General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Mr.Bad (我的反派男友)

Mr.Bad (我的反派男友, Wo De Fan Pai Nan You, also translated My Villain Boyfriend) is a 2022 Chinese romantic fantasy comedy web series in which a young novelist accidentally summons the villain from her own wuxia (Chinese martial-arts fiction genre central to the plot) novel into the modern world, and the two fall in love. It was produced by iQiyi, ran 24 episodes of about 45 minutes each from September 30 to October 9, 2022, and was directed by Li Qingrong with Chen Zheyuan and Shen Yue in the leading roles.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Native / English title	我的反派男友 (Wo De Fan Pai Nan You) / Mr. Bad; also known as My Villain Boyfriend¹
Broadcast	iQiyi, September 30 to October 9, 2022, 24 episodes of about 45 minutes, daily at 20:00¹^•²
Genre	Romance, fantasy, comedy; sub-genre transmigration¹^•²
Lead cast	Chen Zheyuan as Xiao Wudi; Shen Yue as Nan Xing; with Luo Mingjie, Qu Jingjing, and Dong Xuan in supporting roles¹^•⁴
Production	Director Li Qingrong; screenwriters Lu Han (路寒) and Li Jingchun (李静淳); companies iQiyi and Smart Dragon¹
Series placement	Fourth 2022 title in iQiyi's Sweet On (恋恋剧场) romance lineup³
Audience profile	About 81% female viewers, concentrated among ages 18 to 30; 82% positive sentiment in sentiment tracking⁵

Spoilers

Premise and plot

Nan Xing (Shen Yue) is a recent physical-education graduate who gave up discus throwing after an injury and works to break into publishing as a web novelist. When she makes a wish for an unforgettable love at the fountain of Fairy Zhen, the wish summons Xiao Wudi (Chen Zheyuan), the cunning, narcissistic great villain of her own wuxia novel, a demonic-cult master who has traveled roughly five hundred years out of his era. Clever and resourceful, he quickly absorbs modern knowledge at a public library, blackmails his way into the spare apartment next to Nan Xing's, and the two begin a combative neighborly life.⁶^•⁷

Xiao Wudi acts as Nan Xing's love adviser, hoping that helping her with romance will send him back to his own world, and finds himself falling for her in the process, while Nan Xing builds her career at the X Culture publishing company run by the writer Lu Zichen (Luo Mingjie).¹ The finale resolves the mystery of his origin: he learns that he is not the great villain Nan Xing wrote, but a hero and guardian created for her by Mao Xiaojun, a character tied to her past.⁸ The closing episodes move to a wedding attended by the couple's friends and family, and Nan Xing's novel becomes a success.⁸

Production and release

The series premiered on iQiyi on September 30, 2022 as an iQiyi exclusive, with new episodes released daily at 20:00 for VIP members (two per day, six on the first day) over a ten-day continuous run.³ Before launch, more than 2 million users had reserved it on the platform.³ Li Qingrong, who had previously co-directed the hit Go Go Squid!, directed; the producers included Yang Bei, Liu Miaomiao, Yan Zheng, Liu Menghao, and Liu Mujia.¹^•³ It was the fourth of iQiyi's 2022 Sweet On (恋恋剧场) titles, following Love Is Sweet-lineup companions such as Love Should Have a Shape, Love Between Fairy and Devil, and Cross-Time Romance.³

Reception and audience

Sentiment tracking reported by Detawen technology put the drama's audience at about 81% female, concentrated among Z-generation viewers aged 18 to 23 and 24 to 30, with 82% positive sentiment. Viewers drove Weibo hashtag discussions such as #我的反派男友全是糖# ("Mr. Bad is all sugar") and #陈哲远沈月CP名叫南忘今萧#, and the audience skewed toward newer first- and second-tier cities, which the analysis attributed to the show's light-comedy tone.⁵

Commercially, the show did not become a breakout. Industry commentary in The Paper noted that it finished its run without breaking iQiyi's 7000 heat-score threshold, in contrast to Love Between Fairy and Devil, the only title in that year's Sweet On lineup to reach the ten-thousand-level heat band.⁹

Style and genre context

An original script with borrowed parts. The drama is an original screenplay built on the "book transmigration" (书穿) premise, in which a character crosses out of a novel. Commentary in The Paper observed that while book transmigration was well established in Chinese web fiction and its adaptations, pairing the heroine with the great villain of her own novel was an unusual twist, and that the show localized the premise by choosing a wuxia novel, the most familiar genre for domestic audiences, as the source world.⁹ The same commentary traced echoes of the Korean drama wave of 2016 to 2017, including the book-world premise of W: Two Worlds, the athlete heroine recalling Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok-joo, and the wish-based summoning of Guardian: The Lonely and Great God, with the summoning trigger changed to calling for help.⁹

The show also departs from the campus settings of its leads' earlier hits: although Nan Xing's discus-athlete background brings some scenes to a training hall, the story is set in the workplace and at home, following her from job interview through probation to a firm footing at work.⁹ Critics characterized the result as a small-budget sweet romance that handled casting economically, in line with the genre's practice of pairing cost-effective "youthful energy" actors rather than top stars, but judged its light comedy and sweetness restrained, stopping short of the emotional intensity that drove comparable hits.⁹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › International serial drama and telenovelas › East Asian drama series › East Asian web and streaming serials › Titles Iv to My

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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