The first episode was so weird I almost bounced off of it but I'm glad I continued. Despite how tropey it was, the relationship development between the leads still felt cute and sincere. I swooned when the confession finally happened and everything was progressing okay. The male lead is very convincing as a girl and the female lead was decent enough.

I did feel slightly anxious about them inevitably breaking up and prepared myself for it. I think I was expecting a more deft and natural build up to the break up since the characters had been behaving according to a consistent internal logic so far. Instead, I felt betrayed by the feeling that the break up arc was now activated and the characters started behaving unlike themselves just to create angst.

The characters had been managing their switching incidents as they happened but now the fmc was fearful of touching the mmc and withdrawing from him physically. They both knew there was a chance of them being discovered at any moment (the mmc always had to wear a mask in public) and, leading up to the posting of the paparazzi pictures, they'd been aware that a paparazzo had been following then and may or may not have "incriminating" photos of them together. They knew all these things and maybe the fmc wasn't fully cognizant of what the scandal would mean for her and her family...she still completely withdrew from the mmc at their first real difficulty without any consideration for how this might hurt him. It's definitely difficult for celebs to date -especially when it's with regular people- but not impossible. Things do blow over eventually. I guess I just wish the build up was convincing if the break up had to happen in the first place.

I disliked the last 3-4 episodes strongly. I'm over the whole let's-break-up-and-meet-after-a-year trope. It's old and boring. I don't even properly understand why they broke up anymore. Their conversations after the one-year gap made it seem like her one and only major issue had been her fear of them switching and that made no sense to me. So it wasn't the scrutiny from his fandom and the media? Blergh. Whatever. (Note: I didn't care much about the story-in-a-story thing since I figure they only used it to get around censorship. I'm treating the novel as "the story" in my head.)