Bromance is about Ya-Nuo, a twenty-five years old girl who had to live, up until now, as a boy because, at her birth, a fortune teller predicted that she would die during her childhood if she wasn’t living as a boy. One day, she saves the life of the chief a the triad, Zi-Feng and his sister Zi-Han. When Zi-Han falls for Ya-Nuo, Zi-Feng decides to become brother in arms with Ya-Nuo. It’s a romance drama.
As I said before, to my eyes Bromance is the true gender-bender drama, since it’s the only one I watched so far in which I thought the female lead was realistic as a male. The actress completely slayed the male lead. Also, her attitude completely fits the idea of living in hiding. Compared to some gender-bender, she doesn’t let suspect people that she’s in fact a woman, since she has been that way since her birth. People completely ignore her nature until she reveals it of her own will when she’s out of danger to die because she was born as a girl. The simply fact that the female didn’t decide to travestite herself, but was raised this way while knowing that she can’t reveal it is absolutely awesome, breaking the gender-bender cliché. She doesn’t do it for someone else, but for her own well-being because her parents are sure that the prophety is true. Since it was new, it was quite refreshing. She wasn’t simply playing the role of a male, she was literraly living as a male what most gender-bender female lead don’t do. Also, the conflict between the two siblings when both of them have feeling for Ya-Nuo is a pretty interesting development. As always, the female lead drags her friend into a relationship with one of the sibling, since he’s always by her side. By that I mean that the secondary couple is a bit more cliché than the main. The male lead, also, is a bit cliché because he’s rich. That aside, I haven’t seen much male lead that are the boss of a triade, so it’s was an interesting way to change from the awful rich boy cliché. Also, the second male lead seems really important at first, but, as the story progressed, I didn’t find he was really in a love triangle, since he kind of loses easily, if I remember well. I don’t really know where to put it, so I’ll place it here. Strangely, I remember thinking the drama was long, even though it’s only eighteen episodes, not because of lenght, but because the plot and the progression of the story wasn’t the one of an usual gender-bender story (I was young back then...), so I don’t know wether it should be watched as a first gender-bender drama (would give high hopes that other drama wouldn’t meet) or as one out of many (story line different). I’ll just say that, if you’re bored of having the same gender-bender plot, it’s a nice way to have something new, but you should watch it with a empty mind. |SPOILERS| That’s not really spoilers, but since I’ll discuss about the ending, I might as well simply put that. The revelation is awesome too, since the male lead never seems to have suspected that Ya-Nuo wasn’t a boy, even thought he knew that she was a girl. His feelings were absolutely adorable as well as his will to understand why she keeps hiding her true nature. He accepts her revelation when the time comes and it’s probably why it’s one of the best revelation I have seen so far because it’s just after they got engaged and everything.
I’ll conclude it here for the moment. For the plot, I would give a 7/10 and, for the characters a 3.5/5.