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.

Gyeryong Fairytale
(계룡선녀전 / Gyeryong Seonnyeojeon)
MyDramaList rating: 5.0/10

Hello everyone! It’s been a while!
A lot of things have been happening lately and I’ve been crazy busy with work, rehearsals and finding time to relax in between and it took me almost two months to finish this drama but here we are again!

I’ll say right off the bat that one of the reasons it took me so long to finish this drama is because it took me a really long time to get into it. And actually I didn’t really get into it until the end, I had to find the right mood to continue watching. So that’s why it took me so long, even though it’s only 16 episodes. It wasn’t the most exciting thing I’ve seen, but I’ll do my best to write a worthwhile review about it!

First, let me tell you how I came to put this series on my list. Actually, I think I put it there by accident or because I mixed it up with something else. One time, when I was browsing for new interesting dramas, I came upon a summary of this one (at that time it was still an upcoming drama I think) and I remeber seeing some name of an actress that I knew and liked (I don’t even remember who), but that’s why I thought Oh! Maybe that’s nice, I haven’t seen stuff from her in a while. And then some time later I saw a trailer of this drama with the crazy coffee lady and I remember thinking it didn’t look very great (oops), but then I wasn’t sure whether this was the same drama as the one I looked up before. In the end, it did turn out to be that one and the actress I remember being in it wasn’t, so I definitely did make a mistake somewhere, lol. Anyway, I did end up watching all of it and that is how this review came to be.

The story of Gyeryong Fairytale (or its more common English title ‘Mama Fairy and the Woodcutter’), is about Seon Ok Nam (played by Moon Chae Won), a fairy originally from the fairy realm.
One day, when she went bathing in the human realm with her fairy sisters, her winged dress was taken away, and this forced her to stay in the human realm until she got it back. However, when it got stolen, it also caused her to meet a woodcutter. She fell in love with him and they got married. After her husband (and father of two children) passed away in a tragic accident, she has been looking for the reincarnation of her husband for 699 years.
Now, in the present, Seon Ok Nam has taken the form of an old granny (played by Go Doo Shim) and she works as a barista in the mountains of Gyeryong. Because she uses special fresh ingredients from the mountains, her coffee is very special and tasty.
One day, two men happen upon the cafe when they get lost in the mountains. These two men are Professor Jung Yi Hyun (played by Yoon Hyun Min) and his pupil Kim Geum (played by Seo Ji Hoon). After meeting her in her old form at the cafe, the two men later accidentally tumble across the waterfall where the fairies used to bathe and see Ok Nam take a bath there in her young and beautiful form.
For some reason, Ok Nam gets the feeling that one of these men might be the reincarnation of her husband and she follows them to Seoul after they leave. There she meets up with the local guardian deity Cho Bong Dae (played by Ahn Young Mi) who owns a little coffee shop near the university where Yi Hyun and Kim Geum work. She moves there with her daughter Jeom Soon (played by Kang Mina) and her son Jeom Dol who has been an egg for a long time, waiting to hatch again.
The rest of the story is Ok Nam’s search for her husband, and her developing relationship with both men, including re-surfacing memories. Jeon Soom is also looking for a way to become more independent and then there’s another side story of three other deities from Gyeryong who also come to Seoul to find their individual answers, former fairy Miss Oh (played by Hwang Young Hee), fairy Park (played by Kim Min Gyu) and Master Gu (Ahn Kil Kang).

