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Sugar Crown

not a damsel - only in distress

Sugar Crown

not a damsel - only in distress
First Love chinese drama review
Completed
First Love
3 people found this review helpful
by Sugar Crown
Jul 15, 2023
24 of 24 episodes seen
Completed
Overall 6.5
Story 7.5
Acting/Cast 6.0
Music 8.0
Rewatch Value 3.5
This review may contain spoilers

death by boredom + miscasting

It’s a very basic fluffy college youth romcom, that would have had the potential to be among the better ones of it‘s genre if it wasn’t for miscasting of the ML + writing of supporting characters.

Bubbly girl + cold ML = we‘ve seen it a million times BUT I found the FL to be quirky. Some of her train of thought seemed relatable and the actress did a great job. At the beginning of the drama she isn’t the best student (medical department) and is insecure about that but she is also determined and wants to learn.
About the ML. He‘s the most popular student, everyone wants to be with him or be him, he’s a genius, he seems cold, yadda yadda yadda.
-here is where the mentioned miscasting comes in place.
The actor is extremely wooden in facial expressions and movements , barely opens his mouth to talk + the monotonous dubbing makes him seem like a robot.
There is no way he‘d actually be the school hunk.
BUT to break all of that - the writing of his character towards FL was actually great, but sadly was undermined by a stiff performance.
Pretty much 2-3 episodes in, you realize he is not cold but failed his social class because he‘s bad at communicating - very nerd like. But throughout the whole drama he helps the FL become more confident and likes her early on but knows she needs more time.
I actually loved that his character was written that way and if it was smooth sailing, they’d have one of the healthiest relationships in drama land.

HOWEVER for this kind of nuanced character writing to come to live, you need an actor with great micro expressions. Not even a normal good actor would do this character Justice, let alone someone who only has 1 expression.
Some of my cast suggestions would be:
-Liu Yi Chang
-Wang Rui Chang
-Wu Fei
-Li Ge Yang
-Zhou Yan Chen
My top pick would be Fan Shi Qi, but he’s probably over the age of college student by now.

This is my main reason for finding this drama so mindnumbingly boring and why I speed watched the later half.

Other negatives would be it’s so fluffy that the departments they’re studying in are not represented well at all. Our girl is baking in her bakery at college every day, while she is supposed to be a med student? It’s very simplified but in the name of fluffly romance I‘m okay with that.
Another minus would be her love rivals, which are just so ridiculously brazen with their words that I could only laugh.
I also didn’t like his cousin’s love story but oh well… that’s just the icing on top.

The good things about this drama would be simplicity, potentially good and different writing of the ML and the relationship dynamic with FL (she doesn’t have to chase him, he is very kind to her in a subtle way).
Plus I liked her, she was quirky, funny and relatable. The comedy was good too at times and it’s not the worst of the worst - just miscasting that made it very boring to me.
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