Coffee and Vanilla

This is my first j drama. It doesn't look like forced romance. He always gives her time to get comfortable, cares about her, and respects her decisions. Dori and Haruka look so cute together. Dori as Hiroto is something else and their sweet moments give butterflies. Love the ending!

The female lead's innocence? Cute at first, but it quickly crosses the line into "how is she this naïve?" territory. At times, it feels more like stupidity than innocence, and it can get frustrating to watch.

Watching her let every single man around her make decisions for her is beyond frustrating. At one point, you just want to scream, "Girl, make up your own mind!" Her complete lack of agency really drags the show down, and it's hard to get behind a character who can't seem to think for herself.

And let's not forget Dori Sakurada's role. Don't get me wrong, the guy's talented, but he's totally overplaying his role here to the point where it becomes uncomfortable to watch. It's so dramatic, so extra, that I honestly had to pause a few times just to breathe.

I still watched the whole series. Despite all the ridiculousness and eye-roll moments, Coffee and Vanilla is one of those guilty pleasure shows that's just so easy to binge-watch. It's dumb, it's cheesy, but yet a guilty pleasure.

I am not gonna lie. It is bad. There are so many things wrong with it, but I'll mention the ones that are most important: the acting is bad, there is no chemistry between the main characters, the dialog is terrible and clunky, the color grading is weird, and all the characters look like they are 15 years old and they slapped "grown-up clothes" on them to make them more credible. I could keep on going.

Actually the worst part is the first episode. 20 minutes in and they already love each other and by the end he has talked her into sleeping with him, after he ignored her for a week. It gave me really bad vibes.

It is so unbelievably bad, I hated myself for watching it. It's like that sordid curiosity that keeps you going while hoping it takes a turn for the better. Nope, it only gets worse. The lead actor is very, very hot, and that's probably I kept watching... just turn the sound and subtitles off maybe??

With that said, this series is twisted in all the bad ways. As a woman, it was flat out infuriating. I realize that some cultures want the women to be subservient and docile, but this was perverted and insulting. It tries to be "steamy" without coming close to pulling it off. It ends up being vulgar, unrealistic and cringey.

"Coffee and Vanilla" was just too vanilla.

The romance was too sudden and that's why the intensity of it was thrown out of the window. There was an implied love triangle that was easily swept under the carpet only to be mentioned towards the ending. The mature parts were okay, but it looked a bit robotic and forced, lacking any emotion and romance overall. So, the drama was just like this : boy falls in love with popular but childish and naive girl, they get together, many try to set them apart, boy comes to the rescue every single time, happy ending. There was no character development, no love story build up and no surprises. Plus, the leading lady was, as you can guess, the vanilla of the story, and rightly so. She had no personality, claimed to be immature, but she never actually changed, even though there were some scenes that had potential. Her love interest was a more complicated that was never explored.

So, four out of ten.