My Demon was one of the first K-dramas i ever watched and looking back i think it spoiled me a teenie tiny bit 😭

i watched it while it was airing in 2023 because clips from it was going viral on Twitter every day, before i actually became a K-drama PERSON, so i had absolutely no frame of reference except for maybe attorney woo?? which i watched before or after? my memory's a bit fuzzy on that, cause i dont remember registering Attorney Woo as a "kdrama" lol even though it was.

with My Demon tho, i thought oh okay??? this is what we’re doing over here???

the visuals, the chemistry and even tho the story wasn't the strongest or the most well written, i remembered enjoying the romance quite a bit.

My Demon was the ORIGINAL cotton candy 😭 Perfect Crown didn’t create this weakness in me, it merely exposed that My Demon got there first.

and because i was so new to K-dramas, i didn’t even appreciate how good i had it 😭 i had no idea i was subtly developing expectations that i'd then spend my next kdrama era demanding from most dramas that crossed my path.

which is extra funny now because i barely remember huge portions of the actual plot from My Demon😭😭 what i DO remember is how much i loved watching them together and how happy the drama made me. like the positive residue is STRONG.

having watched a truly unreasonable number of dramas now that im 3 months into my Drama Marathon that kicked off in June with My Royal Nemesis, i keep looking back at My Demon like…

oh. hmm... 🤔 you were kinda more formative than i first realized. . .

i have a "rewatch this in 3 years list" and My Demon is definitely on there in top 5

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question:

what drama did this to you? especially if it was one of your first ones and you didn’t realize until later how badly it had distorted your standards 😭

_

my previous diary entries:

0.1: Finished 25 K-Dramas in 60 Days... 😭

0.2: i started My Bias, My Boss!? and unfortunately...

0.5: Kdrama bias vs Fav Kdrama

1: watching a love other than yours on premiere day

2: mr. queen 500 years

3: further proof that i'm always on the right side of history

this scene is so iconic and fun to watch. both kristin and tom, you could tell exactly what they wanted to do with this scene and they accomplished just that

ﮩ٨ـﮩﮩ٨ـ🫀ﮩ٨ـﮩﮩ٨ـ

Diagnosis: misogynist. Treatment: extensive reconstructive surgery.

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⚠️ SPOILERS AHEAD (for the real drama AND my imaginary one) ⚠️

--PRE-OP BRIEFING 🩺

writing is fun for me. this entire operating room exists because i have fun doing this. pls don't make it UNfun. thank you!

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SURGEON’S ADVISORY for rom-com writers:

if you HAVE to... and i mean HAVE TO. Like... i mean, someone is twisting your arm going "NO!!! the romantic male lead MUST be a misogynist!!!" 😭 at LEAST dismantle it correctly.

so i did it for you.

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quick operating room policy before we begin with the surgery:

generally, only dramas with an admission assessment of 7/10 or lower are getting admitted 😭

8s, 9s are SAFE, and 10s will most likely never be on my operating table obviously... cause if i liked you that much, i'm not performing surgery just cause i'd change a scene or two, im not a maniac.

HOWEVER... special circumstances CAN exist 👀 an 8+ might still end up under my scalpel if there's something specific that bothered me SO much that i can't stop rewriting it in my head.

but generally?

7 and under: eligible for surgery.

8 and up: operating table by special circumstances only.

im not just cutting people open for fun, well, i am, but you know what i mean 😭

discharge goal: 9/10 or higher.

that’s when i’m calling the operation a COMPLETE success.

7 or 8? patient survived, but we’re probably leaving with some scars or permanent damage that surgery cant fix..

6 and under? …i did what i could 😭 us surgeons can perform miracles, but we're not gods at the end of the day.

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Admission Assessment: 3/10: patient arrived in CRITICAL condition. emergency surgery, STAT!!!

(skip to the operation aka my rewrite section below if your attention span is as horrible as mine 😭)

INTRO:

welcome to my K-Drama Operating Room 🩺

after having written 32 reviews, i noticed… every time a drama lets me down, i dont just cum to reddit and complain... i start mentally performing surgery on it too 😭

in the shower. at work. in the Uber to pilates class. at 2am when i should be asleep.

moving scenes around. cutting things. transplanting entire plotlines. trying to figure out what exactly went wrong and whether the patient can be saved 😭

so i figured… might as well open an operating room, im a self taught surgeon after all...

--operating room rules:

i save what worked. i cut what didn’t. i reconstruct what had potential.

and i explain WHY i’m making every incision, so you can see my reasoning and fight me in the comments like a civilized medical board of directors… you know, a group famously known for reasonable and humane decision-making 😭

this is NOT fanfiction (i dont read or write them lol) where everyone gets a golden retriever and nobody suffers, cuz you know i need somebody to suffer 😭

which, i admit, sounds mildly concerning coming out of the mouth of your surgeon… but moving on.

i’m working with the patient that came in. same basic drama, same characters and premise, same episodes. i’m just operating on what went wrong.

and there was no better first patient to start with than Love to Hate You.

if you missed my original review, here's the short version:

3/10. one of the most bingeable bad dramas i've ever seen. i watched 8 episodes i think in one night and finished the last 2 the next day, and my final takeaway was:

"Date a misogynist long enough, and you'll fix him."

so today, i'm fixing him. not by dating him tho😭

gonna cut him open instead hehehe 🔪

--WHAT I'M SAVING

before i make my first incision, i wanna be clear: this drama had healthy tissue worth saving, i didn't binge it in a day by accident.

the female lead is capable, confident, funny, knows how to stand up for herself. she stays exactly who she is. if anything, i'm giving her MORE to do.

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The fake dating arc was when i was having the most fun, so it stays... and it gets BIGGER and better. no unnecessary amputations in MY operating room 😭

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The comedy. when this drama was funny, it was REALLY funny. i'm keeping that energy. i'm just not making misogyny itself the punchline.

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The actress going through the divorce. the ONE storyline that made me think they could’ve done so much more with it. her career getting destroyed while her cheating husband walked away with barely a scratch? that double standard deserved way more than a side plot.

in my version, it's the heart of the drama.

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ML's best friend. he stays. but i'm actually making him BE a best friend??!!!

which means occasionally telling your friend when he's being an asshole instead of enabling him for YEARS.

and this fixes something else too: maybe now i'll actually care abt his romance with the FL's roommate. cause in the original, watching this man enable his best friend's misogyny for years played a HUGE part in why i never rooted for whatever was going on between him and the roommate.

you can't spend years going "haha that's just how he is" about your misogynistic bestie and then expect me to swoon when YOU get a romance too...

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Her rejecting the proposal, her explanation abt the marriage culture she grew up around was so true to her character. for abt 5 seconds i thought the ending was going to be refreshing. that moment stays. what came after it does NOT. we’re excising that shit completely 🔪😭

--WHAT I'M CUTTING

The vomiting after the kiss scene??? unnecessary. why are we doing elementary school cooties with a GROWN MAN??? 😭
and it also turned him into a punchline instead of a person.

AMPUTATED. 🪚

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The medication he needs to touch women. also AMPUTATED.

i'm not rooting for a romance where the man needs pills to touch women... thats absurd and cartoon-ish. and not even funny, so whats the point...

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“I’ve never met someone like her.” / “she’s different.” i thought that was the title of the drama or something 😭
we’re NOT amputating the phrase itself, actually. we’re removing the part where the drama thinks this is romantic for some reason... cause if he wants to call her “different”? fine.
we’re turning that sh!t from a compliment into a symptom.

also removed is that “not all men” nonsense from the bar scene with FL and her roommate. the scene itself can stay. the dialogue needs reconstructive surgery. we’re cutting that line completely and fixing basically the entire conversation tbh. it was kinda painful to listen to. felt WAY too much like a bunch of men in the writers room going “okay so what do women talk about when we’re not there?” and then writing a scene with 2 women talking like that...

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The roommate being painfully spineless. she stays, but we’re performing a spinal reconstruction**,** and giving this woman a BACKBONE and some standards 😭

she doesn't need to become the FL 2.0, but she DOES need boundaries, opinions, and the ability to actually stand up for herself.

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"Being tamed is my next challenge."

it never existed. we will never speak of it again.

AMPUTATED.

--WHAT NEEDS SURGERY

these are the problems that this rewrite HAS to solve:

his contempt for women was never dismantled. the story just told us he changed cause he "fell in love" with ONE woman.

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"not like other girls." the drama kept telling us she's the exception... which agrees that every other woman is "the problem."

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nobody around him ever challenged him. his best friend enabled him for years, and the story left the entire job of changing him to her.

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the final scandal was that she'd dated multiple men. i couldn't take it seriously.

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the romance. he never PROVED anything.

y'all know my drill: he falls first, he falls harder, and if he hurts her, he pays.

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my specific rule for this operation:

i'm NOT removing his misogyny. that would be too easy lol (i mean i'd prefer a misogynist male wasnt in my rom com, but what are you gonna do, ykwim? ¯\(ツ)/¯ gotta roll with the punches, ya know...)

i'm making him actually confront it.

by the time this man gets anywhere NEAR his happy ending, he needs to understand that she was never the exception.

he was wrong and an asshole.

alright. scalpel pls. 🔪

--THE OPERATION

patient is prepped. let’s see what we can save 😭

EPISODES 1 & 2: THE SETUP

same meet. she's the lawyer, he's the top actor, they can't stand each other. comedy stays like i said but his distrust of women isn't played as cute anymore... cause like... misogyny is a serious thing lol, not a cute character quirk...

we SEE what it looks like more explicitly, and it’s portrayed more seriously and not like it was portrayed in the original where it seems like the actress was the bitch making things inconvenient FOR HIM:

so, show a proper montage of him being awful AND cold to every actress he works with. he's deliberately built his professional life around minimizing his interactions with women. and we SHOW how hellish it is for them to work with him. cause imagine being the actress who has to work with him, right? You'd hate coming to set every day and would dread doing your scenes with this dude.

show all that.

oh, and one more thing...

FL has a crush on someone else.

let's introduce this SML!

he's a prosecutor she's been going up against in court for years. their banter is flirty, he respects her, and she lights up every time his name comes up.

our male lead is already irritated by this and has no idea why yet 👀

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EPISODES 3 & 4: THE FAKE DATING ARC (EXTENDED EDITION)

the fake relationship happens for the same reasons, but now it runs almost the entire first half, cause THAT'S where the fun was.

and this is where HE falls first.

she's treating it like a contract, rules and clauses and penalties, writing up terms on a napkin and billing him for her time like the true lawyer she is.

meanwhile ML is taking the fake relationship WAY more seriously than the person he's fake dating 😭

he insists every fake date requires a "rehearsal" and he's finding reasons to text her that have absolutely NOTHING to do with their agreement.

the prosecutor's name pops up on her phone during pf of their "date rehearsals" and he has 67 questions.

BUT i'm not letting his one sided crush immediately cure his misogyny either. actually, i think him falling for her should expose the problem even MORE.

cause now he's confused. he likes her and GASP! respects her. he genuinely enjoys being around her. and instead of that making him go "huh... maybe im an asshole with strange, harmful beliefs,"

his conclusion is: she's different.

there it is!!!! except THIS TIME, the drama knows that’s a problem; he still hasn't changed his opinion of women. he's just carved out one exception.

and THAT is what we're building toward.

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EPISODE 5: HE HURTS HER

turning point, and the piece the original was missing entirely.

and its important for this to land: she needs to start having a tiny crush on him by this point too.

halfway through the fake relationship and JUST when she started liking him, she overhears him with his best friend, talking abt women the old way, like from the 1st episode. they're all after something. they all want money, (?? idk who doesn't want money, but ok buddy) status, attention, whatever he was saying lol.

and then he says she's "different, at least."

and she realizes "different" in this case is NOT a compliment!! like an intelligent woman should.

shes like HELL NO!!

she walks straight into that room. she's PISSED. and remember, she's a lawyer!! which i think the drama frequently forgets...? so let her do lawyer things. like let her start asking questions.

"different from who?"

"what exactly makes me different?"

"what exactly do you think about all these other women?"

"what happens if tomorrow i do something that makes me NOT "different" anymore?"

"do i suddenly become one of 'them' too?"

and THAT'S the cross-examination!

and i need this man to slowly realize, while trying and FAILING to answer her, that literally every possible answer makes him sound worse 😭

THAT'S my lawyer FL!!!

put his ass on the witness stand!!😭😭

then she pulls out that stupid little napkin contract and tears it in half.

FAKE RELATIONSHIP OVER!

real feelings unfortunately very much NOT over tho😭 (and of course thats what make it hurt for FL... cause eventually she comes back to him cause its a romcom and all that, but if she doesn't have feelings for him here already, there'd be no reason to come back, so thats why her having developed feelings for him at that point makes sense for this to work.)

And here's where i'm changing his best friend too.

Cause immediately, ML turns to him afterward expecting the usual reassurance. cause that's what he's gotten from this dude for YEARS. excuses. laughing it off. "that's just how he is."

not this time.

his best friend basically tells him: she's right.

and ML is almost MORE pissed cause excuse me???? weren't you on my side 5 minutes ago??? 😭

GOOD.

now BOTH of these men have sh!t to fix.

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EPISODES 6 & 7: CONGRATULATIONS! YOU LOST HER. NOW WHAT?

this is where i'm making him SIT in it.

but b4 all that, he goes outside her house looking pathetic and expecting a sad face to do all the work. it doesnt.

he does some superficial acts so the FL can see hes "changing," and she shuts that shit down, including him finally getting her to have a conversation with him and he's still making his "possible change" abt HER.

he's basically saying: look!!! i'm trying!!! doesn't that mean you can forgive me now???

and she's like... you're still not getting it. and tells him never to speak to her again.

OOP.

because if he's only becoming a better person so she'll date him again, then we are RIGHT BACK where we started.

so she removes herself from the equation.

no more fake dating. no more hanging out.

and NOW we see whether any of this actually stuck.

he gets another actress as a co-star.

and we do NOT make her some perfect angel specifically designed to teach him a lesson. actually, let her annoy the sh!t out of him!!! 😭

THAT'S THE FIRST TEST.

because we don't want our drama to be saying that respecting women means discovering that every woman is secretly wonderful.

we need to show ML seeing that women can be annoying. rude. difficult. completely incompatible with you. AND STILL DESERVE THE SAME BASIC RESPECT HE'D GIVE A MAN.

revolutionary, i know 🫤

and eventually, he has to work with the actress from the beginning again too, and she remembers EXACTLY how he treated her, shhe doesnt care that he's "working on himself." she isn't required to forgive him.

he apologizes anyway for the way hes treated her.

no FL watching, or cameras, and no reward.

meanwhile, i have another man to fix 😭 ugh, thats what i signed up for as a surgeon ig...

cause remember ML's best friend???

yeah. you're not escaping either sir.

keep the roommate actually liking him, her crush was a bit shallow and came out of nowhere lol but what are you gonna do ¯\(ツ)/¯

BUT now that my spinal reconstruction was successful on her, she's bothered by the fact that the ML's bestie spent YEARS enabling the ML's shit.

and his defense is basically:

"well, i never agreed with him."

okay???

you never challenged him either.

you laughed. you made excuses. you helped smooth things over whenever his behavior caused problems.

and THIS becomes his tiny lil arc.

he has to realize that privately thinking "well I'M not misogynistic" while spending years enabling your misogynistic best friend isn't exactly the moral victory he thinks it is.

and the roommate doesn't fold just cause she likes him, now he has to actually show HER something too.

and NOW maybe i'll care when these two eventually get together.

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meanwhile FL is BUSY.

because unlike him, she has other things going on 😭

this is where i’m taking that divorced actress storyline i liked and making it an ACTUAL major part of the drama; her husband cheated, but somehow SHE’S the one getting destroyed for the divorce. she’s losing work. endorsements are getting nervous. the press is picking apart everything she does. she’s too old, too angry, too difficult, too bitter, blah blah fcking blah.

FL gets involved through the firm and helps her fight the professional/legal fallout.

but im also not turning this woman into a walking lesson whose only job is teaching everybody else something.

LET ME KNOW HER.

let her be angry, funny, make a bad decision. let her be petty about her ex-husband. let her have moments where she’s absolutely THRILLED to be divorced!!!!

and through all of this, she and FL actually become super good friends.

and the best part is the ML is not involved in any of this.

she’s living her life, and he’s fixing his shit.

separately.

and somewhere in here, he starts realizing something else:

the woman he called “different” is not actually some magical exception to womankind.

she is just… a woman.

HE was the one with the problem.

THERE WE GO. NOW WE’RE GETTING SOMEWHERE.

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EPISODE 8: OH YOU THOUGHT SHE’D WAIT??? 😭

the prosecutor finally asks her out for real. and she says yes.

OBVIOUSLY.

and our ML finds out.

oh this is delicious 😭 cause there is absolutely NOTHING he can do abt it, so our male lead has to SIT with that 😭

here's the jealousy i live for. he sends spies, maybe his useless best friend to report lol, and he sees pictures. hes fumin'😭 but like i said, he cant do sh!t lmaooo

he has to sit somewhere knowing she’s currently having dinner with a man who respected her BEFORE he wanted to sleep with/date her.

And prosecutor is actually a VIABLE option; he’s in her line of work, funny, attractive obvi, he respects her, has chemistry with her.

i want ML SWEATING! beside himself!!

and more importantly, FL genuinely considers it. cause i’m not giving her a second male lead just to use him as JUST a jealousy prop.

she liked this man BEFORE all of this too which adds to the juice! now she’s actually asking herself whether maybe the healthier choice is the person who didn’t need a 6-episode character rehabilitation program before becoming dateable 😭

meanwhile ML does NOT confess yet. nope. SUFFER SOME MORE.

(says the surgeon😭)

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EPISODE 9: HIS PAST COMES TO COLLECT

NOW we do the scandal.

but absolutely nobody gives a f4ck how many men FL has dated because i REFUSE... that was ridiculous 😭

instead, somebody starts digging into HIM. years of stories from actresses who hated working with him.

old interviews, dismissive comments, people who worked on sets with him finally talking, and the important part:

IT’S TRUE.

im not doing that thing where suddenly everything is taken out of context or is exagerated and poor ML is secretly the victim. NOPE.

congratulations sir. these are YOUR chickens. theyve returned home 🐓

his agency immediately wants to do damage control. deny. minimize. explain. blame his ex. say he was misunderstood. he refuses.

and THIS is his actual SECOND test.

because now changing costs him something!! he publicly admits that he treated women badly.

no tragic backstory or “but i was hurt.” cause in hte original, the flimsy excuse was ridicuclous and not well done. nothing excuses misogyny but this excuse was ESPECIALLY done horribly 😭

And no “that’s not who i really am” either. it WAS who you were.

own it.

and he does! meanwhile FL is watching all of this like 👀

but i’m STILL not letting one public apology win her back, tho.

then the actress from earlier tells her or they see each other somehwere, and she casually mentions that he came to apologize to her weeks ago. before the scandal, before anybody was watching, before there was anything in it for him.

okay, so THAT’S what gets FL.

not the press conference or public humiliation. but the fact that he was already trying to change when he thought he was getting absolutely nothing for it.

NOW she believes him.

and more importantly, now i believe him 😭

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EPISODE 10: FINE. YOU MAY HAVE YOUR WOMAN BACK.

Now he can confess 😭and there’s ONE thing i absolutely do not want him saying:

“you changed me.”

NO SHE DIDN’T.

we’re not putting that job back on her at the finish line!!!

she was the person who forced him to actually LOOK at his horrible behavior and do some internalizing, but everything after that, HE had to do.

So, that’s what he tells her.

he fell for her during the fake dating.

losing her forced him to confront himself.

but he didn’t change so she’d come back, somewhere along the way, he realized he needed to change even if she NEVER came back.

okayyyyyyy.

NOW you may kiss her 😭

and she chooses him.

not cause he’s finally achieved the extraordinary accomplishment of Respecting Women™.

congratulations on reaching the floor???? 😭

she chooses him cause she already loved him, she can finally respect him, AND now she actually believes the change is real.

prosecutor loses ☹️ ☹️ ☹️ i’m sorry mr.prosecutor, you did nothing wrong 😭 but thank you VERY much for your service.

the proposal:

i’m keeping the proposal rejection. eventually he asks.

she says no. same reasons as the original.

NOT “no for now.”

not “ask me again when i’ve been sufficiently tamed.”

just no.

she doesn’t want marriage.

and do you know what he does???

respects her answer... yes, i'll allow him to maybe tease her about it a bit, but at the end of the day, he knows her answer is her answer.

groundbreaking television ik 😭

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EPILOGUE

BUT i still want my stupid little contract callback 😭

so later they’re having dinner and she slides a folded napkin across the table.

he opens it.

NEW CONTRACT

rule #1: a callback to something they share in an early episode. could be anything, as long as its a "them" thing.

rule #2: mind your business.

rule #3: the prosecutor’s name is NOT a swear word. (poor sml lol)

he looks up immediately asking “why is HE still in the contract?”

she smiles.

CUT TO BLACK.

LMAOOOOOO.

close her up. send her to recovery. 🩺

THAT’S IT.

--POST-OP CHECKLIST

☑ he falls first AND harder

☑ he pays for hurting her

☑ his change shows up with every woman, not just her

☑ she's capable, and her skill matters to the plot

☑ a real rival who makes him jealous

☑ 2 friendships between women at the center

☑ SML remains hot and viable until the bitter end 😭

☑ the ending gives her something of her own

☑ the final 20 minutes belong to the couple

☐ epic longing (hey i know my limits 😭)

--PATIENT STATUS

Admission Assessment: 3/10

Post-Op Assessment: 8/10

STATUS: STABLE, WITH SOME PERMANENT SCARRING.

SHE LIVED!!! 😭

did she leave my operating room as a 9 or 10/10?

no.

there’s some permanent damage i simply could not repair with the material i was given 😭 BUT this patient came into my operating room at a THREE and is leaving at an EIGHT.

huge win!

what keeps it from a 9 or 10?

even fixed up, this is a light rom-com about a man with a LOT of catching up to do. which means some of the runtime has to go to him becoming a decent person instead of the two of them being ridiculous together. and the deep, SICKENING, longing that i crave needs a different kind of story 😭 this man spent half his drama becoming dateable. i only have 10 episodes. lets be realistic, my surgery skills have limits.

and at the end of the day, i still need to BELIEVE the chemistry, and no amount of rewriting can guarantee that 😭

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Is this Rewatch Worthy:

my version? yes.

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A bit about my personal prescription:

if you give your male lead a flaw this serious, make it COST him something. make him face it. make him change for everyone, not just for her. and make him earn her back.

don't just give him a girlfriend and call that growth, babes...

Questions:

which of my changes would you keep, and which would you throw out?

team prosecutor or team reformed actor?

which drama should i rewrite next? (i already have a list and it is LONG 😭)

i was on the right side of k-drama history and i didn't even know there was a war happening 😭

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so i only recently discovered that Love in the Moonlight and Moon Lovers: Scarlet Heart Ryeo were not just 2 random 2016 historical dramas...

