Disclaimer: this is a review, and as such it contains spoilers of the whole series. Please proceed to read at your own risk if you still plan on watching this show or if you haven’t finished it yet. You have been warned.

I’m Not a Robot
(로봇이 아니야 / Robosi Aniya)
MyDramaList rating: 7.0/10

Hello again! I took my time watching this one as well because I was in a very busy period personally, both preparing to move and preparing for my company’s business trip to Hong Kong. So I waited until I was back and slightly settled to finish the final episodes in peace.

It was a nice drama to pass the time with, not too difficult to follow and still bizarre enough to be amusing. I was planning on watching this series first of all because I knew the two main actors; I love Yoo Seung Ho and I’m always interested in seeing Chae Soo Bin in new roles as she always was the second female lead kind of actress. It’s nice to see this shift in second female leads who become first female leads all of a sudden (Kim Ji Won, Chae Soo Bin, Shin Hye Sun etc.) I didn’t really know what the story was about, only that the main character had some sort of disease and that he would meet a girl who was pretending to be robot for some reason… I didn’t know what was waiting for me. Sometimes it’s nice to go into a story with no expectations.

I think the best way to give a summary of the story is through the perspective of the three ‘main’ characters. 
First of all, Kim Min Kyu (played by Yoo Seung Ho), a rich young man who became an orphan when he was 13 years old. He is now the director for his late father’s investment company KM Financials, but he rarely comes to work at the office. One reason for this is that he has an extremely rare allergy for humans. When he touches a person with his bare skin, he gets a terrible rash and starts choking. Overexposure can even lead to suffocation. So he lives by himself in a big mansion, with only his robot vacuum cleaner as a companion. He can’t eat anything prepared by others, and basically he just lives in his own little bubble. 
Secondly, we have Jo Ji Ah (played by Chae Soo Bin), a young and energetic girl. Although she’s brilliant when it comes to designing things and visualizing new ideas, she lacks the IQ for actual marketing and invention.  One of these creative ideas are her heart lamps. When you touch one lamp, the other one lights up as well, no matter where in the world it is. It’s a beautiful but simple way to stay in touch with your loved one(s) and let them know you’re missing them/thinking of them. Ji Ah is trying to get her idea through a design competion at KM Financials to get it sponsored. Meanwhile, she earns money by running errands for other people, including getting exclusive items etc.  Ji Ah still lives with her older brother – who happens to work for Min Kyu’s company –  and his family, but he chases her out because she  doesn’t have a real job and their relationship isn’t so good. 
Thirdly, there is Professor Hong Baek Gyun (played by Uhm Ki Joon). He is Ji Ah’s ex-boyfriend from college, but she broke up with him because he never considered her feelings and only focussed on his own work. They used to make a good team: she would pitch the idea and he would create it. One of the creations of their combined genius is the umbrella that you can turn transparent and intransparent whenever you want some privacy.  
Currently, professor Hong is in charge of the Santa Maria Shipyard Building Development Team in KM Financials, although what he and his team are really doing has nothing to do with ships. In secret, they are developing a robot. And not just any robot: an extraordinary skilled human-like robot called AJi3, whose looks are a 100% based on Jo Ji Ah.
The Santa Maria Team means to show AJi3 to KM Financials and try to get them to invest in their robotics development. For this, they need Kim Min Kyu’s approval. So they show AJi3 to Min Kyu, who is impressed, and agrees to test the robot in his household for a day.
But due to an unfortunate technical error -one of the team members accidentally spills coffee on the wires- AJi3 is caused to malfunction.
Since they don’t have any time to fix her before sending her to Kim Min Kyu, Hong Baek Gyun gathers his courage and asks Ji Ah to stand in for the robot since they look exactly the same. When she finds out her ex-boyfriend built a robot in her image, Ji Ah is first shocked (because let’s be fair, it’s kinda creepy and perverted), but when Professor Hong offers it to her as a parttime job with a large amoung of money as payment, she takes it. 
The first official encounter between Kim Min Kyu and Ji Ah posing as AJi3  is very awkward, because Ji Ah  remembers him from an earlier encounter and strongly dislikes him. But no matters how she acts Kim Min Kyu seems to like AJi3 and how she’s so incredibly real and human-like.
So he asks for her to remain as his companion for a longer time and the Santa Maria Team agrees as it gives them more time to fix the real AJi3.
In the meantime, the real AJi3 records everything that’s happening from Ji Ah’s eyes (she has these special lenses that connect their vision). 
What follows is the growing bond between Min Kyu and Ji Ah as his companion. Of course, at a certain point a huge strain is put on their relationship as Ji Ah develops real feelings for Min Kyu but he still believes she’s a robot. 
When the reality of Min Kyu’s allergy becomes apparent, and what it will do to him when he finds out Ji Ah has been lying to him all this time, this strain becomes even more serious. 

