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Asp

chilling under the foliage

Asp

chilling under the foliage
Sweet First Love chinese drama review
Completed
Sweet First Love
5 people found this review helpful
by Asp
Jun 30, 2021
24 of 24 episodes seen
Completed
Overall 3.0
Story 3.0
Acting/Cast 8.0
Music 5.0
Rewatch Value 1.0
In this show you will encounter the following:

- male lead who has eyes only for the female lead,
- male lead written by men/women who hate relationships and normal human socialization,
- female lead written by men/women who hate women,
- villains that don't get any consequences for their malicious actions towards others,
- good side characters (who randomly disappear for 1-2 episodes at a time),
- time skips that feel unnatural,
- plot ???

Bit of a chore to get through because of the forcibly good-natured female lead who is portrayed as a very shallow person towards her own family and yet is nice and trusting to every random character sprite that loads into any episode. Her parents disappear for half of the drama and she doesn't care because she has reasons which don't make sense to anyone but whoever wrote this character. On another note of why she is the contender for the worst character ever, even after she starts returning the feelings to the male lead, she treats him worse than anyone else she knows. She is more appreciative of people who mean her ill will than someone who always fixes all of her problems. A good example of this is her being dismissive of her female friend at times, whilst that same friend is the one person who stands up for her in the face of any problems that occur.

The male lead is disturbingly controlling, obsessive, and pushy with the female lead for the best sentence we have all heard as women while growing up, 'He's a boy, that's just how they act'. The first part of the show is one giant bully guide because, as the male lead himself says in one of the episodes, 'Only I can bully her, no one else can.' True love right here, omg. But I guess we will forgive him because he is super hot and does all these kabedons, as that is more important than having a non-toxic relationship portrayal in a show being watched by people of all ages.

Rejoice, for there are no love triangles, quadrangles, or other lovely geometrical shapes, mainly due to the male lead being super obsessive, so everything that is not the female lead is non-existent to him. This did, however, create a bunch of friendships and some decent side characters that were least painful to watch in this whole ordeal.

The shitty people category was taken straight from a historical Chinese romance novel where we have an 'innocent flower' villain who hates the female lead over the dumbest things ever, like picking up a blade of grass that they wanted when they were three years old. Yes, it's that stupid. And no, they don't get punished or redeem themselves in any manner because who would want to see that, right? The smackdowns that this person gets from the male lead were kind of funny though, but it all goes down the drain because the female lead is there to coddle them.

There are three time periods this show takes place in, and they're weird because in one episode they're in high school and after two school events they're graduating. Then university time where they're graduating after two episodes. The female lead, for example, swaps so many jobs in such a short time that I wondered if they were time traveling. I guess they wanted to show a love story that spans a longer period of the characters' youth, but to do so, they could have extended the episodes a bit so it would have felt natural and didn't require a timeline chart.

Then there was a bunch of seemingly interesting plotlines that were started and then didn't go anywhere. They just get discarded and we never see anything about them again. The side characters have some problems to resolve, we proceed to not see them for a while, villains do villainy shit and then the side characters are back after that. It's all one big glob of an ill-cooked plot.

This show could have been better. They had the characters and the right idea but it seems that current media just can't let go of promoting toxic relationships and how to build them. Luckily we as the viewers can stop supporting these kinds of stories and watch shows with better quality.
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