No Meio de uma Tempestade de Neve de Amor (2024)

Unexpected disappointment

I usually don't write reviews here, I use my twitter account to simply send my random thoughts during the watching party, but I am afraid this one deserves a greater explanation than 2-3 sentences I can squeeze in a tweet.

Back when this drama was airing, many of my friends were watching and praising it. I was asked on multiple occasions why I don't give it a try, and at first, it was because I was busy, but later on I found out it's a sports drama which is usually not my cup of tea. Lately, I've been more into cdramas so I decided to finally give this drama a try. Everyone and their mothers loved it, I should too, right?

Hah, how wrong I was.

I won't lie, the first 2 episodes were actually entertaining, I loved the idea of a guy who randomly saw this pretty girl and fell in love with her at first sight. I found their initial awkwardness around each other cute and realistic, but as time progressed, instead of dissipating, that awkwardness became more and more evident.

There was too much staring and almost 0 communication between them. Every time they had one of their staring parties, I had to divert my eyes because I was physically uncomfortable with it. The lack of communication between them was also killing me because how are you so madly liking someone, but not knowing anything about them except the basic info? They could be a total nuthouse, as opposed to their good looks, aren't you interested in finding out more? They even brought it up multiple times, asking each other why are they so quiet and that raised my first red flag because they literally had so many things to talk about (billiards, moving from China, uni life, adaptation to new surroundings, heck even weather talk would do), but they opted to keep their mouth stuffed with food with a sprinkle of bizarre staring on top (the lack of music in staring scenes made it even creepier).

We got a glimpse of ML's traumatic past which could possibly be a reason for his rather cold and seemingly unbothered behavior, but at the same time, he seems to get along with everyone - every random character that spawned out of nowhere had nothing but good words about him, treating him and taking care of him. So, if you managed to make them like you, why are you now blanking in front of the girl you like? Math ain't mathing.

FL's behavior also didn't really make any sense, but I guess it had to be like that for the sake of the plot. Moving in with the first guy you met on another continent seems like the start of a horror movie to me.

And my last, and probably the weirdest reason I dropped it is the age gap. Now, I watched HL before, and for some reason, I didn't really mind the age gap, but I just can't get over it here. I tried multiple times to forget it, but it just kept pestering me to the point that I started associating their lack of talk with their age difference which made me hate it even more.

I know I dropped this early and that there is plenty more room for it to get better, but I literally can't force myself through it anymore. I had a really high expectations and they weren't met so I should stop torturing myself and ruining the image for the people who actually loved it. The cast was actually good, I loved Zhao Jinmai in Reset and this whole review has nothing with them, but their characters, but even they couldn't make me stay. OST and pretty city shots are also a bonus, but they're not the ones I am ready to sacrifice 25 hours for.

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Very awkward romance

Full disclosure. I stopped after the 3rd eposide.

I usually give shows a fair chance to build characters and engage me. But in 3 full episodes, there was zero development, and zero character growth. The worst part, is that in a romantic drama, you want to see the attraction between the leads develop and grow. In this show, they seem to fall for each other by the 2nd episode, with absolutely no reason provided. All we get from them are quiet awkward conversations from the beginning. So when you add the fact that there is no other ongoing story line, i just gave up.

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Slice of Life

I will come back later once I've finished the show. I just wanted to right my thoughts in one spot

Pros
-Chemistry is the best I've seen. Wish they were given more chances to be together
-No angst
-Gives slow burn vibes
-Acting is really good
-Well casted
-Good clothing choices
-Great sets
-Rarely boring in the first have. Slows down in the second
-both leads were green forests, but they had understandable foibles
-it is very realistic. When it is slow, it’s slow because real life is slow.

Cons:
-I don't really like English music in cdramas. Like they have grammatical errors, which bothers me. Some songs they overplayed to much (which were, to begin with, not that great)
-the sports theme was kinda not very much shown. This drama is much more of a romance than a sports dram

(for the cons, they're not very serious issues)

In general, very good drama. If you liked Love me, Love my voice, you should like this (in comparison, this drama has a bit more conflict than LMLMV)

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The drama itself is very slow-paced, yet it absorbs with its narrative

I started watching ASSOL without any background information. At the beginning of the first episode, I thought that the blizzard city could be from Finland (by default, some place in China). After a while, I realized that the series was partly filmed in Finland. The cities of Helsin and Hel(l) in the story is Helsinki. Thus, as a Finn, the interest in drama rose all at once.

The drama itself is very slow-paced, yet it absorbs with its narrative. The male lead in his role is very convincing. The female lead is certainly a talented actress, but the image of women in Chinese dramas is annoying, to say the least, from such a European perspective. This time, shyness has been taken to extremes. Extra points for the following points: Due to Arctic conditions, this time there has been no need to look at the microskirts of female actors. In addition, the number of soft toys is kept to a minimum.

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