THEY AIRED AGAINST EACH OTHER!!??

same monday-tuesday time slot, same year and literal ratings rivals lol

and the battle was not even close in korea 😭

Love in the Moonlight became a huge ratings hit, eventually breaking 20%, while Scarlet Heart was fighting for its LIFE in the single digits.

which is super funny to me cause i watched both of these 10 years later this year as a new kdrama watcher, with zero knowledge of any of this.

my ratings:

Love in the Moonlight: 6/10

Moon Lovers: Scarlet Heart Ryeo: 8/10

LMAOOOOOO

And what makes this even funnier is the afterlife of these dramas.

Cause while Scarlet Heart lost the Korean ratings war BADLY, internationally it was already massive!!! and on top of that, over the years it has become one of those K-dramas people STILL talk about. Wang So. Hae Soo, the ending, the K-trauma, the eternal season 2 begging, (btw im one of those ppl who wouldn't mind a season 2, but i absolutely loved the way the story ended so im fine with no season 2 tbh)

people are still entering the Scarlet Heart support group in the year of Beyonce and Olandria 2026.

meanwhile i watched Love in the Moonlight and basically came away mostly unimpressed.

So even without knowing anything about the Great Sageuk War that was happening in 2016 😭😭 i arrived 10 years late and chose my side. (the right one hehehe)

and history has been very kind to my decision!!! As always... (thats my special trait)

Anyway the lesson here is obviously that I am always right eventually.

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some of my revious diary entries:

0.1: Finished 25 K-Dramas in 60 Days... 😭

0.2: i started My Bias, My Boss!? and unfortunately...

0.5: Kdrama bias vs Fav Kdrama

1: watching a love other than yours on premiere day

2: mr. queen 500 years

I thought that mustache would be be the only thing I'd have to look pass😭

REVIEW:

I was SO excited for this drama.

Like genuinely.

The Scandal was one of the K-dramas i'd been anticipating, and when I realized Netflix was dropping all 8 eps at once I was literally THANKFUL because I thought:

oh perfect. I'm binging this. Cause i HATE waiting for episodes!

I started Ep 1 on September 18th at 10:28 p.m.

I finished the drama at around 1 a.m. on September 22nd.

😭

An 8 EPISODE drama.

That I specifically planned to binge.

Took me FOUR DAYS...

Somewhere between starting this drama excited and finally dragging myself through Episode 8, watching The Scandal stopped being something i wanted to do and started feeling like an assignment i needed to finish because i'd already started it.

And the biggest problem is actually very simple:

I was bored.

So. Fcking. Bored.

And boredom is one of the WORST things a drama can do to me cause i can forgive almost anything if im entertained.

But The Scandal somehow gave me:

seduction?

séx...

betrayal

obsession???

manipulation???

jealousy??

widowhood... sigh...

revenge (barely)

forbidden desire (lame?)

>!suıcide!<

and I was pausing the episode to scroll Twitter.

HOW???? 😭

Episode 1 was already not making a very good case for itself.

The whole concubine/heir situation was tedious note to start with, cause basically immediately, i truly did not care.

Very slow start.

The concubine herself didn't bother me, and i remember liking that little flower scene between her and Lady Cho because i thought it was unexpectedly sweet. But all these characters ended up giving nothing burgers by the end.

Lady Cho was more interesting to me because there was such a noticeable difference between the little glimpse we got of her as a child and the woman she became.

As a child she seemed happy and lively.

As an adult she felt completely drained.

Resigned. Bored (imagine that😭)

Like she was just going through the motions of the life she ended up with.

THAT made me curious.

But the episode itself?

Tedious.

And unfortunately that word followed me through basically the entire drama.

---

Then Hui-yeon entered the picture properly and...

girl.

😭

She made a HORRIBLE first impression on me.

The episode basically opens with her trying >!to follow her dead husband into the water!< and i was immediately sitting there like:

???? GET UP???

Then I learned that he had died before they even properly married, she'd apparently been living as his >!widow for around TWENTY YEARS!<, and she was still participating in this whole identity of being the virtuous widow who would eventually "follow" him.

And I was SO confused.

I actually had to go look up the historical context because i genuinely thought I was missing something.

And yes.

I get the whole expectations around widow chastity, social pressure etc, and why her entire adult identity had basically been built around being this "virtuous widow."

I understand why another man entering her life would feel "dangerous."

But this drama re-taught me something very important:

understanding a character is not the same thing as enjoying that character.

And Hui-yeon just NEVER clicked for me.

Not once.

She would see Cho Won and do this:

GASP!

look away.

Cho Won appears again.

GASP!

turn around.

Cho Won walks somewhere within a 5 mile radius.

😧 GASP! hide face.

GIRL.

WHAT IS HAPPENING??? 😭😭😭

She did it SO MUCH that I genuinely started wondering whether I had missed some reveal that she secretly knew him already or something....

Because WHY are you reacting to this man like you've just seen the ghost of your long-lost lover every single time he appears???

Idk if it was the directing or the overacting in those scenes but i was genuinely confused and annoyed every time she did that...

Does she do that every time shes within 2 miles of a male or just Cho Won? 😭😭

And i know shes supposed to repressed, sheltered, extremely conscious of propriety or whatever but i found it extremely annoying and it didn't play out in a way that was riveting in the least.

---

Meanwhile, Lady Cho and Cho Won were the first part of this drama that actually made me sit up a little.

Because FINALLY.

JUICE.

We see their history.

He >!wanted her, he wanted her to leave with him, he married!< somebody else.

And this man proceeds to completely lose his fking mind.

😭

He's throwing things around.

Crying.

Having a full emotional collapse.

Then he >!sleeps with another woman while apparently mentally replacing her!< with Lady Cho.

I'M SORRY BUT THAT WAS DRAMATIC AS FÛCK AND SUPER FUNNY.

and I LIKED IT!!

I liked that she affected him that badly.

I liked that he had apparently wanted this woman for YEARS.

I liked the resentment, the unresolved longing, liked him asking whether she still carried him in her heart, i liked when she challenged him and asked what he wanted if he succeeded, his answer was basically:

you.

Okay!!!

NOW we're cooking!!!

Except that ALSO created a problem for me.

Because you're giving me:

this woman is the defining romantic obsession of his life. (was not explored at all tbh... his obsession was not conveyed too well)

And now I'm supposed to transfer my emotional investment to this other romance???

How will THAT work?

ESPECIALLY since... even though Lady Cho was restrained, she still managed to have far more chemistry with Cho Won than he had with the window.

But thankfully that also went nowhere😭😭😭

So basically both >!relationships went nowhere!< 😭😭

---

At least in cruel intentions, Ryan Phillips' character had impeccable chemistry with BOTH Sarah Michelle Gellar's character and Reese Witherspoon characters, so viewers were allowed to play with a range of multiple feelings depending on which relationships they preferred...

But here... they managed to make both relationship stale AF.

You have the seducer.

You have the wager.

You have the woman he's supposed to seduce.

And then, of course, the possibility that he develops actual feelings for his target.

But because this version gave Lady Cho and Cho Won SO MUCH emotional history, I found myself significantly more interested in THEM than in the romance the drama was trying to develop between Cho Won and Hui-yeon. And on top of that, they had no chemistry.

I never bought into it emotionally either.

---

Then the seduction itself just... wasn't interesting.

He starts >!sending Hui-yeon letters.!<

She's responding, then we discover she isn't even READING THEM.

And I'm sitting there like:

WHEN DID WE GET HERE????

Things would technically progress.

I understood the plot.

But emotionally i constantly felt like the show had moved three steps forward without bringing me with it.

i kept asking:

Why do I care?

And the drama kept responding:

...anyway, here's another slow scene with this dude singing in the background 😭

-

By Episode 3, things were already BAD.

I was almost finished with the episode and literally paused it to scroll Twitter and then i fell asleep 😭

Then i eventually went back and finished the episode around 2 a.m. and had almost NO desire to immediately press Episode 4.

That is basically death for a binge drama.

And it somehow got even more frustrating because now i wasn't only bored.

I was bored AND confused.

Hui-yeon was still gasping every time Cho Won appeared, and when she wasn't gasping at Cho Won's mere breathing in her radius, she was floundering through the story like a dead fish.

She was still doing these ceremonies for the man who had died twenty years ago.

She was still talking about "following" him.

By the time I reached Episode 7, this show had officially become a chore... well I've already watched six fucking episodes so I'm finishing it now.

And no, I never grew to like Hui-yeon.

I want to separate the character from the actress because i think the acting in this show overall was actually fine on her part, not impressive but passable.

But Hui-yeon as a character?

No.

The martyrdom, the perpetual startled behavior, the repression, the way she interacted with Cho Won. None of it made me attach to her.

I WILL say that i liked her final decision.

When she >!discovers the truth about Cho Won and the wager!< and basically decides:

I'm still going to >!live.!<

YES.

GOOD.

PLEASE LIVE.

😭

Because that at least gives her story some full-circle meaning.

I liked that a little bit, ig...

That is probably the only interesting thing she made in all 8 episodes😭

Unfortunately one good decision in Episode 8 cannot erase seven episodes of me going:

girl...

---

Now.

The thing I can praise VERY easily:

the acting from Son Ye-jin.

Honestly, probably the strongest thing this drama had going for it.

And the final two episodes really showed that.

Lady Cho's >!breakdown in the closet in Episode 8???!<

Son Ye-jin was ACTING.

I have to really praise that standalone scene cause i think it was MASTERFUL.

wow. When an actress can make you pause and FEEL everything shes feeling in a scene, shes done her work for the day!!

and Son Ye-jin deserves a Korean equivalent emmy for that scene alone, cause i was not only WITH her in that closet, i was INSIDE her!!!

The anger.

The humiliation.

The rage.

The grief.

The panic.

Everything coming out at once.

Very, very well done!

And Ji Chang-wook is also really good at playing an emotionally destroyed man.

Some of the earliest moments i genuinely enjoyed in this entire drama were literally just Cho Won being pathetic over Lady Cho 😭

He's very good at unraveling.

Very good at playing someone trying to act fine while CLEARLY not being fine.

And watching those performances almost irritated me more because I kept thinking:

where was this emotional intensity when i was fighting for my LIFE in Episodes 1 through 6???

The actors were there.

The premise was there.

The ingredients were there.

And I still didn't care.

And then.

THE ENDING.

LMFAOOOO.

Cho Won >!gets on this boat.!< The ferryman basically gives him the opportunity to go back, and then this man >!jumps into the water.!<

My reaction was not:

NOOOOOOOOO 😭😭😭

My reaction was:

????????????????????

I was SO confused.

I literally had to look up WHY he did it.

And after reading explanations, yes.

I get what the drama was going for.

Lady Cho was >!never truly going to choose him in the way he wanted. He had destroyed Hui-yeon's trust... idk why he cared abt that tho, cause he didn't seem to care about that widow that much if you ask me... but whatever, his relationship with the King was gone, his old life had!< essentially collapsed.

He's asked who he would even return to.

Okay.

I GET IT.

I still don't FEEL IT tho.

And that's a huge problem.

Because a >!tragic!< ending like that cannot only work once that google AI summary thing writes me a paragraph explaining the symbolism afterward😭😭

I should FEEL that man's despair while I'm WATCHING HIM!!

When he >!jumped into the water!<, I should have been thinking:

oh my God. of course. he genuinely believes he has nothing left.

Instead I was thinking:

WHY DID YOU JUST DO THAT????

😭😭😭

Romantically, it meant nothing to me.

Character-wise, it felt unearned.

Emotionally, I was completely detached.

So what was clearly supposed to be this huge tragic climax just left me perplexed.

And i don't think that's cause there's literally no possible explanation for his decision.

There is.

The problem is that the drama never emotionally got me there.

ON PAPER???

THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN MY SH!T.

A woman weaponizing a man's obsession with her.

A male lead who has loved somebody for years.

Forbidden desire.

Sexual tension.

Jealousy.

Morally questionable people.

People using each other.

People falling in love with people they absolutely should NOT be falling in love with.

A >!tragic ending.!<

HELLO?????

im the EXACT type of monster who feeds on this sh!t!!!

HOW DID YOU MAKE THIS BORING???

THAT is the REAL scandal of it all.

-

RATING: 3/10

REWATCH WORTHY?

Absolutely not.

You could not pay me!

(actually you could, but it would need to be ALOT of US dollars😭)

-

And Son Ye-jin's Episode 8 closet breakdown DID make some of it worth it in the end???

Yeah.

That woman can ACT.

---

Anyway...

for the people who actually loved this drama, what grabbed you emotionally??

Was it Cho Won/Hui-yeon?

Cho Won/Lady Cho?

The atmosphere?

The performances?

my CLOY essay

(believe it or not, this is the short version...

While watching CLOY, i wrote down so much fckin notes, my review rivaled a GR Martin book. Had to cut around 1k words from this review lol.

ive also been editing this one review for 967 years.😭 at a Cuban restaurant with my friend, waiting at the self checkout line at a supermarket, at the doctor's office, would u believe i was a there for my ADHD meds? Well i was lmaooo...

and my final round of edits are being made right now at a bar right after leaving my hair appointment.

i'l**l post a pic in the comments of the drink i was having while editing lol.

But yeah, this review has BEEN places lol. more places than all my others!)

INTRO:

By the time i got to Crash Landing on You, i was abt 2 and a half months into my K-drama rabbit hole, and my watching habits had become genuinely unhinged. I was binging entire dramas in 2 or 3 days, watching 10 episodes in one night, staying up until 4 or 5 in the morning knowing damn well i had work a few hours later, finishing one drama and immediately starting another one the same day. So when i finally started CLOY on Aug 14, i expected more of the same.

Instead...

something very weird happened:

I watched CLOY like a NORMAL person😭

I'd watch a couple eps after work and then... stop. I skipped a whole Saturday cause i was out with family. I took a 2-day break cause work and life got busy. It was such a chill experience! I just kept returning to it until i finished the last 4 eps on Aug 21st. It took me a full week, which by normal standards is still fast, but by MY standards at that point? that's moderation!

And now, with the benefit of knowing what my watching habits looked like immediately after CLOY, i can confidently say:

no, i had NOT changed 😭 This was simply a Crash Landing on You unique phenomenon.

For whatever reason, this was the one drama i watched like a perfectly normal, well-adjusted human being before immediately returning to my regularly scheduled ADHD mess.

REVIEW:

Dont worry, this got a good rating from me... lol

I know i got dms from a few of yall thinking i hated it and thats why i haven't posted my review yet, but no lol, it just took a thousand years to edit cause of the length.

but i DO have sooo much to say (as always lol. Someone take my notes app away...)

First of all: Yoon Se-ri, I love you.

Easiest part of the drama for me from the get-go!

I loved her basically immediately.

She's ambitious, spoiled, dramatic, resourceful, funny, occasionally ridiculous, intelligent, and adapts to being >!accidentally dropped into NORTH KOREA!< with better ease than most would have imo.

I loved how consistently the drama let her be competent, even when she's completely out of her element, she is STILL Se-ri.

One of my favorite early examples is the village birthday party, she notices one of the ladies feeling embarrassed about the dress she made, and Se-ri immediately knows how to style/present it so everybody suddenly sees how good it is. And THEN she realizes the birthday lady has influence in the village and starts laying on the charm cause she wants her to put in a good word for her "fiancé."

Shes complimenting her, asking to call her by her first name, telling her she looks young... i was DYING at how quickly she read the social situation.

Like yes girl. Network! 😭

She's stranded in North Korea and somehow doing stakeholder management. Pls!! i love her!!

I loved the market scene where she >!discovers Se-ri's Choice products!< being sold there. She's SO proud of herself 😭 as she should be...

But she also immediately starts correcting the merchant because the woman doesn't actually know the product she's selling.

She's like: 1st of all, I'm delighted my brand has international reach. 2nd of all, your product knowledge is unacceptable

😭 THATS MY CEO!!!

NEED to mention the completely ridiculous impromptu >!award ceremony she hosts for the soldiers b4 she thinks!< she's leaving.

Mind u, this girl has NO MONEY, NO CORN, NO TELEVISION, and no authority over half the prizes she's giving away, and yet she's standing there conducting an entire awards show anyway when shes giving things away 😭

One of the prizes is basically: 100 million won or a huge amount of corn? and one of them chooses the corn.

um, good for you sir, but WHERE IS SE-RI GETTING THIS CORN???😭

Then the drama-obsessed soldier gets to choose between a telly and dinner with his fav actress. Of COURSE he chooses the actress, at least THAT is one prize Seri could theoretically deliver cause she actually has celeb connections.

Then she announces an award for the most handsome man there. Capt Ri actually looks up like maybe she's about to say him...

and she gives it to somebody else 😭

i agreed with her tho! That soldier WAS very handsome, but the funniest part was Capt Ri looking weirdly disappointed that he didnt get an award.

And i remember really liking that tiny reaction cause, that little bit of him caring whether Se-ri singled him out gave me more romantic juice than some scenes that were actually trying to be romantic.

(i'll explain, keep reading.)

Then later Se-ri drags him outside and reveals that he actually DID get something.

A tomato plant.

A plant she traded for using half a sack of HIS potatoes lol, so she basically bought this man a thank-you gift using his own property 😭 but underneath the comedy, the scene was genuinely sweet. 😊 she tells him she's giving it to him cuz she's grateful. that one day hell eat the tomatoes and want to thank her, but she wont be there anymore.

Capt Ri, naturally, tells her that he doesnt even like tomatoes and has no interest in gardening lol so Se-ri gives him instructions anyway.

Water it.

Take care of it.

Talk to it.

Tell it ten loving words every day.

And then >!the epilogue reveals that this man is ACTUALLY DOING IT!< 😭 he's sitting there talking to the tomato plant after she leaves.

Meanwhile, the surveillance guy is secretly listening to all of this through the bug like...

um, what are you supposed to do with this intelligence, my guy???😭

That whole sequence worked for me way more than it probably had any right to, and, it became another early sign of the tiny problem i'd keep having with CLOY.

The small, silly, character-based interactions often gave me more than the scenes the drama clearly constructed as Big Romantic Moments™.

And when she finally gets back to South Korea???

OMG! that was one of my favorite stretches of the entire drama.

This woman >!walks into what is basically her own memorial, looks at the picture they chose of her and is immediately!< offended by it.

Then instead of just announcing that she's alive, she basically goes: Tell everybody Yoon Se-ri is alive and well. Also, Se-ri's Choice is having its first-ever 50% sale for 8 days to celebrate my resurrection.

BUSINESSWOMAN TO THE GRAVE 😭😭

love herrrr!!!

I was so happy to have CEO Se-ri back!!

And that actually leads into one of the biggest surprises of my experience watching this.

I liked the South Korea section WAY more than the North Korea section.

Which i wasnt expecting at all.

The North Korea premise is obviously what makes CLOY CLOY, and i did enjoy a lot of it. But I realized around ep 13 that i was having so much more fun once everybody was in South Korea.

And i think part of that is because i'd finally stopped asking the show to prove itself to me by that point.

During the North Korea portion, i kept waiting...

Is THIS when I understand why everyone thinks this is one of the greatest romances ever?

No?

Okay.

Maybe next episode.

Is THIS the scene?

Still no?

Okay...

But by South Korea, i'd basically accepted:

Girl, just have fun.

And suddenly i was having SO MUCH FUN!!

And ep 13 especially???

Episode 13 was coming after me to grab that 8/10 rating with a KNIFE.

But let's talk about the romance because this is where things got... especially quirky

Let me explain.

I kept rooting for it. And i felt like i was in a perpetual status of... ✨️waiting✨️

And I kept thinking:

Maybe this next thing will do it.

The boat kiss? I actually loved the setup; >!Capt Ri remembering the drama-obsessed soldier explaining that South Koreans kiss!< when theyre in trouble was hilarious.

A little funny with a callback i liked, but did i get romantic juice from it?

Nah.

And actually, BEFORE boat kiss and the candle scene, there was already another moment where I started wondering why i wasn't feeling what the drama clearly wanted me to feel.

The hair-tying scene... this one was the first one where i was like... i see what you're trying to do but im not there yet. am i the only one who thought it was too early for this type of a scene?

He's tying Se-ri's hair back.

The music is romantic.

They're close.

The scene is very obviously framed like:

Look at this little intimate moment between them 🥺

And... no juice.

I simply did not feel enough romantic tension between them yet for Capt Ri tying Se-ri's hair to suddenly mean something to me, y'know?

And the thing is the scene right AFTER that hair tying moment was much more romantically entertaining to me; Se-ri is still pissed about the village women talking sh*t abt her and basically ✨️threatens✨️ Capt Ri that if he doesnt act affectionate with her in front of them, then maybe she'll just stay in North Korea and they'll become ACTUALLY engaged and hes forced to go with it 😭😭

THAT'S funny! thats not only character building but its dynamic building too!!! which i looove when those are paired!!

i wanted the writers to kill that bird with that one stone, ya know?!?

THAT is funny romantic tension to me!! the show should have taken advantage of that and build off more scenes like that to make those other scenes they planned HIT more!

Her being ridiculous/high maintenance/making foreign and ridiculous demands, him reacting, them bouncing off each other. good juicy meat!

Romantic hair tying when they've barely known each other for 24 hours...?

Dry meat 😭

Se-ri weaponizing their fake engagement because some village women insulted her hair?

Much better.

The candle scene...

I could practically hear the drama yelling:

ICONIC ROMANTIC SCENE IN PROGRESS, now, CUE THE SWOON!

He's standing there with the candle, she's lost, then she sees him, music swells, her eyes fill with tears, there's the callback to the scented candle, which is cute.

But... dry meat 😭

Like... i sort of get what the scene was trying to make me feel... i simply wasn't feeling it.

And that's when i started getting nervous.

Cause we're at episode FOUR, folks!!!

Where is my sweet, sweet tension???

And the thing is, immediately afterward they have a conversation that gave me WAY more than the over the top candle scene.

Se-ri tells him finding her with the candle did something to her and starts joking that he's apparently some kind of expert flirt lol, he gets nervous and decides he needs to make something very clear: there is a woman in my life. I'm engaged. I don't want there to be any misunderstanding between us.

And Se-ri is OFFENDED.

OFFENDED 😭

She's basically like: Misunderstanding??? WHO is misunderstanding WHAT???

Then she starts bragging about all the men she has waiting for her in Seoul, and suddenly his eyes widen. Men?

Oh???

HELLO???

Now I'm awake!!!

Their banter here was doing more for me romantically than their "romantic" candle scene that just happened.

And it kept happening!

The finger hearts debacle?

HILARIOUSLY good meat!

The drama-obsessed soldier tells Capt Ri that Se-ri's >!finger heart means she's giving him her heart, then later!< Se-ri gives THE SAME HEART TO ALL THE SOLDIERS.

And this man is visibly bothered, then he finds out she gave one soldier TWO hearts 😭😭 and later he confronts Seri: "So you have several hearts?"

lololol

See!!!

THAT gave me such good juice!

Same with the conversation about Gu Seung-jun being "destiny."

Se-ri is talking abt how crazy it is that she ran into a man she almost married all the way in North Korea of all places. Capt Ri, who is obviously completely neutral and not bothered whatsoever lmaoo basically goes: Okay, but hypothetically, what if a woman fell out of the sky and a man found her, and then she ran away and somehow ended up directly in front of his house? Would THAT be destiny?

