Felipe
This review may contain spoilers
Too many characters, not enough good ones
Honestly, I don’t even know where to start. Gen Y has many problems in my opinion, but I’d say the biggest one is Gen Y 2. The fact that the series was planned with a follow up in mind creates a big issue of inflating the season with too many characters and side stories, with minimal payoff.
The first half of the series was focused on the university, which was ok. Mark and Kit are obviously the best part. But unfortunately they have to share much of the screen time with literally the human equivalent of watching paint dry, Wayu. Wayu’s whole personally is that he had a boyfriend and doesn’t have one anymore. There are 12 episodes of Gen Y and not once have we learned anything about Wayu’s interests or anything that would make him interesting. We just know that he likes to cry and that his dad is rich. The university portion had a few side characters that helped a bit, like Jew, Jack and Koh, and the people from the Communications Arts. Padbok was almost as one note as Wayu. He was angry all the time for no reason and I don’t understand why he has friends. He flirts and then tries to beat everybody. Sab was fun and during the first half of the show his friends didn’t bother me much.
On the other hand, the second half of Gen Y was a train wreck. It truly looks like a different show, even the characters look physically different. Simply looking as a character, Thanu was not the worse. The problem is that most of the things about him are unexplained during his time on the show, or are simply the worst part, aka the “destiny” portion of the show. While destiny was a concept we heard the high schoolers mentioning, when talking about love in the cafe, it was okay. It’s typical BL material. But, the fact that this show turned into premonitions and visions of the future because of destiny was the worst turn I could have imagined. To be far, the introduction of more high schoolers and, with that, the amount of screen time they got was already bad. Sandee joined Padbok in the group of characters with no apparent motivation for doing what they do. Is he the god of destiny? I would not put that as impossible at this point. Pok and Tong started as a potentially interesting jock/nerd dynamic but ended up just being the couple with the steamy scenes. Their love/hate + lust relationship really doesn’t work for me. Phai is very boring in my opinion and it doesn’t help him that his whole story if the destiny subplot.
Gen Y doesn’t work, in my opinion, because it cannot stand on it’s own as a complete show. It doesn’t even really delivers as a season 1. At this point, I don’t even care about the answer to the unanswered questions, like what happened between Padbok and Thanu or why did Pha leave/came back. The team behind this show was smart on focusing so much on Mark and Kit early on, so people would keep watching to at least know what happened to the couple.
The first half of the series was focused on the university, which was ok. Mark and Kit are obviously the best part. But unfortunately they have to share much of the screen time with literally the human equivalent of watching paint dry, Wayu. Wayu’s whole personally is that he had a boyfriend and doesn’t have one anymore. There are 12 episodes of Gen Y and not once have we learned anything about Wayu’s interests or anything that would make him interesting. We just know that he likes to cry and that his dad is rich. The university portion had a few side characters that helped a bit, like Jew, Jack and Koh, and the people from the Communications Arts. Padbok was almost as one note as Wayu. He was angry all the time for no reason and I don’t understand why he has friends. He flirts and then tries to beat everybody. Sab was fun and during the first half of the show his friends didn’t bother me much.
On the other hand, the second half of Gen Y was a train wreck. It truly looks like a different show, even the characters look physically different. Simply looking as a character, Thanu was not the worse. The problem is that most of the things about him are unexplained during his time on the show, or are simply the worst part, aka the “destiny” portion of the show. While destiny was a concept we heard the high schoolers mentioning, when talking about love in the cafe, it was okay. It’s typical BL material. But, the fact that this show turned into premonitions and visions of the future because of destiny was the worst turn I could have imagined. To be far, the introduction of more high schoolers and, with that, the amount of screen time they got was already bad. Sandee joined Padbok in the group of characters with no apparent motivation for doing what they do. Is he the god of destiny? I would not put that as impossible at this point. Pok and Tong started as a potentially interesting jock/nerd dynamic but ended up just being the couple with the steamy scenes. Their love/hate + lust relationship really doesn’t work for me. Phai is very boring in my opinion and it doesn’t help him that his whole story if the destiny subplot.
Gen Y doesn’t work, in my opinion, because it cannot stand on it’s own as a complete show. It doesn’t even really delivers as a season 1. At this point, I don’t even care about the answer to the unanswered questions, like what happened between Padbok and Thanu or why did Pha leave/came back. The team behind this show was smart on focusing so much on Mark and Kit early on, so people would keep watching to at least know what happened to the couple.
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