Let me preface this by saying that I had just watched Playful Kiss before this, so watching ANOTHER ditzy main female character immediately after already grated on my nerves. Then the first episode had such weirdly fast-forwarded cinematography that I got motion sickness. Yet, I decided to power through.

I have no words to describe how problematic this was, from the relationship itself, to the way gender and racial stereotypes were portrayed.

Let me start with the quickest: there was a scene where the characters are in the UK, having fun with a lot of white people. Suddenly, they run into some gangsters, who just happen to be the only black people in the show so far. The racism couldn't be more obvious.

Second of all, the way that traditional roles are reinforced in this are subtle, but alarming. There's so much talk about how a woman is still worth marrying if she's infertile, and to me this topic was never addressed sufficiently. There's also a lot of romanticizing of "woman sacrifices career to be a wife." I'm overall really unhappy about the way women are portrayed in this drama—they're either gold-diggers, gossipers, dependent and overthinking, obsessed with a boy, or obsessed with fulfilling the perfect child-bearing wife role. There was honestly not one strong woman role I was happy with.

I hated the main male character. Aside from my superficially saying that he visually does nothing for me, I just thought his personality was one of the most boring and bland I've ever watched. Firstly, he has some creepy and stalkerish tendencies, and I'm sure a lot of things he did as a boss to his employee could be seen as an abuse of power. As the show went on, he honestly got worse (as a boyfriend)—he never seemed to try and see things from Shan Shan's perspective, and he became increasingly controlling. He kept trying to use his money to get her things without her knowing—as if he didn't trust her to make her own life decisions. He kept so many secrets and justified them saying it was for her own good. And worst of all, he completely disregarded her career and kept saying things like "that's my decision" and "it's not up for discussion" when it was supposed to be HER DECISION in the first place,

Add to that the fact that C-Dramas do this weird thing where they make the main characters initiate skinship and pair it with slow-mo and romantic music BEFORE I even had any reason to ship them, and all I got was a boss doing weird physical things to his employee when the extent of their relationship was him watching her eat through his office window.

I honestly wasn't a huge fan of Shan Shan either. This has something to do with the way the drama was filmed, but half of the entire show is her whining in internal monologues. So much of this show is advanced by Shan Shan "accidentally overhearing something," then overthinking it in a lengthy internal monologue while she pouts externally. As cute as she is at some points, I got SO tired of hearing her voice. MOST of the sub-plots are brought about because she needs validation from Feng Teng about their relationship, or that she needs to do something to "be good enough for him." And nobody ever tried to convince her otherwise, or argue that she was good enough. As the show went on, she also started standing up for herself less and less, and I almost ripped my hair out hoping that she'd say something about making her own life decisions, but she never did.

Overall, this was a tiring and dragging plot, filled with lots and lots of problems. The only character I never got TOO annoyed with might be Zheng Qi, who seems thirty times more fun to be around than the boring male lead.