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Reviews
Cheng Xu Yuan Na Me Ke Ai (2021)
Great innocent show
We found this series by happy accident. It was the first Chinese series we have seen and it was excellent, very much a 'page-turner' as it were, especially the chase (no spoilers here). Both leads were very well acted. Some of the love challengers were a little stressful to watch as is common with these kinds of shows, I suppose it goes to show how well the female lead won your loyalty. The support characters were diverse and funny and the ending nicely gratifying.
One of the most wholesome things about Cute Programmer was that it was a romantic series which wasn't filled with coarse language and certain kinds of visuals. This cleared the way for other aspects to come to the fore.
Love Hard (2021)
Some good acting, but overall was ruined by the rubbish storyline. Pointless swearing and poor jokes didn't help.
The supposed character arc of the female lead is one of facile shallowness to seeing people for who they are. The problem is that "who the eventual love interest is" is a disingenuous liar, a deceiver, an all-round terrible romantic choice. Ok, put aside the aesthetics which is enough to make the story uncredible, still you are left with ugliness. This is really quite unsatisfying and unbelievable.
The reaction of the hot guy at the grand revelatory speech was confusing as well. From the story I understood he was a man who actually cared about what was real, chiding his friends for mocking freak karaoke girl's appearance, engaging in activities with real, not apparent, danger. Yet the reaction of his to the revelation that hot girl can't really climb rocks--despite her clearly having put this on because she was really into him--wasn't one of recognizing the situation for what it was (or even being flattered) but of childish anger. At the end of the day, what she did wasn't terrible, wasn't her idea, and even had aspects of kindness about it (any negative effects are properly the responsibility of ugly guy), yet there was no inquisitiveness on hot guy's part despite this being the most natural and expected reaction. The reason is that the writers wanted their lame round-off and had to force it.
And, of course, rewriting the Christmas song was cringe-inducing, had to skip it to save my brew.
So the unattractive liar gets the hot girl, the hot girl goes from loving beauty to loving ugliness, and the caring hot guy goes from perfection to loser. The writers might want to skim over Poetics once more before trying again.
"In respect of Character there are four things to be aimed at. First, and most important, the character must be good."