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.

Individualist Ms. Ji Young
(개인주의자 지영씨 / Gaeinjuuija Ji Young-ssi)
MyDramaList rating: 7.5/10

Okay, last one for this week! I didn’t realize I put several short dramas in a row on my list in this order!
This one was on my list since I saw several gifs of it on Tumblr (it’s been ages since I was on Tumblr, so it’s been on my list for ages as well). It looked good and cute and I love Gong Myung so that’s how it piqued my interest.

This drama only has 2 episodes, but they are both about an hour or more long, so it felt like watching a movie in two parts.
The story is about two people who are both lonely but deal with it in opposite ways. On the one hand there’s Na Ji Young (played by Min Hyo Rin), the ‘individualist’ from the title. Ji Young has felt alone since her childhood, her parents never cared for her with love and were always just fighting each other and telling her to grow up. She decided it would be better to pretend like nothing mattered to her, because she thought that maybe that way she’d become happy. From a young age on, she stopped relying on and socializing with other people. She ignores basically everyone, even her neighbors and colleagues at work, and acts rudely when people try socializing with her. She’s always pushing people away. On the side, she’s seeing a psychiatrist.
On the other hand, there’s Byuk Soo (played by Gong Myung), who is lonely but disguises it by always surrounding himself with other people. He acts overly spontaneous and social, in the hope that people will stay with him. He was adopted as a child and has always been partly discriminated by his adoptive family.
The two opposites live next door to each other, Ji Young on 704 and Byuk Soo on 705. They’ve never really communicated with one another, but when they do it’s mostly Byuk Soo trying to converse and Ji Young ignoring him. One night, the two get tangled up in a situation in which both Byuk Soo and his girlfriend and Ji Young and her boyfriend break up. Actually, Ms. Girlfriend breaks up with Byuk Soo and Ji Young breaks up with her boyfriend. After that, Byuk Soo falls into a pit of loneliness that he attempts to fill up with posting happy and motivating pictures of himself on social media and faking a smile.
One night, when he decides to watch a late night movie as an excuse to cry by himself when no-one is watching, Ji Young shows up for the same movie. As it turns out, she regularly goes to late night movies because she doesn’t want to run into other people. They end up watching it together and Byuk Soo gets his hopes up about befriending Ji Young, but Ji Young doesn’t want to have anything to do with him.
After a few situations where they had to take refuge in each other’s room, they become a little closer and one time when Ji Young is on medicine, she even asks Byuk Soo to sleep with her.
The relationship remains ambiguous, because everytime it seems they get closer, Ji Young is still the one holding back and pushing Byuk Soo away. In the end, though, she has to admit she likes him romantically and they start dating.
This ends when she finds out he read her diary and tried to get her to make up with her parents without knowing anything about their situation. Ji Young relapses into her trust issues and says a bunch of hurtful things to Byuk Soo, like that she never loved him and she never believed he liked her.
However, in the period of time that they were dating, she had been feeling happier than ever. She realizes this after Byuk Soo leaves her side and feels regret, but she can’t reach him anymore because she deleted all his contact details after the painful break-up.
The series ends when Ji Young seemingly recovers and acts nicer to other people. She finds out from her psychiatrist that Byuk Soo came to check on her health and in the end they run into each other and hug and HAPPILY EVER AFTER.

Now, apart from the layered characters which I will say more about later, this drama deals with a very serious mental health problem. Ji Young is not just a loner, she is seeing a psychiatrist for a reason. She takes medicine. What she went through in her childhood is not to be taken lightly.
I won’t get too personal but I once had a friend with similar issues and I can say that I could really understand this story from both sides. I’ve been Byuk Soo (only not in a romantic relationship) and I know how hard it can be to have someone you care about pushing you away all the time. That’s why I watched this series with mixed feelings and occasional flashbacks.
Ji Young has the tendency to sometimes not grant herself to be happy. She claims she’s happy on her own, that being on her own without anyone’s love or help is what makes her a mature adult, and that she was born like this. And she doesn’t accept Byuk Soo’s help because in the end, when you have these kind of issues, no one from the outside can help you, only you can help yourself. And when you’re not capable or even motivated to help yourself, you will start accepting that you are meant to be miserable and alone and you’ll stop accepting any help or hope other people give you.
Her psychiatrist was pretty direct in this, she would cut their meetings short saying ‘I can’t help someone who can’t be honest to herself’. Because what Ji Young truly wanted, inside, is to be happy. And eventually she has to accept the fact that Byuk Soo is the only one who has ever made her feel that way.
All in all, these kind of mental health issues are no joke, they can drag you down a very dark and lonely path. I haven’t seen a lot of dramas dealing with this theme and certainly not with someone like Ji Young as a main character. So I want to express my compliments that there are also series like this one, that don’t explain ‘moonshine and rose petals romance’, but a deep and hurtful romance that still perseveres in the end.

