Ren), the poetry guy. In the beginning, he is a loner in the biggest sense of the word. He has literally blocked off his desk from the rest of the class with cardboard boxes, and he’s known for being very unhygienic. He is brilliant when it comes to writing, and he helps out students by reviewing their essays and rewriting them. He even has his own little reviewing business on the side, but his father is very strict with him and that’s caused him to seclude himself and neglect his physical hygiene. Mu Xi manages to get him cleaned up and he also becomes part of the committee.

And then there’s my favorite couple, haha. Honestly, I shipped these two more than I shipped Dan Yi and Mu Xi, they were just too adorable. First, Li Yao (played by Zhang Lin Yue), an intimidating-looking girl who everyone just assumed to be a bully, but who was actually very socially awkward because of her military upbringing. Basically, she didn’t even have to say anything and people would just give her stuff and then claim that she bullied them. Honestly, from the first moment on, I knew that wasn’t the truth, it was so obvious that she wasn’t even asking for those snacks and I was convinced people were just misunderstanding things. And that turned out to be the truth. There’s this character in Sayonara Zetsubou-sensei that I was reminded of, Mitama Mayo, her name a pun on ‘mita mama yo’ = ‘exactly as she looks’. It’s this intimidating-looking girl, except in SZ-S everyone assumes that she’s probably misunderstood for her appearance, and they give her the benefit of the doubt, even though it’s revealed she is, actually, ‘exactly as she looks’. In Li Yao’s case, this was the opposite. Everyone assumed that she was a bully because of her stern attitude and harsh way of talking, but they find out that she was raised by a military family and she doesn’t know how to act ‘cute’. I really liked her character, she was probably my favorite.
And then there is Cheng Ling (played by Wang Shu Yi), a bullying victim who was constantly running errands for the guys that were intimidating him. Through his arc, he realizes that he is actually a really good runner and athlete, and he ends up joining the tracking team, where he is respected for his speed and skills and they help him get rid of those bullies. For some reason I don’t fully remember, Cheng Ling is paired up with Li Yao when the committee is trying to help Li Yao make friends. They go with him because he’s a mild person, and funnily enough they make quite the pair. I really liked the tough girl versus soft boy dynamic between them, and it becomes more clear afterwards that Li Yao definitely warms up to Cheng Ling and becomes reluctantly affectionate towards him. I thought it was really cute.

Besides the Class 10 committee, there is also the important ‘second female lead’, and this is the class monitor for Class 1, Guan Xin Yi (played by Deng Yu Li), who develops a crush on Dan Yi and keeps trying to get him to transfer to Class 1. Despite her stoic appearance, she becomes a smitten, silly lovestruck girl whenever Dan Yi is near, and she has many fantasy sequences about him. In turn, Xin Yi is always followed by He Lu Xi (played by Fu Xiao), her sort of ‘bodyguard’. He follows her everywhere and always praises her into the heavens, but he also occasionally butts in when she’s trying to approach Dan Yi, which aggravates her. We learn that Lu Xi is in fact in love with Xin Yi, and in the end he manages to very sincerely confess to her, which undoubtedly makes an impression on her, despite her initial dislike of his constant presence. Honestly, I really liked Xin Yi, I thought she was really pure and I liked the actress’ acting a lot. It was just really painful because Dan Yi was clearly very uncomfortable with her advances and she kept approaching him even after he’d already rejected her feelings, so I also understand how awkward it must have been for Dan Yi that she kept watching him. Anyways, I did feel for Xin Yi in her one-sided crush.

I also want to make a mention of Class 10’s homeroom teacher, Wu Heng (played by Zhang Jia), nicknamed ‘Wu sir’ by almost all Class 10 students. He was a really cool guy, and the perfect teacher for Class 10 because he kept believing in every single one of them. He really saw the benefit in trying to help students with more difficulties in studying to get the best out of them, and he deserves all the praise! I really liked his character, he always stood up for his students and really acted as a friend towards them.