I have to say, this series took a really long way to its ultimate ending. I kept thinking, where is this going? Because besides the ambiguous love story between Ok Nam and both men (you keep going back and forth between the two of them – who is the husband??), there are also these conflicting memories. Yi Hyun is initially the person we are made to believe to be the husband, since he starts remembering things that he should remember. We also see him as the woodcutter in the flashbacks. However, since Yi Hyun is such an unlikable character, I did keep thinking how nice it would be if Kim Geum were the husband. Kim Geum was taken by Ok Nam since the beginning and he was the first one to always see her as her younger self. He was always really sweet and he also turned out to have some kind of power being able to communicate with animals whereas Ok Nam could communicate with plants.
Yi Hyun needed a lot of time to even accept that Ok Nam was a fairy and he did some pretty thoughtless things, such as making her deny she was a fairy to other people and in doing so causing her terrible stomach aches for lying. Also, he is an incredibly selfish person. He has had a very unfair youth, growing up as the illegitimate son of a nun in an orphanage and being forced to hide all the time. He has been seeing Professor Lee Ham Sook (played by Jun Soo Jin) for psychiatry sessions since he isn’t able to sleep well. However, after getting closer with Ok Nam, he starts feeling much better and his nightmares decrease. So he starts seeing her as a way to fix his bad health – until he eventually really develops feelings for her. But there was always some selfish need behind his feelings, at least that’s how I felt it.

The drama is 16 episodes long and the main storyline was about Ok Nam finding her husband’s reincarnation and obtaining her lost winged dress.
However, the story takes so many twists and turns and detours and side roads that at a certain point I forgot what the original story was about.
There were a few things that, in the end, I found rather meaningless to the storyline.
First of all, the journey of the three deities. Being friends of Ok Nam in Gyeryong, I believe they decided to go after her to Seoul to help her, but their journey went its own way and resulted into their own little side storyline that had absolutely nothing to do with the main storyline and was just meant as comic relief, I think. However, I didn’t really find it that funny. Sometimes something is so obviously done for comic relief that the actor try too hard being funny and it becomes not so funny. That’s what I felt here.
I was interested in how these three deities ended up on earth, what they originally were in the fairy realm. Because in the flashbacks, we do occasionally see Fairy Oh as a fairy, dressed the same as Ok Nam. And it is revealed that her winged dress was stolen by a man as well. Her story on Earth was exactly the same as Ok Nam’s, she wanted to find her husband and her winged dress back. But why she was turned into an old-fashioned ahjumma (or maybe she did that herself), and she didn’t really put much effort into her own mission, that kind of weakened her character’s purpose.
As for Fairy Park, I recently saw this actor in Let’s Clean With Passion For Now, but I found it a pity how much his acting skills were degraded to just being a funny guy here. He looked ridiculous, he was complaining loudly about everything and I honestly don’t know anything about what happened to him in the fairy realm at all. Who he was, why he was abandoned to Earth (I feel like this was discussed one time but I forgot), but just mainly what he was doing on Earth and what his purpose was – beats me.
And then there’s Master Gu, who is actually a pidgeon? But then he took human form? And what was he before that? He’s shown as a deer hunter one time, but I don’t know anything about what his real purpose or identity was supposed to be. So, basically, they were supposed to be humorous figures but it wasn’t important who they actually were. But I wanted to know.
Secondly, the story of Uhm Gyeong Sul (played by Yoo Jung Woo), Jeom Soon’s ‘boyfriend’. He was introduced as this mentally unstable character, a former client of Professor Lee’s with Ripley Syndrome, so he’d made up this whole life that wasn’t his. And then he was back, all cured, but he was still really suspicious, carrying around a camera on his wrist which he used to take footage of women and he was stalking Jeom Soon and already called her his ‘girlfriend’ when they hadn’t even met yet… So in the beginning I thought for some reason he already knew about Jeom Soon. Since he also had this tiger on his backpack and stuff.. And he did purposely and suspiciously approach her. But then when he found out she was actually a feline in human form he suddenly got all creeped out and ghosted her and I was like… what’s your deal, bro? I didn’t understand his purpose in the story either. What was he up to, what did he mean to do filming without people’s consent and stuff? And was the Ripley story only used to foreshadow that he wasn’t a 100% okay? Because in the end the Ripley story didn’t contribute to anything in his further actions in the drama either.
I have questions.
Lastly, while I loved the woman who played Kim Geum’s mother (Baek Hyun Joo), she was also meant as a comical character with her strange little accent and I still didn’t really see the purpose of her getting her whole own storyline as well, with the elderly university professor going after her and her falling for Master Gu. I mean, it was cute in a way, but it took more space than it should have in the series. I just wanted to know who was Ok Nam’s husband, I wasn’t really interested in all the other stories depicted.
Finally, the two lab assistants Kim Geum worked with. Oh Gyung Sik (played by Ahn Seung Gyun) and Ahn Jung Min (played by Yoo Ah Reum). They were both also mostly comic relief, and specifically as a duo. But they really got stuck into being a one-trick-pony kind of character as well. Gyung Sik was the goofy guy and Jung Min was always just criticizing him. They were both entirely kept out of all the happenings in the series, and if they incidentally were involved they took completely wrong assumptions of what was going on. In the end, I didn’t really see what they contributed apart from showing that Kim Geum did have some friends at work.