And Se-ri is like**: Why do you feel like you're competing right now?**

EXACTLY!!!!

That meat was juicy in that scene!

And i kept wondering why scenes like that were working on me more than the supposedly huge romantic scenes...

But there IS a scene that worked VERY well for me. it involved Captain Ri arriving at his parents house. keep reading to find out why i loved that scene so much!!! 😉😉

The hospital kiss should have destroyed me.

This >!man gets SHOT!< protecting her.

Se-ri >!gives up her chance to go home!< cause she's not leaving him there, she donates blood and stays beside him.

He wakes up and initially gets angry cause she missed the flight everybody worked so hard to arrange.

She leaves crying.

He finds out what she did.

He goes outside.

It's raining.

He kisses her.

This is literally constructed out of ingredients I should LOVE as a romance watcher.

But the meat... ya guessed it, was dry😭

And this was the point where i actually started questioning myself.

Like what is WRONG???

Why isn't this working???

Maybe Capt Ri is too emotionally closed off?

But no... I've loved several romances with emotionally closed-off men before...

Maybe they don't have chemistry...? But that's not entirely true either cause i enjoy them together in those other scenes.

Maybe it's the physical chemistry? (definitely plays a role, ill explain below)

Maybe the directing? (could be)

Maybe the emotional buildup? (definitely)

Maybe all of it???

I genuinely spent multiple episodes trying to diagnose the problem.

And then that pattern emerged again.

Their conversation the NEXT MORNING after that rain kiss gave me more than the rain kiss!!!!

Se-ri starts presenting 3 options for how they're going to deal with what happened (the kiss.)

Capt Ri picks option 3.

Then Seri starts going: Right! Exactly! Obviously it didn't mean anything. You were shot, you had surgery, you were probably still affected by anesthesia, it was raining, i was crying... just an impulse! Physical contact means nothing to me anyway!

😭lolol and you can SEE him getting increasingly bothered.

Then she leaves the room.

He looks down at his uniform.

She stitched the bullet hole for him.

And the stitching is shaped like a little heart.

He smiles ❤️ 💙

SEEE?!?! NOW WHY THAT SCENE MORE BUZZY THE RAIN KISS??? from beginning, middle and end!!! the pay off was sooo good!!! the middle was such good food!!

Those are the scenes i wish we'd gotten more of earlier. Cause i don't actually think these 2 lack chemistry. they lack interactions that would eventually BUILD OFF to those Big Romantic Moments™!!!

The drama sometimes tried to announce their romance b4 i'd personally arrived there.

Captain Ri accumulated points with me, slowly but surely

I basically had an invisible Capt Ri loyalty card while watching this drama.

Every time he did something good:

+1.

😭

He accompanies Se-ri onto the boat when she otherwise would've been alone with the smuggler?

+1

He sends his soldiers to protect her while he's gone?

+1

He makes her coffee from scratch because he knows she misses it?

+2

He arranges this elaborate plan through his father to get her onto an >!international athletics team so she can escape to Europe?!< Especially because Se-ri asks what will happen to him if this goes wrong, he tells her not to worry. Then WE find out his father explicitly told him: l'll help you do this, but if something happens afterward, you're on your own.

Se-ri doesn't know that.

I loved that!!!!!

He was taking a genuine personal risk to get her home without making her carry the burden of knowing what it might cost him.

+3

Then Se-ri thinks he skipped their goodbye picnic cause hes busy preparing for his wedding.

NOPE. The epilogue reveals dude was >!preparing his motorcycle because he intended to follow her route!< and make sure she reached the airport safely.

Then he takes a bullet for her.

+3

And yet...

my rating wasn't budging...

there was a problem here cause normally? A man secretly >!following the woman he loves to protect her and then TAKING A BULLET!< FOR HER?

I should be levitating!!!

I give 10/10 ratings practically for free when sh!t like that happens lmaooo!!!

Instead I was like: yeah that was very good. +3 Capt Ri points but um... that's it😭😭

The problem was that his actions were often much further ahead romantically than where i felt their emotional/physical connection was.

He was doing EPIC LOVE STORY things, but I hadnt experienced the romance as epic yet.

And then there was Switzerland.

Conceptually?

I LOVE THIS.

The idea that these 2 unknowingly crossed paths multiple times years before North Korea?

i love romantic coincidences and invisible threads connecting people before they even know each other. But the execution was sometimes so frustrating, especially because they ruined Seri for me in the scene.

On the bridge, seri is in an >!incredibly dark place emotionally. She's recording what sounds like a goodbye!< to her family. Capt Ri, a stranger, is there with Seo Dan, he asks Se-ri to take their picture.

Fine.

But then Se-ri looks at these 2 complete strangers and mutters something along the lines of: He could do much better.

Girl...?!!?

YOU DON'T KNOW HIM.

YOU DON'T KNOW HER.

YOU DON'T KNOW THEIR RELATIONSHIP.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN HE CAN DO BETTER???

I disliked that line immediately. (that was the only scene where i was like... Seri, girly, i love u but why'd u say that..? what possessed you?)

And it bothered me enough that when the drama returned to that exact encounter much later and tried to make it romantic because Jeong-hyeok remembered her and thought she was his type...

it slightly tinted an otherwise adorable revelation cause my brain immediately went: Oh yeah. This is where Se-ri randomly shaded a random woman she'd never met over a random man she'd never met...😭

the unnamed song.

This one actually annoyed me (especially as a writer/storyteller myself)

cause the IDEA is fantastic!

We discover that years ago, while Se-ri was in >!Switzerland at one of the lowest moments of her life, she heard this beautiful piano melody!< while passing across the water.

She remembered it for YEARS and has tried to find it. she asked musicians about it, nobody knew it.

And we discover that >!the person playing it was CAPT RI.!<

He'd just learned his brother died, he composed the song for him and played it there once. And without knowing it, his music reached Se-ri at the exact moment she was contemplating some HEAVY things.

COME ON!!!!!!!!!

That's incredible romantic material!!!!!

the JUICE i should have gotten out of that!!! that meat would end up dry AF at the end cause i would have milked all the juice CLEAN out!!!

So why did the actual reveal feel like someone checking off a plot point???

😭 WRITERS!!!!??

so, in this frustrating scene, Se-ri basically goes:

Oh, by the way, I played this song last night. Do you know it?

And then she plays it, Capt Ri obviously recognizes it.

Conversation.

Reveal.

Done.

WHAT??? WHY???!

Imagine if she had simply been playing it alone.

He walks past the room.

Stops.

Because there is NO POSSIBLE REASON anyone else should know that melody!

He slowly walks back.

Sees her at the piano.

And then they realize what happened.

THAT'S A SCENE!

There are probably 8438 other different ways the wrirers could've staged that EPIC reveal.

Instead, it felt like:

oh btw, before i forgot, we need to resolve the unnamed-song subplot now. lets get this over with 😭

And then even after this massive revelation, Capt Ri and Seri are standing 10 million thousand feet apart talking to each other.

She's crying and he's realizing that his music >!unknowingly saved this woman's life years!< before he knew her.

She's realizing that this man has been woven into her life for YEARS.

And they're just...

🧍‍♀️ 🧍‍♂️

WHY ARE YOU SO FAR APART???

HUG.

TOUCH HER FACE.

HOLD HER HAND.

SOMETHING!!!!

This happened more than a few times and i genuinely think the physical direction contributed to my romance problem with CLOY.

Sometimes they felt almost too stoic in certain scenes where i desperately wanted more intimacy. Cause theres no way you 2 should be standing 609 miles away from each other during such an iconic/intimate reveal...

The border kiss, though?

That one got me a little.

I smiled.

Capt Ri can't cross the border for... north Korea reasons as hes leading Seri out, he's supposed to stop.

And he takes that one extra step anyway just to kiss her goodbye.

hehe okay, that was cute 😊

I also had a VERY complicated journey with the supporting characters.

Let's start with the soldiers.

I know people LOVE this group. i eventually liked most of them too! Cause at the end of the day, im a lover of the Found Family trope. But i did not instantly fall in love with this found family.

Especially that ONE SOLDIER...

You know exactly which one... 😭

This man spent episode after episode acting like he was allergic to not being annoying!!!

Constantly antagonizing Se-ri, constantly talking abt how they should've killed her.??? um...

At one point he's STILL making jokes abt how he should have buried her, more than almost halfway through the drama... like... we get it, dude, you want her dead!!

And I'm sitting there like:

Is this supposed to be adorable???

Maybe there's a cultural/comedic translation thing happening or maybe this humor works differently for other people... but i genuinely didn't understand why Se-ri was supposed to just laugh along with this man repeatedly expressing regret that she remained alive....😭

Then he writes her some lame goodbye poem.

Everyone's getting emotional as hes telling her to "live well," stay safe, don't forget them, and I'm like:

That's nice and all... but i ain't forget!!

I warmed up much faster to the others.

Especially the drama-obsessed soldier.

And when they get to South Korea??? THE SOLDIERS BECOME SO MUCH FUNNIER TO ME.

The drama guy actually meeting his >!favorite actress was SO!< WHOLESOME. I was melting.

And the soldiers discovering capitalism and shopping and Se-ri handing them her unlimited card and basically telling them to go wild???

loooove!!!

I had such a good time with them in Seoul.

awww and when they had to leave!!!!! no!!!! stay with Seri!! stay in south korea!!!

THE WATCH confused the hell out of me for a while.

We, as the audience, know the watch is connected to Captain Ri's brother, right, we see it in flashbacks, the surveillance guy recognizes it. so i get why i care abt this device.

But Se-ri sees this watch at the market and suddenly becomes fascinated with it...??

im lost... What is your connection to this watch??? 😭

Then she trades the engagement ring Gu Seung-jun gave her to get it?? but why? 😭😭

Eventually, of course, the watch >!contains the evidence Capt Ri needs to understand what happened to his brother.!<

Which is its purpose as a plot device...

But i was VERY confused about why Se-ri herself felt so compelled to acquire this random watch... lmaooo?

Speaking of Gu Seung-jun...

OH, the potential.

When he showed up again in North Korea i was READY.

Cause at that point i was desperately asking this drama: Can somebody PLEASE introduce some romantic tension into this situation???

And then he grabs Se-ri's hand, runs into the elevator, capt Ri, with the eyes of a hawk lmaooo comes after them.

Sees their hands.

Separates them.

Starts twisting Gu Seung-jun's arm.

YES.

YES.

JUICE.

And then he invites Se-ri to dinner and starts talking about destiny.

I'm like:

Second male lead???

Are we doing this???

PLEASE DO THIS.

And then...

this man starts secretly >!recording Se-ri for her brother.!<

Then gets involved in keeping her in North Korea.

At one point i thought he understood that >!Se-ri's brother essentially wanted her DEAD.!<

And I immediately went:

Oh. Never mind. >!Second male lead is out of the running. You tried to murder her!!<

Later i reconsidered because it wasn't entirely clear to me whether Gu Seung-jun understood that "make >!sure she never comes back" meant kill her.!<

So I downgraded his criminal charge in my head from attempted murder to horrendous betrayal of trust.

Still not boyfriend material tho!

And then he >!proposes marriage!< as a possible way to get Se-ri out of North Korea. Which SHOULD have been delicious for me cause JUICE!!

But i was still too suspicious of his motivations.

It felt like too much of what he was doing was connected to his own money situation and saving himself rather than genuine romantic desire for Se-ri.

And that's fine if that's the character you're writing!

But then don't tease me with a love triangle I could've enjoyed!

I wanted Capt Ri to find out Se-ri was marrying another man and LOSE HIS EVER LOVING MIND.

We got a teeny tiny bit of that, but i wanted Gu Seung-jun to genuinely want her too.

Give me the messy juice!

Seo Dan...

sigh.

I think the drama could have done SO much more with her.

Instead, for a long stretch, she was exactly one the type of female character archetypes i hate.

The bathroom scene especially irritated me.

She basically insults/slut-shames Se-ri for "having coffee with 2 men in one day...

um... ok...??

One of those men is Seo Dan's fiancé.

And as far as Dan knows at this point, Se-ri has been introduced as his colleague.

So I'm sitting there thinking:

Why are you talking to this woman like this???

Why do we need this???

Why do these 2 automatically need to dislike each other???

There wasn't enough groundwork for this level of hostility lol

Then she makes that nasty comment about Se-ri's absence being the best wedding gift she could give her and I'm like...

Girl, your problem is standing apprx 3 feet away and his name is Ri Jeong-hyeok, not Seri!!

Then Capt Ri outright tells her**: i would have married you even without** loving you because I promised I would, but now that I love somebody else, marrying you would be unfair.

thats so humiliating!!!

if a man told me this, id run so fast and so far away from his direction, he wouldn't ever recognize me anymore, i'd run in such a way, that he'd even forget my name 😭

But Seo Dan STILL decides: Nope. Wedding still happening.

??!!!!! girl!!!

Because apparently once Se-ri leaves, his feelings will disappear???

WHERE ARE YOU GETTING THIS PHILOSOPHY FROM, SEO DAN???

STAND TF UP!!!

I really dislike when female characters are reduced to desperately clinging to a man who has clearly told them he doesn't want them romantically. there was so much potential for her character outside of that.

And then the drama eventually gives her a romance with Gu Seung-jun.

Which...

I'm sorry.

I mostly did not care😭

I genuinely wanted to skip ahead whenever their scenes came on.

I will say tho... Gu Seung-jun >!abandoning his escape when he realizes she's in danger and going in guns blazing!< to save her?

THAT worked for me.

That was probably the first time I was like:

Okay... i see what you're trying to cook...

Unfortunately, this meal had been cooking in the background for far too long and i was already eating something else. my tummy was full 😭

And then there's Cho Cheol-gang.

WHAT IS THIS MAN'S PROBLEM???

😭😭😭

This was one of my biggest plot frustrations.

From almost the BEGINNING, this man is investigating Se-ri.

Why?

She's supposedly Division 11.

He doesn't believe it.

Okay, but like. WHY don't you believe it???

What did she do to make u suspicious?

Where did this suspicion originate???😭😭

It felt like the plot needed someone to investigate her, so Cheol-gang simply woke up every morning like: I don't trust that woman.

WHY???

He calls around >!investigating Division 11, finds out there hasn't been a woman matching Se-ri's description there.!<

Okay, now you have actual evidence.

BUT WHY DID YOU START INVESTIGATING IN THE FIRST PLACE??? 😭

I spent WAY too much of this drama asking:

Sir, what is your fcking problem???

I don't mind villains being evil.

PLEASE BE EVIL.

But I need to understand what you are doing and why at some point**.**

and his demise was boring AF😭

Se-ri's family...

THE WORST GROUP OF PEOPLE EVER.

Her awful brothers??? Their wives???

The fact that this woman >!disappears during a STORM and is presumed DEAD and these people almost immediately start maneuvering!< for control of the company???

HELLO???

YOUR SISTER IS MISSING!!

And her father is sitting there listening to these people fight over succession while i'm wondering: Does you plan on FINDING YOUR DAUGHTER??? WHAT ARE YOU DOING SITTING THERE DOING NOTHING AS A SUPPOSED FATHER!??!

And the mother?

Sorry.

The drama tried.

I know what it wanted.

It gave us the recording of her sitting beside Se-ri while Se-ri was unconscious, apologizing, confessing her feelings, saying everything she should have said years ago.

Se-ri listens and cries.

And I...

didn't care.

Because i couldnt stop thinking abt the fact that this woman >!took a CHILD to the beach, allowed that little girl to believe she was spending the day with her mother, and then ABANDONED HER THERE IN THE COLD!< until she passed out and strangers found her.

Nah... you don't get one emotional recording and youre forgiven and im crying for your reconciliation....

You were the adult.

She was the child.

I needed a LOT more work there.

Also, can Se-ri PLEASE stop apologizing for everything???

This became one of my most consistent frustrations with her writing.. every time something went wrong, this woman had a tendency to go:

"It's my fault."

This started bothering me pretty early, cause you literally got sucked into a freak storm while paragliding and accidentally dropped into North Korea!!! You didnt wake up that morning and say:

You know what sounds fun? International border violation! 😭

Yet somehow, when the soldiers are talking abt how much trouble everybody is in cause of you, you apologize?

girl...!!

And Capt Ri even has a moment early on where he tells her that they're all in this situation because she missed her opportunity to leave and that she should blame herself.

And she APOLOGIZES!!

I hated that...

Because yes, Se-ri made some iffy decisions after landing there; she ran in the wrong direction, ignored some warnings, made things a little complicated a couple times. but not only was she being HUNTED by soldiers with guns in a foreign hostile country but she didn't know these ppl yet!!!

And the actual reason she is in North Korea???

A FREAK WEATHER EVENT.

Um, thats not a moral failing.

Then later the soldiers get interrogated/beaten because of everything happening around her, and of course that one soldier I already couldn't stand is basically: Look what happened to us because of you.

And Se-ri goes:

I'm sorry.

Again???!!! Jesus...😭

I get why she'd feel horrible ppl were getting hurt while trying to help her, sure but I really dont like how often the drama allowed that concern to turn into:

Everything is my fault. I'm the problem.

Especially because sometimes other characters actively encourage that guilt; Gu Seung-jun literally weaponizes it against her. He tells her that because of her, Captain Ri could die. Because of her, everyone who helped her could get punished. She can eventually go back to South Korea while he has to stay there and live with the consequences. So if she cares abt him, she should disappear from his life.

And the frustrating part is that some of what he's saying is factually true and that scene could have been good juice if it was executed well and he was a good SML.

Capt Ri IS taking huge risks for her and the soldiers ARE potentially in danger.

But there is a difference, people!!! Between:

"People I care about are taking risks for me and that terrifies me."

and

"Their choices are my fault."

Those people have agency too!

Capt Ri especially, and i actually LOVED when his father confronts him abt everything and we discover that Se-ri has been trying to take all the blame.

She's basically telling his father:

I threatened him! I forced him to hide me! He had no choice! Everything happened because of me!

And Captain Ri is immediately like:

No. That's not true.

THANK YOU, CAPT!

He tells his father he didn't care abt her threats.

He CHOSE not to turn her over.

He didn't trust what State Security might do to her. She could have been interrogated, tortured, made to disappear, so he decided not to take her there.

He chose that.

Se-ri did not hypnotize an entire country into risking themselves for her...😭

And I think this recurring self-blame bothered me even more because Se-ri is otherwise such a strong, decisive character.

Captain Ri's parents were unexpectedly entertaining.

Especially Se-ri meeting them without realizing who they are.

She thinks Captain Ri's father is SEO DAN'S FATHER😭 and she's SO CONFIDENT too lol

She's looking at this man going:

Yes. I knew immediately. You and Dan have the same eyes, Same nose. I'm very perceptive visually.

lolol shes hilarious bro.

Meanwhile this man's >!actual wife/Aka Capt Ri's mom is listening from the other room!< 😭 while Se-ri starts explaining herself.

She's basically**: Sir, I run a massive cosmetics/fashion empire in South Korea. I have 14 stores overseas. I was rich and minding my business. Why would I voluntarily put myself in this situation???**

Which is an excellent question!!!!

Then she desperately tries to absolve Capt Ri of responsibility. and then somehow, while trying to convince this man there is absolutely nothing inappropriate happening between her and Capt Ri lol.

Then Capt Ri arrives thinking his father may have had Se-ri killed...??. (morbid btw. i could talk for 2 hours abt how much it bothered me how casually Seri's death/being killed is discussed throughout the drama but this review is already 2 years long)

And THIS.

THIS IS WHERE my rating would have had a .5 if i gave .5 to my ratings!!!

✨️MY FAV CAPTAIN RI SCENE✨️

He loses it.

He confronts his father and demands to know where she is, and then finally Capt Ri says the thing i'd been waiting for him to say:

He doesn't want to spend the rest of his life thinking abt what he should have done. He doesn't want to live knowing he could have protected her and didn't. If something happened to her, he would live in hell until his last breath.

YES.

THERE YOU ARE.

THAT'S WHAT I'VE BEEN ASKING FOR!!!

And then Se-ri comes out.

He's relieved shes alive (crazy btw cause he really expected hia parents to kill her...) and she's crying.

His mom and dad are watching, and

again... they're just... standing there.

😭

HUG HER, MAN!!!

this is what i mean by the distance!!!😭

I still loved the scene, i wont let the director ruin this for me😭😭

that Capt Ri outburst alone nearly earned the drama half a point!!!

But it was another example of me loving the emotional content while wanting more from the physical execution.

South Korea Captain Ri arrived and I suddenly liked this man MUCH MORE.

Because FINALLY his actions and his visible feelings started matching for me.

Jealous Capt Ri??? I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR YOU!!

Se-ri's employees burst into her office because some celebrity she used to date posted a late-night message online saying he's glad she's alive and asking whether they should meet again.

Captain Ri is in the room, and this man suddenly becomes extremely interested in... plants.

😭 he's awkwardly moving around, touching leaves kmaooo, listening to them list Se-ri's previous relationships.

Then afterward:

"So you weren't lying when you said you'd start seeing men again."

HELLO!!!😭

Then she says those relationships were just casual flings, and this man asks:

"Am I a casual fling too?"

SIRRRRRRRR!!!

WHERE WERE YOU IN EPISODE FOUR???😭😭

And Se-ri teasing him abt being jelly with a belly?

Their movie date, their little day off together?

ADORABLE.

The drama suddenly felt so relaxed, so did their relationship. They weren't constantly standing inside giant Romantic Moment™ waiting for the soundtrack to tell me how important everything was.

They were just a couple.

And I liked them much more that way.

Episode 13 might genuinely be my favorite episode CLOY

Because EVERYTHING was working.

The jealousy, the date, the soldiers. the drama-obsessed soldier meeting his favorite actress awwwwww 😊 >!the surveillance guy finally working with them.!<

Everyone banding together.

And then... one of the best things happened!!

SE-RI >!GETS SHOT.!<

My immediate reaction was basically:

OH MY GOD YES!!!!!😭

Because I knew exactly what this meant.

CAPTAIN RI IS ABOUT TO LOSE HIS FCKING MIND!!!

And THAT is what I wanted!!!!

The general aims at him, Se-ri sees it.

Instead of yelling, apparently, she decides to DRIVE >!HER CAR INTO THE LINE!< OF FIRE.

Girl??? 😭 you could have honked idk screamed?

Anything but drove in front of the bullet 😭

But ykw, i'm not questioning it, cause she takes >!the bullet,!< Capt Ri opens the car door. she falls into his arms beautifully.

He's losing it.

JUICE!!!!!

And the hospital aftermath???

SO GOOD. MY FAV STRETCH OF THEIR DYNAMIC

Captain Ri fussing over her constantly. She complains that the scar is huge and now she won't be able to wear bikinis.

So he starts showing her HIS scars. im crying!😭 Then the soldiers walk in while his shirt is half open PLS😭.

Then she tries to open a bottle of orange juice, he immediately does it for her. She basically can't BAT AN EYELASH without this man jumping up like: DON'T MOVE. YOU WERE SHOT. I WILL DO IT.