The thing is, I was really waiting for some seriousness in the story. It started out with a clear structure, Mu Xi becoming the class monitor, and I thought it would be structured as such, like every time she would get a new assignment, bring a new student into the group, and that’s how everyone would come together and they would develop all their bonds. While it started out like that, at some point, I lost sight of the structure and it became quite incoherent in my opinion.
One of the main things I was interested in, was the reason behind Dan Yi and Mu Xi’s respective behaviors. Especially since I’d seen a comment that revealed that Mu Xi had quite a sad backstory. That immediately piqued my interest because I thought that that meant that there would be some deeper layer behind the comic mask of the show. From Dan Yi’s side, it’s revealed pretty early on that the reason he keeps monitoring and guiding Mu Xi is because he feels guilty for neglecting her one time when they were kids. He told her to go hide (for hide and seek) just to get rid of her and then she actually went missing and it took five hours to find her. Ever since then, he’s pledged to himself to always keep watching over her, and this is also the reason he deliberately missed an exam so he could be in the same class as her in middle school.
In season 2, it’s ultimately revealed that Mu Xi grew up without her parents. She lost both her parents at a young age (her father disappeared and her mother then died of depression not long afterwards), and she’s been living with her older brother Ye Yi Han (played by Liu Jun Xiao) ever since. Her older brother has always babied her as his little sister, and this explains her immature behavior, because she’s never had to grow up for her brother. It’s also revealed (very casually, might I add) that Mu Xi created her whole Fantasy Kingdom in her mind after Dan Yi stopped playing with her, so you could say she created a fantasy world (including the imaginary friends) in her mind because she was left alone, which gives her character a pretty serious deeper layer. That was the part I was interested in the most, to get into the reality of her character, to go beyond her performed carefree attitude.

So let me now move on to my main criticism of the show, the reason why I say that it wasn’t my cup of tea and why I rated it relatively low on MyDramaList (I gave the first season a 5.5 and the second season a 6).
It becomes clear that the fantasy sequences from Mu Xi’s imagination were an important asset to her character, as she depended on her imagination and took inspiration from her fantasy world to cope with events that happened in real life. As her group of friends starts expanding, each new person she meets also gets a ‘role’ in her Fantasy Kingdom. Whenever something happens, even a trivial conflict or whatever, it gets translated into a fantasy world sequence, and this is basically how Mu Xi deals with things, she makes it into a dramatic fantasy story. This means that almost every single event, every single game, competition, conflict, activity that she encounters throughout the series, is converted into a fantasy story featuring her and her friends as their personas in her imagination. Don’t get me wrong, I get how people find it funny that they kept taking every single thing so seriously that they have to fight it out and face it off in a dramatic fantasy setting, but honestly… after 30+ episodes of the exact same concept, it started becoming incredibly tedious to me. At some point I found myself letting the episodes play out without really paying attention to them anymore, just so I could move on with the series and get it over with. To me, it just distracted from the part that I was most interested in, which was the meaning behind it all, if there was any.
To put it short, some sequences simply lasted way too long. Some points could’ve been made within a minute. Some sequences could’ve been finalized within two minutes. There were so many cases in which a single sequence – in which basically nothing happened – continued for at least three minutes straight and it just felt like they were filling screentime. For example, a scene of two people bickering back and forth about something without ever reaching a conclusion. Or a scene in which someone is daydreaming about someone else, and just sits by themselves acting all giddy, without the daydream actually leading somewhere.
To give some concrete examples, for both ‘real life’ and fantasy sequences:
There is a scene in which Mu Xi is playing loud music in her room just to bother Dan Yi who is trying to study downstairs. The sequence is really just going back and forth between Mu Xi dancing in her room and Dan Yi looking annoyed. There’s no development in the scene, it doesn’t end in any way, Dan Yi doesn’t even go upstairs to ask her to turn it down or something, it’s really just three full minutes of making the point that Mu Xi is doing that to annoy Dan Yi and it really didn’t need three whole minutes to play out.
There is another scene in which Huang Yi finds out he got 80 points in a test and he’s so excited about it that he has to go and show it to every single classmate and boast about it to them. It’s followed by sequences of each several minutes long in which he goes to bother several different people about the fact that the got 80 points on a test. I mean, if they could’ve at least made an interesting conversation about it, fine. But it was literally just him going on and on about it, while the other person wasn’t even paying attention. In the end, of course, it turns out his test got switched up with someone else’s and the joke’s on him. But again, it really didn’t deserve that much screentime. They just dragged out the joke for too long while you already saw the twist/punchline coming, and when it finally came, it just wasn’t funny anymore.
There was an entire episode about the committee playing a phone app game because they’d received a complaint of a classmate whose girlfriend had dumped him because he was so obsessed with that game. In my opinion, they could’ve skipped over the entire sequence. They could’ve shown them go ‘okay, let’s check this game out for ourselves’ and immediately skip to ‘xxx hours later’ and then them getting to the point of what they’d learned from it. Now they went through the entire game, only to come to conclusion, ‘oh yeah, it was pretty fun actually’. Like, what was the point? The point was only made when the classmate saw that Xin Yi had gotten as obsessed with it as he had, and that’s what made him realize how he’d treated his girlfriend. The whole story of what they did when they were in the game was not interesting to me at all. Same went for the episode in which they played the werewolf game, or the military-style laser game. It just took too long to make a point, and then ended up not making a point at all.
In cases where the fantasy world sequences were used to make a point, they went a long way around to actually make that point. For example, they showed this whole fantasy story which ended in Xin Yi obtaining some magic pen that gave her power over everyone until Mu Xi managed to break it, and it turned out to be a story that Mu Xi made up about how her pen got broken. The pen itself wasn’t even introduced until the latter half of the fantasy sequence, there was a whole part before it came to the actual pen, so it just became really far-fetched in my opinion.
In some cases, an episode would have one main story and it would get interrupted by several short in-between skits of classmates doing something. I guess it was to keep giving everyone equal screentime or something, to always show what everyone was up to in their free time, but some of these in-between skits really didn’t have a point either and also just felt like screentime fillers. I mean, what was up with Ke Er playing Red Light Green Light in the middle of the street with classmates who weren’t even participating in the game?
My point is that most events and sequences were dragged out way too long, to the point of just not even being funny anymore. The scenes that were funny were also predictable as heck, and that in turn took the fun out of it in many cases. Like, the hiccup scene was relatively funny in itself, but it wasn’t original. I’ve seen this exact scene in Azumanga Daioh, in which they try to get rid of someone’s hiccups, and in the end the hiccups just move on to someone else. Like, they created all these extensive sequences, but they didn’t make them original. I rarely laughed out loud, I found myself chuckling at most at some scenes, but everything was just so over the top ‘trying to be funny’ that it stopped being funny to me. As I mentioned before in the character introductions, the two brothers really weren’t that funny to me. At times I even got a bit annoyed with them, because they were also kind of perverted and the scene where they went and kissed a random girl on the street as a joke, call me sour, but I really didn’t think that was funny. It was just a bunch of teenagers acting like kids, the fantasy sequences were written and acted out as if a group of children had made up a play, and it was pretty bad in my opinion.
The overall structure was really incoherent, like there would be this whole fantasy sequence without context that had me like, ‘what the heck is going on this time’, and then afterwards, in the real world, it would be revealed that it was another story Mu Xi made up about something really trivial, like her pen breaking. That could’ve been done way better.