Let’s keep it at that for the story’s summary. I will now write a little about my interpretation of the main theme of the story, which is ‘trust’. 
Min Kyu’s allergy started when he was betrayed by people who took advantage of his parents’ deaths. Hwang Do Won, a good friend of Min Kyu’s father, and father of Min Kyu’s best friend Hwang Yoo Cheol, offers to take care of Min Kyu after he is orphaned. Min Kyu first thinks this a charitable offer, but then spots him triumphantly celebrating taking over the company with the other board members. When Yoo Cheol pushes Min Kyu to sign the contract so they can live together -oblivious to what is really going on- his hand suddenly turns to a monstrous claw in Min Kyu’s eyes and he suddenly gets a rash. In that moment, everyone, even his best friend, became an untrustworthy enemy to him. 
Now, 15 years later, the relationship between Min Kyu and Yoo Cheol (played by Kang Ki Young) is still very strained, as Yoo Cheol is also in line for becoming the next CEO of the company his father now owns. And then there is Ye Ri El (played by Hwang Seung Eon), Min Kyu’s first love whom he is supposed to marry, but he finds that he can’t trust her either. 

We find out more about the disease throught the perspective of a side character, namely Min Kyu’s doctor, Dr. Oh (played by Uhm Hyo Seop). He has another patient with this same allergy and he learns that this other person was cured by his trust in a particular person who took care of him. It seems that the way to cure the allergy is for Min Kyu to start trusting people and open up to at least one person.  For Min Kyu, AJi3 (but actually Ji Ah) becomes this ‘person’. He realizes at one point that he doesn’t get rashes as long as AJi3 is within his sight, so he has to keep her near at all times. He starts depending on her, and she takes care of him, and so their bond deepens. 
However, Min Kyu becomes aware that the way he cares for his robot at some point becomes a little unhealthy. One time, Ji Ah can’t control herself and kisses him, which throws him into complete terror and confusion because he realizes he might be in love with a robot.
This becomes unbearable for Ji Ah as well, to watch him like that while all she wants to do is scream that she’s not a robot. And so, about halfway through the series and their relationship, they end up in a circle of pain and guilt whenever they see each other. 
It seems to be temporarily solved when the Santa Maria Team decides to stop and pretend AJi3 reset completely, giving Ji Ah a chance to leave and get some peace of mind. However, for some reason she ends up in the same train as Min Kyu, who is shocked to see someone looking so much like the robot he just said goodbye to. Out of curiosity, he follows her and she ends up telling him that she was the original model for AJi3, but nothing of their time together. He eventually finds out, of course, when she lets her guard down and he sees her wearing a necklace he gave to AJi3 before her ‘reset’, and this causes his allergy to come back in tenfold, as he feels like he’s been betrayed by the one person he trusted most. 
Even after finding out the complete truth, it takes him a while to accept Ji Ah’s attempts of atonement. But when he hears the whole story from her side, he eventually comes around and they become a very happy and cute couple together.

That was one moment where I got a bit annoyed with Min Kyu, by the way. I understand he was mad at her for lying, but I couldn’t be mad at Ji Ah because as a viewer we see Ji Ah’s struggle as well. We see her crying by herself at night when she is hurt by his actions – actions that shouldn’t affect a robot but are really painful for a regular person with regular feelings. As viewers, we get sympathy for Ji Ah because we experience her struggle, we see that she loves him and hates the fact that she can’t tell him the truth. It’s not like she wanted to harm him or anything. Yet when Min Kyu finds out, he is not even interested in what she has to say and that really bothered me because it was so obvious, like literally written on her face how much it hurt her too. And it had to take a push from someone else (thank you Ji Ah’s awesome friend) for him to realize ‘oh wait, maybe it’s been hard for her too’. I really liked the scene where they sat down together in the snowy park and just talked the whole thing through. People in K-Dramas should have more genuine feeling-talks, it would solve so many of the misunderstandings. I am pro a -genuine feelings talks- trope. 

But yeah, ‘trust’ was definitely the red thread through the story for me. 
You could even think of Min Kyu’s disease as something psychological, because it was linked to his distrusting nature. When Ji Ah (or AJi3) enters his life, he starts to trust and depend on others again, he starts to open himself up to the world again, and that’s what heals him. Suddenly he can touch other people without getting rashes again. And it also gives him the push he needs to finally stand up for his father’s company and confront the people who have taken advantage of him when he was young. 

