What Dramas Did I Finish This Week?

Hello and welcome back! These are the dramas I finished this week. If you're interested in previous reviews, click here and if you want to see a list of my Favorite Asian OTPs and Ships, click here!

KDRAMA

FINISHED My Holo Love (12/12): “Me Alone and You” is about the events that occur when a lonely woman meets the artificially intelligent “Holo.” The drama is filled with stories of heartbreaking loneliness and tear-stained love. Go Nan Do is the owner of an IT research company. As a genius inventor, he started the company, and all projects were created through his hands. However, the only people who are aware of his existence are his stepsister and the official CEO. He was a hacker in a major case 10 years ago and supposedly died while being pursued. Han So Yeon is an assistant manager at a glasses company. Whether it is working on brand marketing or the logistics of the launching party for the company’s flagship store, she shoulders on her work and stays ahead of the industry’s trends. She meticulously takes care of her clients and her work. However, when it comes to her personal life, she keeps her distance as she suffers from prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize faces.

I was watching this cdrama called Love Crossed in which a girl falls in love with a guy who's the model for a dating sim that the world is obsessed with and though I liked the concept for that show, the execution was spotty from disliking the female lead to not being a fan of the writing. Looking for something similar but with better writing I stumbled onto this show. I had heard about it when it first aired but I never watched it cause I'm really not a fan of stories in which people fall in love with AIs or robots or anything in that genre so I tend to skip shows like these all the time unless it's something like I'm Not A Robot in which a girl was acting like a robot. This time I was able to read spoilers and find out that the love story actually isn't between the female lead and an AI but the AI's inventor and that was enough to sell me. Having said that there was still a huge chunk of this show that irritated me (as in too much time spent on the "love triangle") but I did like the ending and I liked that the love So Yeon felt was actually a misunderstanding cause every moment she thought she shared with Holo was actually with Nan Do. I also really liked the second couple cause I'm always a fan of the bad boy falling for the good girl trope. In the end this was a fairly passable show but if you're a fan of the genre it could be fun! 7 / 10

FINISHED The One And Only (16/16): When Pyo In Sook was a child, her parents abandoned her with her grandmother who raised her. Her life has never been easy or comfortable. She now works at a public bathhouse scrubbing customer's bodies. Her defense mechanism is to not express her feelings to other people. One day, a doctor tells her she has a terminal illness and will die soon. Even coming face-to-face with her own mortality, In Sook remains emotionless. She begins receiving care at a hospice and meets two women with lives very different from her own: Seong Mi Do, a social media influencer, and Kang Se Yeon, an ordinary housewife who feels lonely and taken for granted. One rainy day, In Sook meets Min Woo Cheon, a contract killer who works at a private detective office. Woo Cheon's cool exterior masks a deep sadness. Each of the three women decides to end the life of one person who has done them wrong before they die, but in becoming friends, their anger begins to subside. When In Sook and Woo Cheon develop feelings for each other, though, she begins to rethink her plans.

This show is hands down the example of a show that was fascinating in concept and started out so strongly only to fall apart about halfway through and limp slowly to the end. For so much of my viewing experience I was so hesitant to say that I was disappointed cause I so badly wanted to adore this show but now that it was ended I can see more clearly. The best thing about this show was the relationship between In Sook and Woo Cheon because my oh my the actors had chemistry! Like I know they basically fell in love at first sight but guys they were so cute! I'm such a sucker for two trauma babies who find comfort in one another like in Come And Hug Me and Just Between Lovers and seriously they were the only reason that I bothered to finish this show. It felt like so much of the show was spent watching the same scenes over and over again. Like we knew the answer to the murder mystery almost halfway through the show and yet we had to struggle to watch one cop figure out the truth! And let's not even talk about how annoying and inconsistent all the other characters were. In one world I would be fascinated by Mi Do and Ji Pyo's romance and the fact that he was clearly a sociopath who managed to find a version of love (I mean we can't exactly judge since Woo Cheon was a hired killer) but here we had Mi Do go from In Sook's biggest fan to wanting her to take the fall over and over again and the romance was mostly just there to give her something to do. By the time the finale came around I was mostly just glad that it was over! 7 / 10

FINISHED User Not Found (22/22): A romance drama about two female high school students who happen to share the same name. When they both transfer to a new school at the same time, hoping to use the opportunity to turn their lives around, they forge a secret contract to swap identities. Shin Yi Joon is the most popular student at his high school. Although he seems tough and aloof on the outside, Shin Yi Joon is actually a huge softie on the inside—and far from getting into fights with other students, he even has a hard time saying no to other people.

