The Flaming Heart (2021)

I paid to watch THIS?

I want to be charitable because I showed up to support Gong Jun, but...I cannot. (For much more enjoyable uses of your time that also include his face, I’d recommend Word of Honor, Begin Again, or The Love Equations). This was just a gigantic mess. At first, I was having fun with the zany editing and lackluster plot/characters, but by episode nine, it wasn’t campy in a good way anymore. I watched subsequent episodes on 1.5 speed and fast-forwarded through most of them anyways.

I’m not sure where to begin, except that in so many ways, this was a sub-par version of You Are My Hero, like the comments say. The male lead in one of the civil protection agencies, the female lead a doctor, even the same plot near the beginning of the male lead’s team having to teach the female lead’s team something to do with emergency procedures.

The pacing was terrible, I’m not sure if it was that the episode count was cut to fit into July’s patriotic drama theme or what; the comments here on MydramaList can certainly attest to the absolutely bizarre editing. There are flashbacks to scenes that actually didn’t occur into the final cut; it’s that bad.

Yan Lan is unbearable, alternating between boring, bratty, and useless. She has a remarkable amount of spare time for a doctor, sitting around her office for most of her hospital scenes. The actress was more charismatic as Chuchu in Legend of Fei, and that is saying something for the writing here.

The “villain” was a shallow creation whose actual villainry was kind of pulled out of a hat near the end.

My biggest letdown was the lack of … feeling for anything. In YAMH, they leaned better into hurt/comfort tropes, and invested time in developing the main couple. They were adorable. In Flaming Heart, everything feels brisk, businesslike, ushered along without any chemistry or feeling, and I never felt a thing for the main couple, nor even the other two hetero couples we’re introduced to. The tropes that do make it in – They Knew Each Other As Kids, His Dad Died Saving Her In A Fire, Oh Look At That We Met At The Same Natural Disaster Rescue Site – are either not given enough time for us to feel something, or we just don’t care either way.

My favorite part was whenever Wang Yizhou’s Li Yan Liang appeared, and the “very good friendship” his character had with Doctor Ji Yuan. I shipped them way more than any of the many couples shoved in our face in this drama.

I was not sad to reach the final episode, it was more a sigh of relief that I was free. I recommend people spend their time watching You Are My Hero or the above recommended Gong Jun dramas instead!

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Great Firefighter mission scenes but everything else is sloppy, rushed, & full of nonsense

Geez, with a C-drama that doesn't have the annoying drama clichés, usually I would find okay, but this one, can't say I ended up liking it to the fullest. I was disappointed of how the product of this drama turned out.

What I liked about this drama:
- The firefighter rescue missions: Watching the scenes gives just a glimpse of the everyday lives firefighters go through, sometimes the missions are simple while other times it can be a dangerous challenge to save lives.
- The characters - Even if the plot wasn't that great, I was too invested into the characters already so I couldn't just easily drop this. I love the closeness of their friendship, like they just know they could rely on each other.

What went wrong for this drama:
- The story plot: They had such good content and topics in the beginning. It should've been expanded to several episodes as I saw these events as important. The events impacted the livelihood of the main characters and yet it was rushed to like a 15 min portion of an episode. Adding a villain to this drama proved useless to me. Why include episodes about corruption when you could've solely focus on the rescue missions from the firefighters and medic, heck even show more romance between our 4 couples. Anything is better than adding drug corruption.
- Speaking of romance, it's lacking in details as every scene just feature like the couples liked each other from the start when that really wasn't the case for some couples. Though I like the chemistry between the leads, I needed more of a progression of a relationship for our couples, not just "hey I like you now, let's be together"
- Bad Transition and Editing: Because of the director & writers trying to put every idea of a scene by squeezing them together in an episode, the flow from scene to scene did not flow well. It was bad for the most part, however I will say that the flow was good at times when the setting of a location remained the same. Editing was terrible in some scenes. Sometimes you had a character talking but the camera wasn't focus on them so you didn't know who was talking and there were some audio issues as well. It's like they didn't bother watching the episode before releasing it.

Had they been police officers, I would understand the need of a villain but come on, this is a group of firefighters and a medic team. Why would they need to stop an evil illegal drug overlord? This just doesn't make sense and makes the last 7 episodes of this drama pointless. Happy ending regardless though.

But hey, that's just my opinion. If you read this and still wanna give it a try, go for it. I only stuck around because of the cast. It's not terribly bad but just a drama with better potential had this been given at least 30 episodes.

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