The set-up for Perfect Match/Five Blessings is seriously great, and the chemistry between the sisters seems fun, and the later developments near the end of Love Game Eastern Fantasy rule, but the pace and therefore delivery really brings it down several notches, which is genuinely unfortunate.

Extra annoying because the premise of five sisters from an impoverished noble family without husbands or sons, open a tea shop with their mother and slowly all get paired up is super fun. The way they stick together is super fun. But the romance has no sauce, because the men are all so childlike.

Jokes aren't all that funny either, unfortunately. The other one idol period drama I've been watching, Perfect Match, sometimes called Five Blessings, has got the same problems, but in addition also loves to misuse flashbacks to make its characters seem more smart in their endless schemes.

Truly felt like children's television, which, I think there's even a specific term in the field to describe that feeling in idol period dramas. I just thought it was a shame, because children aren't that thoughtless either. There are better ways to get thoughts and developments across than this.

Frequently, the costumes and the set design are gorgeous if a little overdone! It's super corny, but in a fun way! There's only one problem: it's thirty-two episodes, often almost an hour long, and there's so much exposition: every character has to tell every other character what's going on.

Familiar premise, alright. And she does change the plot of the book in numerous ways throughout, which are all fun. There's also a bit about her father being dead in the real world and he is alive in the world of the novel, playing her father there. Those scenes are very sweet, as are many scenes.

So, Love Game in Eastern Fantasy (2024) is about a young girl who, while writing a hate tweet about a new book by her favorite author, gets thrown into a simulated reality based on the events of that book, where she assumes the role of a minor villain, and is forced to romance the second male lead.

**Obviously, I am kidding! If you can stomach it, and please take a look at the content warnings [domestic abuse, misogyny, suicide, murder, etc.], I was deeply moved by the genuinely surprising warmth and beauty of As You Stood By.

Providing context in this way allows the action that happens in the chapters to breathe unimpeded, and get really granular. It's such a feast for the eyes, because the cartooning gets to zoom in on these characters and their relationship to the world in dramatic terms rather than didactic ones.

Appreciate how it handles exposition, too: there might be a small paragraph at the end of a section that is going to explain what happened, and its implications with regard to how class society functioned then, and it's really useful, rather than making characters say all that over pages of dialogue