I'd been waiting for this childhood-friends-to-lovers drama to come out for the longest time, but after watching it...I think the only good thing about it is the FL.

She's the very typical type of FL you see in Chinese youth dramas — not too bright but really optimistic and bubbly, but I absolutely love how Zhang Miaoyi plays her. She's endearing, chaotic, lovable, fun, but most importantly, stands up for herself when it counts. Which is why it was very disappointing that none of the other characters really matched her energy, and it was even more disappointing that the drama gave up on developing her character in exchange for tropey romantic scenes. For example: the FL is apparently good at martial arts but this is suddenly forgotten so that the ML can come and save her.

Just in general, the plot felt choppy. A lot of youth dramas have cookie cutter scenes; the better ones link them together well and make it seem like they're memorable moments in someone's life. In the more typical youth dramas, they remain recognizable tropes and it just feels like one scene after another, which is what this one felt like. In terms of the side characters, they were also very cookie cutter and I didn't really care for the friend group as a whole either. The plot and the characters all just felt like they were going through the motions.

Additionally, this is one of the dramas where the dubbing really negatively affected it. It was very obvious and made lots of dialogue seem off. For the FL, it was best when we got ZMY's original voice, but there were some lines that were dubbed and it was very jarring to see the mouth and sound suddenly not match up. For the ML, the voice didn't match the acting at all.

With that being said, the acting of the ML was...not good. He had very few expressions (and basically no microexpressions) throughout the show, and I just felt like it was very flat and bland.

And so: I don't think I really felt the romance. The hardest part about doing friends-to-lovers is transitioning from the platonic relationship to a romantic one, and that transition was very confusing and random. I wasn't sure when it happened and because of the lackluster acting and lack of well-paced plot progression, the leads felt better off staying friends.

My advice? Watch When I Fly With You instead. It's one of the few recent coming-of-age dramas that did everything right.