Tbh I don't really have much to say about this show cause no one is more surprised I finished this hot mess of a show than myself! I have a soft spot for web series and that's why I started this but it was nowhere as good as any of the other web dramas I've watched which includes those that are also set in high school. The concept for this show isn't terrible and I've definitely watched a ton of these types of shows but I think I'm just not a fan of shows where the main couple aren't both in on a secret. I think that's honestly why I never watched School 2015 cause I know that I'd 100% get SLS given that the second lead is the one to help the female lead with her secrets. I like my main couples to be a team and when that doesn't happen I'm not that into them which is the case here. Like setting aside the fact that Yi Joon's actor couldn't act to save his life, I felt like the romance was so subdued and honestly it went from 0 to 100 in two seconds flat. Like one minute they both thought the other liked someone else and the next they're all but confessing to each other! If I did have a positive though I guess I'd say that I really liked the friendship between the two Min Jae's. 6 / 10

CDRAMA

FINISHED Love Scenery (31/31): Liang Chen is devoted to bringing good music works to the listeners, expressing the idea of being kind, real, and perfect. Lu Jing loves computer and big data research. He is highly recognized in the academic field through studying complicated human behavior and psychology, thus influencing the classmates around by his solid specialty literacy. They are strangers first but then brought together by big data and they become closer in the journey of pursuing dreams.

As you can see I've really been on a streak recently in binging dramas on my to be watched list and the next one up was this show! I'm a pretty big fan of gaming dramas even if I'm not a gamer myself cause there's just something so interesting about the esports world especially as it's depicted in cdramas. To my disappointment though this show actually wasn't about professional gaming and actually ended up reminding me a lot more of a mix between Love O2O and You Are My Glory though I don't think it was anywhere as good as You Are My Glory. If I'm honest this show was kinda a hot mess which is unfortunate cause it started out so strong! I thought our leads had intense chemistry and my favorite scene to this day is still the dance the two shared at the masquerade party but the show really squandered it with the writing. I really am not a fan of female leads who act like shrinking violets when they're in relationships but I also don't like female leads who are too scared to stand up for themselves. I hated every scene we had with the second male lead and I could not understand why Liang Chen didn't tell him to shove off ages ago! It also doesn't help that the gaming aspect was super weird cause the show treated it more like the characters were really in the game rather than just playing but I guess since that was the only interaction the leads had for the first third of the show that it had to be more cutesy than realistic. Speaking of it made so sense that the reveal was dragged out for so long and I prefer the You Are My Glory version where the leads figured out who each other were almost immediately. All in all this show isn't bad but if you wanna watch a show with a celebrity and the gamer guy who teaches her to game then I'd recommend You Are My Glory instead tbh.  7 / 10

xoxo Allie

What Dramas Did I Finish This Week?

Hello and welcome back! These are the dramas I finished this week. If you're interested in previous reviews, click here and if you want to see a list of my Favorite Asian OTPs and Ships, click here!

KDRAMA

FINISHED My Holo Love (12/12): “Me Alone and You” is about the events that occur when a lonely woman meets the artificially intelligent “Holo.” The drama is filled with stories of heartbreaking loneliness and tear-stained love. Go Nan Do is the owner of an IT research company. As a genius inventor, he started the company, and all projects were created through his hands. However, the only people who are aware of his existence are his stepsister and the official CEO. He was a hacker in a major case 10 years ago and supposedly died while being pursued. Han So Yeon is an assistant manager at a glasses company. Whether it is working on brand marketing or the logistics of the launching party for the company’s flagship store, she shoulders on her work and stays ahead of the industry’s trends. She meticulously takes care of her clients and her work. However, when it comes to her personal life, she keeps her distance as she suffers from prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize faces.

