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Quarantine Drama Reviews, Really Excellent Edition — Find Yourself
Find Yourself
This is a contemporary romantic drama about a “leftover” woman — a 32-year old woman who has never been in a relationship (never been kissed, etc.), whose parents are trying not to pressure her (but who are very obviously anxious that she be married and whose anxiety leaks through) but who is strongly feeling the pressure from society to settle for a guy that is okay, and settle down and get married. The common consensus is that she is too old to dream about things like love, while she is very much a romantic at heart and is still waiting for true love.
When her college almost-boyfriend who she had a "if we're not married by XXX, let's get together" pact with (who her twin brother refers to as her last chance at true love) shows up married, she is disheartened but never fear! Very shortly thereafter, she ends up in a love triangle between a 22-year old intern at her company and a 37-year-old CEO she keeps running into.
(Her endgame OTP is the 22-year-old intern.)
The rest of this review is going under a spoiler cut because even though the ending (they end up together!) is obvious given the genre, the way everything comes up about is very cleverly done.
I'm not sure I can be entirely objective about this drama because (1) I relate very strongly to the heroine and where she is in life when the drama begins, (2) I think the male lead is very attractive and (3) I would very much like to be in a love triangle with a 22-year-old intern and a 37-year-old CEO.
All joking aside, I'm not the only one who loved this drama! I think this drama was super popular in China because setting aside the inherent romantic storyline, the show sets up a lot of landmines that it trips to beautiful effect throughout the drama -- I'm talking about each and every one of the dramatic reveals, of course! I've done multiple "selective rewatches" of this show since I finished it, where I go through and skip ahead to exciting scenes, and I make sure to watch the reveals each time.
(The birthday party if of course the VERY best reveal, just a full 20 minutes of dramatic revelations and awkward conversations and Yuan Song's incredibly oblivious dad.)
I also like the way the drama tried to take absurd, OTT drama scenarios and inject some realism / practicality into it. Whenever there are secret relationship hijinks that are hilarious to the viewer, it's followed by a fight between the main couple about the need to keep the relationship secret in the first place.
There are things that I didn't like about this drama, of course.
Overall, I absolutely adored this drama so much.
To give you a non-spoilery sense of how much I loved this:
Final Verdict: Would Recommend (Again: would STRONGLY recommend)
This is a contemporary romantic drama about a “leftover” woman — a 32-year old woman who has never been in a relationship (never been kissed, etc.), whose parents are trying not to pressure her (but who are very obviously anxious that she be married and whose anxiety leaks through) but who is strongly feeling the pressure from society to settle for a guy that is okay, and settle down and get married. The common consensus is that she is too old to dream about things like love, while she is very much a romantic at heart and is still waiting for true love.
When her college almost-boyfriend who she had a "if we're not married by XXX, let's get together" pact with (who her twin brother refers to as her last chance at true love) shows up married, she is disheartened but never fear! Very shortly thereafter, she ends up in a love triangle between a 22-year old intern at her company and a 37-year-old CEO she keeps running into.
(Her endgame OTP is the 22-year-old intern.)
The rest of this review is going under a spoiler cut because even though the ending (they end up together!) is obvious given the genre, the way everything comes up about is very cleverly done.
I'm not sure I can be entirely objective about this drama because (1) I relate very strongly to the heroine and where she is in life when the drama begins, (2) I think the male lead is very attractive and (3) I would very much like to be in a love triangle with a 22-year-old intern and a 37-year-old CEO.
All joking aside, I'm not the only one who loved this drama! I think this drama was super popular in China because setting aside the inherent romantic storyline, the show sets up a lot of landmines that it trips to beautiful effect throughout the drama -- I'm talking about each and every one of the dramatic reveals, of course! I've done multiple "selective rewatches" of this show since I finished it, where I go through and skip ahead to exciting scenes, and I make sure to watch the reveals each time.
(The birthday party if of course the VERY best reveal, just a full 20 minutes of dramatic revelations and awkward conversations and Yuan Song's incredibly oblivious dad.)
I also like the way the drama tried to take absurd, OTT drama scenarios and inject some realism / practicality into it. Whenever there are secret relationship hijinks that are hilarious to the viewer, it's followed by a fight between the main couple about the need to keep the relationship secret in the first place.
There are things that I didn't like about this drama, of course.
- I SUPER didn't like the relationship between her twin and his student. I appreciated it for the hilarious hijinks that resulted from that enmeshment but I generally don't like teacher/student relationships and even though I don't think they started their relationship until after she was not in his class (and he decided to transfer schools to avoid the situation coming up again) this one still didn't work for me.
- I was sad that Yuan Song and He Fanxing spend most of the drama broken up instead of together, even though they do have some lovely pining and lovely UST-filled scenes and I did appreciate that the show seemed to convey how their interactions softened a little when there weren't relationship-driven stresses in the play (I'm thinking mainly about the scene where he peels the orange for her and it was very domestic and even their co-worker noticed). But I wanted more happy relationship moments!
- I hated the guts of the secondary male lead. I know lots of people liked him, and he did nice things for the female lead, sure, but I just could not get over the fact that he was secretly sabotaging their relationship under the guise of friendship. It just seemed very underhanded. I had NO sympathy for him when he finds her notebook. I mean -- he basically used societal pressure to pressure her into dating him! She had to plan all these activities to try to force herself to have feelings for him because she was trying so hard to just settle, and really, he knew all of that going into the relationship. So. NO SYMPATHY.
Overall, I absolutely adored this drama so much.
To give you a non-spoilery sense of how much I loved this:
- When watching, I got a little antsy about waiting for the other shoe to drop re: certain plotlines so halfway through, I skipped ahead and watched the last 2 episodes and yet when I went back to fill in the episodes I missed, I still got obsessed and stayed up until 4am watching, multiple nights in a row, even though I knew exactly what was going to happen.
- Upon finishing the drama, I immediately went to AO3 and read all the fic for this show (other than the super-long AU fics because I didn't see the point in AUs for this show), which granted is what I do for many things and it's not like there are a lot of fics for this show in the first place but the point to note is that all the fics for this show on AO3 are in Chinese. So yes, I read Chinese fics for this show because I wanted more just that much. (In case you were wondering, other than the two super-long AUs that I skipped, every single one of the fics on this show are PWP, which I think is because the Chinese government censors explicit fics on Chinese sites? There were definitely fics where they posted only the chapters with sex to AO3 and there were non-sex plot-chapters where you would have to go to a different site/app to find, which I did not do because that seemed like a lot of work.)
Final Verdict: Would Recommend (Again: would STRONGLY recommend)