Far from being a masterpiece like NIF
I like the idea of them being reincarnations of the NIF characters. If it were canon, I would say that I fell in love with Jingyan in all his lives.Now, let's move on to the negative points. First off, addressing the elephant in the room, everyone knows that soap operas are products of the industry designed to preserve the status quo. However, the conservatism and classist maintenance in the script of this drama really got on my nerves, especially since it's a republic drama. On the surface, Ming Tai's rejection is because he doesn't like "used" things, which is already quite sexist, but that's not the real issue. The real problem is that Man Li comes from a poor and unknown background. It seems sweet that Ming Tai falls for a communist girl, but the script doesn’t pair them together for that reason. It’s because she is a middle-class girl from a family of doctors, more suitable for someone like him who grew up in the elite.
Secondly, this character shouldn’t have been played by Hu Ge. I like Hu Ge and have been following his transition to art films, but here he's pathetic. He’s tolerable in the action scenes, but whenever he needs to act like a spoiled boy, it’s cringe to watch. He visibly looks like a man in his thirties trying to portray a young adult who just left adolescence.
There’s one more thing, though I won’t consider it a flaw of the drama because it stems from my own perspective. I don’t like Ah Cheng’s relationship with the family. As a brazilian, it’s expected that I would not support paternalistic relationships. In some scenes, I felt uncomfortable for him and wouldn’t blame him if he developed a critical view of how that family truly treated him.
To clarify, as I know some people have difficulty interpreting certain opinions, my criticisms do not disregard the "realism" of the drama's context, but rather focus on the tone with which the drama addresses these points.
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