June 22 Hongguo Short Drama Top 10: Live action takes #1, AI keeps six slots

The June 22 Hongguo heat-chart repost gives live-action short dramas their clearest win of the week: 《朝思暮时》 took the top slot, and 《江先生别太野》 plus 《盛夏来信》 put three live-action titles inside the top five. The catch is that the same list still describes AI/manhua dramas as holding six of the ten slots, so this is less a full live-action comeback than a contested leaderboard. 1

Coverage note: this issue uses the publicly retrievable Sina repost of the Hongguo heat chart, not a directly accessible Hongguo official chart page. Heat figures below are kept in the format shown by the repost; the #3 value appears as 「47029」 in the source text and is treated as a display anomaly rather than converted into a normal unit.

The headline is real: a live-action drama beat the AI/manhua field for #1. But the table still says six AI slots, and four of those are either 《发配边关》 variants or titles in the same fantasy-resource ecosystem. That means live action won the top of the day while AI/manhua still controlled the breadth of the chart.

For viewers, 《朝思暮时》 is the cleanest single watch if you want to sample the day's winner. The premise is legible in one sentence: a woman realizes she misread her husband and neglected her family, then has to repair the emotional damage. That kind of remorse-and-reconciliation engine is still something live performers can sell better than faceless spectacle.

The strongest AI signal is not one title reaching the top 10. It is the way 《发配边关，罪妻开荒，养出战神》 appears across multiple sequel/variant rows on the same day. The Paper's discussion of the title emphasizes its female-led farming-survival appeal, and also notes that 《万妖图录传》 has stretched to a seventh season while keeping heat. 3

That matters because short-drama rankings reward repeatable emotional architecture. AI/manhua can scale fantasy worlds, monsters, frontier towns and battle scenes without the same actor-schedule and location burden as live action. Once the audience accepts the look, the format can keep feeding seasons around a tight premise.

The backlash against AI is not hard to find. One June 22 Sina reposted comment argued that AI can copy standard anger and joy, but struggles with the layered silence of despair and the everyday texture of dialect or lived-in performance. 9 Another viewer-facing post said AI model faces often feel too similar, while live-action actors remain easier to recognize. 10

That is why the live-action titles still left on this list all lean into actor chemistry or emotional specificity: 《江队，别太野》 sells a contract-marriage bickering pair, 《盛夏来信》 works through betrayal and agreement-marriage melodrama, and 《逃离他的岛》 has a revenge-contract relationship built around two identifiable performers.

If tomorrow's chart keeps 《朝思暮时》 above the 《发配边关》 cluster, live action will have more than a one-day headline. If the AI/manhua rows keep multiplying around sequel titles, the more important story is production architecture: Hongguo's daily top 10 may increasingly be contested not title by title, but format system by format system.