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In Your Heart chinese drama review
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In Your Heart
12 mensen vonden deze beoordeling nuttig
by jpny01
mrt 5, 2022
8 van 8
Voltooid
Geheel 5.0
Verhaal 4.5
Acting/Cast 7.0
Muziek 6.5
Rewatch Waarde 1.0
Deze recentie kan spoilers bevatten

Ugh. Close, but not quite - by about 6 years.

This had some things going for it. The leads are both very attractive. They don't behave like your standard seme and uke (with one extremely large exception) - they're just two guys in love. The plot is conventional and unoriginal, but it has a charming quality to it - maybe a naive sincerity.

But then the ending happened. Because BL seems to require by some unwritten but unbreakable law to have ridiculous manufactured drama thrown in, this was spoiled by an overdramatic crisis with an unfortunate resolution.

So if you want to watch this, I would recommend stopping after the kiss.

On to spoilers. There are also spoilers for Addicted in here as there are obvious comparisons to be made.

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First of all, a lot of people are going to use the R word. That's not what this was, but hear me out. Rape is horrible. If he had been raped he would most likely be bloody and bruised, physically and psychologically, need medical and psychiatric attention, hospitalization, and depending on where it happens, criminal charges would be automatically filed because doctors are required to report it and neither of their families have the power to cover it up. Also, the "victim" was clearly fine with it afterwards, and after they start he appears to immediately join in willingly, although you only have feet to judge by.

So what was it? That's the problem. It's not supposed to be rape, but it's not exactly not-rape. Let's compare it for a moment to the infamous scene in Addicted. There, the two are already in a relationship, they're already phyiscal (albeit not anal yet), and one doesn't want to do anything solely because he's afraid he has a communicable disease, and in the uncensored version, it's clear the sex was just a hand job, which can be sexual assault, but it's really, really hard to do that to an unwilling person for... reasons anatomical. I get why people didn't like this, but at least it didn't have a morally repugnant motivation on the part of the writer.

This wasn't a hand-job, and they hadn't done anything physical yet whatsoever other than a lips-barely-touching kiss. So we've returned to the incredibly homophobic idea that it's morally unacceptable for a man to desire and pursue being penetrated, and therefore he has to be forced, because somehow rape or sexual assault are less morally objectionable than being gay. This is also common in straight romances, for the same reason - a woman shouldn't want or pursue sexual pleasure, so she has to be forced. So it's repugnant as a message. That was not a factor in Addicted. When they finally had anal sex, Luo Yin is afraid it will hurt, and Gu Hai offers to bottom instead, but Luo Yin wants to be f@#$ed. So there's no judgment of top vs bottom in the writing.

As drama, a BL setup can be as ridiculous as you want - one of them can be a ghost or a vampire, or they can be in magical universe where all boys pursue other boys - but within that context, people on an emotional level need to act like people. If Zi Ming wanted to have sex, then it doesn't make sense for him to try to fight him off - and there were punches to the face involved, so he felt serious violence was necessary to defend his virginity. So if he didn't want it, then he was raped, in which case it makes no sense that he was fine with it afterwards, unless he has some sort of severe trauma in his past that makes him feel like he deserved it, which there is no sign of in this story. So it's bad writing. It would have been OK for him to resist a bit because he was upset Cheng Yi was leaving without talking to him, but this was not that. This was "guys don't let other guys do THAT to them."

Further, in Addicted we also had some love scenes, and interaction as a couple. Here we didn't - just the force part, and none of what it is implied that followed, i.e. love-making. And then one of them leaves for contrived reasons and the ending is ambiguous, although it's implied they're staying together and planning to reunite (all that stuff about gravity).

Cheng Yi's motivation seemed to be trying to get Zi Ming to to admit his feelings. So, here are the options:

Option 1: Tell him that you love him, and ask if he feels the same way about you.
Option 2: Have a fist fight and rape him until he admits he likes you.

So in the end, we get a regressive message about gay being worse that sexual assault, we got an unoriginal story with writing that doesn't make emotional sense, and we got an unsatisfying ending. What's not to like?

As for the contrived reason for leaving, I get that his grandmother feels she's getting too old to take care of him - but he's 18. He's now at an age where he can take care of her, or at least be equal in that regard - so what kind of nonsense is this? If she felt it was for his own good, then she should have sent him away years ago, and if she's selfish, then she should hold onto him. But it's not selfish keeping someone you love and who loves you with you instead of sending him to a parent he doesn't love and who doesn't really seem to love him. So again, a fail on the emotional level for the writing. She seems to be aware of how important Zi Ming is to Cheng Yi, so she comes off as a homophobe who doesn't care about her grandson's happiness or thinks it's some passing phase.

Addicted was really funny and the transgressive things that happened made sense in the context of the story and characters. Here we had a cheap and unimaginative knockoff that replicated the transgression for no apparent reason and without it really fitting the story or characters. Also, have you ever tried to have a fist fight and force someone to have sex in a small apartment with someone's parent in the next room? That's not likely to end well. Even if she wasn't home, the neighbors would hear every bit of it.

I was enjoying this up until the kiss at the end of Ep 6, and then it accelerated downhill to a terrible ending. I want to support Mainland Chinese BL, but if bad knockoffs of Addicted is all we can expect, maybe forget it. Wait till Xi dies and then shift the high-production value bromances back to BL.

Story: 4.5 - unimaginative but relatively coherent plot-wise, less so from a character perspective.
Acting: 7 - average. Not great, clunky at the beginning, but improved throughout.
Music: 6.5 - not bad, not intrusive, not special.
Rewatch Value: 1. There's not even a shower scene to replay over and over. You get only a cruel glimpse at Zi Ming's beautiful body and then it's over.
Overall: 5 - I went with the suggested average. 5 sounds about right.
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