Meanwhile everyone else is watching him baby this CEO.😭

ADORBZ!

THIS is another part of their romance/dynamic that works for me with them; the domestic stuff, him fussing, her teasing. stupid arguments, all that.

The romance felt much more alive to me there than during some of the enormous cinematic romantic set pieces.

Episode 15 was another "IS THIS BECOMING AN 8/10 drama???" episode.

The whole group >!being captured!<, Captain Ri trying to take responsibility for everyone.

Se-ri getting sick AGAIN.

The interrogation stuff.

The body-language expert analyzing footage of Capt Ri helping old ladies and children and then analyzing the way he behaves around Se-ri to conclude that he's in love with her lol.

And the ending...

It was dreamy.

Switzerland is gorgeous, >!they're together and have this beautiful home. They finally get to exist somewhere without soldiers, borders, guns, secret police, family succession wars, evil generals and random ppl bugging their hotel rooms,!< i was happy for them!!

And then apprx 5 seconds after the credits ended, my brain went:

WAIT.

TWO WEEKS????

😭😭😭

Excuse me???

Is Se-ri flying to Switzerland for 2 weeks every year??? Is Capt Ri there more???

Are they only together for those 2 weeks???

CAN SOMEBODY BECOME SWISS???

Can we get this man another citizenship???

Can they get married???

Can he move to South Korea somehow???

Can Se-ri move somewhere thats not South Korea???

WHAT ARE THE LOGISTICS??!

You cannot make me watch 16 eps of these people getting shot, kidnapped, arrested, separated by international borders, risking execution and discovering they unknowingly saved each other's lives in Switzerland...

just for me to discover they're essentially running the world's most complicated annual vacation romance!!!!???

I immediately started trying to solve Korean geopolitics myself on google on my couch after i finished the drama cause i refused to accept this arrangement!! and got sidetracked by finding out CLOY had a musical?? lol

CONCLUSION:

i enjoyed CLOY much more once i accepted that I wasnt going to experience it the way the big time fans did.

Once I stopped asking:

"When does this become iconic?"

and started asking:

"Am I having fun?"

The answer was yes!

And that's ultimately how I feel about it.

I had a lot of fun watching it!

I understand why its so beloved.

FINAL RATING: 7/10

Our Movie? Well, that explains it then... cause if it was MY movie, i would've directed it with 40% more kissing and 70% more suffering.

INTRO

Okay, so this was kind of an accidental binge 😭

i actually started Our Movie because one of my moots had just finished another Namkoong Min drama and wanted to watch him in a romance next, and said she was going to start this one, i told her i wanted to watch it too, and we were basically like okay!!! let's start together!!!

Except she actually started it.

Meanwhile i was still finishing Crash Landing on You, (my review for CLOY is after this one btw review #30) watching Encounter, finishing a korean movie Hidden Face, AND planning to start Twenty-Five Twenty-One idk maybe cuz i thought there were 48 hours in a day for some reason😭

So she got ahead of me. then i finally started Our Movie... and somehow i ended up passing her😭

REVIEW:

For the first part of ep 1, i was pretty neutral. Interested enough, but mostly just watching everything get established and figuring out how i felt abt everyone.

And then somewhere along the way...

one episode became another.

Then another.

Then another.

And suddenly the person i was supposed to be catching up to was behind ME 😭

This drama has that not in your face kind of bingeability where an episode ends on something and you're like:

well obviously i need to know what she says next...

just one more.

Then THAT episode ends.

well...

one more can't hurt.

And suddenly you've watched half the fcking drama 😭

And there was a LOT i liked here: the filmmaking, Da-eum the fl, Je-ha the ml, most of their romance, and I loved watching this movie slowly become intertwined with their actual lives.

There were a couple romantic highs that had me smiling.

But the entire drama is built around this woman who >!knows she is dying and therefore desperately wants to LIVE...!< and weirdly enough, that's also where my biggest issue with the romance comes from.

I wanted the romance itself to feel even more lived.

More passion, desire, more time together, more of their final days.

And ultimately... MORE PAIN when all of that was taken away.

Basically...

GIVE ME MORE >!LIFE BEFORE YOU GIVE ME THE DEATH!!!!< 😭

But lemme back up a little.... Cause one of the things that got me into this drama in the first place was actually the movie they were making.

Je-ha is a director who made one successful debut movie and then basically disappeared for 5 years. He's stuck in this massive sophomore slump, >!living underneath the shadow of his extremely famous director father, and there's clearly a part of him that doesn't know how much of his own success!< actually belongs to HIM.

And i liked Je-ha pretty quickly as a character because he's kind of prickly lol.

There's another director who gets under his skin by pointing out that, unlike Je-ha, he's actually been MAKING movies for the last 5 years, yk... like a director should 😭 And Je-ha basically responds by telling him his movies flop and are filled with so much pointless nudity ppl probably just skip through it.

lololol 😭

But underneath all of that, Je-ha is obviously insecure about where he currently stands as a filmmaker.

He made ONE successful movie.

Then nothing.

And he's got this enormous shadow hanging over his entire career.

His father.

So when he's offered the chance to remake his father's famous melodrama Love in White, he's basically like: Absolutely fcking not.

Which made perfect sense to me. This man's entire career is already haunted by his father's name. Why would he want to remake the movie everyone associates with his father's genius and trap himself even further underneath that legacy? Except...

he finds the original screenplay.

And >!it wasn't written by his father. IT WAS WRITTEN BY HIS MOTHER, and his father took credit for his WIFE'S!< screenplay.

sick individual...

And this is actually where the whole filmmaking storyline got REALLY interesting to me.

Cause suddenly Love in White isn't just: Je-ha remakes Daddy's masterpiece.

There's something underneath the version of this movie everyone knows.

&gt;!His mother's work.!<

And now Je-ha has an actual reason to go back to it and reclaim it. I thought that was a beautiful reason for him to change his mind.

And THEN you put the fl Da-eum into the middle of all this; She's an aspiring actress who initially gets involved with the production because Je-ha is looking for someone who can consult on a movie about a >!terminally ill woman.!<

Except.. >!Da-eum herself is terminally ill.!< THAT reveal at the end of ep 1 was when this drama really got me.

Da-eum acting isn't some random bucket-list item she suddenly picked because of her thing either. She wanted this before, and already been pursuing it before >!illness interrupted her life.!<

i liked that.

There's even this tiny detail involving grape juice that i liked, connected to her childhood and her mother. It's such a small thing, but i liked those details that made Da-eum's life feel like something that existed before we met her and before this movie.

Then she auditions for Love in White. Je-ha casts her.

And his one condition is: >!!Don't die.!<

SIR???? 😭

But i LOVED that as an episode ending. Cause that's basically the impossible condition underneath their entire relationship before their relationship even exists.

He knows her thing. She knows her thing.

And eventually the one thing he wants most from her is the one thing she literally cannot promise him.

PACING

And around here was when i realized this drama was moving REALLY well.

Ep 1 got better as it went.

Ep 2 was really good.

Ep 3 was even better.

Ep 4 was even better AGAIN!

For a while i genuinely thought:

oh??? are we just gonna keep climbing??? 😭

And a huge part of what kept me watching wasn't even the romance yet.

It was Love in White.

I LOVED that these people actually had JOBS lmaoooo. You know how sometimes a drama gives somebody this interesting profession and then halfway through the show you're like... do any of you clock in anymore??? 😭

Not here.

Theyre MAKING this damn movie.

Auditions, test shoots, financing, investors, directing, acting, production problems.

I liked all of it. And during the test shoot, Da-eum isnt even the only person being tested. The investors are basically testing Je-ha too.

Can this man who hasn't made a movie in 5 years actually direct another one?

Can they trust him?

And can they trust his bizarre decision to cast this unknown actress?

Je-ha knows how much is riding on Da-eum's performance... but specifically doesn't want Seo-young telling HER that.

Cause he doesnt want Da-eum walking into the test shoot carrying all that pressure.

And that's when i started noticing one of my favorite things about Je-ha: his actions betray him WAY before his words do.

This man will worry abt her health.

Watch her.

Protect her.

Shield her from pressure.

Step in when things get uncomfortable And then act like he's not emotionally involved.

Okay sir 😭

You can literally watch his concern for her slowly stop looking like:

that's my actress.

and start looking like:

...oh no.

Which brings me to...

THE ROMANCE.

Cause one of my favorite things was watching Je-ha spend part of this drama LOSING the war against his own feelings 😭

Da-eum is the one who actually says it first. (never my fav thing when fl does that, but ykw, im not too mad, i'll get over this one...)

And her confession comes after another revelation.

This wasn't >!even the first time she'd encountered Je-ha. Years earlier, she had wanted to audition for his previous!< film. And now she's finally standing in front of him years later, actually starring in his movie.

Then she tells him:

I like you.

And this man basically responds:

You know, when i cast you, i >!considered the possibility that you might die during production and your death could!< generate publicity for the movie.

...

EXCUSE ME????? 😭

And unfortunately...

i was sitting there SMILING.

😭

Cause i love angst!!!

And by this point we'd already watched this man quietly care abt her for several episodes. So my immediate reaction was basically: Ohhhhh. You're trying to hurt her. You're trying to make her back away from you. You're trying to turn this into something cold and transactional because you do NOT want to deal with what caring abt a >!terminally ill woman actually!< means.

YOU'RE NOT FOOLING ANYBODY.

And sure enough...

her first love shows up.

And suddenly >!Mr. Her-Death-Might-Be-Good-Publicity!< is like:

👁️👁️

Who is that?

Why is he here?

Why are they together?

Why is he taking her home?

um....YOU REJECTED HER. 😭😭😭

The brief jealousy was SO good and SO funny.

And i was a little sad when my jealousy-delivery mechanism left the building so quickly 😭

Cause eventually her first love basically recognizes: yeah, she likes Je-ha. Je-ha likes her. And that's essentially that.

And i was like... thats it? 😭

i get that this is only 12 episodes, we don't have time for this man to spend 5 episodes standing outside in the rain screaming that he's loved Da-eum since college.

But i was having FUN!!!

Let Je-ha suffer a little longer!!!😭

And eventually Je-ha has to admit just how badly he's lost this battle anyway.

Cause at the beginning, he can think about Da-eum's >!death!< abstractly.

She's an actress. She's >!sick. She could die during production.!< That's something he has to account for. But later, he cant stand watching her suffer. And when he thinks about her >!dying!<...he feels like he's going insane.

THAT.

THAT'S what i wanted! And wanted even more of, if only we had more episodes! i wated to watch him grapple with that reality a little bit longer! Because if you're giving me a romance where one person is >!terminally ill,!< i need the other person to fall HARD.

Do NOT give me:

"Oh no, that's sad 🥺"

NO.

I need:

The thought of a world where you no longer exist is making me fcking insane.

THANK YOU.

And i think that's also why the sunset scene worked so well for me. Da-eum asks Je-ha to come watch it with her. And this man starts RUNNING lolool USAIN BOLT type sh!t 😭

I was laughing watching him sprint...while simultaneously smiling and kicking my feet because it was what i wanted 😭

They end up at the lighthouse.

They kiss.

Cute!!!

But my favorite kiss?

THE RAIN KISS.

And THAT is where this romance showed me something that i desperately wish it had given me more of.

Rain already means something to Da-eum. There's this memory from when she was little of her playing in the rain with her mother. So when it rains as an adult, there's this genuine excitement in her.

She goes to Je-ha. She kisses him.

And then HE deepens it.

HELLO?????

THAT KISS!!!!!

That's probably one of the biggest romantic highs in the entire drama for me.

And i remember watching it like: Oh... So THIS is what their chemistry looks like when you put some HEAT behind it???

Interesting... DO IT AGAIN!!!!

And then they basically... didn't. 😭

Not like THAT anyway.

if this were MY movie? 40% more of THAT type of kissing. Immediately!😭

I liked the tenderness, emotional intimacy, their softer moments and the understated nature of their relationship.

But this is a woman whose entire character is built around wanting to >!LIVE!< while she still can, wants to act, wants experiences, wants memories, wants love, wants to do all these things everyone else assumes they'll eventually have time for.

So once she and Je-ha fall in love...

LET THEM WANT EACH OTHER!!!

Give me all those things AND desire, AND passionate.

I want i'm losing you, idk how much time we have, i want every part of this while i still can.

THAT would've taken this romance somewhere even higher for me. And it would've made what eventually happens hurt more too.

Which brings me to the other 70% of MY version of Our Movie.

SUFFERING.

😭😭😭

But before we get there...

unfortunately we need to talk about some women.

I DON'T CARE ABOUT THE HAND WARMERS.

Cause i actually REALLY liked Da-eum and Seo-young together in the beginning.

Da-eum is basically a Seo-young fangirl, she liked her BEFORE all this. And instead of immediately going: 2 women + one man = THEY MUST HATE EACH OTHER!!!

the drama initially lets them have this sweet dynamic.

THANK GOD.

Seo-young helps her. Da-eum admires her.

Yes, there's obviously something awkward underneath it because Seo-young was expected to be the >!lead of Love in White, Je-ha chose Da-eum instead,!< AND Seo-young still has unresolved feelings abt Je-ha. But i was SO pleasantly surprised that the drama initially wasnt doing the whole: GET AWAY FROM MY MAN 😡 thing.

Cause i'm tired of that reductive crap.

So when Seo-young eventually DID start becoming increasingly hostile toward Da-eum, i was like:

Oh no.

No no no no no.

PLEASE don't fcking do this 😭

I LIKE these women together!!!

And the frustrating thing is that Da-eum hasn't even DONE anything to her. Eventually Seo-young basically admits that herself. She tells Da-eum that she hates her... but doesn't even really know why.

Okay girl...

😭

At least homegirl knows her resentment isn't fair i guess. Bare minimum, but i'll take it!

Because there's a difference between having an ugly feeling... and deliberately doing something ugly because of it.

Which brings me to: JAE-IN.

Girl.

F*CK YOU.

😭

Da-eum's college "friend."

And i use the word friend VERY loosely. Cause we eventually find out that Jae-in was spreading rumors that Da-eum >!slept with Je-ha to get the role.!<

YOUR FRIEND?????

A woman you went to college with?

A woman who HELPED you?

And because youre jealous that she's succeeding, your response is to spread a s3xual rumor that specifically makes her professional achievement look illegitimate???

VILE!!!

And what REALLY bothered me was that Da-eum being >!terminally ill!< should not even be necessary for us to understand how disgusting that is.

Take that away completely. Imagine Da-eum is perfectly healthy.

IT'S STILL DISGUSTING.

Girl...

GET THE FCK AWAY FROM ME.

And yeah ig. later she feels guilty and buys her hand warmers...

Whatever...

I DON'T CARE ABOUT THE HAND WARMERS.

I understand that learning >!Da-eum is dying!< forces her to confront how petty and cruel youve been. That does not mean i personally have to forgive you. And then >!Da-eum dies anyway,!< so now what are you gonna do????

Live with it, ig...?

That's actually where the difference between Jae-in and Seo-young mattered to me.

Seo-young has ugly feelings toward Da-eum. She knows they're ugly and cant even completely explain them.

Jae-in actually CHOOSES to hurt Da-eum because of hers.

I still didn't love everything they did with Seo-young, especially because i liked her and Da-eum together SO much initially. But i found her more complicated than Jae-in.

Jae-in???

Girl, goodbye.

And then there was that journalist lurking around taking pictures and investigating Da-eum's illness, and every time that man appeared i was basically like:

SIR. PLEASE GET A HOBBY.

Which honestly gets into my feelings about a lot of the supporting characters.

They were...

fine?

I don't even necessarily think they were BAD, i just didnt care abt a lot of them that much. My emotional investment was overwhelmingly in:

Da-eum.

Je-ha.

Da-eum's father.

And Love in White.

Everyone else was varying degrees of:

Okay!

Anyway...

Da-eum's father, tho???

I REALLY liked his arc,.

And i'm SO glad the filmmaking didn't disappear once Je-ha and Da-eum started falling in love.

Cause the further the drama goes, the more the movie they're making and the life they're actually living start bleeding into each other. Da-eum is >!playing a terminally ill woman while actually dying.!< Her real experiences start informing her performance. People watching her sees she's doing an incredible job portraying illness while WE know some of what they're seeing isn't acting. And Je-ha is directing a story about >!loving someone who's dying while simultaneously falling in love with a dying woman.!<

Like???

The boundary just gets thinner and thinner.

And eventually Love in White stops feeling like some movie they're making in the background.

It becomes THEIR movie. roll credits lololol

Which makes where that storyline ends SO satisfying to me.

THE SUFFERING.

😭

Cause the final 3 eps ARE sad.

I'm not sitting here pretending nothing happened.

There is basically this long sad stretch where the thing we've known since ep 1 stops being some future concept hanging over the story and starts becoming:

Oh.

This is actually happening.

&gt;!Da-eum is getting worse.!< Her father knows. Je-ha knows. The movie needs to be finished. Everyone knows her thing now. The clock is almost at zero.

And eventually... >!she's gone.!<

And i thought all of that was good..

I didn't hate the ending or anything... but i wanted it to go further.

Cause when i say: I WANTED MORE PAIN.

what i really mean is:

I WANTED MORE LIFE FIRST.

I wanted to spend more time with Je-ha and Da-eum together when the end stopped being abstract, wanted to SEE more of >!her final days with him.!< What does their relationship look like when both of them know they might be running out of "next times"?

What do they do together? What stupid little ordinary things become precious because they know they wont get to do them forever?

How does Je-ha behave as >!Da-eum gets weaker?!< How does Da-eum deal with knowing >!she's leaving him?!<

What do they talk about? How affectionate are they? How much more desperate do you become to touch somebody when you know one day very soon you won't be able to anymore?

THAT'S where i wanted this drama to live for longer.

You've spent this entire story making me watch these two fall in love while a giant clock hangs over their relationship. Once that clock is almost at zero...

DON'T LOOK AWAY.

Stay there.

Make me experience it with them.

And THAT is why my complaints about the passion and the pain are actually the same complaint.

I wanted their relationship to feel more FULLY LIVED before >!she died.!<

More desire, physical affection, kisses like the rain kiss, ordinary couple moments, final-days intimacy.

Give me more LIFE between them.

And THEN...

take her away.

😭

Cause the more life you give me between them, the more enormous the hole feels when one of them is suddenly missing. i really wanted was for this romance to reach an even greater level of intensity before the story took it away from me.

And i think THAT'S what kept it from emotionally destroying me in the way i thought this premise might.

Cause the drama ultimately takes a gentler approach to death than i would've.

I just personally would've liked the drama to stab me approximately 17 more times before arriving at the end 😭

FINAL RATING: 7/10.

A VERY high 7.

And this is toward the higher end of that rating.

I basically inhaled this drama.

It was ridiculously easy to keep watching.

There were several genuine highs for me.

The fact that i started this because i was supposed to watch it alongside somebody else, started BEHIND her, and somehow ended up overtaking her and finishing the entire drama first probably says more about how enjoyable i found it than anything else 😭

could've hurt me more tho...

Is this Rewatch Worthy?

No.

Cuba, cardio, and my rapidly developing separation anxiety

INTRO:

How Encounter become my "U up?" drama.

I started Encounter on Aug 21 at around 3am😭, cause obviously the brief period of responsible K-drama watching i experienced with Crash Landing on You had officially come to an end 😭

I hadnt even finished CLOY yet. I watched 2 episodes of Encounter and started a 3rd b4 finally forcing myself to go to sleep at around 5 a.m like a maniac.

Later that same day, i finished the last 4 episodes of CLOY, briefly detoured into 2 absolutely bizarre, fever-dream eps of the C-dr@ma Âffinity, and then went right back to Encounter.

But this ended up being a surprisingly scattered watch for me. I think its cause a huge part of me wanted to delay the experience of Encounter ending. It was a kdrama i wanted to go on forever for some reason, and unsurprisingly that made me NOT want to rush through it.

Over the next week i kept squeezing episodes in wherever i could while also watching 2125Twenty Five Twenty One sometimes staying up until 1, 2, or 3 in the morning before sleep eventually won. Then on Aug 29, after literally falling asleep while trying to watch it the night before lol, i woke up, did my Saturday things, came back to it, and binged the entire rest of it.

My immediate feeling was just... sadness that it was over.

For a drama i watched in such a chaotic, stop-and-start way, Encounter itself ended up feeling like one of the calmest, coziest little corners of my K-drama rabbit hole.

-

REVIEW:

Okay so this drama did something to me 😭

I started it knowing basically nothing about it. I wasnt going into this expecting some new favorite or expecting it to end up anywhere NEAR my top 10.

And then episode 1 happened.

Cuba happened.

And so i went from watching 2 strangers randomly spend a day together to being like... wait. Why do I already love this??? 😭

Soo-hyun gets >! pickpocketed, almost falls to her death lol, meets this random man, and spends half the day asking him "Do you have money?" while he uses the little emergency cash he has to buy this rich woman sandals, food, beer, transportation, EVERYTHING!< 😭

And i was immediately gone.

And what really got me was them!!!

Their chemistry is sooooo fking effortless!!

And i think i knew REALLY early that their chemistry was gonna get me because even their little pre-relationship dates had me giggling 😭 Soo-hyun going to the park Jin-hyuk wrote about in his >! cover letter,!< them looking at his photos together, him trying and FAILING to impress her at the claw machine only for her to win immediately 😭 Him accidentally calling her "pretty girl" and then remembering >! OH SH!T THAT'S MY CEO.!< And Soo-hyun very casually trying to figure out who he was smiling at on the phone because he said it was someone he "really, really likes"... only for it to be >! HIS MOM talking about Korean beef 😭 Girl was investigating a girlfriend that did not exist and I LOVED IT.!<

And this man was already doing Cardio Boy-adjacent shit before i even named it 😭 He hears the song from Cuba on the radio and drives all the way back at the crack of dawn because he wants to see her. And when Soo-hyun asks WHY he's there, instead of coming up with some excuse, he basically just tells her: "i came because I wanted to see you." UGGGGHHHHH. That's Jin-hyuk in one sentence. He wants to see her, so he goes to her. Simple as that.

And i loved that they didnt immediately jump from that into some giant declaration either. >! They eventually settle on being in a "some relationship," basically that little stage where you both KNOW something romantic is happening but you're not officially together yet.!< And it felt perfect for Soo-hyun. This woman has spent her entire life having decisions made FOR her. Let her take her cute little baby step 😭

also, speaking of chemistry.

This is one of those romances where i genuinely couldve watched them do absolutely nothing for 16 eps and probably would've been happy 😭

Walk around, eat together, do mundane sh*t, take pictures, hold hands... look at each other and smile for an unreasonable amount of time?

I'M SAT and i wanted more!! i could have watched them forever!@ and i knew i was fcked when i started to mourn them before episode 2 ended lmaooo.

There's something so mellow and dreamy abt this entire drama. It's romantic without constantly screaming LOOK HOW ROMANTIC THIS IS!!! It's soft and mature and cozy and sometimes genuinely magical.

