Going to be honest, this drama was clearly trying to get by on pretty privilege.

Because About Youth was practically plotless, it makes sense that the synopsis is unhelpful and does not capture the drama at all (the student president election literally takes up like five minutes of the entire drama). This drama is essentially a school/youth drama plus an attempt at a profound themes of suffering under parental expectations and other sad life issues. Not only are these issues overdone in dramas, but they’re also horribly executed in About Youth with 1) no complexity or nuance and 2) no conclusion or ending message at the very least.

But you know, that’s okay. I can live with that. The problem lies in the fact that without a plot, the characters have to carry more weight in the drama. And carry they did not. I’m not sure what the writer was doing if there’s no plot and no personality in any of the characters. The characters were so flat I thought we were in a 1D world. They were nice, and that was about the extent of their personality.

Of course, with no-personality characters, you couldn’t possibly hope for any good chemistry. So this drama was basically screwed from the start. There is absolutely zero chemistry between any of the characters in this drama to the point where they are all practically inert. The writer seems to try to use forced physical proximity to build up some kind of chemistry and it ends up being SO AWKWARD. Like why are their faces so close if they just met and one of them is just trying to dry the other’s hair? Personal space is clearly dead now. Am I the only one who would be like get out my personal bubble you pervert?? In the end, the “physical chemistry” the writer tries to build especially between the main leads ends up being worse than no chemistry at all – it’s so unnatural.

Warning! You may see some cute gifs or scenes in the trailer with some romantic tension. You may think, oh, they must be a super cute and natural couple. Don't be fooled! It's all fake! It's all a lie! There is no natural chemistry in this drama at all.

And then nothing ends up being cute! It’s just cringy.

I will say the physical chemistry between the second couple is a bit better. Still no romantic chemistry, and whatever dumb conflict/plot they had was absolutely useless, but at least they had like three cute skinship/romance moments. Honestly the only thing keeping me going was how pretty these two actors were. And when that’s your only motivation to keep watching, you know it’s pretty bad.

And it gets worse. Not only is there zero romantic chemistry, there’s also zero platonic friendship chemistry! Between the leads (since I consider this an attempt at friends to lovers), and between like any of the supposed friendships. No. Chemistry. At. All.

On the positive side! The music was lowkey kind of good. That band had some bops.

Other notes:
Acting - not terrible, pretty mediocre. Maybe even less than mediocre. The actor who played Ye Guang wasn’t half-bad during his emotional scenes. Second leads are decidedly worse.
Pacing - honestly, I couldn’t really tell since there was literally no plot and therefore no need to move along a plot. I assume it’s pretty slow since there are so many useless “cute” (read: cringy) scenes
Kiss scenes - kind of awkward. But A+ for effort.

So yeah. I’d skip this one, but apparently that's just me.