peering through the illusion

back to watching dramas after a drought in recent months since everyone loves me + fortune writer! first drama to get me to watch and actually hold my attention.

Regeneration starts with a very strong first 6 episodes as we slowly get Fei Ke's (Jing Boran) backstory through the 4 people who knew him. Each story is riveting with unexpected twists and paints a complex portrait of our main character. Through these four stories, we see how Fei Ke interacts differently with each of them, all of the stories smearing him as a liar and a fraud. All of the cast hold their roles well, bringing an almost a Murderous Affair in Horizon Tower energy to the drama.

**Spoiler-free, non-plot-related thoughts before the spoilers:**
Lovely cinematography and pacing!! The camerawork pulls you in, matching the tone of the drama. Romantic when it needs to be with Su Qian, serious and not beating around the bush when it comes to Xuan Er's story, and showing all of the characters and their motivations with the camera. The costuming is chic and realistic, from Chen Jiajia's dressy formal wear to Fei Ke's casual sweatshirts. Jing Boran does great in these kinds of nice but sly roles, being able to take on different vibes for Fei Ke's different "personas": swanky college student, eager and ambitious college grad, charming husband. Towards the end though, when there is a need for more emotion and impact, Jing Boran's performance falls short and leaves more to be desired. My only other gripe with the acting is sometimes the way Zhou Yiran delivers her lines feels like she's struggling with enunciating the words properly (like she's specifically speaking slower in order to enunciate words well), which isn't a major issue as she's super natural in her role, but it just sometimes irks me in later eps (8-10) when her slower speech stands out more compared to everyone else's.

**SPOILERS, but nothing major**
It was around episode 8 that things started to spiral for me. Though not super crazy, it seemed like some of the explanations given to explain Fei Ke and to point out the holes in the people's stories felt a little like the writers trying to backtrack everything they told the audience in the first 6 episodes. Although the explanations are logical on the surface, The discrepancies in the portrayals of Fei Ke in them feel like the writers were trying to push all of the blame onto the four other characters for "corrupting" this pure, innocent, hardworking boy. Fei Ke had his own twisted charm in the first 6 episodes, and there were other ways to reason his character without making the audience feel like it was a "haha gotcha!" moment from the writers. It seemed like the writers wanted the charm of a morally gray character without having the consequences of writing a morally gray protagonist.

**MAJOR SPOILERS**
The first seven episodes ending with the father being called out as being manipulative would've been a great twist, maybe incorporating how ambitious and desperate Fei Ke/Li Zerui was for success into a "both were using each other" moment would've been amazing. It would've relieved Fei Ke's character of Chen Jiajia's suicide while preserving his character when interacting with Cheng Hao, Xuan Er, and Su Qian. The motivation that after being wronged in his youth during the gaokao and then coming out of jail a changed man would've been a great Count of Monte Cristo revenge plot. Instead, Fei Ke gets made into a "misunderstood anti-hero" which feels like it comes out of nowhere when the audience has spent 6-7/10 episodes of the drama thinking Fei Ke was a morally gray protagonist or a straight-up villain.

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