And THE TIE 😭 Soo-hyun buying Jin-hyuk a tie and then standing there putting it on him herself while this man is smiling like an absolute IDIOT. She literally tells him to stop smiling and he's basically like I CAN'T HELP IT 😊 PLEASE. And then Woo-seok happens to see them together??? Even better. Thats exactly what i mean when i say this drama could make the smallest physical interactions feel ridiculously intimate.

And Cuba especially????

UGHHHHHH!!! lovely!! 😊

Cuba is basically a character in this relationship, also they strangely only speak English there for some reason??? the more you know ig... 😭

i was so confused every time i heard English and tried and failed not to furrow my brows😭

but yeah Cuba is where they met before they knew anything about each other's lives. >! Before she was his CEO. Before he was her employee. Before the company drama, the families, the ex-husband, the press,!< all of it.

They were just 2 people who liked being around each other. So every time this drama returned to Cuba or something connected to Cuba, i fcking MELTED.

The shoes, the camera, the note, the music, and then them actually >! going BACK???!<

That >! episode 10!< ending!! 😊 >! The note he left for her the first time. Him calling her Soo-hyun.!< The confession.

AND THAT KISS????

One of the BEST K-drama kisses ive seen. I said what I said 😭

That entire ep was fcking magical!!!!

And the funniest thing happened to me right before ep 9.

I'd stepped away from Encounter for a little bit because life was happening and i was watching other things, and i literally said:

Whenever i step away from them, i miss them.

i missed Soo-hyun and Jin-hyuk. i missed the atmosphere. Every time I came back, i was genuinely excited to be back with them.

Then i watched episode 9...

AND THEY >! LITERALLY STEP AWAY FROM EACH OTHER FOR A MONTH AND MISS EACH OTHER!< 😭😭😭

LIKE?????

I understood you guys!!!!

I too cannot stay away!!! 😭

That coincidence is so iconic to me because it perfectly explains my relationship with this drama.

And i think that's what separates Encounter from a lot of dramas for me, i was attached to the feeling of watching it and wanted to live inside this drama.

And Soo-hyun and Jin-hyuk are ADORABLE!!!

Jin-hyuk is such a lovely romantic male lead.

He's attentive in this really understated way. He notices things. He pays attention to what Soo-hyun actually needs. And he doesnt treat her like this untouchable >!CEO.!<

He sees her.. like SEES her!!!

One moment that REALLY sold me on him was after Soo-hyun's horrible ex-mother-in-law basically humiliates him. Because instead of walking away thinking about how badly HE was just treated, this man starts thinking about SOO-HYUN. Abt how hard it must've been for her to live around that woman for years. yes,!! That's what I mean when i say he's attentive. Even when somebody hurts him, his brain goes: wait... she endured THIS??? And he's hurting for her instead. THAT is a good romantic male lead!!!

Also, i have concluded that this man's love language is cardio because WHY IS HE ALWAYS RUNNING TOWARD THIS WOMAN 😭😭😭

He misses her...

🏃‍♂️

Finds out she's nearby...

🏃‍♂️🏃‍♂️🏃‍♂️

Needs to see her...

RUN, JIN-HYUK, RUN 😭

But underneath that quirk, i genuinely loved that about him.

Whenever Soo-hyun retreats because she's scared or overwhelmed, Jin-hyuk's instinct is almost always to move toward her.

And i also loved watching Soo-hyun slowly change because of that relationship.

She starts this drama as someone whose entire life has basically been decided by other people.

&gt;!Her family, marriage, ex-husband's family, the company, the public.!<

EVERYBODY has an opinion about what Cha Soo-hyun should do.

And over the course of the drama, i watch her slowly start asking:

What do i want?

Her initiating holding his hand made me ridiculously happy.

Her >!choosing his family's dinner instead of going to that fcking memorial!< made me want to CHEER, cause everyone else in her life is constantly telling her to choose what THEY want her to choose.

Meanwhile Jin-hyuk is constantly giving her room to choose for herself.

And then:

"I'm entirely Cha Soo-hyun."

UGGGGHHHHHHHHH.

Her getting drunk and confessing that she's scared he'll disappear one day.

Him promising to stay one meter away.

And drunk Soo-hyun basically going:

ONE METER??? THAT'S TOO FAR.

😭😭😭😭

WHO IS THIS WOMAN AND WHAT DID YOU DO WITH EPISODE 1 SOO-HYUN???

I loved seeing her become playful, seeing her actually LIVE.

And then there was the ex-husband.

Listen.

I actually think Woo-seok was wasted potential.

Once we found out that he >! genuinely loved Soo-hyun and that the affair wasnt even real???!<

OH???

You have her ex-husband, who is >! STILL in love with her, has history with her, has power, wants her back,!< AND now there's this man she's completely in love with???

GIVE ME THE JUICE!!!!!! SUCK THAT MEAT!

I didnt want Soo-hyun super torn between them or anything like, but i wanted her firmly choosing Jin-hyuk while Woo-seok made Jin-hyuk sweat a little!!!

I wanted jealousy!

Competition!

TENSION!

And whenever the drama actually gave it to me, I ATE IT UP.

The scene where Woo-seok calls Soo-hyun "my woman" to Jin-hyuk???

One of my favorite scenes!!!!

Cause Jin-hyuk basically responds: "Calling her your woman sounds pretty one-sided."

i was cracking up!!!😭😭😭

And then Woo-seok tries telling him that he can't handle Soo-hyun and should find someone more "appropriate" for him, and Jin-hyuk's response is basically that ou don't calculate whether someone is appropriate and then decide to fall in love.

And when Woo-seok basically calls his determination youthful recklessness?

Jin-hyuk was like "it's courage."

BITCHHHHH.

And he's RIGHT.

Because Woo-seok cared for Soo-hyun, sure, but when she was actually >! married to him and suffering under his mother,!< where was HIS courage???

You "loved" her, yet you didn't protect her...? um... how does that work...?

Meanwhile Jin-hyuk is standing there like:

Watch me.

THAT'S THE SH&T I WANTED 😭

I wish the drama had used Woo-seok like that MORE!!! But instead, we spent way too much time on other sh&t i didnt care abt.

Which brings me to...

the things that kept this from being a 9 or 10.

Some of the corporate drama was fcking ridiculous 😭

That whole early storyline >! with the anonymous employee board and the PUBLIC LOBBY CONFRONTATION???!<

I was sitting there like... girl just WALK AWAY???

Why are we participating in this circus???

BUT... I will give that ridiculous scene ONE thing 😭 Jin-hyuk calling out to >! Soo-hyun in front of that entire lobby and asking her to go eat ramen with him???!< I LOVED THAT. Because he basically identifies himself as the mystery man everyone is gossiping about just so she doesn't have to stand there alone. The setup was fcking stupid. The romantic payoff tho was unfortunately excellent 😭 put these two inside some plot I dont care abt and somehow they'll still give me a scene i love.

Director Choi tho became my enemy from that moment on tho... cause sir, your strategies SUCK, no?

Then you team up with the >! ex-mother-in-law!< even though everybody with functioning eyes can see that woman is a SNAKE just like you???

And you're surprised when that doesn't end well for you???

Congratulations i guess 😭

And don't even get me started on the mothers.

Soo-hyun's mother is PATHETIC!

Watching that woman KNEEL to her >! daughter's former mother-in-law and practically!< beg them to take Soo-hyun back???

EW.

Your daughter escaped these people!!!!

LEAVE HER ALONE!!!!

And Jin-hyuk's mother pissed me off too.

They're pathetic in completely different ways. Soo-hyun's mother is worse to me because this woman has spent YEARS treating her own daughter's life like political currency.

Chairwoman >! Kim being horrible is one thing. She's a snake and everybody knows she's a snake. But YOU ARE SOO-HYUN'S MOTHER??? Why are you helping these people control your own daughter??? Meanwhile Jin-hyuk's mother genuinely loves her son, which somehow made her cowardice frustrating in a completely different way.!< She's so scared that loving Soo-hyun will destroy the nice, "ordinary" life she imagined for him that she doesn't trust her own grown-ass son to decide what kind of life HE wants.

Different mothers. Different motivations. Same fundamental problem: neither one trusts their adult child to decide what happiness should look like for themselves.

But I will say...

When his mother told Soo-hyun to >! break up with him???!<

👀

I was ready.

Because listen, i love Soo-hyun and Jin-hyuk.

I wanted them together and happy of course!!!... at some point...

BUT I ALSO WANTED PAIN 😭

I had been waiting for some real internal relationship conflict and I was like YESSSSSS, BREAK HIS HEART!!!!

And the timing of his mother's request to the female lead was especially EVIL in a juicy storytelling way, cause Jin-hyuk had JUST started talking about a real future with Soo-hyun 😭 After seeing that bride during the wedding shoot, he brings Soo-hyun the bouquet and basically admits that he can't imagine living without her anymore. And when she hesitates, I >!loved was because marriage itself is scary to Soo-hyun. She's already been married to that coward. She already knows what it feels like for marriage to become another cage where everybody else controls your life. So watching her slowly let herself imagine that marriage with Jin-hyuk could actually mean something completely different??? UGGGHHHH. And THEN his mother comes in with "please break up with my son."!< MA'AM. READ THE ROOM 😭 But story wise, i loved it!!!

Then episode 14 happened.

And I felt BETRAYED 😭

Because we only have SIXTEEN EPISODES.

TIME IS FINITE!!!

Stop teasing me and GIVE ME MY BREAKUP!!!

I still enjoyed all their scenes because i always enjoy them, but ep 14 felt like it was wasting precious time delaying something i knew was coming anyway.

Then >!episode 15!< said:

Oh, you wanted pain?

And gave me EXACTLY what i ordered 😭😭😭

Jin-hyuk was fucking BROKEN lol... this man was BAWLING😭😭

Completely devastated.

Beautifully destroyed.

And I was sitting there SMILING 😭

It was beautifully painful!!!!

THAT was the emotional payoff i wanted.

By that point, i believed their love so much that watching them hurt actually worked. so watching that separation absolutely destroy them???

DELICIOUS

And then we get to the finale...

this is where my rating ultimately dropped from the 9/10 rating i thought i was going to give this drama

I loved the ending.

It was beautiful and bittersweet and i finished it around 11:50 at night feeling genuinely sad that there wasnt another episode waiting for me.

BUT.

Why the F*CK are we spending so much of my FINAL EPISODE on side characters???? 😭

WE HAVE A FINITE AMOUNT OF TIME.

This episode is like an hour and 15 minutes.

Every minute you give someone else is a minute I DON'T GET WITH SOO-HYUN AND JIN-HYUK.

And i dont care abt some of these people!!!

Especially Jin-hyuk's female best friend.

Girl.

I have not cared abt your >!unrequited love!< for this man for FIFTEEN EPISODES.

Why would i suddenly care NOW??? 😭

This girl spent half the drama appearing in the background like some kind of monitoring spirit every time Jin-hyuk interacted with Soo-hyun.

At one point i literally started calling her a cockroach because WHY ARE YOU ALWAYS HERE 😭😭😭

The drama had been trying to make me care about this for AGES 😭 The flashbacks to how long she'd liked him, her constantly watching him with Soo-hyun, all those sad little looks... GIRL I GET IT. YOU LIKE HIM. What exactly am I supposed to DO with this information??? 😭 I kept waiting for that subplot to justify how much time we were spending on it and it just... never did for me. So by the time we finally got the confession in episode 16, i wasn't thinking "aww, closure." i was thinking GET OFF MY SCREEN, FREE ME!!!

that annoying girl had ONE moment where i was like okay queen!!! when she called Soo-hyun and told her about Jin-hyuk's transfer.

Thank you for your service.

That was enough. now go home!!!

I did not need a long-ass confession in my FINAL EPISODE 😭

im watching the clock like:

HELLO???? I HAVE APPROXIMATELY 30 MINUTES OF SOO-HYUN AND JIN-HYUK LEFT IN EXISTENCE???? WRAP THIS UP????

Thats ultimately my biggest issue with Encounter.

It sometimes spends too much time on things i dont care abt when the thing i DO care abt is sitting right there.

And ironically, thats also proof of how much i loved this drama.

Because one of my biggest complaints is literally:

WHY ARE YOU NOT GIVING ME MORE OF THEM???

More of them just existing together.

I wanted MORE.

And that's the feeling im going to remember most.

At one point i literally had to go to sleep instead of continuing, and i realized that i was simultaneously annoyed that i couldn't keep watching AND happy because going to sleep meant i was delaying another episode and making the drama last longer 😭

When i had 6 episodes left, i was already complaining that there were only six.

Then 4

Then 3

Then 1

I spent the second half of this drama basically mourning episodes that I HADN'T EVEN WATCHED YET 😭

So yeah.

-

RATING: 8/10.

I would've cut some of the ridiculous corporate drama.

I would've used Woo-seok WAY more.

I wouldve tightened episode 14.

And i would've snatched precious finale minutes away from side characters and handed them directly to Soo-hyun and Jin-hyuk 😭

But the things this drama did well???

It did them SO beautifully.

The romance, chemistry, atmosphere, cinematography, English Speaking Cuba.

The softness, the longing, the feeling of just wanting to exist beside these 2 people for a little longer.

I loved it.

And i already know that whenever i think abt Encounter, its going to give me this warm, fluffy, slightly bittersweet feeling.

TOP 10:

Would I recommend it?

YES!

and if you dont like it, i will NOT hear any of it, because like i mentioned before, there is a difference between a bias drama and a fav drama.

and Encounter is one of my bias dramas.

WELCOME TO ENGLISH SPEAKING CUBA 😭

Current ranking: #9 in my top 10 K-dramas.

And yes, The King: Eternal Monarch has officially been evicted from the building of top 10. Sorry to that man 😭 (but its still #11, dont worry lol cause i have a top 20, find the full list by clicking on my profile)

-

Is this Rewatch Worthy:

Yes. duh.

the moonlight was lovely. unfortunately, somewhere around episode 13, the love left.

MY META EXPERIENCE:

B4 i even get into the review, I have to talk abt how weirdly perfect the timing of this watch was.

Love in the Moonlight aired 10 years ago, and somehow ubdecided to watch it for the first time basically right before it was celebrating its 10-year anniversary.

So while i literally JUST finished watching this decade-old drama, like a day or after, suddenly i'm seeing news that the cast will reunite, theres a resurgence of the show id just finished on socials, and then new reunion pictures are dropping a few weeks after, there's an ELLE cover, anniversary content is everywhere, and a 10-year reunion special is about to air.

Like??? What are the odds???

I only fell into K-drama land 3 months ago, so there's something so funny and genuinely cool about getting to experience a little piece of the excitement around a drama in real time when i wasnt even here for the original phenomenon.

Everyone else is celebrating something they watched 10 years ago, and im over here like guys I JUST met these people 😭

It made watching this feel weirdly meta, like i accidentally showed up exactly on time to a party that started a decade ago 😊

So regardless of how i ended up feeling about the actual drama... that part of the experience was genuinely so fun.

-

INTRO

By the time i started Love in the Moonlight on July 28, I was almost 2 months into my K-drama rabbit hole and had reached the stage where one drama at a time was no longer enough for me 😭 i had just finished King the Land, immediately tried to chase that high with Her Private Life, paused that 3e episodes in, started Mr. Queen and made it to Episode 9, then somehow started the Phil*ppiñes rem@ke of What's Wrong with Secretary Kim and watched 12 episodes of THAT... and somewhere in the middle of all this, i started Love in the Moonlight.

And unlike several of the dramas i was casually bouncing between, this one actually grabbed me.

i basically dropped everything else and tore through the entire thing, finishing it by July 29. Then, because finishing a whole K-drama in about 2 days wasnt enough, i immediately started The Red Sleeve that same day lol

Looking back, though, the speed at which i watched Love in the Moonlight is almost funny considering how i ultimately felt about it...

because i didnt binge this drama because i was trying to get it over with. I binged it cause for a while there, it genuinely had me.

Which is probably why the way it eventually lost me was so disappointing.

-

REVIEW:

I feel betrayed.

-

This started SO well.

Like genuinely, for the first half i was having such a good time.

Ra-on pretending to be a man when she has perhaps one of the least convincing "i'm definitely a man" faces I've ever seen? Hilarious. I accepted it. But i still think everyone in Joseon needed glasses 😭

But Kim Yoo-jung was SO charming. Her comedic timing was great, she had such a lovely screen presence, and Ra-on was easily my favorite part of the beginning.

And then the romance started cooking!!!

&gt;!The lantern wish, the Crown Prince wishing that she would find her mother!! Him getting increasingly attached to his little eunuch???!<

The *"*He belongs to me" line!!

hehehhehe i was giggly...

Then the confession. Then the kiss. >!Then finding out that he'd already seen her in the dress and knew she was a woman before he confessed???!<

Oh, i was SEATED.

And i liked the second male lead too! Actually, for the beginning of the drama, he was doing better than the Crown Prince for me!!

&gt;!He figured out that Ra-on was a woman almost immediately. He bought her the dress shed been looking at and basically told her that whenever she was ready to stop hiding and live as a woman, he would help her leave the palace.!<

He offered her FREEDOM.

I ate that up!!!

So at this point im thinking: great female lead, adorable central couple, second male lead I genuinely like, some good jealousy food, secret identities, palace shenanigans, comedy...

Where could this possibly go wrong?

Apparently: the second half.

&gt;!Cause once Ra-on left the palace, something changed.!<

And the worst part is that i had been WAITING for her to leave!!!

silly me for wanting good tension in a story and opportunities for yearning ig😭

When she was was spending her final day with the Crown Prince >!while he had absolutely no idea she was planning to disappear???!< I loved it!!!

I was sitting there thinking:

Oh this is about to HURT. im ready!!!

I wanted her gone.

I wanted him searching for her.

I wanted yearning.

I wanted desperation!!!!

I wanted this man LOSING HIS MIND >!because the person he loved had disappeared.!<

And then she actually left...

...and somehow the emotional payoff just wasnt there.

Yes, he was upset ig... Yes, circumstances were complicated because of who her father was. I understand all of that logically.

But i didn't FEEL it.

And unfortunately, that became my problem with most of the rest of the drama.

The romance had spent all this time building toward something huge, and when the stakes finally became huge, the emotions somehow became smaller...

&gt;!There is literally a scene where Ra-on is about to be BEHEADED,!< and i was sitting there wondering:

"Ummm... Your Highness? Are you going to do something???"

Obviously he was politically constrained. I understand that.

But i dont care if my romantic male lead is completely powerless in that moment.

MAKE ME BELIEVE HE WOULD TEAR THE PALACE APART IF HE COULD.

Instead, the most emotionally devastated i saw Park Bo-gum's character become was when >!his childhood friend was seemingly dying in his arms.!<

And it was a good performance!

But all i could think was:

&gt;!WHERE WAS THIS ENERGY WHEN THE LOVE OF YOUR LIFE WAS ABOUT TO HAVE HER HEAD CHOPPED OFF???!!!!!<

Meanwhile, the love triangle that i thought was going somewhere basically >!evaporated.!<

The second male lead had so much potential!

He protected her secret. He offered her an escape. He literally killed someone who discovered she was hiding in the palace. He confronted the Crown Prince because he believed keeping Ra-on in the palace was putting her life in danger.

There was an actual ideological difference between these two men over how to protect her!

DO SOMETHING WITH THAT!!!

Instead, he gradually became less prominent, and then he >!died protecting her.!<

And admittedly...

That scene got me.

Ra-on telling him that he always made her laugh and apologizing because she always hurt him, and him telling her that she was the painting he'd always wanted?

Beautiful.

Probably one of their best scenes together.

And then...

&gt;!He's dead.!<

Okay.

Moving on!

HELLO????

This was one of your major characters!!!!

His >!death!< barely had room to breathe before the drama started wrapping everything else up.

And that's really how the entire ending felt to me: rushed and emotionally unsatisfying.

The frustrating thing is that there ARE things i genuinely like about the second half.

I really liked the Crown Prince's relationship with his mother and the woman who cared for him afterward. I liked seeing him finally learn what happened to his mother. I liked that he remembered what she taught him about the kind of king he should never become.

And I liked watching him eventually become king and decide to rule his people according to those values.

That's good character development!

If all of that had been happening alongside a romance that was absolutely DESTROYING me emotionally???

I probably would've loved it.

Instead, i kept appreciating individual things while thinking:

Okay... but where did the drama i was watching go?

Also, the Queen???

Ma'am.

&gt;!You abandoned your own newborn daughter and stole somebody else's SON because you were obsessed with producing a prince???!<

GET PREGNANT AGAIN???

I understand there was no guarantee shed have another son and that producing an heir was tied to political power, but watching an innocent baby girl be treated as disposable because she wasnt male made me despise that woman.

And the future Crown Princess constantly insisting that shed stay beside the Crown Prince despite knowing perfectly well that he didnt love her?

Girl.

Please stand UP.

Ultimately, i think that's why im so disappointed.

Love in the Moonlight didn't start as a 6/10 drama for me.

That's what hurts.

There was a point where i thought this was heading somewhere really good.

The comedy worked. The female lead worked. The Crown Prince was steadily winning me over, the chemistry was cute, the secret identity was fun.

The love triangle had potential.

The romance kept escalating.

And then the trajectory just...

veered.

The story became increasingly interested in palace politics and wrapping up everyone's political arcs at exactly the point where i needed the romance to become MORE emotionally intense.

The >!separation!< shouldve destroyed me!!

The danger shouldve had me panicking.

The reunion shouldve felt enormous.

The ending shouldve felt like this massive emotional release after everything theyd survived.

Instead, i finished Episode 18 and went:

"Wait. That's it?"

And apparently Episode 19 is a SPECIAL, which i discovered only after sitting there thinking I still had another episode to fix all of this 😭

I feel bamboozled.

Because this one showed me exactly how good it COULD have been.

Then it went somewhere else.

RATING: ⭐ 6/10

i would like to report a missing person: the drama i was watching in the first half.

Is this Rewatch Worthy:

No.

Dear X, I regret to inform you that I reject your thesis.

REVIEW

⭐ 6/10

This one has a little history.

I actually started Dear X before i fell into K-drama land this summer. I'd seen it trending while it was airing, watched a few episodes, and then stopped.

... Or at least, i THOUGHT i watched only a few episodes.

When i decided to restart it from Ep 1 recently, I was convinced i'd originally made it to around Ep 3. Then i got to Ep 4 and remembered the whole thing. Ep 5? Watched that too. Ep 6? Yep. Ep 7? ALSO familiar.

Apparently Past Me watched more than half this drama and then it simply vanished from my memory until i rewatched the episodes again 😭

Ep 8 finally became uncharted territory, and having now finished all 12 episodes today, i have a new mystery:

Why did Past Me stop at ep 7, and was she perhaps trying to warn me?

Because this started as an 8/10 for me.

The strongest thing about Dear X was always Ah-jin.

i LOVED watching a female lead who had been dealt an absolutely horrific hand in life and refused to take anything lying down. She was abused by every parental figure who should have protected her. She grew up learning that nobody was coming to save her, so she learned how to save herself.

But the problem the drama eventually ran into with me was that it kept telling me i should be horrified by her while repeatedly giving me situations where i understood exactly why she retaliated.

Sung-hee bullied her, became obsessed with competing with her, tried to humiliate her, and continued coming after her even after Ah-jin made it abundantly clear that she should leave her alone!!

