My Eternal Star (2023)

A 12-year old's fever dream

This drama series is exactly what a 12-year old expects in a romantic relationship. The main positive is that the actors are all good looking.

The story itself is the usual cheesy cold-male and bubbly-female, who were friends as small children, but it quickly goes downhill from there. The 2ML is rejected many times, continues chasing, and doing things that are manipulative and completely inappropriate. The sexist stereotypes are infuriating, from the usual ditzy women, to the way contemptible way that ML treats FL, to a particular scene involving the third couple right after she visits his grandmother. Of the three older men in the drama (dad, and two businessmen), only one who behaves in a way I would consider a mature adult.

The reason I say it's a 12-year fever dream, rather than simply classic Chinese stereotype is due to some of the behaviours of the individuals. For example, when the girls get excited, they jump up and down squealing. The FL's voice is that cutesy soft sweet deeply annoying one that no real human being has. It's almost as if the characters magically went from age 12 to adult without ever actually maturing.

There are no kisses. Only a couple hand-holds and hugs.

I agree with the reviewers who dropped after a handful of episodes. If you want to enjoy something, this show isn't it. I watched all the way through the end because I kept wondering how much worse it would get. And they successfully kept surprising me by having each episode be worse than the previous.

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A Drama That Had Good Ideas But Writer Failed To Deliver

This is one of those dramas where I question myself, what did I just watch? While I did enjoy the moments of our leads from the moment they started to have feelings for each other, the jealously scenes the ML had, & the happy ending overall, the writer just missed out on so many things that could've made this drama a whole lot better.

The story plot focus could've been about the e-sports competition for the ML's character & the journey of being a hanfu designer for the FL's character, but instead, we just get the ML's character searching for his eternal star childhood love, which the writer didn't deliver well anyways because the FL's character didn't remember at all. She didn't get into an accident or anything so if it was that important to her, why did she forget about it? At least show some hints of the FL's character of a childhood memory throughout the drama so the ML's character could start wondering if she was the one he's looking for. Instead, we just got subtle scenes of him on the phone with who knows who, searching for his childhood love and I would say 70% of the drama revolved around the apartment life of Yu Heng & Xiao Di. Again, some great story ideas but the writers just failed to act on it. Most episodes just didn't feel significant enough to be consider as worth watching.

The characters in this drama could've been written better. SML's character was poorly written until almost towards the end with his one sided love, no matter how many times FL's character told him she only sees him as a friend. ML's character Yu Heng just didn't have any good character qualities for most of the drama. It wasn't until he realizes his feelings that he starts to be a little better and likable. FL's character Xiao Di was childish overall. Though she does have some good moments, there were a lot more scenes where she was frustrating with the way she thinks or acts to situations. Even Xiao Di's friend and Yu Heng's friend didn't really serve much of purpose to me other than just being there and being a complicated 2nd couple. Then you have this game enemy of Yu Heng, who you don't even know why he hates Yu Heng so much. This guy finds out Yu Heng's weakness but doesn't really do much with it and he's only in a few episodes throughout the drama and then the writers showed a somewhat ending for this guy. What kind of writing, for this bad guy character, is this? It just doesn't make sense to me the importance of his role. Don't even get me started on that annoying girl who was Yu Heng past teammate but also has a crush on him.

There are dramas where I could watch the intro & ending credit because of the music ost but this one I couldn't. I just didn't like the music personally. The drama does have some good ost in the drama itself but I wish those songs would've been the intro & ending osts instead of what they chosen.

Though there are a few scenes I do enjoy seeing and may come back to, definitely won't rewatch the whole thing.

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