All in all, the show looked pretty low-budget and the editing and the writing seemed really lazy at times. The only thing I liked better about the second season was that it at least revealed a little bit more about the main characters and in the final three episodes, they finally added some serious acting. The final three episodes proved to me that there was still some promise in this show, because then it suddenly became all about Dan Yi and Mu Xi, no more fantasy worlds. Even though the scene where they get caught by those security guards at the amusement park started off as another lengthy bickering scene between the two men, I did like that they turned it into a scene where Dan Yi and Mu Xi indirectly expressed their feelings towards each other while giving advice to the two guards, and it was also nice that Mu Xi looked back at those men as they were walking away and briefly saw them as her imaginary dino and horse friends. That was the first time I really felt like those imaginary friends played a part in her maturing. Only in the final three episodes did I get the feeling that there had been some development in the relationship between Dan Yi and Mu Xi. Apart from that, there were some sparse good shots that made me go ‘wow, that’s actually kind of nice’. There’s this scene in which Xiao Dong puts on a whole performance for a girl just to turn down her confession, and then when it’s done and everyone around him starts breaking down the set, Xiao Dong is left standing still in the middle of it, his face dropping and you just feel his pressure of being an idol and succumbing to situations like this to fend people off, and that I actually found a pretty powerful shot. So there were little gems like that hidden in-between, but all in all the fantasy sequences just dragged out too long for me, it took too long to get to the point and then basically everything was wrapped up in the final three episodes. Despite the fact that I found it refreshing that this wasn’t a love story at first, at some point I did find myself starting to long for a romance aspect in the story, because then at least something exciting would be happening.
Even the scene in which Mu Xi reveals her backstory was kind of an anti-climax for me. She helps Xiao Dong out with some acting lessons (which she excels at and he doesn’t) and then suddenly she starts telling this story and at first it didn’t even occur to me that she was telling her own life story. I just thought it was another rehearsing script that they were practicing with. It happened in a sequence of ‘acting exercises’, so they really made it seem like it was another one of those. I’d expected her story to be revealed in a more serious context, but now I was just like, oh, okay, I guess this is it? It was just weird how they occasionally put in some deeper layers of the story in a real curt and casual way. It was the same with that bit about how Mu Xi started creating that fantasy world in her mind. That bit lasted like 5 seconds and then it was done and I was like, ‘wait, go back to that!! That’s what I’m interested in!!’ So yeah, in my opinion, they gave too much screentime to filler stuff, and too little screentime to more important stuff, or at least stuff that I was interested in. The final three episodes got me really interested, and I just wished the rest of it could’ve been as engaging as those last episodes.

