Twelve years after "Struggle", 64-year-old Zhao Baogang still failed

Mi Lai (Wang Luodan) is endlessly entangled for love, but she also has the gentleness to fulfill others;

Xia Lin (Ma Yili) is desperate for love, but she also has the persistence of being dependent on each other.

The girl in Zhao Baogang's works is full of "creative" loveliness.

As a phenomenal drama series,"Struggle" directed by him sings a hymn of youth born in the 1980s.

However, 12 years later, Zhao Baogang fought on the youth battlefield of the post-90s generation, and his enduring treasure seemed to have failed.

"Youth Fight" Douban 4.4 is frequently questioned by netizens that the plot is old-fashioned and greasy, and the characters are floating but unrealistic. Is the sword really old?

As soon as "Youth Fight" was launched, it quickly became a hot search topic under the name of "Youth Edition Ode to Joy".

It is true that the plot settings of the two are similar-the

story tells the story of Xiang Zhen (Zheng Shuang), Qian Beibei (Gai Yuexi), Jin Xiaoni (Chen Xiaodi), Ding Lan (Xu Yue), and Yu Hui (Wang Xiuzhu). Five beautiful girls with different personalities but similar interests.

Faced with the numerous tests of life and love on the eve of college graduation, as well as the upcoming social challenges, they are unrestrained and brave in pursuing love.

Is this kind of plot description familiar? This is the case for the plot outlines of Zhao Baogang's series of youth dramas such as "Struggle" and "Who is in charge of my Youth".

However, the popularity of "Youth Fight" does not rely on the strong plot on the list, but on the hot search temperament of the protagonist Zheng Shuang.

With the flow of stars,"Youth Fight" has lost the public's focus.

Why? What happened to "Youth Fight", which was once successfully reproduced under the template?

The biggest problem with "Youth Fight" is the lack of authenticity.

This lack is first reflected in the distortion of the character's image.

What kind of group are the contemporary post-90s college students?

Some netizens once concluded that the post-90s generation is different from the post-80s generation who are full of inspirational and radical thoughts, but are both Buddhist and mourning.

But this seemingly negative attitude towards life is not what others call the "beaten generation", but a clever disguise for the post-90s generation when they face heavy life, emotional, and work pressures.

Behind this lazy attitude is their mature and rational thinking about the future, as well as their secretly determined life plan.

What are the post-90s generation like in the play?

Xiang Zhen, a senior graduate, started a business willfully in order to make her boyfriend look up to him, and still owes his classmates royalties.

It may seem that he was born a calf and is not afraid of tigers, but in fact it reflects his lack of purpose and sense of responsibility.

Qian Beibei only looks at her appearance when looking for a boyfriend, and ignores boys who are sincerely pursuing her.

Jin Xiaoni and Cheng Yu are not busy with the future, but focus all their attention on the bitter pursuit of love.

Yu Hui failed to start her own business and disappeared without a trace without saying hello. After taking back the debt, the two sisters made up in just one sentence.

I have to say that favors in "Youth Fight" are all too easy to pass on.

But in essence, this seemingly free and simple model of life is based on fictional reality, on the survival foundation of high consumption, extremely selfish personality and strong sisterhood.

Most of the female protagonists in Zhao Baogang's youth dramas are straight-headed girls who flaunt their "true temperament", from Mi Lai, who willfully pursues love, Yang Xiaoyun, who quickly marries and leaves, Qian Xiaoban, who runs away from home, and now Xiang Zhen.

Girls who are free and easy by nature are loved by people because they dare to love and hate their decisiveness and self-confidence, because the small flaws that appear in informal matters are as full of vitality as small freckles in youth.

But the candid girl in "Fight for Youth" has a greasy flavor.

Xiang Zhen chewed gum and held an unclear Beijing movie. She pushed her best friend who couldn't swim into the swimming pool, and acted recklessly if she couldn't get love.

Yu Hui always criticizes everyone and doesn't care about the painful situation of others.

This kind of truth is not free and easy truth, not sincere truth, but a kind of fake that does not think about others.

The screenwriter tried to use informal details to express free and easy behavior, but failed to grasp the difference between honesty and selfishness, giving the characters a greasy fake.

The lack of realism is also reflected in plot distortion.

What should the life of contemporary college students be like on the eve of graduation?

Taking an postgraduate entrance exam, looking for a job, starting a business, eating canteens, playing basketball, everything is normal.

