I’m not going to lie, this show completely sucks. I’ve watched a lot of BL in my time and I’ve watched all the other HIStory series and HIStory 3 may well be one of my favorite dramas of all time, which is why I was so excited when I saw they’d released the next series.

I know the two shows have nothing to do with each other but I was excited about the continuing improvements the show had been making as well as the narrative complexity and maturity of 3 so I wanted to see where this series took it.

I think in every sense this show was a giant step back for the franchise. Leaving aside the fact that the plot felt lifted straight out of a c-list BL manga (seriously, some scenes felt so much like shot for shot recreations of common BL tropes I had to look to see if this was an adaptation of something), or the fact that every single acting choice made by the guy playing Li Cheng grated on my very soul, or the fact that they could not apparently find even a single outfit that would correctly fit Teng Mu’s actor, there is looming over all of it the abject horror of yet another stepsiblings plot line, this one featuring a super concerning age gap, literal stalking and of course sexual assault that is not only played off as a romantic stepping stone but is explicitly depicted in an erotic way in the show.

I hate with my whole entire soul the fact that this show for some absolutely unknowable reason chose to tie together the plot lines about coming out of the closet and being accepted by your parents (something the vast majority of BLs just gloss over completely) to the couple that is literally a guy who wants to sleep with his much younger step sibling. The writers of this show looked at the possible problematic tropes that BLs so often contain and I do my best to overlook and just went right for the absolute most harmful, insidious ones.

I don’t think Teng Mu and Li Cheng’s storyline was that bad, like it was fine and if it had been a standalone I would have considered this show slightly disappointing but completely mediocre. The acting isn’t great and the back and forth is seriously exhausting but at least it’s well within the realm of universally accepted romance content. Everything else however, a disaster. I would actively warn people away from this series.