There was also the thing with Dan Yi’s grandmother (played by Zheng Kai Nan). I actually thought she was a bit annoying in the beginning, but she ended up being kind of a parallel to Mu Xi, they were quite alike in their playfulness and mischief. It was sad that she passed away at the end of the series (I’m still not sure about her illness because apart from her dementia I didn’t really get how exactly she was ‘sick’ enough to die), but I do like to think that she played a part in Mu Xi’s awareness of life and death. The only thing I couldn’t help but frown at was the fact that they couldn’t even get the woman a proper wig, you literally saw her real hair coming out underneath, so that again was a bit sloppy.

I really liked Mu Xi’s older brother, by the way. I sympathized with his character because he was basically forced to become Mu Xi’s parent after their parents fell away and he probably also didn’t fully know how to go about that, so he just made sure she was happy, loved and fed properly. It was clear that he also struggled sometimes with the fact that Mu Xi refused to grow up, and in that Dan Yi was probably more strict to her than he was, but he still remained to be such a supportive loving brother to her, he never tried to actively change her. I liked when he came to talk to Mu Xi in her classroom about Dan Yi leaving Class 10, he was just a really nice guy. I wasn’t completely sure what kind of work he was doing though, so maybe I missed that, but I guess something with story writing? But then they could’ve also made that come across as a bit more professional, because he kept getting stuck at writing stories starting with ‘Once upon a time’… like, a little bit more inspiration from the writers here? Anyways, it was nice to see Mu Xi at least didn’t have any real sadness back at home, her brother was the most important person to her and she tried to do something back for him on several occasions, so that was nice.

I think I’m forgetting a lot of details about specific arcs, but I guess I have managed to put down my main thoughts on this show. So now I’m gonna go on the cast comments! The nice thing was that I knew almost no one in this cast. Sometimes it’s nice to have a clean slate of actors to give feedback on without referring to other stuff I’ve seen them in.

First of all, Eleanor Lee, or Li Kai Xin. I read that she’s actually Singaporean! I have to say that I did like her acting, she really surprised me at times. Even for a character like Mu Xi, who was very childish and immature, she didn’t get on my nerves per se. I think she acted out the layer behind it pretty well. You could see how sometimes stuff ate her up inside, and then she just masked it by acting like she always did. The few serious scenes she had were really good and those made me think that she is in fact a pretty good actress. I’d have to see more of her, but I did like her as the main lead in this show. Apparently this was one of her first drama acting roles, so maybe I’ll see her again in another more recent Chinese drama! I’d like to see her in a role that’s more serious, because I definitely saw that she had some good acting skills in her more serious scenes. But I have to admit that even in her ‘childish’ scenes as Mu Xi, she never took it too far and made it unbearably cringy or anything. I think she balanced it pretty well, and at some point it really did make me feel like it was okay for her to just stay as she was. It’s okay to remain a kid at heart, even as you grow up.