Her father abused her for years, exploited her, attempted to sell her when she was a child, and kept returning to terrorize her.

Rena targeted her out of jealousy, treated her horribly on set, slapped her, tried to humiliate her, and then continued investigating her after Ah-jin basically gave her a giant flashing LEAVE ME ALONE warning!

>!The corrupt detective tried to manipulate the investigation into her father's death and then spent years blaming Ah-jin cause HIS OWN corruption destroyed his career....?!<

i spent several episodes yelling at the investigation and another thing i will mention later...

>!but yeah, when ah-jin's father dies, i couldnt understand why so much of the investigation seemed determined to ignore the most obvious fact: this man was ACTIVELY BEATING AND CHOKING HIS DAUGHTER when Jung-ho intervened!!!!!<

>!i kept getting stuck on this bizarre distinction everyone was making between whether Jung-ho believed he was attacking Ah-jin's abusive father or the stalker who had previously attacked her...!<

Why was THAT being treated like the central moral question!!!!?

Either way, he walked into a situation where a man was violently assaulting a woman and intervened!

>!And then that detective tries to manipulate the investigation and public narrative because he wants to protect Jung-ho's potential baseball comeback??? Ah-jin exposes what HE is doing, his own corruption blows up his career, and somehow this man spends YEARS treating Ah-jin like she personally ruined his life.!<

SIR???

YOU WERE THE CORRUPT DETECTIVE.

You ruined your own life!

And this became another recurring pattern in the drama for me: somebody makes a choice, that choice has consequences, and somehow we eventually circle back around to Baek Ah-jin being responsible for it.

and every single time, i felt like someone would fuck with Ah-jin, Ahjin would retaliate much more effectively, and then suddenly everyone would begin the moral accounting at Ah-jin's retaliation...

HELLO???

Can we rewind to Step One?????!

That's where the drama slowly started losing me.

Because i feel that Dear X wanted me to wrestle with whether Ah-jin had become some kind of monster because of what was done to her...

lol???

Except i kept waiting for the thing that would make me go, Okay girl, you've officially lost me.

It never came.

even when i disagreed with Ah-jin, it was usually because i thought her PLAN was stupid, not because i suddenly thought she was evil lol.

>!like for example, the entire situation with her father and Jung-ho was absurdly overengineered. She literally made her own body the bait and depended on several people behaving exactly how she predicted while her father was beating the hell out of her.!<

Girl. There HAD to be another way!! You literally could have died from hemorrhage??😭😭

But morally... i still wasn't sitting there mourning her abusive father... and i dont understand why the drama seems like they wanted me to make a big deal out of his death...?

And while we're talking about things this drama wanted me to accept: i spent an unreasonable amount of this show arguing with the LAW 😭

Jae-oh's entire backstory drove me crazy from the beginning. >!His father was attacking his younger brother with a knife, Jae-oh intervened to protect him, and his father died in the struggle. And somehow Jae-oh is the one who loses YEARS of his life in juvenile detention?!<

HUH???

Maybe there are nuances of Korean self-defense law im missing, but i spent that entire storyline wondering why protecting another person from an active knife attack was being treated like Jae-oh just decided to murder his father one afternoon...?

>!And what made it even more frustrating was that Jae-oh then carried all this guilt, stayed away from his brother, and basically tortured himself over something that happened while he was trying to SAVE him....!!!!<

This drama had me wanting to call Jae-oh's lawyer myself and get them disbarred cuz, what?@?@?

And this became increasingly important because of Joon-seo.

i started out liking him. His childhood connection with Ah-jin was sweet, and i liked the idea of this boy promising to protect the girl nobody else protected.

Unfortunately, as the drama continued, i realized that Joon-seo and I had VERY different definitions of protection.

He was always willing to suffer for Ah-jin.

But was he actually willing to be useful to Ah-jin..?

THAT was my question!!

he would "sacrifice" himself. Blame himself. "Torture" himself. Question Ah-jin's morality. Talk about punishment. Wonder what loving someone like her said about him.

And eventually i was sitting there like:

dude, literally, are you going to HELP this woman or write another dissertation about the moral implications of "loving her?!"

Meanwhile, Jae-oh literally became everything i wanted Joon-seo to be.

JAE-OH SHOULD HAVE BEEN THE MALE LEAD!

Jae-oh understood Ah-jin. >!Never once believed she pushed granny down the stairs!!<

>!He didn't need her to become "morally acceptable" to him before he could stand beside her. When she needed something, he helped. When something felt wrong with Do-hyuk, he investigated. When Ah-jin was being psychologically broken down and the supposed male lead had basically removed himself from her life, Jae-oh was the one who checked on her and realized she needed help.!<

>!And ultimately, he gave his life helping her escape.!<

>!His death genuinely upset me, especially because by the end i think his relationship with Ah-jin was the purest relationship she had in the entire drama.!<

Jae-oh knew who she was and still made his own choices.

And THAT brings me to another problem i had with the show's moral argument.

People constantly make choices around Ah-jin, and the drama seems weirdly determined to place those choices back onto her!!!

Jae-oh chose to help her. Jung-ho chose to intervene when he saw a woman being violently attacked.

>!In-gang had struggled with depression for years before Ah-jin entered his life.!<

but somehow Ahjin repeatedly becomes the repository for everyone else's decisions, suffering, and consequences!!!

The In-gang situation especially drove me INSANE because it gave me one of my most hated characters in the entire drama:

Mi-ri.

I absolutely despised that woman by the end!!!

This lady runs an entertainment company where she collects dirt on her own actresses so she can control them if necessary. She's perfectly comfortable manipulating people when it benefits her.

>!But In-gang dies and suddenly she discovers MORALITY?!!?!<

And all that moral outrage gets directed toward Ah-jin.

>!She blames Ah-jin for his death, threatens to destroy everything she built, blacklists her, and then literally tells her that the only way she could make up for what happened would be to jump off the roof.!<

Disgusting!!!

>!And then when Mi-ri's own life starts collapsing, her assistant goes to AHJIN asking for help???!<

Girl...

Why would she help you?!!

>!She wasn't even responsible for what was happening to Miri, but even if she had been, you just told this woman to kill herself!!<

So when Ah-jin essentially threw Mi-ri's own words back at her and told her to take her own advice?

... I cheered.

Then we got to Do-hyuk.

-.

-.

-.

And this is where I think Dear X jumped the shark.

It's not that Do-hyuk served absolutely no purpose. I get what the storyline was doing. >!He was obsessed with Ah-jin, wanted to control her, psychologically destabilized her, manipulated her environment and trauma, and wanted to make her dependent on him.!<

Cool.

but...

WHY IS THIS HAPPENING IN EPISODE 10 OF A 12 EPISODE DRAMA???

Suddenly i wasn't watching the show i'd been watching for 9 eps.

>!now Ahjin is living in a creepy mansion with a mysterious 3rd floor, a missing/institutionalized ex-wife, surveillance, strange gaps in her memory, deliberately recreated trauma, a husband secretly listening to her conversations, and a whole psychological-thriller plot that feels like it wandered in from another drama.!<

And then it has zero time to go anywhere! 😭😭

Do-hyuk caused such a massive tonal shift that i expected his storyline to justify hijacking the final act.

It literally never did!!!😭😭😭

By ep 10, my dread wasnt even the strongest emotion anymore.

I was just confused...

And unfortunately, the final 2 eps confirmed my biggest fear: they were not going to stick the landing.

Which brings me back to Joon-seo...

sigh...

Because i genuinely cannot believe this man's final contribution to Ah-jin's life.

>!He helps make a doc "exposing" her past right as she reaches the biggest moment of her career.!<

>!idk what exactly was meant to be ‘exposed’ here... that she was bullied? abused? that the adults in her life repeatedly failed her??? im confused 😭😭!<

And who gets included?

SUNG-HEE.

HER HIGH SCHOOL BULLY.

>!The same woman who spent years blaming Ah-jin for her own life, came back into Ah-jin's orbit, infiltrated her home and eventually tried to SLASH HER FACE WITH A KNIFE.!<

>!And somehow we're using her as evidence in the moral prosecution of Baek Ah-jin?!<

WHAT ARE WE DOING???

Then Joon-seo decides that Ah-jin cannot continue living the way she chooses to live.

And apparently his solution is to >!drive BOTH OF THEM OFF A CLIFF????!<

Excuse me???!! but like who made YOU the arbiter of whether Ah-jin gets to LIVE?

This is where the show's entire moral thesis completely collapsed for me....

Joon-seo spent his life claiming he wanted to protect Ah-jin, but Ah-jin was right about him from the beginning.

He was a shackle.

His supposed love always came with a condition underneath it: eventually, she needed to become someone he could morally approve of.

And when she didn't?

>!He destroyed her career and literally tried to end her life.!<

>!Meanwhile, the man who actually accepted her and helped her without appointing himself judge of her soul was dead.!<

Make it make sense!!!!

And that's ultimately why this drama fell from an 8/10, to a 7/10, and finally to a 6/10 rating for me.

I don't need every female lead i love to ride into the sunset with a husband, two children and a golden retriever.

But I DO need to understand what the tragedy is SAYING.

And I absolutely despise what this ending seemed to be saying about Ah-jin.

This woman survived ALL OF THAT! abuse, poverty, bullying, exploitation, violence, public humiliation and an industry full of people perfectly willing to use her.

And the thing I loved about her was that she REFUSED to lie down and accept any of it.

She fought.

>!And somehow the conclusion of this story is that she needs to lose her career, lose Jae-oh, lose basically everything she built, get publicly destroyed by the man who supposedly loves her, and then have that same man decide they're both going to die because HE has decided she cant be saved?!<

No.

I reject the thesis.

And the only reason this drama is getting a 6 instead of a 5/10 is cause of one thing:

>!BAEK AH-JIN didn't die.!<

>!When she crawled out of that car after Joon-seo drove them off the cliff and left his ass there?!<

GOOD.

He decided both of their lives were over, and she disagreed.

That was probably the most Ah-jin thing she could have possibly done, i just wish surviving hadnt been the only thing the writers were willing to give her.

>!Because after everything she endured, i wanted freedom, i wanted her thriving, i wanted her peace.!<

>!I wanted her to finally live without someone abusing her, controlling her, diagnosing her, punishing her, "saving" her, or deciding what kind of person she was allowed to be.!<

>!Instead, the show punished her until the final minutes.!<

So yeah.

Rating: 6/10

My Rating Scale

10/10 – Masterpiece. No notes.

9/10 – Very close to a masterpiece. I absolutely loved it.

8/10 – Not a masterpiece, but I loved it.

7/10 – Fine overall. I liked it, but the flaws kept it from being great.

6/10 – Mixed. There were a few things I liked, but most of it didn't work for me.

5/10 – I didn't enjoy most of the experience.

4/10 and below – Bad to abysmal.

[removed]

a beautiful story about youth, ambition, 1st love, friendship, and the deeply personal experience of needing your best friend to lose specifically to YOU.

\---

⚠️SPOILERS AHEAD. LIKE, THE ENTIRE DRAMA⚠️

**---**

INTRO:

How I accidentally turned this into an event..

Twenty-Five Twenty-One was not watched in one clean little binge.

(i know, right? i keep surprising myself every day too!)

By the time I got to Twenty-Five Twenty-One, i'd been speed-running K-dramas since June 3rd like somebody was going to revoke my access to Korean entertainment at any time.

Id binged dramas overnight, started dramas while other dramas were still airing, paused dramas to start other dramas, forgotten the first drama existed, remembered dramas three weeks later, and gone back to them like nothing happened.

I'd even imposed a “stop starting new K-dramas until you finish the unfinished ones” rule on myself.

I broke that rule within 2 seconds btw. 😭😭

So by August, my watchlist was basically an active crime scene.

Then I posted my 24th K-drama review and realized something.

Twenty-Five Twenty-One was sitting right there on my watchlist. And I decided:

This has to be #25

idek know why that felt so important to me.

Maybe because the title was right there.

(Probably lol.)

Maybe because after burning through so many dramas in such a short amount of time, i wanted #25 to feel like a little milestone.

I was enjoying so many things in such a short amount of time that it was kind of like sitting in front of something super delicious feast and gobbling the entire thing up in 3 bites 😔

Maybe these self-imposed milestones are my way of forcing myself to pause and actually immerse myself in something for a second.

LOL look at me psychoanalyzing myself. 😭😭

So i decided Twenty-Five Twenty-One had to be Review #25 and effectively put my entire review series on administrative leave until I finished it.

i started it on August 23rd and proceeded to watch this drama in fragments of my actual life.

I watched it during lunch at work.

I watched it while getting my nails done.

I watched it while getting my hair done.

I watched it at a Korean restaurant.

I continued it in the Uber home from that restaurant.

I watched it at 1 a.m.

I paused it to finish Encounter.

I wandered off into other dramas.

I came back.

Then on September 3rd, I finally properly resumed from episode 11 and basically went:

Okay. We're finishing this now.

I watched until 2:20 a.m., stopped halfway through episode 15 because unfortunately employment continues to interfere with my artistic process, and went to sleep. 😭

So today, September 4th, nearly two weeks after I started it, i finally completed Twenty-Five Twenty-One!!!!

Compared to the girl who once watched ten episodes of King the Land in one night until daylight started appearing outside her window???

This was practically a slow burn.

And maybe that was good for it.

Was making this feel like an event to me necessary?

No.

But if you don't celebrate random parts of your own life in weird little ways, whos gonna do it for you?

Finishing Twenty-Five Twenty-One felt ceremonial to me.

Thanks to me. 😭

\--

REVIEW:

This was superb.

And I feel like the funniest possible way to explain my experience with this drama is that I spent the first several episodes yelling:

"WE'RE NOT THERE YET."

at the main romance...

only to eventually finish the drama thinking one of the most romantic relationships I watched was between Na Hee-do and Ko Yu-rim.

So.

There's that. 😭

But let me start from the beginning.

Cause Twenty-Five Twenty-One ended up being one of those dramas where my relationship with it changed A LOT while I was watching it.

And somehow, that made me appreciate it even more.

\---

NA HEEDO, YOU HAD ME AT "I will simply get myself expelled"

The first thing that hooked me about this drama was the fl, Hee-do.

I loved her almost immediately.

Her school fencing team gets shut down because of the financial crisis and instead of accepting that maybe her dream isnt happening, this girl basically goes: Okay. I'll transfer schools.

but she cant transfer.

then, shes like: fine. ill force them to transfer me.

And then proceeds to embark on the world's dumbest juvenile delinquency campaign???

I loved her.😭😭

Cause underneath all the comedy, Hee-do is hungry.

She wants something.

She LOVES fencing and wants to be good and she wants to make the national team.

She wants to win.

And ik ive said it b4 probably, but i LOVE an ambitious female character!!! and i loved how refreshing it is to watch a female lead whose ambition remained this important throughout the entire drama.

Romance happens.

Friendships happen.

Her relationship with her mother changes.

She grows up.

Her entire life changes.

But she never stops being an athlete.

Even toward the end, when Yu-rim comes to see her before their match in Madrid, Hee-do refuses to see her, because:

"I want to win."

YES.

THAT'S MY GIRL.

She needs Yurim to be her opponent at that moment, not her friend, and I loved that the drama never treated her ambition like some character flaw she needed to eventually soften out of.

She wanted to win when I met her.

She wanted to win when I left her.

Beautiful!!

\---

NOW ABOUT THIS ROMANCE

This is probably going to sound strange considering i ultimately liked Heedo and Yijin together, but for a WHILE...

I did not want these people dating. 😭

I really liked what they already were; i liked him laughing at her, i liked Heedo annoying him, i liked them playing together, i liked him supporting her fencing.

I liked that they became safe spaces for each other during an incredibly shitty period of both of their lives.

But somewhere around episodes 4-5, the drama started putting this HUGE emotional weight on their relationship and i was sitting there like:

...I'm sorry, are we there already???

Because i wasn't.

There were separations.

Voicemails.

Longing.

Parallel shots.

Missing each other.

this sweeping emotional framing telling me these two people had already become monumentally important to one another.

And intellectually?

Sure...

i got it.

but emotionally?

WE'RE NOT THERE YET.

😭

I wanted the friendship to breathe, and i wanted more accumulation before the drama started asking me to experience their relationship with that kind of magnitude.

And hilariously, this becomes even more interesting in hindsight because Hee-do herself eventually looks back at their relationship and basically wonders whether they were better before they tried to turn what they had into "this kind of love."

And I was like... WAIT A DAMN MINUTE.

Because that's kind of what I was feeling!!!

their relationship was SO naturally suited to that undefined space where they could support each other, disappear, reconnect, tease each other, inspire each other and just... exist.

Romantic partnership came with expectations, and expectations exposed things their friendship didnt necessarily require them to confront.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Because eventually...

they got me.

\---

OK YIJIN, YOU CAN HAVE HER NOW

Episode 9.

That's when I finally went:

Ohhhhh. Okay. Fine. I see it a little.

By then Yi-jin had accumulated enough actions behind his feelings that his love actually landed for me.

He had shown up for Hee-do, supported her. protected her when necessary without treating her like she couldn't protect herself.

Admired her as an athlete.

And then when Heedo is trying to figure out what the hell their relationship even is, she calls it a rainbow. lol???

Yi-jin is basically like:

Girl, no.

It's love.

He was simply answering the question.

What are we?

For me, this is love.

Okay.

he got me, cause that was beautifully simple without needed to be some grand, over the top thing.

And once they got together, i actually really enjoyed how easygoing they could be and their playfulness was probably my favorite part of their romance:

I loved Yi-jin teasing Hee-do, loved them being ridiculous together, loved the little moments where they just genuinely seemed to enjoy each other's company.

\---

UNFORTUNATELY FOR YIJIN, ANOTHER RELATIONSHIP HIJACKED THIS DRAMA FOR ME

And I genuinely did NOT see this coming.

Because early on, I was actually scared of what the drama was going to do with Yu-rim.

The second yurim told Yi-jin he was her first love and started acting weird about him getting close to Hee-do, I was like:

Oh God.

PLEASE.

Please do not take this interesting female character and reduce her to a girl who hates another woman over a man!!!! please!!

I was already invested in the fact that Hee-do had idolized Yu-rim.

i loved that teenage Hee-do had spent years watching this incredibly talented girl fence and collecting articles about her.

I loved that her hero turned out to be... kind of an asshole to her. 😭

Never meet your heroes, ig.

But I desperately wanted there to be something underneath Yu-rim's hostility that had nothing to do with Yi-jin.

And BOY.

Did I get what I wanted. hehehhehe

Because apparently Yu-rim wasn't thinking about Hee-do because of Yi-jin.

YU-RIM HAD BEEN THINKING ABOUT HEE-DO FOR YEARS

Excuse me???

\---

NA HEEDO & KO YURIM: MY FAV LOVE STORY IN THIS DRAMA

I'm being completely serious when I say these two might be top 10, possibly top 5, favorite K-drama relationships I've watched so far.

I LOVE THEM.

Their entire relationship is insane.

As a child, Yu-rim competes against Hee-do.

Hee-do beats her 8-0.

Hee-do doesn't even remember it lol and Yu-rim THINKS ABOUT IT FOR YEARS.

😭😭😭

She couldn't eat for days afterward and trained while thinking about Hee-do.

She wanted to beat her.

She wanted to beat her specifically 8-0. (aww so romantic 😊)

Then Hee-do disappears from competition for a while, Yu-rim becomes this enormously successful athlete... and when Hee-do finally shows up at her school and cheerfully announces:

I'm your fan! 🥰

Yu-rim is basically internally going: YOU!

then she eventually admits that even after they've become close... she's still afraid of Hee-do.

Meanwhile Hee-do isnt afraid of Yu-rim at all.

I ate this UP!!!!

Because their entire early dynamic became richer!!! hee-do spent years thinking about Yu-rim because Yu-rim became her hero.

Yu-rim spent years thinking about Hee-do because Hee-do became her fear.

These two girls unknowingly built pieces of their identities as athletes around each other.

And THEN...

because apparently that wasn't enough to make me crash out...

THEY'RE ALSO THE ANONYMOUS INTERNET FRIENDS THEY'VE BOTH BEEN CONFIDING IN.

Girl.

Come on.

You expect me NOT to ship this???!!! whats going on?@?!?😭😭

\---

The Injeolmi reveal changed EVERYTHING

This might be one of my favorite developments in the drama.

Because Hee-do and Yu-rim have spent all this time hating each other in real life while unknowingly being emotionally vulnerable with each other online.

And once the truth finally comes out?

Oh, I was DONE.

The bathroom scene... Hee-do defending Yu-rim while other girls talk badly about her.

Yu-rim crying.

The identity reveal.

The hug.

And all that hostility starts transforming into something else.

I remember watching them become sweet with each other afterward while Yi-jin was filming them and looking completely baffled.

Meanwhile i was basically sitting there like:

WAIT.

WAIT WAIT WAIT.

...is THIS the romance I want??? 🤔

😭

WELL YES.

it was.

And the more the drama developed them, the worse I got.

Their matching scar, training together, standing up for Ye-ji together, competing together, winning together!!

Supporting each other.

Being able to understand each other without needing every single thing explained.

And most importantly:

becoming friends never stops them from being rivals.

THANK YOU.

They love each other.

AND THEY WANT TO DESTROY EACH OTHER ON THE PISTE.

That's the good shit hehehehhe

\---

Madrid. MADRID. MADRID.

If I gave half-star ratings, this is probably what would've turned my 8 into an 8.5.

This entire sequence was SO FCKING GOOD!!

By this point, Yu-rim has changed nationalities because of her family's financial situation. she's representing Russia, shes being called a traitor in Korea.

The media is weaponizing everything.

Hee-do is being pressured to beat her because apparently if she loses to the "traitor," she's somehow a traitor too.

um ok... annoying, but we move...

Reporters are twisting things Yu-rim says about Hee-do. they're twisting things Hee-do says about Yu-rim.

Except now something has fundamentally changed.

Earlier Hee-do didn't understand Yu-rim.

Now... she knows her!

People around Hee-do see the articles and get angry on her behalf and hee-do recognizes they twisted her words. i love that!

And meanwhile Yu-rim is sitting at a computer typing messages to Hee-do...

deleting them...

typing...

deleting...

because suddenly she can't be honest with Hee-do the way she used to.

which is especially heartbreaking because computers used to be their safest place.

Before they knew each other's identities, they could tell each other everything, now they know each other completely... and somehow the distance has made honesty harder.

UGH!!!! THE ANGST!!!!!!

And then they finally face each other. Korea versus Russia.

National hero versus "traitor."

At least that's what everybody else wants the match to mean.

But for them it's just:

Na Hee-do versus Ko Yu-rim.

then at the end of the tense as match, they take off their masks. And these two women just fall into each other's arms SOBBING while the entire crowd is cheering around them.

Yu-rim apologizes for not emailing. Hee-do holds her. They're crying.

I'm emotional.

Everybody's emotional 😭😭

AND THEN:

"I was happy today."

"Me too."

F\*CK OFF.

😭😭😭😭😭

I LOVE THEM.

\---

And somehow their ending was even MORE romantic???