I was watching this cdrama called Love Crossed in which a girl falls in love with a guy who's the model for a dating sim that the world is obsessed with and though I liked the concept for that show, the execution was spotty from disliking the female lead to not being a fan of the writing. Looking for something similar but with better writing I stumbled onto this show. I had heard about it when it first aired but I never watched it cause I'm really not a fan of stories in which people fall in love with AIs or robots or anything in that genre so I tend to skip shows like these all the time unless it's something like I'm Not A Robot in which a girl was acting like a robot. This time I was able to read spoilers and find out that the love story actually isn't between the female lead and an AI but the AI's inventor and that was enough to sell me. Having said that there was still a huge chunk of this show that irritated me (as in too much time spent on the "love triangle") but I did like the ending and I liked that the love So Yeon felt was actually a misunderstanding cause every moment she thought she shared with Holo was actually with Nan Do. I also really liked the second couple cause I'm always a fan of the bad boy falling for the good girl trope. In the end this was a fairly passable show but if you're a fan of the genre it could be fun! 7 / 10

FINISHED The One And Only (16/16): When Pyo In Sook was a child, her parents abandoned her with her grandmother who raised her. Her life has never been easy or comfortable. She now works at a public bathhouse scrubbing customer's bodies. Her defense mechanism is to not express her feelings to other people. One day, a doctor tells her she has a terminal illness and will die soon. Even coming face-to-face with her own mortality, In Sook remains emotionless. She begins receiving care at a hospice and meets two women with lives very different from her own: Seong Mi Do, a social media influencer, and Kang Se Yeon, an ordinary housewife who feels lonely and taken for granted. One rainy day, In Sook meets Min Woo Cheon, a contract killer who works at a private detective office. Woo Cheon's cool exterior masks a deep sadness. Each of the three women decides to end the life of one person who has done them wrong before they die, but in becoming friends, their anger begins to subside. When In Sook and Woo Cheon develop feelings for each other, though, she begins to rethink her plans.

This show is hands down the example of a show that was fascinating in concept and started out so strongly only to fall apart about halfway through and limp slowly to the end. For so much of my viewing experience I was so hesitant to say that I was disappointed cause I so badly wanted to adore this show but now that it was ended I can see more clearly. The best thing about this show was the relationship between In Sook and Woo Cheon because my oh my the actors had chemistry! Like I know they basically fell in love at first sight but guys they were so cute! I'm such a sucker for two trauma babies who find comfort in one another like in Come And Hug Me and Just Between Lovers and seriously they were the only reason that I bothered to finish this show. It felt like so much of the show was spent watching the same scenes over and over again. Like we knew the answer to the murder mystery almost halfway through the show and yet we had to struggle to watch one cop figure out the truth! And let's not even talk about how annoying and inconsistent all the other characters were. In one world I would be fascinated by Mi Do and Ji Pyo's romance and the fact that he was clearly a sociopath who managed to find a version of love (I mean we can't exactly judge since Woo Cheon was a hired killer) but here we had Mi Do go from In Sook's biggest fan to wanting her to take the fall over and over again and the romance was mostly just there to give her something to do. By the time the finale came around I was mostly just glad that it was over! 7 / 10

FINISHED User Not Found (22/22): A romance drama about two female high school students who happen to share the same name. When they both transfer to a new school at the same time, hoping to use the opportunity to turn their lives around, they forge a secret contract to swap identities. Shin Yi Joon is the most popular student at his high school. Although he seems tough and aloof on the outside, Shin Yi Joon is actually a huge softie on the inside—and far from getting into fights with other students, he even has a hard time saying no to other people.

