Brothers, Hate Me Already!

Zoey is at the end of her run and about to retire when something goes wrong in the system and drops her into an old melodrama as its villainess. The role comes with a quota: she has to make people despise her, and the meter has to fill before she can leave. The same fault that put her there leaves her thought broadcast switched on, so every calculation she makes about how to be awful is audible to the family she has been assigned to. She sulks, she picks fights, she says the cruelest lines she can think of, and her three older brothers hear the reasoning underneath and find her endearing. The family is written to go bankrupt and she keeps letting slip what she knows, so the collapse gets headed off before it starts. Chen Que, the fiance who is supposed to hold her in contempt, begins showing up wherever she is. The hostility meter goes back down to zero and stays there while Zoey works out whether the mission can be completed at all, or whether she is stuck being adored.