The Romance of Tiger and Rose
My friend B recommended this C-drama, and I just finished it this weekend, watching on WeTV 🙂 It’s a fun rom-com, emphasis on the comedy, a nice, light rebound after the incomparable Love and Redemption. I’ve already watched 3 dramas after Love & Redemption, and still, nobody can top L&R!
I finished My Holo Love (will review soon), and started Go Go Squid but got bored with it by Episode 20ish.
I am watching C-drama now because I feel like I’ve run out of interesting K-dramas already ?
Summary:
The Female Lead (FL) in The Romance of Tiger and Rose is a feminist screenwriter for a TV show. Don’t ask me how she is the only screenwriter for a show, and she seems too young. But anyway, don’t think about it too much. The show she is writing is a romance, but the lead actor complained that the script was lacking, as if the writer has never been in love before.
She goes home and, fueled only by annoyance at the criticism, snacks and chips for the next few days, furiously rewrites / finishes the script, then gets dizzy from exhaustion as soon as she writes the end.
When she wakes up, she finds herself in an Ancient Chinese setting. After a while, she realizes that she’s somehow become one of the characters in her story – the willful, disobedient and spoiled Third Princess. What’s worse, it’s a character that she had written to be killed off in Episode 3, which, according to her plot, was about to happen soon. Since she can’t bear to die, she uses her knowledge of the plot to survive. But this derails the plot because the hero (Male Lead, the Crown Prince of the rival city) ends up falling in love with her, instead of falling in love with the original heroine character (the Second Princess).
She realizes that the only way to wake herself up from this dream was to put the plot back on track, so she ends up doing many comedic attempts at getting the hero and the Second Princess together.
As expected, the Female Lead goes from naïve screenwriter who only understands her characters superficially, to someone who finally understands the feelings and motivations of the characters she created, and eventually finds herself falling in love with our hero. What happens now? Can she still push our hero to fall in love with someone else? Can our Female Lead get back to the real world? Can she bear to leave her love behind in the dream world?
REVIEW
This was a very funny rom-com, but don’t expect it to make much sense, because comedy is prioritized over logic 🙂 A few bits of comedy come from her writing clichés, tropes, following bandwagon deus ex machinas, and incorporating legendary characters into the story – things only she (as the screenwriter) and the audience realizes, and then when these things she wrote finally happen, she asks herself why she wrote such absurd things, LOL.
The lead actress (Rosy Zhao) is great at comedy, and excels at rom-coms like this. I’ve already seen her in Dating in the Kitchen, but I think she was much funnier here. The lead actor, Ryan Ding, also has good comedic facial expressions. I found his makeup a little bit too caked on, but I don’t know if that was intentional.
The series, while being funny, also tackles gender equality. Thankfully, the issue was handled well, and not in a preachy way. In the world the story was set in, there are two rival cities:
- Huayuan City – where most of the show takes place. Huayuan City is very matriarchal. Women are the ones who hold power, and men are subservient to women. Men are considered weak. Only women are allowed to rule, hold high positions, go to war, make household decisions, etc… It is the men who dance and sing for the women.
- Xuanhu City – this city is very patriarchal and is the exact opposite of Huayuan City. Men are the ones in charge, and women are expected to serve men.
Our screenwriter originally wrote the story because she was all about women power, but she eventually realizes that both extremes are not good.
The supporting characters / side kicks are also very funny. The show wouldn’t be as much fun without them! Gossipy servants and underlings seem to know what happened immediately and serve to move the story forward.
Another thing I appreciate about The Romance of Tiger and Rose is that they don’t make the characters dumb. The characters are intelligent enough to quickly grasp what’s happening – none of that “characters are too dumb so they always misunderstand things” nonsense.
There is not much action (kung fu), as this is primarily a rom-com. I loved the costumes though! I love Female Lead’s braided hairstyles!
Verdict: Watch this if you need a good time / want to be distracted, but don’t want anything heavy or sensible. The comedy kept me going. This series is only 24 episodes.
Have you seen The Romance of Tiger and Rose? What did you think of it? 🙂