Tbh I don't really have much to say about this show cause no one is more surprised I finished this hot mess of a show than myself! I have a soft spot for web series and that's why I started this but it was nowhere as good as any of the other web dramas I've watched which includes those that are also set in high school. The concept for this show isn't terrible and I've definitely watched a ton of these types of shows but I think I'm just not a fan of shows where the main couple aren't both in on a secret. I think that's honestly why I never watched School 2015 cause I know that I'd 100% get SLS given that the second lead is the one to help the female lead with her secrets. I like my main couples to be a team and when that doesn't happen I'm not that into them which is the case here. Like setting aside the fact that Yi Joon's actor couldn't act to save his life, I felt like the romance was so subdued and honestly it went from 0 to 100 in two seconds flat. Like one minute they both thought the other liked someone else and the next they're all but confessing to each other! If I did have a positive though I guess I'd say that I really liked the friendship between the two Min Jae's. 6 / 10

CDRAMA

FINISHED Reset (15/15): When Li Shi Qing awoke that fateful morning, she had no idea her life was about to change forever. Going about her day as usual, Shi Qing boarded the bus without ever giving her actions a second thought. But when the bus she was on was involved in a horrendous accident, Shi Qing had only seconds to realize that her life was about to end. Or was it? Waking up that very same morning, going through the exact same motions, boarding the same bus, and dying in the same accident, over and over again, Shi Qing soon realizes that she has become trapped in a never-ending time loop. Desperate to find a way to escape not only the loop but her tragic fate, Shi Qing inadvertently drags fellow bus passenger, Xiao He Yun, into the loop with her. Together they try to find a way to alter their fate, by ensuring the bus arrives safely at its destination but attempting to do so proves anything but easy.

Knowing that I'm obsessed with both time travel and mysteries means that I was really very excited to jump into watching this show when I first heard of it since it contains both plots. After having checked it out I have to say I'm kinda torn over how I felt about it. In actuality the story wasn't that bad but I think it's one that lends itself to be binged rather than watched weekly cause I found myself really immersed in the world when I binged a week's worth of episodes at a time but then losing interest when the next week started. Rinse and repeat. I also have to say that I didn't particularly understand why in the final loop the police didn't view our heroes as being sketchy when they did in every other loop and the idea that this wasn't the case here because it was the end of the show is a total cop-out! Having said all that I liked that we had two people in this loop rather than just Shi Qing like in most time travel stories. I liked that we followed them through their hunt for the truth and that we saw them screw up in new ways each time cause it kept things from getting too stale given that we're technically repeating the same day over and over. I also liked the way the mystery played out and I didn't even mind the subtle romance that bloomed so I guess I would recommend it if someone likes time travel mysteries but I don't think it'll ever be on the top of any of my lists. 8 / 10

FINISHED Shining For One Thing (24/24): Lin Bei Xing, an "experienced girl" who is about to enter her 30s, missed out on achieving her dream of love as her boyfriend, Zhan Yu, breaks the contract, and her life and work have become a mess. However, not sure if this is God playing tricks on her, Lin Bei Xing returned to the age of eighteen. The third year of high school is a nightmare, but Lin Bei Xing decided to retake the college entrance examination and get rid of Zhan Yu, to live anew for herself. However, Lin Bei Xing's sweet dream was dashed by a boy called Zhang Wan Sen. The accidental encounter of Zhang Wan Sen after the college entrance examination became the switch to end Lin Bei Xing's time and space journey.

I was fairly excited to check this drama out when I saw it appear on my drama feed this week cause it sounded very similar to Someday Or One Day and after having watched it I can conclude that it's definitely similar though I think I prefer Someday Or One Day in the end cause not only did that show have a better ending but there was so many less problems with it. I mean while both shows had somewhat vague endings, in that one at least there was a hint of a happy ending while here it was just bitter bitter bitter! I mean how can you force me to fall in love with Wansen and his relationship with Beixing only to be like actually he's still dead no matter what Beixing did in the parallel universes?? And let me stop you before you come at me with oh but at the last second we saw him appear with an umbrella cause dude that can't be real since it's not logical in the sense of the world so it was clearly done as a meta thing which means I will discount it. I also was so confused about so many random plot points. Like did Zhan Yu really dump Beixing for her friend? If that was the case then why was young Zhan Yu so into her? Like I kept waiting for some secret reason to come out regardless of whether it was the right choice for Zhan Yu to make like in Another Miss Oh but instead he's just there to be annoying here and there? What about Beixing's final loop and why she didn't go to the police from the start or tell her parents to stop her brother? In the end despite this show being a mixed bag and tbh there being plenty of better time travel shows out there I had enough fun with this show that I'd give it a 7.5 / 10!

