[RECAP] Just An Alluring Smile (Love O2O) Ep 27-30 (Finale)

Previously recapped . . . Ep 1-8, Ep 9-10, Ep 11-15, Ep 16-17, Ep 18-22 & Ep 23-26

Disclaimer: In a strict sense, this isn’t a scene-by-scene recap of the drama — it’s more of a thoughts/commentary/fangirling review thing. For a detailed explanation of each episode of Love O2O in English, you can read them all at Dreams of Jianghu, then come and read up my thoughts. Oh, and spoiler alert. (Duh).

There’s just something so oddly satisfying about this pic . . .

The Basics:

• Name: Just An Alluring Smile, Love O2O, Kiss Me, 微微一笑很倾城(wēi wēi yī xiào hěn qīng chéng)
• Length: 30 episodes
• Language: Mandarin Chinese
• Genre: Gaming, College romance
• Airing: Two episodes per day Monday to Saturday, one episode on Sunday
• Based on the original online novel by Gu Man

The Cast Of Characters:

• Yang Yang (杨洋) as Xiao Nai (肖奈)/ ID: 一笑奈何
• Zheng Shuang (郑爽) as Bei Wei Wei (贝微微)/ ID: 芦苇微微
• Mao Xiaotong (毛晓彤) as Er Xi (赵二喜)
• Bai Yu (白宇) as Cao Guang (曹光)

How To Watch:

• Raw, unsubbed episodes on YouTube via Croton Media
• Subbed episodes on DramaFever

The Plot:

Bei Wei Wei (Zheng Shuang), a computer science major and avid gamer, “divorces” 真水无香 in the role-playing wuxia game Dreaming of Jianghu (referred to as “倩女幽魂” in the drama). Her gaming abilities soon capture the attention of Xiao Nai, who, through the character  一笑奈何 — the highest-ranking player on the server — joins forces with Bei Wei Wei’s 芦苇微微。

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The Actual Recap (Ep 27-30)

To be honest, I never know how to deal with endings. So let’s take a deep breath and accept our fate. Yeah, no.

The point of these episodes is basically to tie all the loose ends together and furnish everything with a pretty bowtie and a cherry on top. Let’s see how Love O2O did it.

Wei Wei agrees to go with Er Xi to receive payment for her summer internship at that company, but Er Xi has to go pee. Er Xi awkwardly bumps into Cao Guang and nearly heads for the wrong bathroom; they’re apparently pretending that they don’t know each other.

Meanwhile, Meng Yiran approaches Wei Wei outside the school building, where she’s waiting for Er Xi to come out. After all the stupid drama from earlier, Meng Yiran’s thought it through — she apologizes to Wei Wei for creating a side-plot of Love O2O and tells her she’s decided to transfer schools; she also explains that she’s learned to friends more, expressing her jealousy of Wei Wei’s close friendship with Er Xi.

And to be honest, I feel like most of the bitchy drama was from her so-called “friend” — even at the beginning of the drama, Meng Yiran picked up hints that Wei Wei was a good, well-meaning person; it was part jealousy of Wei Wei & Xiao Nai and part, well, her friend that caused it all.

Yay character development.

The main obstacle of these upcoming episodes is the deal with Xiao Nai’s company — with very very limited time, Xiao Nai insists on completely optimizing the demo prior to the deadline. Everyone’s all tired and frustrated at him being such a perfectionist, even to the point of calling him “perverse”.

But one night Xiao Nai takes Wei Wei shopping — it apparently coincides with “Chinese Valentine’s Day”, or the seventh day of the seventh month of the lunar calendar — and comes across this random ad. When he observes some binary code, Xiao Nai very lamely turns into Sherlock Holmes.

As someone who has taken legit programming courses before, I can only but cringe in disapproval; no one, and I mean NO ONE thinks of code like that. NOT COOL. >_<

So somehow it all turns into inspiration . . . of how he ultimately successfully optimizes that demo. I’m not even going to question it. Whatever.

With the demo finally complete, the dudes all go shopping for tuxedos (for the meeting presentation thing later); when Wei Wei remarks that KO looks quite fine in a tuxedo (Mo Zha Ta proudly agrees), Xiao Nai insists on trying on one himself. XD

Then comes the business presentation — as was far too obvious in the previous scenes, A Shuang betrayed them all. Well, obviously Xiao Nai knew all along — again, it was so freakin’ obvious — so that when their demo couldn’t connect on to the company’s server he had prepared his own.

The “business presentation” was ehhh — they legit tried to include stuff in there because 新倩女幽魂 is a Chinese RPG that legit exists in real life, and this real-life actor named Yang Yang just so happens to be the spokesperson. And then that’s when some of us realized — Love O2O is basically an extended commercial for the RPG 新倩女幽魂.