I did come to like Ham Sook’s contribution in the end. I have seen Jun Soo Jin in a couple of dramas as a student, when she was still younger so it was nice to see her play the role of an official adult now, and she showed way more variation to her acting than before, so that was nice. And it was funny how she put in effort to try and seduce Yi Hyun in her clumsy way.
The drama played with us because in the beginning, when we still believe Yi Hyun is Ok Nam’s husband, we are principally against Ham Sook because she’ll stand in the way as the second female lead. But then it turns out things are not what they seem and we suddenly feel sorry for Ham Sook because Yi Hyun is such a selfish bastard. Even after she tells him how she feels about him, he just brushes her aside without an answer and then the next time they talk he just calls to borrow her car as if nothing happened between them at all. He was really tactless and only thought about himself.
But I did come to like Ham Sook more towards the end, when she comes clear about how she truly feels and becomes more honest.
In a way she and Yi Hyun were very fitting for each other because they were both a bit broken and selfish in their own way and they needed someone to stay with them.

I did get a little frustrated with Yi Hyun at a certain point towards the end – he knew about Kim Geum’s feelings for Ok Nam and still he didn’t hesitate to make a move on Miss Fairy even though he saw he was breaking his best friend’s heart. A normal person or a decent friend wouldn’t just do that. He was so self-consumed with his own greed at that time that he didn’t see what he was doing to other people around him that cared for him, especially Geum and Ham Sook.

Before I go on to the next part of my review, I will explain a little about the history behind the story. The truth that is revealed only in the last couple of episodes and which explained a lot about what was happening in the ‘present’ story.
Ok Nam used to be a traditional fairy going by the name of Alkaid, with the butterfly hairpin shape in her hair and stuff (I guess this is a Korean traditional image of a fairy?), and she had two good friends when she was there. One was Bause and the other one was Izy. Bause had powers of the sky and air (he is the predecessor of Ok Nam’s husband and later Kim Geum, so he’s played by the same actor) and Izy of Mizar (played by Yoon So Yi) had powers of fire. Izy got into trouble a lot for setting things on fire in the human realm, even though she always justified her actions because they were taken against people that had done wrong themselves as well.
As it turns out, Izy had a crush – or at least a weak spot – for Alkaid.
One time, a village sacrifices a little orphan boy to solve a terrible drought, and in turn they got a storage room full of rice. Out of anger for this injust trade, Izy sets the storage room on fire, but the fire accidentally also kills a bunch of villagers that try to put it out – which was not Izy’s intention.
However, she is banished from the fairy realm because Bause tells the Fairy King about what she’s done, even after Izy has begged him to keep it a secret. Filled with grudgeful feelings towards Bause for his betrayal, Izy is banished from the fairy realm and forced to take the form of a deer, cursed to be on the run from hunters all the time.
After a long time, she encounters the woodcutter, who she immediately recognizes as Bause’s reincarnation. However, the woodcutter has no recollection of his former life and Izy is angered by the fact that he so easily forgot about his betrayal of her while she has to live with it forever. She ends up cornering him and causes him to trip off a cliff – also an accident, because she didn’t actually want to physically harm him.
However, she became guilty of his death.
The whole timeline of this is really complicated, because several happenings seemed to be happening at the same time. For example, the little boy that is locked up by the villagers in hope of ending the drought is revealed to be Yi Hyun’s predecessor: Yi Hyun still has nightmares about being locked up and starving to death. At the same time, he shares the memories of Izy, who witnessed this sacrifice.
And it is later revealed that one woman who ran towards the little boy to give him some porridge to save him (but was too late) was rewarded by being reincarnated as Bause – but Bause and Izy were both present at the time the storage room was set on fire as a punishment for this very case.
So was she just reincarnated super fast? Or how can two people be there at the same time? Or was what Izy did about some other kid being locked up by villagers as a sacrifice? It confused the heck out of me.

