A love story more than a time-loop mystery plot

I watched this fucking show only for Greg Han Su ("Li Tsu-Wei" in the story) and the first impression it gave was so diabolical I cannot overstate how asinine the first two episodes are (all episodes are an hour long), considering how there are some lingering plot issues down the line aside from a quick fix ending with some loose ends this pacing decision irks me even more than it should, which brings me to my first point of complaint

NEGATIVES
(-) Pacing
The show, even with it's literal theme of time looping, felt like it kept looping and reusing the same romantic/thematic beats again and again, "Huang Yuxuan" (Ko Chia-yen) can only come back to the past and have touching moments with her soulmate THIS many times before it becomes an egregious hairpulling annoyance, it's cute until it feels like the story is freezing up because the person at the receiving end of the feelings can feel conflicted to reciprocate the same feelings again and again and again and again

I love Greg and but the screentime that's given to their budding romance almost feels like the only thing the romance ever does is keep budding, the feelings will pace forward but pseudo-reset when she travels again to the past (the momentum of the plot kind of forces them to not COMPLETELY repeat this weird romantic tug of war of loving/not loving)
Despite how I put this issue here at the start, this actually is to be expected, for some reason this does fit Taiwanese show-making it's this really weird pacing that makes different scenes feel the exact same because they are meant to DO the exact same thing, anyways the fact that this is a noticeable issue even though I watched this show at 2x speed just shows how much downtime there is

(-) The ending
The story wrap up is bad, there's always a copium case to be made for "it's not about the end it's about the journey" and that kind of applies to this show because even with my grievances they actually did a lot of effort into the sequence of events that shape it all up,

That being said it's just such a letdown, the actual conflict resolution for the time-based murder mystery plot kind of happens in the last 10 minutes, insane that this is how little time they give to it after 13 hour-long episodes, THAT'S 13 HOURS of set up with 10 minutes of pay off

(-) Loose-ends
The first loose-end is actually related to Wang Chuan-Sheng, him being gay is dropped in here OUT of the blue, there's like a short introduction to the episode where he's shown to be a gay guy who confesses to his crush, gets rejected, outed and bullied........ then proceeds to drown himself, the show genuinely never uses this AT. ALL.

By the end even Chen Yun Ru gets to repossess her body and have a final arc dedicated to her (which I actually liked), but Wang Chuan-Sheng whose body is paraded around for the entirety of the plot, a person who much similar to Chen Yun Ru decides to take his life is not extended the same courtesy of finding peace with himself, given the outcome of the show Wang Chuan-Sheng actually ends up drowning himself.... a not so happy ending I assume

How do they resolve the paradoxical time loop? They kind of......................... don't? The sophistication of the mechanics of the time loop are irrelevant to the plot it's just moreso just in-place for the sake of the story if anything, they never explain what the conditions really are for making it work (idk if the track glitching/skipping is what causes it I could NOT tell),
But then afterwards we don't really understand WHAT happens, the story hints a lot in different episodes that Mo Chun-Chieh and Chen Yun-Ju would end up together but aside from Chen Yun-Ju abandoning the idea of suicide out of the blue (which is just....... wow that was easy), how does Chen Yun-Ju fall out of love with Li Tsu-Wei? What actually informs her change of heart? The "don't kys" speech by Mo Chun-Chieh? (I'm reading these names from imdb god forbid i remember them)
Also Li Tsu-Wei meets Huang Yu-Hsuan when she's a kid, how the hell do they end up together? Don't they have like a generous age gap, they just DID NOT try for the ending it's such a bad send off (don't tell me to watch the movie version)
What actually happens to the class-monitor turned psycho villain? I guess the crime he commits are only possible when the music recorder allows him to go back in time and commit the crime but.... does he then NEVER commit any crimes? What are the logistics of his psychopathy is he a persona that ONLY existed due to the time loop? It's a very strange loose-end

(-) Mo Chun-Chieh
The mistreatment of Mo by the plot feels genuinely outrageous, he's just a TOTAL cuck, he gets cucked and re-cucked so many times it just felt like why was he even there? Just to get cucked into oblivion? He walks on a cuck carpet to sit on his cuck throne with his cuck crown with his cuck scepter adorned with cuck jewels and with a flick of his wrist he can summon a legion of cuck slaves just my god the show HATES this guy.

The way he's put on the poster makes you believe that he has valuable significance to the plot, and not to say he doesn't but his significance is just stamped with the word CUCK, EVEN IN THE POSTER HE ISN'T HEARING FROM THE EARPHONES HE'S CUCKED OUT OF THAT ARRANGEMENT, neither Huang Yu-Hsuan or Chen Yun-Ju want him (until the very end where it's implied Chen changes her mind)

Just some hateful shit

POSITIVES-ish?
(+/-) Plot
I like and hate the plot at the same time, time looping is a saturated genre but elements of the show are able to stand out, there's come crumbs in the distance that made me just want to keep watching, there's a lot of eyerolls, like how many times will Huang Yu-Hsuan spot Wang Quan Sheng on the street before she has to stop the bus only to miss him again and again COME ON,

But despite some of the corniness the idea of this youthful friendship and these 3 friends having these moments in the summer of 1998 just feels right, Huang Yu-Hsuan patching a lot of the issues Chen-Yun Ju experiences by stabilizing her family and social life and then having that back fire when Chen-Yun Ju repossesses her body and cannot fit the mold that Huang Yu-Hsuan left behind, this way Huang Yu-Hsuan leads Chen-Yun Ju to her death the more she effortlessly fixes her life in small ways throughout the show is GOOD writing, the delivery felt too short by the end but it still works,

