Interesting Plot & Side Characters Save a Drama that Botched It's Main Relationship

What really drove this show was character development. Of the 6 main characters, most of them ended up completely different than they started the show. Wei Qing starts as this abusive, borderline sociopathic guy who thinks he can buy, steal, or manipulate anything outcome he wants... even making the FL his girlfriend. Lin Fei Fei, friend of the FL, thinks that money is everything she wants out of life, even in love. Her other friend, Bi Qiu Jing, thinks love is something that is nice to observe, but nothing she'd ever want to participate in. FL's childhood crush Li Ming Cheng has a similar logic-brained view on relationships. Ning Fei, sorta brother of the ML, is a complete mess of a person, who can barely function in society, much less in a relationship.

This show really finds it's form in the middle, when each of these characters grow up and start to find themselves. Wei Qing becomes more emotional and empathetic. Bi Qiu Jing & Li Ming Cheng begin to see value in love, even in their own twisted ways. Ning Fei becomes a more confident and stable person. Lin Fei Fei sees there's more to happiness than money.

The problem with the show is the FL, Zhou Shi, doesn't have this character development. She starts off hands down the most normal of all of them, but by the end, you got the feeling that they all grew up and became adults while she didn't. She'd spent ten years in love with brother Ming Cheng for simply helping her study for an exam. She had this misconstrued notion that she should love someone simply for helping her. Literally, everyone in her life knew that she was in love with Wei Qing, by episode 20, but instead of acknowledging her feelings, she was indecisive and dragged it on. Then at the very end, she decides to kiss him, after he revealed he saved her life in a swimming pool a decade earlier. This shows her character clearly didn't grow. She kept finding love as an emotion of reciprocity for a favor, not as something deeper. She clearly had a deep emotional care for Wei Qing, but for someone, she couldn't recognize it as love... even if the whole audience and all her friends could. And because of that, the audience was deprived of seeing them date at all. They are literally together for 2 minutes before the show is over...

This ending where they get together is incredibly rushed, which I'll be a little less harsh on them for, given that there is a sequel in the works. I hate how that sequel is sending her abroad for grad school (I hate this plot trope... she is literally about to be independently wealthy from having ownership rights of Xun Ran's paintings, on top of dating a multi-billionaire... don't you think she could get private training in China that means she doesn't have to leave her whole life behind to pursue inferior training? It just felt like she was running away from her new adult life at the end) and how it's already revealed they break up. Hopefully, through this breakup, they can explore her character growth as she begins to develop a more mature perspective on love as the other 5 characters in the show did in the original series. If she does, then this will have been a satisfying drama with 6 complete character arcs. If not, oh well at least we have the nice side characters, and hopefully Wei Qing can find happiness elsewhere.

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