So after Xiao Nai explained about how 新倩女幽魂 integrates traditional Chinese culture, etc., he gets the deal. Yay.

And that’s when the episodes start getting awfully draggy. It’s a strange sensation, because on one hand, I don’t want the fluffiness to end, but on the other hand, it was so draggy and there were too many flashbacks. Especially since I was somewhat in a state of, well, denial over the drama ending — what is “ending”? Of course, we see Wei Wei and Xiao Nai do cute things forever and ever and ever . . .

But anyway Wei Wei and her good friends graduate — I love how they still fangirl upon seeing Xiao Nai waiting for Wei Wei. Annoyed, the camera man looks back to see him and tells him to hide behind a tree.

The game 新倩女幽魂 is really, really popular in the Love O2O universe so Xiao Nai gets interviewed, during which he may or may not have called Wei Wei his fiancee.

And finally he gets into the real business:

“When are you going to let me graduate?”

 

“Graduate from what?”

 

“Didn’t you want me to study two years faculty of self-control?”

Xiao Nai visits Wei Wei’s family and Wei Wei’s dad turns out to be even more of a creepy stalker than Xiao Nai. >o<

He’s freaked out because Xiao Nai is so perfect, it’s bothersome (which I admittedly have to sort of agree with). Okay, I can name a few of Xiao Nai’s flaws — he can only cook noodles and is rather narcissistic. He’s incredibly confident (ex. narcissistic) when he was just 500% sure that Wei Wei would accept his affections ASAP. (Except . . . Wei Wei did, so it was correct judgment on his part.) And to pretty much everyone around him except maybe a few friends, he always assumes this facade of indifference, perfection, and most usually both. But as the main attraction of a fanservice novel, what is there to do?

They actually sort of included that shower + wedding dress scene at the end and actually made it a rather sensual watch. I was impressed. (And men’s voices, especially when filled with lust . . .)

But don’t pretend I didn’t notice those red ears. XD

After they were officially married, they went to the now closed down Internet cafe — the Internet cafe all the way back from episode 1, that is.

“When I first saw you, you were sitting there.”

 

“It was actually love at first sight for you, right? I now realize you’re pretty much a pervert*. You have a complaint?”

 

“No. But I feel that it’s not to a high enough degree. I’m at least a hungry wolf among the colored ones.”

 

“You cannot reverse your shame to be your glory.”

 

“As a wolf with a specialist diet, not being hungry is more shameful.”

And, finally:

“I was thinking — if I knew that there was today, it definitely would have been love at first sight.”

*”Pervert” in Chinese is 色狼, or literally “colored wolf”. A “hungry wolf”, on the other hand? Ooh . . .

When the ending theme song rolled in, I sort of just stared in shock.

Overall Thoughts

Love O2O was amazing. Seriously.

Despite my many complaints and sarcastic comments, especially regarding all those obvious product endorsements and stupid side plots, it was an extremely fun, enjoyable, and stress-free watch.

Though they held the real-life relationship off all the way until episode 10, since then it was just scene after scene of giddy satisfaction. A little bit too much of satisfaction, anyway, as now I’m just way too spoiled and seriously lack patience. That being said, I’m glad Wei Wei and Xiao Nai developed a platonic relationship online prior to their whole fluffy real-life romantic relationship (that developed at pretty much the speed of light).

The amazing thing about the drama is how the characters — Xiao Nai especially, hehe — literally “walked out of the novel”. Through the light filters and such, all the fun little fluffy, heart-fluttery, and swoon-worthy scenes transitioned onscreen basically seamlessly.

Xiao Nai and Wei Wei’s respective roommates, despite not receiving much screen time, felt relevant and added lots of nice humor to the overall drama. And then they even included some KO and Mo Zha Ta. *winks* ❤

Even the bitchy drama happening at Wei Wei’s school and in the online RPG were nice additions — and there was just such a great sense of triumph when it was all over.

That being said, I still wish Wei Wei could be less passive when around the real-life Xiao Nai. Eventually, the kisses got better — in part because they just stopped showing close-ups of their mouths. As the episodes progressed, Wei Wei did get more comfortable around him but the shyness that was originally good-humor became rather frustrating.

Don’t get me wrong — it can be clearly seen how Xiao Nai — erm, Yang Yang’s visuals — can just make all of our knees go weak. Especially when he smiles, ohmygoodness. But Wei Wei, who is usually a strong-willed, hardcore woman when she needs to be one, sort of just, well —

So I don’t know. I just wish Wei Wei wasn’t so demure and passive. >_<

They were still infinitely cute together, despite this being a BTS.

In general, Love O2O is really just a fluffy and stress-relieving watch where the episodes pretty much pass by in no time. It’s so different than what’s been on my usual watchlist, but it was definitely worth it and its huge hype.

— moon148

This drama ended? *blinks* Say what?