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.

The Great Seducer
(위대한 유혹자 / Widaehan Yuhokja)
MyDramaList rating: 7.5/10

Hello hello all! It’s been quite some time since my last review. Within the last couple of months, I’ve moved and a lot happened with work and life and I also started watching some more non Asian series on Netflix and Amazon Prime which kind of distracted me from K-Dramas for a while, even though I had already started this series. So my apologies for the belated review! After meeting with my fellow K-Drama loving bestie I completely got back on track so I will continue my to-watch list again starting now 🙂 I hope I haven’t kept you waiting too long, haha. The only disadvantage for me to take so much time finishing this drama and writing this review is that not all details are as clear in my memory as others. So I apologize if this is not the most interesting review, I hope I can make it worth your while.

This drama had been on my list for a while as well. Even though I swore to never watch a drama with Joy again after seeing The Liar and His Lover, it was Kim Min Jae that persuaded me to still give it a try. And I’m glad I did watch it. I wasn’t disappointed.

To start with a short summary: Kwon Si Hyun, Lee Se Joo and Choi Soo Ji are friends for life. The three of them, all from rich families, have since high school been a unit of three (I will keep using the term ‘Unit of Three’ to describe them in this review since I quite like it). No-one comes between them and although they act lavishly and arrogant, when it’s just the three of them it’s clear that their friendship runs deep and has many layers. When one is in trouble, the other two come rushing in matter-of-factly.
Kwon Si Hyun (played by Woo Do Hwan), the only son of a large conglomerate’s director, is ‘the great seducer’. He excels in seducing women and letting his friends clean up after him when he’s done with them. His mother has recently passed away and he has a bad relationship with his father.
Lee Se Joo (played by Kim Min Jae) is the youngest son of another rich family and he is constantly beaten up by his relatives. His mother is in a coma in the hospital for unexplained reasons, and he only has 1 other person at home who treats him normally. To escape his home situation, he relishes in the night club life and is almost as big a playboy as Si Hyun, the only difference being that he gets into fights more often.
Choi Soo Ji (played by Moon Ga Young) is the only girl of the group and lives like a princess. Her mother is the director of a big hospital group, Jungmyung.
The three friends have never had to worry about people judging them or bothering them, they have always been together and they don’t really care about other people. Until the time approaches that they’re going to have to face arranged marriages and Soo Ji is publicly humiliated by her fiancé Lee Ki Young (Lee Jae Gyoon). She conjures up a plan to revenge him, asking Si Hyun’s and Se Joo’s help. Her plan: to take revenge on Lee Ki Young by taking away from him both his first love and the girl who replaced her as his new fiancée.
This first love is Eun Tae Hee (Joy (Red Velvet)/Park Soo Young). Tae Hee has been going through a rough time after her parents got divorced. Her father is a barista in Germany and her mother a renowned pottery artist with whom she has a bad relationship since the divorce. Tae Hee comes back to Seoul to live by herself and pursue her dream of becoming an architect, bringing her to the same college as the Unit of Three. She knows Lee Ki Young because her father used to be his mentor. Anyways, she has no feelings for him whatsoever and isn’t really thinking about romance anyway.
The girl who replaced Soo Ji as Lee Ki Young’s fiancée is Park Hye Jeong, a very naive and princess-like girl who is also the daughter of a large food company’s owner.
Soo Ji’s plan is as follows: Si Hyun has to seduce Tae Hee and she will become ‘friends’ with Hye Jeong to eventually rid Lee Ki Young of all the people he cares about.

This is the set-up of the story in episode 1. I have to say that it took me a couple of episodes to get on top of everything because from second 1 there’s already SO much happening and SO many characters being introduced. It felt like meeting all characters (main AND side) in one single episode and it was a very turbulent start for me. We are pushed right into the dramatic lives this Unit of Three lives without a warning or gentle introduction.
I was also surprised by the sensual innuendos that were shown from the start, because that’s quite rare for a Korean drama. They really showed the playfulness with which the Three interacted with each other, especially Si Hyun and Soo Ji, who would sometimes even pretend that they were a couple or that they had no boundaries when it came to physical contact.
At first glance, it seems like there is some lowkey romantic tension between Si Hyun and Soo Ji, more than between Se Joo and Soo Ji. Se Joo is, in that respect, initially kind of a third wheel. When the revenge plan starts bringing tension between Si Hyun and Soo Ji, Se Joo is kept in the dark about a lot of things.

Let me briefly jot down all the different storylines and then I will pass by them one by one.
1. The Unit of Three (the friendship between Si Hyun, Se Joo, and Soo Ji)
2. The love story between Si Hyun and Tae Hee
3. Tae Hee’s story and family background
4. The relationship between Si Hyun’s father and Soo Ji’s mother
5. The relationship between Si Hyun’s father and Tae Hee’s mother
6. Hye Jeong’s and her family situation
7. Kyung Joo and her mother
(I initially wrote down two more, but I will probably cover them in the above 7 and I don’t want this review to become too long. There is already so much content to cover!)