However, this is not the case for college life in "The Fight for Youth".

Xiang Zhen didn't learn and didn't work hard. He wanted to start a business in a hot-headed manner. After failing, he had a rich boyfriend paying for her.

Jin Xiaoni does not attend classes all day long to track and monitor her boyfriend. She has a bright future. The science and technology man thinks of it for love and imprisons him.

This plot setting certainly increases the diversity of characters and promotes the rapid advancement of the plot, which is in line with the fast-paced narrative techniques common in Zhao Baogang's dramas, but this setting is a bit like a "small era" dog blood.

In reality, we are more entangled with ordinary love and hate: either differences in employment choices, or differences in personalities and growth rates lead to breakups.

Rather than being promoted frequentlyby death and challenging legal authority recklessly.

In "Youth Fight", Zhao Baogang created an idealized, conflicted and dramatic youth country.

Here, characters must go through financial fiasco, emotional loss, family obstruction, and experience 99 and 81 difficulties before they can achieve positive results.

However, when such an experience is placed in a reality-themed drama, it is easy for the characters to feel suspended. After all, more college students 'lives are just a little bit of waves in calm, rather than struggling to survive in stormy waves.

Such a distorted plot setting lacks the necessary realistic basis, and will only be a stimulating but not exciting youth, which will make it difficult for the audience to resonate emotionally and project emotions.

The youth struggle seems to be a group portrait of contemporary youth struggling, focusing on the emotional, work and life pain points faced by young people. However, the revelation of pain points only stops at uncovering the scars, but does not explore reasonable solutions.

This also led to the distortion of the theme of the entire play.

In Zhao Baogang's youthful utopia, young people face various challenges:

at work, the workplace's discrimination against majors, the failure of interpersonal relationship operations in life; emotionally, the imprisonment of love from different family backgrounds.

However, the solution to these problems is to temporarily shelve the problems by cleverly avoiding reality. Basically, it is still a symbolic solution to quench thirst.

In the play, Xiang Zhen and Yu Hui failed to start a business. The solution was for their heroic second-generation boyfriends to tear up IOUs and throw them into the wind. They were romantic and beautiful, and they were unscathed.

When Qian Beibei and Cheng Yu conflict in their views on love, the solution was a retaliatory house arrest, a person who tried every means to escape, instantly turning from a loving lover to an irreconcilable enemy.

The many setbacks encountered in reality are all tolerable in "Youth Fight".

The pain of real life seems "light" to the characters in the play, because these conflicts are not set up to explore the experience of growth, but to push the characters forward.

The root cause of all problems lies in the flaws in the logical setting of the series. The people are set first and the plot fills the gaps.

From the beginning, the series has set five ideal girls, thereby setting their different personalities and images with the blessings and hardships they deserve.

The biggest problem with the person-first approach is the poor connection between the plots of the characters 'stories.

For example, in the play, Xiang Zhen's boyfriend Zhao Cong accidentally disappeared after helping rescue Qian Beibei. Later, Xiang Zhen searched for someone without success.

The story does not explain the reason for Zhao Cong's disappearance, and arranges a new boyfriend for Xiang Zhen. Wumei's life goes on as usual, and there is a gap in Zhao Cong's connection.

Another problem is reflected in the incomplete causal logic of the subplot itself.

Qian Beibei, a rich girl, has been spoiled since she was a child, so the story arranges for her to be a crazy boyfriend, Cheng Yu, who transformed from a sweet and domineering president at the beginning to a perverted and violent maniac without warning.

The turning points in the psychological transformation process of the characters in the plot are not reflected, turning a confident male college student into a strange villain.

Thinking back on the screen when "Struggle" was popular, but today's "Struggle of Youth" can only be barely supported by Zheng Shuang's traffic, we will all wonder why Zhao Baogang's Youth Code failed today.

The reason is that the traditional template can no longer adapt to the characteristics of the new generation of young people, and it is impossible to still use the old themes and personalities to write stories about the post-90s generation.

Young people in different eras have their own special economic and social circles, and their values and attitudes towards life will be very different. The motivation of the post-90s generation is different from the external release of the post-80s generation. The Buddhist funeral of the post-90s generation is not purely "work" or "laziness".

Perhaps the biggest lesson we learned from "Youth Fight" is that the practice of using unrealistic character presuppositions to routine the plot really fails.