The romance is repetitive and drags but it still feels juicy every now and then when the setting freshens up, Lee studying up the ladder to get into the same university as Huang and stealing her heart as he originally did, them re-telling the same horrible joke to each other in different timelines, it's this youthfulness that it captures that is really captivating to watch

The mystery is decent and some revelations such as Lee actually being the guy Huang ends up dating in the future are great, the idea of the villain time travelling is interesting on paper but SO poorly delivered it's outrageous with him straight up nonchalantly visiting Huang and just time travelling casually and then we don't even get why he puts Huang to sleep instead of killing her but decides to kill Lee.... well I guess that would end the plot right then and there

(+) Acting
With some glaring misses, I think the main case did a pretty good job and it was pretty easy to tell who was in whose body and at which time because the actors did a good job of channeling some mannerisms that set their personas apart from one another which I actually thought was cool

(+) Greg Han Hsu is insanely hot

(+) Production is actually surprisingly good, there's a lot of different shooting locations, there's some scenes that are repeatedly shown with different new smaller insights and perspectives, some dream sequences that aren't even real are fully shot and put in that really enhances the experience (I particularly love the one with the psycho hall monitor's backstory where they show that he was behind the curtain when Lee came to visit Huang after the "car crash" even though it looks comically stupid it just makes the scene a little bit more sinister than it originally was)

Conclusion
Even with how much critique I've packed into this review, I watched it till the end because I do think there's elements of the show that are very compelling, but the ending is just NOT even there it's such an afterthought and the show feels like it's constantly rehashing thematic beats throughout

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Give it a try

I watched this show during COVID and I actually think the idea of a BL over the internet worked comfortably well, it actually did REMARKABLY good garnering multiple million views which is always great to see for BL,

The show has it's misses, especially in dialogue, it can be a little bit cringe sometimes but you really do see them as a group of friends, there's stereotypical writing for the "nerd meets jock" cliche but I think both the actors do a wonderful job of conveying love for each other, I really don't want to be too harsh on a show that's just meant to be light-hearted and a fun watch for people in quarantine and it's simplicity IS it's charm.

I don't have a large thinkpiece about it, hello stranger was my actual first real life BL experience and it isn't too shabby, even if it ages a little poorly over time. Music is fantastic though my god

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Well produced BL with a VERY good concept but still not enough, I want more

Finally sat down and watched it, second Taiwanese film I've watched where the main BL "couple" (or not so in this case it's kind of one sided) does not end up getting together at the end which gave me insane whiplash because the regular motherload of BL focuses on how quickly the main couple becomes canon

Anyways this one has an actual plot and I thought it was pretty intriguing, the idea of a homophobic cop being forced to marry a dead gay guy because he has been cursed with bad luck after picking up a red letter and now he has to solve the mystery of his murder is actually cool, it's not a meet cute plot it's not a contrived highschool scenario it doesn't feel like fanfiction this actually feels like a movie

It's scooby doo level mystery but I thought the weakest part about it is Mao Mao, it's nearly impossible to sympathize with him throughout the duration of the movie, another issue is the comedy, Taiwanese humor is so lost on me it just barely ever cracks a good enough punchline but there are definitely some that got a smile or two out of me

The production value though, oh my god did they spend a good dime on this movie especially the CGI which looks really stupid but they still went out of their way

It also ends unceremoniously I was honestly surprised, it was a very weird decision to have the ghost reincarnate at the middle of the movie and then have it come back as a gag to the plot and then re-reincarnate for even less of the emotional value at the end with a half baked confession from the dad

For BL standards, this is good, we almost never have a decent plot and this one at least bothers having an overarching one, carried by Greg Han who is actually so insanely hot my god

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There's something addictive about this problematic show

It's hard to put into words why this show works and personally even moreso than any BL that have come after it, ignoring it's very weird rapey writing (throw kidnapping into the mix) with the most questionable sexual moments (it doesn't matter you have herpes I still want to have sex..............WOW writing award), also the rapey-ness is both ways Bai tries to fuck a sleeping Gu Hai near the end it's just such a problematic show

But looking past this, in this absolutely fucked up way outside of the actual rape, the show manages to capture a gay teenager's horniness remarkably well, it feels completely unintentional the way Gu Hai's behavior actually does translate to actual real life teenagers (despite being an adult with muscles) but its very clear the writer just wrote him like this little explosive ticking bomb of sexual harassment

This is also one of the few shows where the canon couple coming together is done in the best way possible, the backdrop for Bai's life in poverty and how Gu Hai trying to match his life to Bai's and spending meaningful time with him and his family, him trying to improve his writing by tearing a page from Bai's notebook and buying him little presents to show him affection but them reaching the wrong desk, the writer for the actual novel this is based on manages to develop these very simple and small story beats that bring these two characters closer without it feeling very contrived, Gu Hai already does love him in an obsessive way which already breaks out of the tradition of BL story-telling where both of the characters have to climb the ladder to see each other romantically.

It's this one sided lingering that makes Gu Hai problematic but compelling to watch, you know it's stalkerish, creepy and obsessive but you can't look away, there's something about the way he's written that feels weirdly honest, he feels unfiltered and unsanitized, a person who is willing to get his hands dirty and really go there for the person he desires....... but the show doesn't view him as such, the show only sees him as romantic, this confusing delivery really stuck in my mind after all this time despite it being years since I've watched the show.

I can't divorce the show from it's very intriguing and problematic developments, but it being this way also circles back to adding an extra dimension to the show itself that it doesn't even realize it's adding, this isn't HIStory season 1 which JUST feels like you're watching rape on top of rape

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