a mismatched soup, poor editing, and at least some AI output too
Love For You is a mismatched soup that combined various influences without fully understanding what makes them good. Initially I thought you kind of need to have seen both Light & Princess (same FL, same director, similar pushing away party around timeskip years) and Speed & Love (Thailand crime badboy ML, step-sibling romance) before consuming this one. However, people claiming it a less braindead (more realistic) Speed and Love are totes wrong. When it veers into that direction is really is just as Wattpad, but far less catchy. I've seen comments praising one particular episode as stand-out amazing, but while I agree it's the best in this show, in Speed And Love it would just be average.
Then, LFY tried wading into Hong Kong crime drama a la Infernal Affairs, but again without knowing how to make it exciting. We have a whole business and crime segment that goes nowhere for the longest time.
Maybe the biggest issue is that none of the genres attempted are executed in a convincing way, they're all just lightly cosplayed into and then ignored for the next thing, to the effect that none of these ever connect into anything cohesive.
Song WeiLong is nowhere near the level of good CN idol actors like Zhang LingHe or He Yu. Seems he'll forever be on the mediocre Yang Yang level.
Zhang Jing Yi does a decent enough job in her role and makes the show kind of watchable, but she also can't stop how dragged out the overall unspectacular core plot is.
To pad that out, LFY brings out some of the least interesting/charming/novel side characters ever seen. A huge chunk of the show goes into their school years, but not a single (!) of their peers is fleshed out in any way. The ML has two friends who just live to be tethered to him and cater to his whims, while the FL doesn't even have a single classmate with a name. In that phase the show does a good job of showing the leads' relationship, but besides that there is literally and I mean literally zero meaningful content. Yet the viewer has to see Love For You wade through all the motions of growing up in China, from dragon festivals through college qualification exams to swearing loyalty to the flag, all executed with as much ritualistic pomp as could possibly be shown on TV.
I'll admit for one friend character they eventually manage to give him a life, but instead we get new work colleagues etc that are just as bad and generic, while simultaneously the world's most irrelevant second leads (of sorts) claw their way into hogging screen time. Liang JingKang and He RuiXian deliver performances that are as meh as their characters; the other supporting actors generally do well (Miao RuoPeng as best friend Wang BoZai and He MingHan as policeman Zhou in particular are good, and they're also the only two you couldn't just delete entirely).
By episode 24, we have full-on AI written trash scenes to forcefully stuff some personality into those husks of half-dimensional side characters (if you've ever worked with AI creatively you will immediately spot this). Other times, it's clear that a particular plot idea was planned out in multiple different ways, but the editors just kept several. Or they keep two near identical dialogues, so you sit there thinking "but this character already said this a mere minute ago".
Near the end, the production got so sloppy that you have:
- crew members in the frame https://i.imgur.com/pDHcred.png
- 2 or even 3 film crew vehicles in a shot https://i.imgur.com/aRZe5ty.png
The editing regularly fails to explain things properly, does not deliver flashbacks of what a character has been up to off-screen during an important period, or tells you ten episodes after you gave up on every finding out. One plot arc supposedly wasn't filmed for budget reasons, so it's a gaping hole with a one minute summary, and no attempt made to tell you how it affected the character's growth. On the production side, only the camerawork of one of the crews working on this stands out as consistently good (while another likes to shove their camera almost up the actors' nostrils).
We also constantly go through checkbox drama scenes picked from the list of things that happen in dramas, and they are placed in totally random spots without meshing with anything around them. It's like they had bingo cards to fill out of "in a drama, the leads run away from something hand in hand", "in a drama, when one of them is in the rain for half a minute they get sick"; I'm truly surprised that the ML catching the FL for a near-kiss wasn't shoved in anywhere. Even a character having a trauma is handled that way: checkbox ticked for trauma present, checkbox ticked for trauma somewhat resolved, and afterwards nobody remembers a trace of it; best of all you're now free to obtain a new trauma later, like one is the flu and the other a stubbed toe.
The OST is alright (and the leads have some songs on it), but it doesn't hold a candle to shows with memorable OSTs, and some of the background music is dreadful. There are irritating comedy noises too, for generally very unfunny scenes. Sometimes even the foley sounds stick out as notably bad / mis-timed.
If you're here for the step-sibling plot, watch Speed and Love instead. The writing is super stupid, but it demolishes Love For You in chemistry, production/editing, scene lighting, OST, BGM, ML acting skills, action scenes, and so on.