Huang Jun Jie’s performance made a really nice contrast to Eleanor Lee’s. I think they made a good team. I thought it was sweet that he felt like he needed to guide Mu Xi after he almost abandoned her as a kid, although sometimes I also found myself going ‘why do you even still bother with it, dude, just let her be a kid, it shouldn’t be your responsibility to change her’. I think he did a really good job in pretending to be the strict teacher to her while actually he was just really concerned about her becoming able to fend for herself as an adult. The scenes in which you could see how much he cared for her, and he’d just be smiling in the background while watching her, those were really sweet. When she prepared a birthday cake for him and the positive surprise just beamed off his face… You could tell that he never intended to hurt her in any way, and it was also development on his part to decide to step away, to realize that maybe his constant presence was what kept making her act like that, because she felt like she always had to compete with him. And then when they were arguing at the amusement park and he was like ‘nothing about you is trifle to me’ I was like 👁👄👁 and also when he called her ‘his boss’ and even leaned in… 👁👄👁 Like, even I was getting my hopes up a bit, haha! And then the final scene between them on the beach, when they asked each other if they were happy, and they both said ‘yes’. Like, it was scenes like these that kept me engaged in their relationship. Also, I thought it was a real funny twist to make him tone deaf, I definitely didn’t see that coming. I liked his performance. Also, his smile reminded me of Miura Haruma (T^T).

I guess Lu Yan Qi is the only cast member I’ve seen in a drama before, she was in Love O2O, (although I don’t remember her character🥲). Anyways, I recognized her. I had kind of hoped that there would be more to her character, with the whole introduction where Mu Xi had to persuade her to come to school at first. I’m not even sure why she didn’t want to come to school other than that she just didn’t feel like it, and even as a classmate she didn’t seem to have many exceptional personality traits. She actually seemed a bit one-dimensional to me, as her sole purpose seemed to be being Xiao Dong’s fan. I did like her in the part where she had a small fight with Mu Xi and immediately felt like she had to go apologize, but otherwise she didn’t really seem like someone who’d put a lot of emotional effort in friendships. But I guess that also made her a typical teenager, haha.

I really feel like they did Dai Jing Yao a little dirty as an idol in this show. I would’ve liked to see him do some singing and dancing, to see his actual skills rather than that it was dubbed over by some random track that just busted the show’s lazy editing. Now it was just him continuously saying that he’s an idol and making it look like he played every instrument there was, but there wasn’t any ‘real evidence’, while I feel like it would’ve cost them less if they’d just let him sing a song. If there was anything that this show needed, it was authenticity, and he could’ve brought more of that. Luckily for him I see that he’s gotten more acting roles in dramas after this, so who knows when I might spot him again, I’m curious to see how he’s grown since this show.

I really liked Deng Yu Li’s performance because she showed, in my opinion, the most versatility out of everyone. Her character in ‘real life’ was kind of rigid, but her sweet side came out when she fell for Dan Yi. In her own fantasies and in Mu Xi’s, she also showed sides that we didn’t get to see from her ‘real’ character, so that was nice. Her fantasy sequences with Dan Yi were the only ones that made me laugh because she really went for it! As I’ve mentioned in other reviews before, it works best when the character isn’t trying to be funny, and that’s exactly what she did. She was really in the moment, and when she then suddenly acted really out of character (for example when they all played that phone app game and she became obsessed with it), it was extra funny because it was so unexpected. I think she gave a really genuine performance, I liked her versatility and she’s so pretty, too! I’d love to see more from her.

Ge Qiu Gu reminded me a little of Nam Da Reum, appearance-wise. I see he’s in about 5 new upcoming dramas! He’s doing well for himself! Despite being the older brother of the two, there really wasn’t that much difference between him and his younger brother, haha. They were quite the troublemaking bunch! I thought the idea of having a comic duo like that was nice, and I definitely saw some good acting from him in serious scenes, but I still thought the brothers were a bit over the top in their slapstick acting. It was just really clear that they were trying to be funny, and that’s what made it less effective on me.
Same went for Gao Kai, I totally got the whole concept of their characters, but I found myself occasionally annoyed by their pranks because I just didn’t find them funny 🥲. But anyways, they were a loyal duo and it was nice to see that they really respected Mu Xi for who she was and didn’t want her to change.

Jin Di is so cute and bubbly! Shen Wei was one of the most anime-like characters, with her astrology quirk. I liked that at least she had something that she could always fall back on, not just talking about being an astrology geek, but always having new ways in which she could use that in scenes. I liked that she was that kind of friend who’d always be smiling at everyone, but she definitely knew what was up more than she let on. I thought it was cute that the Huang brothers had a little crush on her, haha. She was one of the more established characters, that was nice to see.