Hee-do goes on to have this incredible fencing career, wins medals, becomes a legend and eventually she retires.

And when she's asked about the most honorable part of her career?

She says:

being Ko Yu-rim's rival.

HELLO???

And Yu-rim is there.

She says she's honored too, SCREAMS it from the crowd actually, holding flowers.

They hug.

And I'm sorry.

That's romance.

Out of this woman's entire fencing career...

all the medals... victories and accomplishments...

one of the things she chooses to honor is:

You.

Being your rival.

Growing beside you.

Fighting you.

Losing to you.

Beating you.

Becoming better because you existed.

And Yu-rim feels exactly the same way.

That was easily my favorite scene of the finale.

\---

the side characters were side-charactering VERY successfully

i appreciated that the world never felt like it consisted solely of Hee-do and Yi-jin, cause i genuinely cared about these people.

Yu-rim and Ji-woong were SO cute!

And hilariously uncomplicated compared with whatever the hell was happening everywhere else. 😭

This dude spent an absurd amount of effort engineering an opportunity to HOLD HIS OWN GIRLFRIEND'S HAND because she kept accidentally ruining his plans.

Sir.

Just grab her hand!!!😭

I loved him racing to the airport when Yu-rim was leaving and loved him essentially telling her that even if misery is all she can give him right now, he'll take it because they'll endure it together.

They're so wholesome.

And also these two actually survived the long-distance relationship.

Good for them!!!

\---

I really liked Seung-wan.

Especially the storyline with the abusive teacher.

Watching this adult man beat students and then watching the police basically shrug because corporal punishment was normalized was gross and annoying.

I also really liked Yi-jin stepping in when that reporter tried to exploit her.

Because Yi-jin occupied this interesting position in the group where he could be goofy with them, drink with them, get dragged into their nonsense...

but he was still an adult.

And in moments where that distinction mattered, he could protect them in ways they didn't necessarily know they needed protecting.

\---

Ye-ji quitting fencing was way more interesting than it needed to be

This little storyline could've been completely forgettable... instead I loved it.

Ye-ji wants to quit fencing, Coach Yang refuses to simply let her walk away and makes her prove that she isn't quitting because things are difficult.

Hee-do and Yu-rim literally stop training in solidarity with her.

Then they TRAIN HER so she can reach the required result and finally quit.

😭

That's true friendship lol

Maybe Coach's method taught her something.

Maybe Ye-ji proved something important to herself.

And maybe she STILL thinks Coach put her through unnecessary bullshit.

The drama allows both perspectives to exist.

I appreciated the writing with this tiny side plot.

\---

And speaking of complicated relationships... Hee-do and her mother

Oh, these two...

I was SO annoyed with Hee-do's mother early on. Especially once we got into the grief surrounding Hee-do's father. Because Hee-do isn't just grieving him, she's carrying years of resentment toward a mother she felt repeatedly chose work over her family.

And the drama gradually complicates that without telling me:

Her mother was grieving too, her professionalism was real and admirable.

Yi-jin himself admires her professionally without initially understanding the personal cost behind that professionalism.

But Hee-do was also a CHILD who needed her mother.

Those truths can coexist. and i loved how the writing showed that

\---

THE BREAK UP ACTUALLY MAKES PERFECT SENSE

9/11 ruined their relationship.

Which is a sentence I absolutely did not expect to type when I started this drama. 😭

But obviously it's more complicated than that.

Yi-jin gets sent to New York as a reporter, he's surrounded by death, traumatized ppl families, bodies being recovered. He's having nightmares and hes struggling.

And suddenly Hee-do's encouragement...

doesn't reach him anymore.

That is SUCH a painful reversal.

Because their relationship was literally built on their words being able to reach each other across distance.

Earlier, Yi-jin could disappear and Hee-do's voice still reached him.

He could be somewhere else and his words still comforted her.

Now she's trying to support him... and she can't.

And Yi-jin doesny want to give Hee-do his pain because, from his perspective:

Why make two people miserable when nothing gets solved?

He thinks he's protecting her, but Hee-do pretty much hears:

You shut me out.

And THAT is their incompatibility.

Yi-jin cannot bring himself to give her the ugliest parts because he thinks love means protecting her from them.

they both need fundamentally different things from a partner.

And then Hee-do connects it to her mother.

And everything CLICKED... and Hee-do realizes:

I do not want my future to look like my childhood.

OOOOOF.

That's GOOD writing.

\---

And... I wasn't devastated by the breakup

Sad? sure.

Especially for Hee-do.

But devastated?

No.

I think I simply accepted it.

Sometimes relationships run their course. Sometimes two people can profoundly love each other and still not be equipped to build an entire life together.

Sometimes somebody is exactly who you needed at nineteen...

and isn't who you need forever.

And that's okay.

They changed each other, they loved each other, they helped each other survive difficult periods and they were happy.

their break up doesn't erase it.

And thankfully, the drama doesn't leave them with that awful tunnel fight as their final emotional note.

They had a nice goodbye.

\---

"Nothing lasts forever."

I think this is ultimately where the drama got me.

Episode 10's beach trip was probably when I first really felt it.

The five of them are together, young, laughing, being stupid at the beach.

Everything feels enormous and permanent because that's how life feels when youre young and currently living inside it.

And I remember watching them thinking: can we just freeze them here?

Because you KNOW this configuration of people can't last forever.

But the drama never argues that impermanence makes something meaningless.

Quite the opposite. and i liked that

\-

i liked seeing where everyone ended up.

I do wish we had gotten slightly more adult Hee-do, ya know? she is the protagonist, and i wouldve loved to sit with the woman she became just a little longer.

But after spending sixteen episodes so invested in this girl's ambition, I would've happily taken more time with adult Hee-do.

\---

The epilogue was adorable.

Security question:

Who was your first love?

Na Hee-do.

Correct.

😭

That's all I needed.

\---

RATING: 8/10.

I was hovering around an 8/10 for a large portion of the drama, and that's exactly where I landed.

The early emotional intensity of Hee-do/Yi-jin sometimes arrived before I personally felt their relationship had earned that magnitude, and even once I liked them romantically, they never became the emotional center of the drama for me.

But Hee-do's journey, the friendships, the fencing, the coming-of-age themes, the wonderfully complicated women, and especially Hee-do/Yu-rim elevated this enormously.

Madrid alone would've gotten this an 8.5 from me if I gave half ratings.

But I don't.

So...

8/10.

Beautifully bittersweet.

No regrets.

Disclaimer: im a data nerd. i love data. i can talk about stats all day. this is something i enjoy to do, about all my hobbies. (i also do it for work, cause i work in data tech lol but work is mostly boring. Hobby data is much more fun!)

---

Something I see repeated a lot in Smallville fandom by Lana haters and Clana haters, is that Clark and Lana were dragged out for years despite viewers being "tired of them," that audiences had lost interest in the relationship long before it ended, etc.

And Ive always wondered: is there actually evidence that the audience watching the show at the time felt that way?

Because it always sounded ridiculous to me when they say that.

So last week, I started looking at the original U.S. viewership numbers because I wanted to make a post about it.

And this post is it.

---

And I was right in my suspicions, because I found out that the ratings, in fact, don't support that narrative of "viewers were tired of lana/clana."

---

To be clear before somebody argues with a point I'm not making: ratings cannot tell us why an individual person watched an episode. They also cannot prove that every person watching Smallville shipped Clark and Lana. Major episodes often had several selling points at once, i found through my research of how they were promoted.

But ratings can tell us whether episodes heavily centered on Clark/Lana were turning viewers away.

And there is NO evidence that they were.

In fact, most of the show's biggest Clark/Lana episodes performed extremely well.

---

Season 2

S2 was Smallville at basically its peak in raw audience size, so obviously these numbers have to be compared within the season rather than to later seasons.

But look at "Red."

This is one of the show's first huge Clark/Lana episodes. Red-K Clark openly pursues Lana, he takes her on the infamous bar date, he tells her he wants her, and pretty much acts on feelings that normal Clark keeps restrained.

"Red" drew approx 8.9 million viewers.

For comparison:

* "Vortex" - 8.7M

* "Heat" - 8.1M

* "Duplicity" - 8.8M

* "Red" - 8.9M

* "Nocturne" - 8.3M

* "Redux" - 8.2M

That made "Red" one of the most-watched episodes of the entire season. Only "Lineage," at 9.4M, was higher.

Then there's "Rush," another extremely Clark/Lana-heavy episode, where an uninhibited Clark and Lana finally act on their attraction.

That episode pulled 8.1 million viewers. Contemporary reporting shows me that Smallville that night actually set a WB record in the key 18-34 demo, with an 6.1 rating/15 share, while attracting 8.1M total viewers.

Also, look at how S2 ends.

"Calling" is basically the clark/Lana dam finally breaking. Clark tells Lana how he feels, they kiss, and they finally decide to be together.

"Calling": 7.1M

Then "Exodus" continues their new relationship before everything blows up.

"Exodus": 7.5M

Thats actually an increase of abt 400,000 viewers for the finale.

None of this proves everyone watching was a Clana shipper.

But it certainly doesn't look like Clark/Lana was something audiences were avoiding...

And Season 5 is where this gets much more interesting to me.

Because by S5, nobody can say Clana was some shiny new relationship people were curious about.

The show had already spent 4 seasons on Clark and Lana.

And what happens when Smallville finally puts them into a real relationship?

"Mortal" is basically the fantasy Clark has wanted since the beginning of the show. He's temporarily human, he and Lana can actually be together, and they finally sleep together.

"Mortal": 5.84M viewers.

The following episode, "Hidden," continues their relationship and has Lana dealing with Clark apparently being killed.

"Hidden": 5.92M.

S5's ep-by-ep average, calculated from the reported audience figures, is approx 5.32M.

So these eps were both comfortably above that average.

And then we get to the elephant in the room:

(one of my favs btw)

"Reckoning."

Clark finally tells Lana the truth.

He takes her to the Fortress.

He proposes.

She says yes.

We see the possibility of Clark and Lana actually getting married!

Then Lana dies, Clark reverses time to save her.

6.28 million people watched it.

That made "Reckoning" the second-most-watched episode of Season 5, behind only "Aqua" at 6.40M.

And the jump from the episode immediately before its pretty striking:

"Fanatic" - 5.45M

"Lockdown" - 4.90M

"Reckoning" - 6.28M

"Vengeance" - 5.37M

"Tomb" - 5.41M

That's roughly abt 1.38 million more viewers than the previous episode, an increase of about 29%.

It was the show's 100th episode. The WB heavily promoted the fact that somebody important was going to die, even using promotional imagery suggesting either Lana or Jonathan could be the victim. There were obviously multiple reasons people tuned in.

But that actually makes another point worth considering:

What did Smallville put at the emotional center of its heavily promoted 100th episode?

Clark telling Lana his secret.

Clark proposing to Lana.

Lana accepting.

Lana dying.

Clark being so devastated that he literally begs Jor-El to reverse time to save Lana Lang, the love of his life.

Whatever anyone personally thinks about the relationship, (its your business), the show clearly still considered Clark/Lana its major emotional hooks five seasons in.

And then Season 6 is where the retrospective narrative becomes especially weird lol.

Because this is the season where I would expect to see the supposed "Clana fatigue" that the haters keep insisting on become obvious if viewers were truly fleeing whenever the show returned to them.

Instead:

"Crimson" - 4.91M

That's the Red-K episode where Clark kidnaps Lana from her engagement dinner, declares he still wants her, and the entire Clark/Lana/Lex triangle explodes in front of everybody.

It performed above the Season 6 episode average of approx 4.50M.

Then we get "Promise."

And i think "Promise" is one of the most interesting examples because theres absolutely no ambiguity about what the episode is selling.

It's Lana and Lex's wedding, but emotionally the episode is overwhelmingly about Clark and Lana.

Lana finally discovers Clark's secret.

She realizes hes been saving her all these years.

She decides shes not going to marry Lex.

Clark decides he cant let her marry Lex and prepares to tell her everything.

Lionel threatens Clark's life to force Lana down the aisle.

Clark watches the woman he loves marry someone else.

The official episode synopsis itself centered Lana's doubts and Clark's decision to reveal his secret.

After nearly a month without a new episode, "Promise" returned with approximately 4.69M viewers.

Then:

"Promise" - 4.69M

"Combat" - 4.07M

"Progeny" - 3.98M

"Nemesis" - 3.88M

"Noir" - 3.59M

"Prototype" - 3.43M

"Phantom" - 4.14M

The audience actually dropped by roughly 620,000 viewers the very next week after "Promise." Contemporary listings report "Promise" at a 2.8 rating/5 share and abt 4.7M viewers.

Again, correlation isn't causation... but where exactly is the ratings evidence that audiences were refusing to watch because the show was still emotionally invested in Clark and Lana?

I need someone to pull that data cause i went to dig and all i found was evidence to the contrary...

And it gets even funnier when we reach Season 7.

At this point Clark and Lana have been the show's primary romantic relationship AND main emotional center for six years.

They're finally living together!

Then comes "Wrath," one of the most aggressively Clark/Lana-centered episodes of the season. Lana receives Clark's powers, they have sex for the first time since S5, their relationship is the emotional A-plot, and the episode digs directly into whether Clark actually knows the woman he's spent years idealizing.

The ratings:

"Lara" - roughly 4.3-4.4M

"Wrath" - 4.64M

"Blue" - 4.51M

"Gemini" - 3.71M

"Wrath" increased from the previous week, outperformed the following episode, and was above S7's roughly 4.15M episode average. Multiple episode datasets put it at 4.64M.

After seven seasons of Clark and Lana.

That's the part I find interesting.

And no, this doesn't mean every single Clana episode was a ratings monster... they all performed well, but there season finals, or other big events that performed better in some cases. Like the "Aqua" example i gave earlier.

There are non-Clana episodes that were enormous. "Lineage" pulled 9.4M in S2. "Aqua" was actually the highest-rated episode of S5 at 6.40M. "Justice" was the biggest episode of S6 at about 5.26M.

See? Big event episodes.

There are also Clark/Lana-heavy episodes that performed normally rather than producing some massive spike. But they NEVER underperformed, thats the important thing.

So...

My point is much simpler:

The popular retrospective claim that Smallville kept dragging Clark and Lana along even though its audience had long since gotten tired of them is very difficult to square with the actual viewing patterns.

If audiences were collectively exhausted by the relationship, you would expect episodes foregrounding it to consistently underperform.

They don't.

like... come on.

Even "Wrath," seven seasons into Clark and Lana's story, increased from the previous episode and sat above the Season 7 episode average.

It doesn't mean other characters and storylines weren't also major draws.

But it does tell me that the modern fandom narrative of "everyone was sick of Clark and Lana and the writers just wouldn't let it die" should probably stop being presented as historical fact...

Thanks!

Because the people actually watching Smallville when it aired kept showing up for episodes where Clark and Lana's relationship was front and center.

And that's part of the reason the show kept going back to them.

Whatever people think of Clana now, Clark and Lana were not some irrelevant subplot inexplicably kept alive against audience interest like some of you desperately want people to believe.

They were Smallville's central emotional and audience-facing hooks for most of its original run.

⚠️Some spoilers ahead⚠️

A favorite is:

"I love this drama."

A bias is:

"I love this drama in a way that compromised my ability to participate in civil discourse about it."

😭

Like you can have a completely reasonable criticism. Other people might agree with you. You might have examples.

Doesn't matter!

The judge's been compromised! The jury's been bribed!

I'm the defense attorney.

And also the defendant....?😭 🤔

-

These are mine:

Lovely Runner

I've seen the allegations; the time travel doesn't always make sense, "plot holes," "things get 'repetitive."

Why does this serial killer keep finding these people across the space-time continuum?

Interesting questions!

shhhh!!!

😭

This is the only K-drama I've ever given a 10/10 so far, so that means it has reached a level where criticism just bounces off me.

You found an inconsistency in timeline #4?

Sounds difficult. I hope you figure it out😭😭

Meanwhile ill be over here watching Sol and Sun-jae fall in love for the 47th time.

-

King the Land

Apparently this drama is "boring, predictable, too cheesy, too tropey, too fluffy, doesn't have enough conflict," and according to a surprising number of people...

"has no plot???"

😭

Meanwhile I finished this drama feeling like my life was over!!!

while some of you were waiting for the plot to "start," I was having the TIME OF MY LIFE!!

I was perfectly content watching those two people fall disgustingly in love while their friends caused mess around them. it was so gooood!!!

"There's not enough conflict after they get together."

well, they're BUSY BEING HAPPY.

leave them alone!!! 😭

-

My Royal Nemesis

Now THIS is where my bias becomes historically significant!

One of the biggest criticisms of this drama is that the second half isn't as strong as the first, or the story gets messier or some things aren't explained enough or the ending is rushed.

Too many tropes blah blah blah

And to all of that I say:

Do you understand that this drama is responsible for me even BEING HERE???!

😭

Before My Royal Nemesis I was a functioning member of society.

I'd watch a K-drama occasionally.

Finish it.

Move on with my life.

Then I watched this.

Something happened to my brain chemistry and I've basically been watching K-dramas every day since.

So unfortunately My Royal Nemesis cannot receive a fair trial in my courtroom.

Conflict of interest.

Case dismissed.

-

Encounter

This might actually be my most irrational one because I gave Encounter an 8/10. (i also gave my royal nemesis a 8)

I KNOW there are things wrong with it; i have literally complained about them MYSELF in my review (will post it soon)

But then I started looking at what other people criticize and saw:

"Too slow."

Okay.

"Boring."

Hmm.

"The leads have no chemistry."

EXCUSE ME????

Now you've gone too far.

😭😭😭

NO CHEMISTRY???

Soo-hyun and Jin-hyuk???

The two people I would've happily watched walk around, eat dinner, take pictures, hold hands and stare at each other for another 16 episodes???

Those people???

wow, so the exact thing that makes Encounter boring to some people is part of what hypnotized me ig...

---

So those are my four so far out of the 30 kdramas i have completed since june!

Lovely Runner 10/10

King the Land 9/10

My Royal Nemesis 8/10

Encounter 8/10

And they're not even my four highest-rated K-dramas, which is how i realized i need to make this its own category at some point.

There are dramas I've rated higher than some of these that I can discuss like a normal person, that's the funny part

but these four so far...

No.

Objectivity has been revoked.

-

Question:

What are YOUR K-drama biases?

Not necessarily your favorites or your highest-rated dramas.

I mean the dramas where you KNOW the criticisms. Maybe you even agree with some of them.

But when somebody else starts criticizing...

"Okay that's enough. Watch your mouth."

😭

im happy for them. go lesbians, go!

⚠️ SPOILERS AHEAD ⚠️

3/5.

Okay.

So.

For context, I watch a LOT of K-dramas.

Like...

a lot.

I started watching K-dramas a little over two months ago and somehow I'm already 30+ dramas deep.

Korean movies, though? yeah... not at all lol

I basically NEVER watch them.

Technically, before this, I'd seen four:

(that i know of)

The Handmaiden

Parasite

Obsessed

and

Love and Leashes.

But I don't even really count The Handmaiden and Parasite as part of my current Korean-media obsession.

I watched The Handmaiden like a couple years ago because somebody recommended it to me as a movie.

so i wasn't thinking about it within a korean media context, if you know what i mean.

And Parasite was Parasite.

That movie was a PHENOMENON.

So i watched it in theaters when basically everybody else was watching it lol.

So again, I wasn't seeking out Korean cinema.

I was just watching Parasite.

Obsessed is actually the first Korean movie I deliberately watched BECAUSE I had started watching K-dramas.

I watched it a few days after finishing My Royal Nemesis because I saw someone on Twitter mention that the same actress was in it.

And that was all the convincing I needed 😭

Then there's Love and Leashes, which I THINK I watched at least part of years ago???

Honestly, I don't fcking remember 😭

But I recently watched the whole thing during my Kdrama marathon, and immediately afterward I started Hidden Face.

Which brings us here.

Because I did NOT immediately finish Hidden Face.

In fact...

I started this movie like FIVE OR SIX WEEKS AGO.

AND THEN I ABANDONED IT. 😭😭😭

-

I don't even remember exactly why I stopped watching.

I think I was just...

bored???

At the time, as far as I knew, I was watching an erotic thriller about a woman who mysteriously disappeared and her fiancé who started fcking another woman.

Which...

now that I'm typing that out...

actually sounds like something I SHOULD have been interested in??? 😭

But for whatever reason, it wasn't grabbing me. (i had kdramas to binge lol so i prioritized those instead 😭)

I think I stopped around the first time Seong-jin and Mi-joo had sex.

At that point, I had NO FCKING IDEA that Soo-yeon was watching them.

I didn't know she was in the house, i didn't k ow there was a secret room.

I didn't know ANYTHING.

I genuinely thought:

missing fiancée.

cheating fiancé.

new mysterious woman.

Okay.

Whatever.

And then I turned the movie off.

FOR WEEKS.

😭

Anyway.

Today I randomly decided to finish it.

And apparently I had stopped watching this movie shortly before it decided to go completely fucking insane.....?😭😭

-

BECAUSE SHE'S IN THE FUCKING WALL?????

HELLO???? 😭😭😭

That reveal IMMEDIATELY made the movie more interesting to me.

Soo-yeon isn't just "missing."

She's RIGHT THERE.

She's trapped behind the fucking wall watching her fiancé grieve her for approximately 17 seconds before fcking another woman IN THEIR HOUSE.

😭😭😭

This woman is STARVING, trapped in a tiny room.

She's desperately trying to get somebody to realize she's there while she has a front-row seat to her fiancé moving on with his life.

WITH MI-JOO.

And at first I was like:

oh my GOD.

Somebody GET HER OUT OF THERE!

And then the movie was like:

dont worry...

... we have like 3 additional layers of insanity to reveal.

-

Because then we find out MI-JOO KNOWS SHE'S IN THERE. shes even partly responsible!

??????????

GIRL.

And instead of letting her out, she's basically .

No ❤️

Mi-joo is actively keeping this woman imprisoned while sleeping with her fiancé and taking over her life.

Okay!!!

NOW I'M WATCHING.

-

But THEN.

THENNNNNNN.

The movie reveals that these two women have HISTORY.

And not the "we used to be childhood friends 🥺"

type of history.

These women have:

kinky-aşs lesbian BDSM history.

😭😭 i was dead

EXCUSE ME???

Mi-joo isnt just some random woman who wandered into Soo-yeon's life and decided to steal her man.

She knows her and WANTED her

She resents her!! (with good reason. cause the way she dismissed her on the phone call was trash)

And somewhere underneath ALL OF THAT...

she still wants HER too???

WHAT IS GOING ON??? 😭

-

And this is where I realized something about my extremely limited Korean-film viewing history.

Because again, I've watched FIVE of these things.

And somehow ive accidentally constructed a Korean filmography consisting of:

class warfare

BDSM lesbians (well yes)

adultery

obsession (well yes)

murder

more BDSM...

more lesbians

rich people behaving terribly (as they're prone to do...)

people secretly living inside houses

and now...

women imprisoning their former lovers inside the walls of their homes.

WHAT IS KOREAN CINEMA TRYING TO TELL ME???

