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We Best Love: Fighting Mr. 2nd taiwanese drama review
Completed
We Best Love: Fighting Mr. 2nd
10 people found this review helpful
by immoralq
Apr 10, 2021
6 of 6 episodes seen
Completed
Overall 7.0
Story 8.0
Acting/Cast 9.0
Music 9.0
Rewatch Value 6.0
This review may contain spoilers

not as good as its predecessor

I really, really wanted to like this series. I loved the first one and I thought sure, surely, the writing for this one will be just as good.

Sadly, I was wrong.

And it was the writing that let it down. All the acting was on point. The entire cast knocked it out of the park, so to speak, even if the script they had to work with was dodgy. The music was beautiful, the editing good and the story itself, if it had been translated into the script better, would've worked.

The plot involved Shi De and Shu Yi meeting again after five years. After unexpectedly having to stay in the U.S. for two years, rather than two months, Shi De comes back and runs into Yi's father, who has confiscated Yi's phone. He tells De, in less subtle terms, that he's not good enough for Yi, which brings back a whole lot of insecurities that De already had about their relationship and he agrees to stay away from Yi for five years.

Three years after that, De is running the successful Hua Cing Technology company on behalf of this mother, when who should walk in the door to oversee the company's merger with Cheng Yi Group?

What follows is the rekindling of Shu Yi and Shi De's relationship along with some incidental corporate espionage thrown in to make it all more dramatic.

My main problem with this series is the writing. I don't know what Lin Pei Yu was thinking with this. I was confused so many times about when scenes took place in the timeline. Non-linear storytelling is fine, but it needs to be clear and concise and this was neither. Scenes were just thrown in and we were just supposed to, what? Intuit that they were set in the past?

Also, whilst in a visual medium you always want to try and show rather than tell, you have to actually show things so people understand them. I don't want to just make assumptions - I want it to be clear that I'm making the *right* assumptions. And I shouldn't have to go on social media to find out what the writer is trying to show. I shouldn't have to reference other media to understand the one I'm watching.

Why did Shu Yi suddenly forgive Shi De between one episode and the next? Why did Pei Shou Yi go from (apparently??) rejecting to accepting Yu Zhen Xuan in the space of about five minutes? Come to that, why is Pei Shou Yi running a bar instead of being a Doctor? Did I miss the explanation for that?

Was that blonde woman actually Ashley? I assume so. Is Ashley Shi De's stepsister? Is she the nanny? My assumption is stepsister. Why throw in that special episode and answer no questions about it? Because Shu Yi has decided that he trusts Shi De (apparently out of nowhere) that means we, the audience, don't get to know?

Tell me how I did with my assumptions, show. Tell me!

A smaller, yet as important problem, is also the casual ableism that runs through this series. Yu Zhen Yuan has real feelings for Pei Shou Yi, but they are dismissed as him being "crazy" because Shou Yi thinks Zhen Yuan suffers from filial imprinting, paranoia (which we see no signs of) , Aspergers, mild depression and prone to autotomy (which apparently means Zhen Yuan is prone to cutting his own limbs off.)

Pei Shou Yi makes all these diagnoses despite the fact that he wasn't a psychologist and hasn't been an actual medical doctor in years.

It's like the writer just went for an out-of-date DSM and randomly picked things she thought would make the character as woobie as possible.

And, even assuming that all these diagnoses are correct, that still wouldn't mean Zhen Yuan's feelings for Shou Yi aren't real. To claim so is ableist and wrong.

Pei Shou Yi himself says he suffers from an affective disorder (but never specifies which one) but if he suddenly declared he had feelings for Zhen Yuan, nobody would call him crazy.

A third series was teased, and I'd like to see Bing Wei and Zhe Yu's wedding, because that proposal scene was lovely and they're the most sensible couple on this show.

I can't give this as high a rating as 'No. 1 For You', but I still rate this highly and I did enjoy most of it. It is fairly re-watchable and I give this my sincere recommendation.
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