I can’t help but feel like they also did Ke Er a bit dirty. I really liked Zuo Yi Fan in the beginning, I thought she’d be a really cool character, but they put her in a lot of scenes where her character didn’t really come out well. I see that she’s also one of the few actors from this series who hasn’t done that much since this one, which is a shame. I thought her character had a lot of potential, but they only showed off her artistic skills that one time with the blackboard art competition, and after that she suddenly turned into a rock and roll fanatic (?) but again only in words and gestures. It was like they were trying to come up with something new for her character, and then just left it at her occasionally saying ‘I like rock and roll!🤘’ and only proving that by having her sing ‘We Will Rock You’ one time at the singing competition. It just felt a bit lame and I would’ve liked to see her get more action when it came to her artistic qualities. Ke Er deserved better!

I thought Guo Jia Ren was so handsome in this! Like even when he was that loner in class, I couldn’t help but notice that jawline?! Haha, sorry, but I liked that they added him in, even if it was a bit later. I’d almost forgotten about him, I remember he was shown in that introductory one-take in the first episode as he was reciting a poem. Anyways, I liked that at least he got a bit of backstory with his dad, and that they made amends after his dad found out about his good grades and stopped criticizing him so much. I was actually a little interested in his character, I would’ve liked to get a bit more info on him. Anyways.

My favorite girl Zhang Lin Yue! Honestly, Li Yao was my fave. I really liked what she did with the character, she fit the image so perfectly. It was cute to see how she was trying to be cute towards Cheng Ling but it just kept coming out so harshly. I like a layer (if that wasn’t already obvious, lol) and she was one of the few characters that really interested me. I really liked her.

Wang Shu Yi really made an adorable Cheng Ling. I felt so bad for him in the beginning, as he was introduced as that typical timid kid who couldn’t stand up for himself, but after joining the tracking team he became so easygoing! I would’ve loved for him and Li Yao to become an actual couple, I think they were so cute together. Him being one of the few people who could see through her tough mask and catching her off guard really gave them OTP vibes. I liked him.

So yeah, I get where this show was coming from and I get what was probably the idea of it, but I think the way they went about constructing it was pretty sloppy. There were some instances that made it clear what they were going for, and you could definitely see Mu Xi learn from her experiences and become more mature in her own way throughout everything that happened, and not always necessarily because of Dan Yi’s influence. But the way they filled it in was just too tedious. I honestly didn’t feel like they needed two seasons of 18 episodes to construct the message of this story. It could’ve all been so much more to the point. The lengthy fantasy sequences often made me lose sight of what the whole story was about. I had kind of hoped that there would be less of it in the second season, and though it did start out that way, they came back in full power in the middle and that’s when I started paying less attention to it. I didn’t skip anything, I didn’t fastforward through anything, but I did hover over the procession bar many times to check how long a scene would last because I was getting impatient.
I usually like it when a drama series is a bit like an anime, and this is the case with many Chinese dramas in particular. In terms of characters and in terms of skits, I think that if this had been an anime, it would’ve probably been more fun to watch, but now that it was people trying to act like anime-like characters, it became a bit too slapstick for me. Sometimes people were just trying too hard and it took away the fun element for me.
Despite my criticisms, I do wish to end this review on a positive note. I thought the concept of the story was nice, about a girl with a wild imagination navigating through school life, supported by a childhood friend who wants to make sure she turns out alright. Mu Xi is a very admirable character, because she doesn’t care about what other people think of her behavior. Sure, she acts like a spoiled brat sometimes, but it’s not that she’s not aware of what happens around her. She just has a different learning pace, and that should be okay. It was nice seeing a character sticking to her own pace, not succumbing to the expectations of other people. The whole idea of this girl growing in her own way while gathering a group of friends and deepening their bonds was really nice. Honestly, if the fantasy sequences had been less tedious and a bit more coherent, I would’ve enjoyed watching them frolic around in that Fantasy Kingdom, as long as it led somewhere and added to the meaning of the story. The characters were all interesting in their own way, and all had the potential of gaining their own respective stories. I would’ve liked it if they’d given more backstories to all the characters rather than creating far-fetched fantasy stories that didn’t mean anything in the end, they could’ve used the screentime, those 36 episodes, for much more to-the-point narrative building. But anyways, I don’t want to be too sour, it was still a light and comic watch and I understand why some people love the simplicity and pureness of it. It definitely held some lessons.

But I can’t deny that I’m very excited to now move on with my list, haha. I want to keep switching it up more between Korean, Japanese and Chinese dramas, so look forward to some more variety in area and language! I will be back with my next review soon, I think. Until then!

Bye-bee!