FINISHED The Day Of Becoming You (26/26): The leader of a boyband and an entertainment reporter are forced into many outrageous situations after they switched bodies. Jiang Yi is a big star in the entertainment industry. He is the cold and distant leader of a popular boy band. In reality, he's simply not good at expressing himself ever since his parents divorced when he was young. Meanwhile, Yu Sheng Sheng has become an entertainment reporter who keeps running up against a stone wall at work. Their lives were not meant to intersect, but an accident results in the two exchanging bodies on their birthday which happens to fall on the same day. The sudden change catches them off guard and with only each other to turn to for support in the days and nights that followed, Jiang Yi and Yu Sheng Sheng gradually fall in love.

Okay look so I really meant to watch this show last year when it first aired but you know cdramas and their airing schedule! You miss premiere week and then it's like you've like missed half the show and at that point you might as well wait until the whole thing finishes to binge which is finally what I got around to doing this week. Tbh I think my hesitance had to do with the whole body swapping aspect of the show cause I've never been a fan of that trope so to no one's surprise that was my least favorite part of this show and I do think it's a bit of a copout to tell us that the entire story we watched was actually the plot of Sheng Sheng's novel cause then it feels like we fell in love with some other couple but in the end this show was cute as all hell so I'm not all that pissed. Sheng Sheng and Jiang Yi had so much intense chemistry and their acting was so incredibly done. My heart fluttered every time Jiang Yi looked at Sheng Sheng as if she was his whole world! I also really liked that despite the fact that were no real stakes in this show in terms of evil family members or second leads, it didn't feel like nothing was happening like in a lot of other modern cdramas I've watched or dropped recently like My Little Happiness and I wonder if that can be chalked up to the fact that the will they/won't they went on longer than in those other shows. Yes there were lots of tropes but your irritation with them will definitely depend on how cute you find the main couple cause obviously they're the reason you'd stick around. 9.5 / 10

xoxo Allie

What Dramas Did I Finish This Week?

Hello and welcome back! These are the dramas I finished this week. If you're interested in previous reviews, click here and if you want to see a list of my Favorite Asian OTPs and Ships, click here!

CDRAMA

FINISHED Nirvana In Fire 2 (50/50): Xiao Ping Zhang and Xiao Ping Jing are the talented sons of Xiao Ting Sheng, the Prince of Changlin and general of the Liang dynasty’s most powerful army. Ping Zhang is the eldest and heir of Changlin, while Ping Jing is carefree and receives teachings from the the master of Langya Hall in the jianghu. The Changlin Manor exists, first and foremost, for the people of Da Liang. They are greatly respected and trusted by the current and past emperor and they act with high integrity and loyalty to the country. However, there are those who worry that the Changlin Manor is gaining too much power and favour, and there are those with old grudges to repay. As such, shadowy plots battle once again with righteous conduct in this sequel, as familial ties, moral values, ambition, and coming of age themes take the protagonists through a tumultuous road to finding oneself.

After having finished the first season of this show last week I jumped right into checking out the second one. I know that most people didn't like this season as much as the first but on the whole I think it was just as good as the first but in a different way. I definitely cried more in this season than I did the first and I think it's cause the show made me fall in love with the Xiao family so much only to rip them away from me one by one until only Pingjing and his sister-in-law was left! On that note Pingjing was definitely my favorite character in this show cause we got to follow him through a huge chunk of his life and watch him go from this carefree troublemaker to somehow who shouldered the world's problems on his shoulders. I would not be the first person to point this out but Pingjing is basically who Lin Shu would have been like if his family wasn't destroyed so early on. I also loved that we saw a lot of descendents from season 1 and that unlike what most sequels do we saw that they all became good people. If I did have any complaints with this show it would be that I didn't particularly care for any of the villains this show gave us unlike those in season 1 but also that the ending was so bittersweet for me. I guess in a way I could understand why Pingjing left the capital and power to live a happy life with the woman he loved but I also couldn't help but feel like the villains won in the end because they did manage to strip Changlin of everything they had. Having said all that I'd still give this show a 9.5 / 10!

xoxo Allie