The whole explanation of what actually happened in the past did make it more interesting for me, but in the end I still don’t fully understand it. I feel like there are still too many plotholes to count.
One of the scenes that made the least sense to me was this big scene in the woods when Yi Hyun was completely taken over by the vengeful Izy and she almost burned everything down. All the people came to that scene, even Gyeong Sul (he was dragged to Gyeryong by Miss Cho, but I don’t know why he was in that particular scene). I don’t know why anyone was in that particular scene because no one could do anything. Everyone just had to wait for something to happen and there was nothing to be done. So it felt really weird, the ‘bad guy’ was making a move and nothing was actually done.
However I did like the part where Miss Cho took Yi Hyun with her to the past to show him his predecessors and made him reflect and see that Kim Geum had been trying to save his life for several lifetimes, in different forms and reincarnations. It made him become more humble and open and that’s exactly what his character needed. Yi Hyun and Kim Geum were best friends, after all. It had to turn out somehow.

Anyways, it seems that while Ok Nam was alive, both Bause and Izy were both reincarnated about three times before the three of them met again.
What I did like was that it was suggested that Izy (a woman!) had a crush on Ok Nam (also a woman!) I mean, how often do you see that in a Korean drama? Not very often.
And, on a side note, the digital novel Jeom Soon is writing about a young lord and his male slave as a kind of old-fashioned BL was also a nice twist. They added some same-sex romance in the background, which is always appreciated.

