I started When I Fly Towards you last week and now, I am in the second last episode. I love, love it. It is like a warm hug. Makes me feel all nostalgic. It is only my second Chinese drama. The first one was Hidden Love. I liked that one too but found the heroine’s voice too irritating after a point (I LOVE the OST of that drama though). This one is more about friendship and that period in their lives more than romance, but I still love it so much. There are very few books or dramas / movies that make me tear up because of the beauty of it, this one does.

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    Oh there’s a correction – I found Hidden love’s heroine’s way of speaking irritating, not her voice. I wish she had changed it once she went started at university, instead she continued to speak in a childish voice.

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      This is something I learnt about on the site and it’s to do with dubbing. A lot of the actors have regional accents or speak another language so to get round it they are dubbed by voice actors and for some reason the one woman with the childish voice is everywhere. I stopped watching Chinese dramas for a while as it was proper annoying but now more people are doing their own dubbing and there is a wider range of voice actors so we get a true reflection of the variety of female voices.

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        Oh really? That’s interesting. I was really close to dropping Hidden Love because of the childish way of speaking, but it had rave reviews and I persisted. It is a beautiful drama overall, the romance was very cute and I really didn’t have a problem with age gap too. Someone told me that she changes her way of speaking after she grows up, I kept waiting for it happen until it was ep 20 and I finally gave up 😉 The heroine in this drama speaks a little childishly too, but definitely way better than HL.

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        Another good 2023 Chinese drama, “Love Me, Love My Voice,” had to do with voice acting/dubbing. The male lead and a lot of the side characters are voice actors/dubbers and work for a famous voice acting/dubbing company that they co-own. So a little behind the scenes look at the voice acting/dubbing industry. The drama is based on the novel “Really Really Miss You” by Mo Bao Fei Bao.

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          Thanks for sharing I will look that one up as long as it’s not one of the extra long ones which I only watch when there is tumbleweed rolling in K drama land.

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            Love Me, Love My Voice is 33 episodes at 45 minutes per episode so equivalent to a 24 episode k-drama.

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        What a great tid-bit! I honestly thought the Hidden actress was speaking the way she did to keep the young/naive image..

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      Welcome to the world of C-dramas! 😁
      If you ever want recs, I’m sure there are a ton of us who will be glad to give you some, myself included.
      I can’t speak on “Hidden Love”, as I don’t liked the FL actress (Rosy Zhao Lu Si), so I never go near her stuff— I’ve only ever watched 1 of her dramas and that was more than enough— but I agree with what others have already said. Lots of times, the regional accents of the cast does have an impact on one’s watch of a Cdrama, especially if the drama isn’t dubbed (wherein a universal accent is used by the voice actor/actress cast) or when the cast dubs the drama themselves. I’m okay with it when it’s for modern dramas, but even as a native speaker myself (I’m Chinese Canadian who can understand and speak Mandarin [the dialect in Cdramas] and Cantonese), hearing the difference in accents for costume dramas will take me by surprised, especially when it comes from actors/actresses with a stronger accent or when they have a very specific/niche way of pronouncing certain words just because of where they’re from (e.g. The Beijing accent or the Northeastern accent)

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    For me, When I Fly Toward You was far better than Hidden Love.

    In the first, their relationship was really well balanced. He’s better than her at school but still needs her for English. He’s introverted but he still shows his love.

    In Hidden Love, I didn’t like that she never fell in love with someone else, since she was a kid, it was him…

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      I agree, WIFTY is better for me too. I love their relationship. At the beginning, I was surprised that she was so straightforward, but he needed someone like her. Also, he always showed that he cared in very small ways and she was always perceptive enough to understand that too. Talk about soul mates! You could always tell that he found her irresistibly cute, which added to the balance you mentioned too. She always ‘talked’ about his cuteness, he always ‘showed’ in his eyes how cute she was.

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    I loved When I Fly Towards You and really enjoyed Hidden Love. I also enjoyed both of the novels that they were based on. Unfortunately, When I Fly Towards You is only half translated so I had to read using google translated. There are tons of really great Chinese dramas.

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    I think you made a good start. Hope you find many more dramas you enjoy in 2024.

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