Let me talk a bit more about the characters, especially Byuk Soo since I’ve already said a lot about Ji Young. I can’t repeat enough how much I adore Gong Myung, he’s such a cutie. His portrayal of Byuk Soo was very innocent. In his desire not to be left alone he almost literally becomes a little puppy begging people not to leave him. It gives him an immaturity and a naivety, which again places him directly opposite of Ji Young. His innocence and naivety, combined with his need for attention and love is what ultimately makes him a bit too greedy. He is very eager to get to the next level in his relationship with Ji Young, even though he still doesn’t fully understand what Ji Young is going through. When he reads her diary and starts involving her parents (which, I agree, went too far considering he didn’t know what had happened between them and he should’ve gotten Ji Young’s permission/approval), he does it because he cares for her and genuinely thinks it will make her happy – he’s just trying to help. But it backfires because it causes Ji Young to relapse into suspicion and distrustfulness.
I think both characters had mixed up ideas of being an adult, that became clear in their break-up where they both accused each other of being immature in their own ways. There’s no proper way of being an adult. Being alone and independent -even self-enforced independent pushing people away because you’re convinced you’re strong enough by yourself and don’t need anyone else- is not what I would call being a mature adult. But I also wouldn’t call clinging to other people to fill up your personal voids a mature or independent thing. Being an adult is not defined by things like that, it’s different for everyone.
But hey, they were breaking up and those were just some of the nasty things they said to each other in the heat of the moment. It happens.

When Ji Young harshly pushed Byuk Soo away in their break-up, I honestly felt slightly annoyed with her. I know that overreacting is also something that happens in such situations, but I still couldn’t help but think she was being really harsh. She even almost left the kitten he got her on the street (that moment was unforgiveable). But in the end, when she calmed down, things got better. She started being more honest to herself and that bettered her relationships with the people in her daily lives as well.
And Byuk Soo’s love for her was so strong that he inevitably came back to her and accepted her back with open arms without even expecting an apology.

I still need to say one last thing about the other characters. Of course Ji Young and Byuk Soo are the main characters, but the side characters were very important too. Not only did they demonstrate how Ji Young and Byuk Soo’s behavior was received by their surrounding peers, but they also helped in putting things into perspective. There’s always going to be people around you, whether you care about them or whether they care about you or not. In the beginning, the people around the two main characters were mostly depicted as obstacles. In Ji Young’s case, she saw her female nurse colleagues as pointlessly small-talking people bent on socializing. Byuk Soo saw his peers as people who could fill up his voids – and maybe he didn’t even care about them personally, as long as he wasn’t alone.
But that shifted. Byuk Soo starts to become aware of how he’s truly perceived by his colleagues, how they don’t care about him and only call him whenever they need something from him. He finds out his little sister still doesn’t feel comfortable with him joining their family vacation. He is suddenly hurt by the truth and realizes this is not what he wants people to think of him.
Ji Young gradually gets a bit more friendly with her colleagues once she decides to get better and this does miracles for their relationships. Even when she’s in a bad place and starts crying in the staff room, she still allows one of her colleagues to hug and comfort her, which is a huge step from how it was in the beginning when she wouldn’t even let anybody touch her.
Both main characters learn from the side characters where they stand and how they can fix their relationships. The side characters were definitely important for the drama.

lthough I appreciated the occasionally heavy topic of Ji Young’s issues, I was still happy that the series had a happy ending. In the end it was about healing and coming to terms with oneself. Ji Young started accepting herself, and that’s how Byuk Soo also forgave her in the end. He never made her feel like a sick person who just had to start loving herself, he was just waiting from a distance until she was ready. She needed that time to heal on her own. And Byuk Soo was always the type to storm off angry and then still come back because he couldn’t give up on her after all.
I think it was great to see a love story between two people who you’d probably never expect to end up together in real life.
My favorite part was definitely the period when they were dating, because they were so friggin’ adorable and Byuk Soo picking her up to carry her across the rain puddles was one of the most precious things ever.
And that KISS. Can we talk about that amazing kiss? Okay, now THAT’S what I call a KISS. THANK YOU.

I’m planning on watching some more regular-sized dramas next, so I won’t be uploading this many reviews per week as I did last week, lol. I prefer to take my time to fully watch a series and form my opinions on them.
I hope you’ll keep up with me!