By the way, I want to give a special shoutout to Kang Ki Young, who plays Min Kyu’s childhood friend Hwang Yoo Cheol. I love this actor so much. He is almost ALWAYS cast as the funny sidekick, the guy with the funny expressions and the jokes. But he’s actually such a good actor. This is only the second drama I’ve seen him in as a serious role. It just proves that typecasting isn’t the limit. I always enjoy seeing actors being cast as a completely different type of character in several dramas: versatility is a very important aspect of being an actor, in my humble opinion. And he definitely has that, so thumbs up to this guy. 

To talk a bit more about the different ‘relationships’ in this series. I was overall really weirded out by the bond between Min Kyu and Ri El, mostly because I didn’t feel like there was a bond at all. Min Kyu kept talking about her as his first love and only option for marriage, but when they met in person, they went right past one another, not only in their conversations, but in their personalities as well. I just didn’t feel any kind of chemistry between them at all. Plus it was so clear that Ri El and Yoo Cheol were leaning more towards each other, so I wasn’t sure what forcing Min Kyu and Ri El together was supposed to mean. It was just a weakly attempt of Min Kyu to distract himself of his real feelings for AJi3. 

Then there was Yoo Cheol and his father. Maybe not a very interesting bond for some people, but again, there was a very relatable struggle here. Yoo Cheol was never aware of what his father did to Min Kyu, that he even had a part in their deaths. So he has been wondering for 15 years why his best friend suddenly started acting so cold with him. And then he finally finds out, and a part of him wants to support his father even though he’s a bad man, which is also relatable because family is family. It’s easy to say ‘you should break ties with your dad because he’s evil’, but in reality you can’t just abandon your close family, even after finding out they’ve done a very bad thing. Of course it depends on the person, but I just want to say that I found Yoo Cheol’s character very relatable. He just goes with the flow that is his father’s influence, and he is made to go along with the impression that Min Kyu just became a distant jerk all of a sudden. But when you find out the truth, you try to get the best of the both worlds. I think in the end he fixed it very well, and he even got the girl. 

There’s something to be said about the alienated relationship between Ji Ah and her brother as well, but I found it quite difficult. They seemed so far away from each other. Even when in some moments it became clear that Jo Jin Bae (played by Seo Dong Won) really did care about his sister, he always kept it to himself. They never shared a hug or anything. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a distant sibling bond in a K-Drama before, there’s always something that brings them together. I couldn’t really find out what it was that fixed their relationship in the end, maybe it was even partly because of Min Kyu. I’m not really sure. 

I’d like to say a few more words about the main cast before concluding my review.
About Yoo Seung Ho, I have only seen him in 3 dramas now, but I enjoy watching him (ehem). When he smiles, somewhere in the world a puppy is born. No but seriously, it was nice to see him smile so much. The other two dramas I saw of him were I Miss You and Ruler: Master of the Mask, and in both cases his character was extremely intense and/or angsty. It was nice to see him in a regular romantic comedy for once. 
And like I said before, I really liked seeing Chae Soo Bin as a female lead for a change. She was the second female lead in Sassy Go Go and Moonlight Drawn By Clouds, and for the rest I’ve only seen some cameos of her.
But it seems that since last year she’s been making more appearances as lead roles and I’m excited for her. I really liked her in this drama, her cute quirkiness, her smiles and her sass. She actually looks like a doll.
She also did a really good job as AJi3, she totally pulled off the robot acting. I think it should be a big challenge because she had to play both an actual robot and a human who had to pretend to be a robot. 
I only knew Uhm Ki Joon from Dream High and I thought he looked exactly the same there, lol. Baek Gyun never really became an actual rival between Min Kyu and Ji Ah, there was no real competition there. But I liked that he got the hint and eventually started noticing his teammate. I feel like he has always been so consumed by work that he never noticed anything else. When Ji Ah was his girlfriend and then broke up with him, he also kept Ji Ah’s memory with him and never looked beyond that, he never moved on from that. So it was a good thing that in the end, Pi made him realize the possibilities. 

One of the greatest parts of the series in my opinion was the part where AJi3 escaped from the bad people who wanted to turn her into a weapon and went strolling through the city on her own, meeting new people and conversing with them. And the part where the whole team watched the recording from her adventure on the big screen and everyone was so touched because this was AJi3’s original purpose, this was what she was created to be: learning to be around real people, conversing with them, caring about them. It was a very heartwarming moment. 

Overall, I thought it was a cute but simple drama. It didn’t make a super big impact on me, but it was nice enough to keep watching. I thought the concept of the story, someone with a physical handicap learning to see the possibilities of the world again through a faithful companion, was quite well thought of. 

The next drama on my list is another Chinese one, I’m guessing another long one. So it’ll probably be another while before I post my next review. Until then!