Let me say something about the main cast members and their respective portrayals of their characters.
First of all, Moon Chae Won. I think they casted her very well, because she is a very beautiful young woman, but the old-fashioned clothes and hanbok also didn’t mismatch her. When putting her next to Ham Sook, for example, she still could pass for a little old-fashioned, which really fit her character.
Ok Nam is very gullible and loving towards all beings, and she is a fairy in every way. I think she did very well, although I don’t have a reference for any other roles she has played so I’m not sure about her variety but I’m sure she’s good.
Then, about Yoon Hyun Min, I found out he was the second male lead in Tunnel, but I have no recollection of him at all. I recognized him from somewhere, but his character in Tunnel was so different from this that I didn’t even think about it. As I remember I didn’t have any major issues with his role in Tunnel, also because I thought it was a really good drama (check it out guys), but I didn’t really like his acting in Mama Fairy to be honest. It was a bit too over the top for me. He was either trying to be too funny or too dramatic. I got a bit frustrated with him at some point, because I genuinely didn’t like his acting (sorry). And I also didn’t have a lot of sympathy for his character, so that didn’t help. He was too selfish and too insecure at the same time and he went as far as to blackmail people into staying with him because of his hard youth – that’s a no for me.
In comparison with Kim Geum, I didn’t like him so I just wanted him to stay out of the way. In the beginning when I still thought he was going to turn out to be the actual husband, I still had hope that he would become better, but then there was the twist. And I honestly was scared that she would go for him as opposed to Geum in the end, anyway.
Talking about Kim Geum, I really loved Seo Ji Hoon in this drama. I actually never saw anything else from him, but I grew to love him so dearly in this. He was such an unbelievable sweetheart, at some point I just wanted him to end up with Ok Nam even if he wasn’t the husband. At some point I just thought, ‘maybe in the end she’ll give up on finding her husband because she’ll fall in love with Geum!’ and then when Geum turned out to be the husband all was right with the world. Anyways, it seems like in this drama, it depended mostly on whether or not I liked the characters, lol.
I watched Hotel Del Luna before this, which also had Kang Mina in it, and I don’t know what to say other than: I will always love Kang Mina. She’s had my sympathy ever since Produce 101 and she can’t do much wrong in my eyes, I just like her as a person, lol, and that’s why I’ll always be rooting for her when she appears in another drama. Fighting, girl!
There was a mixture of actors I knew and didn’t know in this drama, so that was nice. I also really liked the old granny version of Ok Nam, even though they gradually cut her out. I think it was because by then everyone was seeing Ok Nam in her young form, but it was kind of sudden. In the first couple of episodes, she kept switching from young to old and back, and then halfway suddenly she was gone and she only came back in the last couple of episodes. She deserves all the credit as well! I just found out she played the mom of the three brothers in My Mister, I didn’t recognize her at all!
As for Miss Cho, I haven’t seen anything from Ahn Young Mi as far as I can remember, but I did think she made a nice twist. In the beginning she could’ve also been seen as comic relief, with her extravagant appearance and weird gaming obsession, but I really liked how she turned out to be a pretty big deal in the deity world, even the younger sister of the Fairy King and she actually did kick some serious ass in the end. First when it came to punishing Jeom Soon’s ‘boyfriend’ for secretly taping women and then when she took Yi Hyun for some reflection and humble pie in the past. I ended up liking the layers of her character more than I thought I would in the beginning of the series.

And let me just say one last thing: I was so curious as to when Jeom Dol (the egg) was going to hatch. Because in the flashbacks he was just a young boy – they didn’t explain what happened to him that made him turn into an egg either, by the way – and then I was just like, what the hell is going to come out of that egg? And it was a good indicator that he would only respond to his father being near; because when Geum lifted him the egg started to crack more. When it eventually hatched and the spoon-worm came out…
you could’ve wiped me off the floor, man, I laughed so hard about this creature. It was so random! It was this little clay worm thingie and I… I just couldn’t, I still can’t. I just laughed out loud whenever it had screentime. And then the jokes that were made:
Jeom Soon: ‘Oh my poor brother, why were you reborn as a spoon-worm?!’
Jeom Dol: ‘I’m not a spoon-worm, I’m a blue dragon!’
–
Cho Bong Dae: ‘Oh, look at you, you beautiful creature, a blue dragon, with your beautiful scales and sharp claws and sleek body and…’
Fairy Park: ‘Is she making fun of him because he’s a spoon-worm?’
I JUST COULDN’T WITH THIS THING. He did look pretty as a dragon, tho.

Although the series as a whole didn’t really speak to me, I did think it had a wholesome ending. Everyone ended up with whoever they were meant to end up with, Yi Hyun and Ham Sook went on a trip together, Yi Hyun became a decent person, Kim Geum proposed to Ok Nam (I’m not crying, you are), Jeom Soon made up with Gyeong Sul and published her novel, etc.
And the spoon-worm remained a spoon-worm. I’m sorry, I’ll stop now.
I don’t think this is a very good drama, although there was some amusing and enjoyable moments and I did ship Ok Nam and Kim Geum to pieces in the end. I guess this was a bit too fantastical for me and there was no way for me to take anything seriously. There was too much going on which distracted from the main story and I really felt like they overdid it in the comic relief department. It just wasn’t realistic enough for me.

I’m now going to watch a Japanese drama (it feels like ages!), so I’ll be back soon with another review! Please keep supporting my reviews even though it sometimes takes me a while! See ya next time!