Cause MY particular K-drama diet has mostly consisted of:

yearning 🥺

fate 🥺

time travel 🥺

jealous men falling hard and harder 🥺

"I would cross universes to find you" 🥺

Meanwhile MY Korean movie diet is discovering that THERE IS A HUMAN BEING SECRETLY LIVING INSIDE YOUR FUCKING HOUSE

Which has now happened TWICE.

I'VE SEEN FIVE MOVIES.

😭

and this why i wanted to make a Korean film review series as well cause this coincidence is too funny to me. idk how many korean films i plan to watch but...

Anyway.

Back to these freaks.

-

Because eventually Soo-yeon gets out.

Mi-joo ends up IN the room.

And I'm thinking:

Okay.

Revenge?

The positions have been reversed.

Mi-joo left Soo-yeon trapped in there, and now Soo-yeon is going to leave Mi-joo trapped in there.

Simple enough.

EXCEPT APPARENTLY NOT.

Because then we get to the ending.

...

Is this...

their arrangement now???

😭😭😭

Soo-yeon is back with Seong-jin.

Seong-jin gets to continue living his respectable little life with his fiancée after cheating on her while she was LITERALLY STARVING INSIDE HIS WALL.

Mi-joo is still in the secret room.

And Soo-yeon...

is visiting her???

Taking care of her???

CONTINUING WHATEVER THE FUCK THESE TWO HAVE GOING ON???

😭 and ykw?

Fine.

Good for them.

I guess???

-

The ending is probably my favorite thing about the movie because it doesn't give me the obvious resolution.

Soo-yeon doesn't escape and immediately dump Seong-jin, and Mi-joo doesn't simply get arrested.

Nobody learns an "important moral lesson" and nobody emerges from this situation having become a healthier person lmaooo

Instead Soo-yeon basically looked at this entire fcked-up love triangle and said:

Actually... ¿porque no los dos...? 😭 and shes right!

Seong-jin gets Soo-yeon.

Mi-joo gets...

Soo-yeon, technically???

And Soo-yeon gets Seong-jin AND her kinky-ass former lesbian lover hidden inside her house.

I hope they're happy???

-

And that's kind of where I land on Hidden Face overall.

3/5.

Once the actual premise revealed itself, I was MUCH more interested than I had been when I originally abandoned it.

And I liked how every new piece of information changed what I thought the movie was about.

But considering I literally stopped watching it for more than a MONTH because the beginning wasn't holding my attention...

I also can't pretend I loved it.

It was entertaining once it got going.

The reveals were fun.

The ending was a tiny bit unhinged.

And these people are all deeply, deeply strange.

3 stars.

Would I watch it again?

Nah.

-

I have absolutely NO idea how frequently I'm going to do these because, unlike K-dramas, I really don't watch Korean movies that often.

But whenever I do...

some absolutely deranged shit happens.

So.

See y'all at #2 whenever Korean cinema decides to traumatize/confuse me again. 🫡

An hour ago, i finished Crash Landing on You and immediately discovered there was a musical...?

obviously i immediately went to youtube because i wanted to see clips

so, i watch a lot of videos in other languages on YouTube, so I still had the English translation/dubbing thing turned on.

I clicked on a clip.

and nearly DIED.

because YouTube does not simply translate the dialogue...

IT TRIES TO SING TOO??? wtf 😭😭😭

i was expecting to hear this beautiful dramatic Korean musical performance and instead this English AI voice came in fighting for its LIFE trying to keep up with the melody 😭

i was genuinely was cackling!!!!! 😭

please watch this with sound because i need other people to experience what i just experienced 😭

after im done with Crash Landing on You (my current watch, almost done)

I will be starting 2521!!

okay so I just posted review #24 of my "new K-drama fan" series today, which means naturally I have decided that I HAVE to watch Twenty-Five Twenty-One next so it can be review #25.

Was it already on my watchlist? Yeah

Did i already want to watch it? Yes.

Would i necessarily have started it TODAY if it wasnt called Twenty-Five Twenty-One?

...no 😭

but come on.

Review #25: Twenty-Five Twenty-One

The opportunity presented itself. I had no choice.

ANYWAY.

I pulled it up, read the synopsis before starting, and...

what the fuck does this mean 😭😭😭

«"In 1998, twenty-two and eighteen meet for the first time in an uneasy year as the whole world shook and called each others' name and when they became twenty-three and nineteen, they hurt each other. In the year of twenty-four and twenty, they relied on each other, and they loved only when they were twenty-five and twenty-one."»

???????

huh???

Ive read this like FOUR TIMES.

These are all English words.

Why do I suddenly not speak English when they're arranged in this particular order??? 😭

So...

22 + 18 = meet

23 + 19 = hurt each other

24 + 20 = rely on each other

25 + 21 = love

AM I WATCHING A ROMANCE OR SOLVING FOR X??? 😭

i eventually looked it up yesterday and the actual premise is she's an 18-year-old fencer whose dreams are affected by the financial crisis, he is a 22 and his family has lost everything, and they meet while they're both trying to figure out their lives.

SEE???

I UNDERSTAND THAT.

WHY DIDN'T YOU JUST SAY THAT??? 😭

Anyway, episode 1 here I come.

No spoilers please!! I genuinely know basically nothing about this drama beyond the premise and would like to keep it that way.

See y'all at review #25 🫡

Everybody and their MAMA was crossing dimensions by episode 12😭

⚠️ SPOILERS AHEAD ⚠️

Rating: 8/10

___

Review:

The King: Eternal Monarch might be one of the first K-dramas Ive watched where I enjoyed the actual concept just as much as I enjoyed the romance.

Maybe even MORE than I enjoyed the romance???

I liked Lee Gon and Tae-eul together. I was invested in them. They had some really romantic moments.

But the parallel worlds???

OPEN ANOTHER FUCKING DOOR.

I WASN'T DONE!!!

yall know how much i like time travel, well, take my love for time travel and double it!!! Thats how much i love the parallel/alternate world trope!! 🤩

I genuinely would've watched another entire episode of these people just traveling through different universes and meeting alternate versions of everybody.

that's how much I enjoyed this trope!

and i liked the approach this drama took with it too!

---

In the beginning, the two leads were absolutely the main thing holding my attention.

Whenever we left them, I wanted to go back to them because I wanted to see how their dynamic was going to develop.

Especially because Tae-eul???

I LIKED HER IMMEDIATELY.

She was such a fucking ballbuster 😭

Lee Gon shows up in her world talking about how he's the King of the Kingdom of Corea, acting completely insane from her perspective, and this woman would NOT give him an inch.

She basically spent the beginning looking at him like hes mentally unwell😭

And I LOVED that.

Then this man ends episode 2 asking her to MARRY HIM???

SIR???

SHE DOESN'T EVEN THINK YOUR COUNTRY EXISTS.

he was funny for that tho.

There wasn't really any romantic chemistry between them for me at that point, but I didn't mind because... why WOULD there be???

She thinks he's fucking crazy.

What interested me was their dynamic and seeing how the hell we were going to get from "this man is clinically insane" to these two actually falling in love.

---

And their relationship DID gradually warm up.

By around episode 7, I was more invested, and I could feel their dynamic getting warmer.

But I was still waiting... you know that MOMENT in a romance where suddenly something happens and you're like:

OH.

THERE IT IS.

And now youre completely fucking locked in???

I kept waiting for that.

And tbh...

It never really came.

Even by episode 12, I wouldn't necessarily have said their chemistry itself had gotten dramatically better.

I had just become more invested in them as a couple.

I liked them and wanted them together, and I cared about what happened to them.

They were cute.

They were FINE.

But I never reached that OH MY GOD THIS ROMANCE IS EVERYTHING stage.

And that's okay! i wasn't particularly mad in this instance lol

Because surprisingly, the rest of the drama was doing enough that I didn't NEED the romance to carry the entire thing.

---

Which brings me to the actual star of this drama for me:

THE PARALLEL WORLDS.

I already told u that i fucking love this concept, so naturally, i was SEATED!

At first I was sitting there thinking:

Wait... if everybody has counterparts, are we eventually going to see these people MEET themselves???

Because THAT sounded fun!!!

And then we got Jo Yeong and Jo Eun-seob.

😭😭😭

YES.

EXACTLY.

THAT.

Seeing this extremely serious, composed captain encounter this completely different version of himself was so fucking funny.

They were complete opposites, and every time the drama played around with those two, I was having a great time!

Those were genuinely some of the funniest and most fun scenes in the entire drama for me.

and then we got Tae-eul's counterpart.

then more people started crossing over.

Then more counterparts started becoming relevant.

And eventually I went from:

OMG I hope people meet their alternate versions!!!

to:

WAIT.

who the fuck ISN'T a dimension traveler at this point??!

😭😭😭

Because by episode 12 it felt like EVERYBODY was a traveler and it was soo funny and random.

---

Usually, if I'm watching a romance and we leave the main couple for too long, I'm sitting there waiting to get back to them.

Sometimes I'm straight-up skipping scenes, and yes, there were still a couple scenes here where I was like okayyyyy, let's get back to what I care about.

But nowhere NEAR as much as I've done with other dramas.

Because I actually cared about this world.

The parallel-universe mystery was interesting enough on its own that I didn't constantly need Lee Gon and Tae-eul on my screen to stay engaged.

And that's pretty fucking rare for me.

I wasnt bored

Even before the romance had fully won me over, the STORY had me.

---

And by the end, the thing that surprised me most was that the world never stopped being interesting.

Actually...

I WANTED MORE.

Especially when Lee Gon started opening door after door looking for Tae-eul.

Now THAT was one of the romantic parts that really worked for me.

He basically tells her:

"I'll open every door in the universe. And I'll come to you."

or something like that...

and HELLO?????

And then this man ACTUALLY goes searching across worlds for her.

Okay... You got me there.

That's romantic as hell!

But at the SAME TIME, half of me was watching that sequence like:

WAIT WAIT WAIT DON'T GO SO FAST, I WANNA SEE THESE WORLDS!!! 😭 😩

I wish they had stretched that out MORE.

Let him search longer!

Show me more universes!

Show me more alternate versions of these characters!

Because there was that one moment where Tae-eul runs into another version of Lee Gon on the street and he doesn't recognize her at ALL.

He's just living this completely different life.

I think he was a soldier???

And I LOVED THAT.

There was something so fascinating about seeing the face of someone she loves...

and it ISN'T him.

im always going to devour that concept!!!

And the drama gave me a taste and then SNATCHED THE PLATE AWAY.

NO.

PUT IT BACK.

😭

I would've happily watched Lee Gon encounter ten more versions of Tae-eul, and Tae-eul encounter ten more versions of Lee Gon.

Give me more Yeong/Eun-seob ridiculousness.

MILK THE CONCEPT!!!

You have infinite universes!!!

USE THEM!!!

---

I also just really liked these characters.

Like...

most of them???

This is one of those rare dramas where I didn't view the entire supporting cast as people standing between me and the main couple.

I genuinely enjoyed spending time with them.

And then there's Kang Shin-jae.

My little understated almost-second-lead situation.

Because technically, there was a tiny little potential love triangle sitting there...

And y'all know me.

Normally I'm standing outside the drama with a megaphone screaming:

MAKE THE MEN JEALOUS!!!

😭

And don't get me wrong.

Would I have accepted Lee Gon getting jealous over Shin-jae?

ABSOLUTELY.

I would've eaten that shit UP.

But I can actually end up really liking the quieter version of this trope.

Shin-jae loved Tae-eul.

He eventually came out and told her that he had feelings for her, but the drama didn't turn it into some huge thing.

His feelings were just... there.

Underneath everything.

One-sided.

And ykw, I liked that too ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

There are TWO ways to feed me.

By giving me the dramatic second male lead making the male lead lose his fucking mind with jealousy...

OR by giving me the sad little understated man quietly loving her from the sidelines.

I'll take both, as long as they're well done

😭

---

And then we get to the ending.

I LIKED IT.

A lot, actually.

Lee Gon and Tae-eul don't magically solve the fact that they belong to two completely different worlds.

She doesn't abandon her entire life and permanently become Queen of Corea.

He doesn't stop being king and permanently move into her world.

Instead...

they travel.

aww so cute!!!

They keep opening the door, keep finding each other.

They spend their time together exploring different worlds.

And eventually we see their hands when they're old...

AND THEY'RE STILL DOING IT.

Okay.

That's TOO fucking cute.

🥺🥺

It also left me with one extremely important question:

DID THIS MAN JUST NEVER GET MARRIED???

😭

Like...

was Lee Gon just King of Corea for his entire life with no queen???

Did everyone at the palace eventually just accept that His Majesty disappears on the weekends to go dimension-hopping with his girlfriend from another universe???

Did nobody ask about an heir???

---

But that ending also made me desperately want ONE MORE EPISODE.

I wanted an entire episode of Lee Gon and Tae-eul traveling.

That's it.

Let me see these people go on interdimensional dates.

---

So no, The King: Eternal Monarch wasn't some epic romance that completely destroyed me.

The chemistry never reached that level for me.

There was never that ONE romantic moment that suddenly transformed the entire drama and had me losing my mind over Lee Gon and Tae-eul.

But I still genuinely liked them together.

And the idea that these two people from completely different universes just kept choosing to find each other for the rest of their lives?

Yeah that's romantic.

But it got such a high rating from me because I'm a fiend for this concept and i enjoyed this world so much!

The meat was THERE! Why did nobody suck it???

⚠️ SPOILERS AHEAD ⚠️

Rating: 6/10.

RING RING!!

Hello? Yes, I'd like to report several missed opportunities. 📞

____

Review:

When the Phone Ring was... decent for the most part. Not horrible.

And I think thats what makes this one a little frustrating, cause there were moments where I could see a MUCH better drama hiding inside this one.

For a little grounding context on where I was in my K-drama journey when I watched this, my viewing habits had become absolute CHAOTIC MESS by this point😭 I had just finished Crazy Love, was still making my way through It's Okay to Not Be Okay, and at that point watching one drama from beginning to end before starting another was no longer something I believed in...

So When the Phone Rings ended up getting caught in the rotation too. I started it, paused it to go back and finish It's Okay to Not Be Okay, got distracted by My Dearest, and eventually came back and finished it.

Which is probably pretty representative of how I felt about this drama. There were things here that absolutely grabbed me, but not enough to make everything else disappear.

There were ideas here that I genuinely loved.

There were moments where I was completely locked in.

There were moments where I thought, OH??? NOW WE'RE COOKING.

And then the drama would just... not suck the meat out of them.

Because that is genuinely my biggest problem with When the Phone Rings.

406 WAS THE BEST PART OF THIS ENTIRE DRAMA.

And I really wish they had done more with it.

The moment Hong Hee-joo gathered up the courage to start calling Baek Sa-eon as 406, I was INVESTED!!!!

Because think about the situation she was in.

This woman had just been kidnapped.

her HUSBAND is called during the kidnapping, and this man basically responds with that whole dismissive "call me when there's a corpse..."

EXCUSE ME??? hellooo!???

And then she survives, gets access to the kidnapper's phone, and realizes she suddenly has this anonymous way of speaking to her husband.

Oh, the POSSIBILITIES!!! the juicy, juicy meat waiting to be sucked!!!

husband cruelly dismisses wife in danger, wife hears that and decides to play with him and make him!!!

i was SEATED for something like this!!

She starts pretending to be 406. She starts making demands. She starts pushing him toward divorcing her. And for once, this woman who has spent years trapped inside this bizarre marriage and family situation has some actual power over him.

I LOVED THAT.

i loved seeing her become brave enough to call him.

i loved watching her say things to him that she couldn't say as his wife.

i loved the reversal of their usual dynamic.

and most importantly, I wanted her to GO FURTHER!!!

If she genuinely wanted out of this marriage, MAKE HIM SWEAT!!!

If she was angry about the way he treated her, MAKE HIM REGRET IT.

And once he realized that his own wife had heard what he'd said while she was literally being held hostage???

i wanted CONSEQUENCES.

i wanted shock.

i wanted guilt.

i wanted him realizing just how badly he'd hurt her.

i wanted that entire situation to force him to confront what their marriage had become and how his behavior contributed to it.

There was SO MUCH JUICY MEAT THERE!!!

AND THEY DID NOT SUCK IT!!!!

Instead, the 406 storyline eventually becomes another vehicle for the romance, and Hee-joo never takes it nearly as far as I wanted her to.

the romance then became a bit weak to me!

Which is especially frustrating because this was easily the most interesting version of her character to me.

-

The chemistry wasn't horrible...?

Was I sitting there thinking these two had some of the best chemistry I've ever seen?

No.

Their KISSES, though???

okay.

Those were GOOD. hehehehehe 🫦 😊

Like... GOOD good.

and tbh, the kissing probably made me perceive their chemistry as stronger than I otherwise would've, because those scenes absolutely worked for me.

But overall, I just didn't feel that overwhelming romantic pull that would've made me obsessed with them as a couple.

And again, I think part of that comes back to the writing.

There were so many opportunities to create more tension inside this marriage.

INCLUDING THE SECOND MALE LEAD.

Because I genuinely thought for a while that they might actually use him as a romantic foil.

And I would've LOVED THAT.

You have this emotionally complicated marriage, a husband who hasn't exactly made his wife feel loved, and another man who could potentially become someone she turns toward?

HELLO??? RING RING!!

Make Baek Sa-eon JEALOUS, pls!

Make him realize his wife is not guaranteed to stay there forever.

Make him see that another man could potentially treat her better.

Give me some actual competition!

But nope...

They basically went, "Anyway, let's pair him with the news anchor."

And I was just sitting there like...

Okay???

😭

I didn't care about them together.

I cared about him insofar as he could've complicated the main relationship.

Once that possibility disappeared, so did my interest in whatever romantic storyline they wanted to give him.

And then... ARGON.

LMFAOOOOOO😭😭😭

I genuinely don't know what happened here.

We get to the LAST EPISODE and suddenly we're going to a fictional foreign country experiencing a WAR???

HUH???

WHERE DID THIS COME FROM???

😭😭😭

It was so unbelievably out of left field that I was actually laughing.

And yet...

I LIKED IT???

I'm sorry!

i know it's ridiculous!

I know it feels like somebody accidentally attached the finale of a completely different drama!

But i was entertained! Sue me!!

Suddenly we're overseas. There's a war. There's danger. There's a rescue mission. Everyone in this fake-ass country apparently speaks English???

WHAT IS HAPPENING???

But you know what?

I was having fun.

😭😭

It was bizarre, but it was also one of the most exciting parts of the entire drama for me.

And I actually liked seeing the story suddenly become bigger and more dangerous, even if I have absolutely no idea why they decided to introduce all of this in EPISODE TWELVE!!!!!

i did really like the ending, though.

Especially that little dinner scene with Sa-eon after everything was over.

Seeing him with his former employees, with his new name and this new version of his life, was genuinely cute.

I liked seeing everyone together after all the insanity.

And i liked getting to see Hee-joo and Sa-eon actually exist as a couple outside of the circumstances that originally created their marriage.

It was a lil sweet.

But ultimately...

6/10...

When the Phone Rings wasnt horrible.

That's almost what makes it worse.

Because I can see all the ingredients for a drama I would've liked significantly more.

The anonymous 406 calls.

A wife secretly confronting her husband.

A marriage that desperately needed to be shaken up.

A husband who could've been forced to truly reckon with how hed treated his wife.

A potential second male lead threatening that marriage.

Hot kisses.

A RANDOM INTERNATIONAL WAR???

THE MATERIAL WAS THERE! THE MEAT WAS BEGGING TO BE SUCKED!

But so many of the things I found most interesting either ended too quickly, weren't pushed far enough, or went in a direction I cared about less.

I kept wanting the drama to dig deeper into its own best ideas.

It just... wouldn't.

EDIT: Something else I forgot to mention...

Hee-joo's meekness DID bother me at first.

I kept wanting this woman to STAND UP!!!! 😭 but eventually I just kinda accepted that maybe that's simply part of who she is?

And i definitely don't think her being mute automatically means she should be meek. If anything, I interpreted it more as something she'd grown into after YEARS of being treated the way she was.

her mother literally conditioned her to stay quiet. She'd spent so much of her life being controlled, silenced, pushed around, and made to take up as little space as possible.

So... okay. I can understand how someone raised under those circumstances might become extremely passive.

That's actually another reason I loved 406 so much!!

Because we got this little glimpse of a different Hee-joo.

She was a little bold and was making demands and was saying shit to her husband shed never have the courage to say to his face.

And I really thought that was going to be the beginning of her becoming more assertive in general.

Especially once she got her voice back.

I dont necessarily think she needed to suddenly become a completely different person, because maybe she really is just naturally soft-spoken and reserved. That's fine.

But I would've loved to see more of that 406 confidence permanently bleed into Hee-joo.

Like girl, you found your voice LITERALLY AND FIGURATIVELY!!! USE IT!!! 😭

And I think I finally figured out what wasn't completely clicking for me with the chemistry either.

I already said their chemistry wasn't too horrible and their KISSES absolutely worked for me.

But outside of those moments, I never completely bought into them.

And... I think some of that might've been the acting.

I just didn't find either lead particularly strong here.

There were scenes where I understood exactly what the drama WANTED me to feel between them, but I wasn't always feeling it from the performances themselves.

The kisses could sell the some physical chemistry... but the acting didn't always sell the emotional chemistry to me.

And I think that's the distinction I was struggling to put my finger on when I originally wrote this.

---

My Rating Scale

10/10 – Masterpiece. No notes.

9/10 – Very close to a masterpiece. I absolutely loved it.

8/10 – Not a masterpiece, but I loved it.

7/10 – Fine overall. I liked it, but the flaws kept it from being great.

6/10 – Mixed. There were a few things I liked, but most of it didn't work for me.

5/10 – I didn't enjoy most of the experience.

4/10 and below – Bad to abysmal.

i planned to kill her but unfortunately I have developed Feelings™

i have an itch I need a drama to scratch

I want the villain, antagonist, morally gray guy, whatever you want to call him, to fall for the FL.

And I mean actually fall for her. I want the longing. The obsession. The jealousy. Him protecting her when he absolutely should not be. Him having plans that suddenly go out the window because SHE is involved. That whole "this man is objectively terrible but unfortunately the chemistry is chemistrying" situation 😭

And to be clear, I do NOT need them to end up together!!

He doesn't have to be the ML. He doesn't have to get the girl. They don't even have to kiss. I genuinely do not care lol. I just need there to be actual romantic &/or sexual tension/chemistry between them (preferred but im more preoccupied with him being obsessed/in love with her) and for HIM to genuinely develop feelings for her.

the more inconvenient his feelings are, the better😭😭 the man I know I probably shouldn't be rooting for but every time they have a scene together I'm like...wait a minute 👀

Basically I also want recs when im just sitting there questioning why the VILLAIN has this much chemistry with her

pls give me your recs!!

ill prioritize

"villain FALLS for her and she becomes his weakness"

"He's literally trying to destroy everyone else, but he can't bring himself to hurt HER."

IDEAL REC:

"He's literally the antagonist and spends most of the show trying to ruin everyone, but he becomes obsessed with her and she's the only person he won't sacrifice"