An Innocent Mistake (2012)

I liked this drama a lot more than I had anticipated. It doesn’t have that many reviews and not many people have watched it, but I am certainly glad I decided to. The synopsis doesn’t really give the drama justice. It makes it sound like Man Qing, our female lead, didn’t get enough love from her adoptive parents and leaves home to find paternal love elsewhere, when that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Rather, what we have is a set of interwoven stories between Man Qing’s life and the choices her mothers made and Yu En’s (our male lead) life that was inversely affected by his father’s and stepmother’s choices.

The drama’s title, “An Innocent Mistake” (or the Chinese title “A Beautiful Sin,” which also sounds like “Most Beautiful” when spoken; a nice little pun ^^) doesn’t make sense until the very last few episodes of the drama in its explosion of a climax. But everything leading up to there was, to me at least, wonderfully engrossing and intriguing. There are times I couldn’t believe how twisted the drama was presenting itself as, yet at the same time appreciating the places it went. It definitely didn’t hold back on the darkness lurking beneath the drama’s surface plot.

I think the main point of the story is how two people being in love will always somehow and in some way hurt another person, whether that love be paternal, maternal, romantic, obsessive, idealized, etc. It also addresses how easily it is for that love to transform into hate; and how, in order not to hate, you have to take the situation you saw before your eyes and see it in the other person’s shoe too. The plot was magnificently layered in that way. More that that, it also had a logical beginning, middle, and conclusion, as well as probably one of my favorite TW-drama endings yet. It wasn’t even draggy, though it was a bit slow moving. I felt the pace was just right to build up to the ending. (I should probably point out that the version I watched was 26-episodes at 40 minutes a pop, rather than the 16-episode, 90 min version listed here). It also has some melodramatic elements, but nothing too unbelievable.

The other part of the drama I’d like to gush about are the actors. Not every single person who appeared on the screen was brilliant, but the main cast and most of the supporting cast definitely were. Mo Zi Yi as Yu En had all my feels the moment he fell for Man Qing and you could see every conflicting emotion playing on his face. Lin Chen Xi as Man Qing was an excellent choice to play a stoic young adult who is, basically, a classic tsundere-type character. Mo Zi Yi and Lin Chen Xi as the leads also had incredible chemistry together, which made the drama an even more joy to watch.

The three actresses playing Man Qing’s mothers all filled their roles very well as seasoned actors. They acted so well it felt like they really were surrogate sisters who were healing their broken pasts by living with each other. About the only weak link in the drama both story-wise and acting-wise was Chen Yu An as Zhang Wei Wei, who was used mainly as a plot pusher and whose acting was noticeably weaker than her co-actors. But she only appears at the beginning of the drama then is pushed to the background, so you don’t have to endure her to too long, thankfully.

The music was also not something to exactly write home about either. I liked the opening song well enough, and the ending song had some nice lyrics, but it was just... ordinary. I did like that the drama didn’t overuse those songs like other dramas do sometimes, though. The directors knew when the use the lyric-version and when to use the instrumental-version.

There aren’t that many negatives in this drama, so I’m not sure why it’s so under-watched. It’s not exactly a light and fluffy watch, so I guess that’s kind of a detriment. I would suggest to only watch it with an open mind and being able to have persistence even when the drama feels like it’s going way off onto the weird track. It gets back on the right track with all the finesse a drama with depth should.

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