If you are here for slice of life or side character matters, run for the hills.
If you are hoping for an interesting crime or business plot, this isn't it either. At all. Those take turns between not fleshed out, then forgotten about, repeat.
I for one wish I had entirely skipped or dropped this colossal waste of time.
Then, LFY tried wading into Hong Kong crime drama a la Infernal Affairs, but again without knowing how to make it exciting. We have a whole business and crime segment that goes nowhere for the longest time.
Maybe the biggest issue is that none of the genres attempted are executed in a convincing way, they're all just lightly cosplayed into and then ignored for the next thing, to the effect that none of these ever connect into anything cohesive.
Song WeiLong is nowhere near the level of good CN idol actors like Zhang LingHe or He Yu. Seems he'll forever be on the mediocre Yang Yang level.
Zhang Jing Yi does a decent enough job in her role and makes the show kind of watchable, but she also can't stop how dragged out the overall unspectacular core plot is.
To pad that out, LFY brings out some of the least interesting/charming/novel side characters ever seen. A huge chunk of the show goes into their school years, but not a single (!) of their peers is fleshed out in any way. The ML has two friends who just live to be tethered to him and cater to his whims, while the FL doesn't even have a single classmate with a name. In that phase the show does a good job of showing the leads' relationship, but besides that there is literally and I mean literally zero meaningful content. Yet the viewer has to see Love For You wade through all the motions of growing up in China, from dragon festivals through college qualification exams to swearing loyalty to the flag, all executed with as much ritualistic pomp as could possibly be shown on TV.
I'll admit for one friend character they eventually manage to give him a life, but instead we get new work colleagues etc that are just as bad and generic, while simultaneously the world's most irrelevant second leads (of sorts) claw their way into hogging screen time. Liang JingKang and He RuiXian deliver performances that are as meh as their characters; the other supporting actors generally do well (Miao RuoPeng as best friend Wang BoZai and He MingHan as policeman Zhou in particular are good, and they're also the only two you couldn't just delete entirely).
By episode 24, we have full-on AI written trash scenes to forcefully stuff some personality into those husks of half-dimensional side characters (if you've ever worked with AI creatively you will immediately spot this). Other times, it's clear that a particular plot idea was planned out in multiple different ways, but the editors just kept several. Or they keep two near identical dialogues, so you sit there thinking "but this character already said this a mere minute ago".
Near the end, the production got so sloppy that you have:
- crew members in the frame https://i.imgur.com/pDHcred.png
- 2 or even 3 film crew vehicles in a shot https://i.imgur.com/aRZe5ty.png
The editing regularly fails to explain things properly, does not deliver flashbacks of what a character has been up to off-screen during an important period, or tells you ten episodes after you gave up on every finding out. One plot arc supposedly wasn't filmed for budget reasons, so it's a gaping hole with a one minute summary, and no attempt made to tell you how it affected the character's growth. On the production side, only the camerawork of one of the crews working on this stands out as consistently good (while another likes to shove their camera almost up the actors' nostrils).
We also constantly go through checkbox drama scenes picked from the list of things that happen in dramas, and they are placed in totally random spots without meshing with anything around them. It's like they had bingo cards to fill out of "in a drama, the leads run away from something hand in hand", "in a drama, when one of them is in the rain for half a minute they get sick"; I'm truly surprised that the ML catching the FL for a near-kiss wasn't shoved in anywhere. Even a character having a trauma is handled that way: checkbox ticked for trauma present, checkbox ticked for trauma somewhat resolved, and afterwards nobody remembers a trace of it; best of all you're now free to obtain a new trauma later, like one is the flu and the other a stubbed toe.
The OST is alright (and the leads have some songs on it), but it doesn't hold a candle to shows with memorable OSTs, and some of the background music is dreadful. There are irritating comedy noises too, for generally very unfunny scenes. Sometimes even the foley sounds stick out as notably bad / mis-timed.
If you're here for the step-sibling plot, watch Speed and Love instead. The writing is super stupid, but it demolishes Love For You in chemistry, production/editing, scene lighting, OST, BGM, ML acting skills, action scenes, and so on.
If you are here for slice of life or side character matters, run for the hills.
If you are hoping for an interesting crime or business plot, this isn't it either. At all. Those take turns between not fleshed out, then forgotten about, repeat.
I for one wish I had entirely skipped or dropped this colossal waste of time.
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