Yes, it’s a lot. And it’s crammed into 16 full episodes (32 back-to-back). Of course, with so many storylines and characters in a series, some tend to be more interesting than others, some get more attention than others, etc.
For example, for me, the most important thing was of course the romance between Si Hyun and Tae Hee. And a storyline that didn’t really concern me that much was what was happening with Soo Ji’s mother and the scandal she got into. Some minor characters were introduced in the beginning and were, in my opinion not very important as the series progressed (for example, Kyung Joo’s mother). I think most things that happened in the beginning were purely written to emphasize the lavish and scandalous lifestyles of the Three. Anyways, here we go.

1. The Unit of Three (the friendship between Si Hyun, Se Joo, and Soo Ji)
The friendship between the Unit of Three forms the basic layer of the entire series. Even though you might say that Si Hyun and Tae Hee become the main characters as their romance progresses and Soo Ji and Se Joo disappear to the background as more supportive characters, without the bond between the Unit of Three there is no basis. It’s an unspoken bond that no-one can break. They even have their own secret hideout in a penthouse somewhere that Se Joo’s mother left him, which they use as a place to gather, hang and make their plans. No-one else is allowed in there.
Both Si Hyun and Se Joo have made advances on Soo Ji in the past, but she always brushed them off. As Si Hyun gets more and more involved with Tae Hee, Soo Ji starts to become more and more confused about her real feelings for Si Hyun. As Si Hyun’s feelings for Tae Hee lead him to start drifting away from his friends and eventually make him decide to leave their little group, Soo Ji has a hard time holding herself together. Se Joo, desperate to keep supporting Soo Ji, keeps taking her side and even ends up telling Tae Hee the truth about why Si Hyun initially approached her, driving them apart again.
In the end, they all kind of make peace with the fact they grew apart and split up. After the 5 year time jump in the last episode, Si Hyun anonymously sends Soo Ji flowers on one of her cello recitals with a note containing Se Joo’s current address in Japan and she visits him there. With that, we can assume Soo Ji and Se Joo do end up together after all while Si Hyun makes his way back to Tae Hee.

2. The love story between Si Hyun and Tae Hee
While the friendship of the UoT is the basis of the story, the main storyline of the series has to be the romance between Kwon Si Hyun and Eun Tae Hee. When Si Hyun is instructed by Soo Ji to seduce Tae Hee, who initially has no direct interest in romance, we see that it’s a challenging game for him. He approaches her quite aggressively, starts chasing after her and turns up at places she regularly visits (including her volunteer job at a care facility for elderly women). In the beginning, Tae Hee is annoyed by him but he ends up breaking down her walls and she lets him in. She lets herself be seduced by ‘the great seducer’.
However, the plan doesn’t really go as they expected because Si Hyun (of course) starts developing real feelings for Tae Hee. And then he starts to struggle between two worlds: his friends, the UoT, their unspoken pact and the plan; and the new world of redemption he found thanks to Tae Hee, in which he is free again to focus on the simple beauties in life and his almost forgotten passion for drawing. This imbalance causes him to waver a couple of times – he ends up hurting Tae Hee in front of his friends twice.

I have to add here that I really appreciated how straight-forward Tae Hee was with him. When he turned her down in front of his friends (before crawling back to her afterwards) she held her head high and straight-out asked him what the hell his deal was. Yes, as soon as she left she bawled her eyes out but she had the guts to not let his friends see that. And then she would just keep confronting him until he told her what was really going on. In the second of these cases, when Si Hyun was pulling the classic ‘I found out something that involves our pasts and could hurt you so I’m protecting you by being an ass and pushing you away very harshly’ trope, she actually cornered him, got him to emotionally break down and had him tell her what was going on. And they always made up so quickly after that!
It’s always nice to see a couple talk with each other in their relationship and not just accept it when one of them suddenly seems not to be interested anymore.

In the end they still break up. The way in which their pasts are connected is still an issue (even though the reason they initially broke up was actually a misunderstanding). But they find each other again when Tae Hee becomes a professional architect and Si Hyun becomes her secret client. So it’s still a happy ending for this beautiful couple!
Seriously though, I thought they were an adorable couple. Their chemistry was really good and I really enjoyed watching all the scenes where it was just the two of them together.

3. Tae Hee’s story and family background
Okay, so, one of the complicated storylines here is Tae Hee’s (family’s) story and how it ties her to Si Hyun (and indirectly to Soo Ji). Because things get very intricate.
Basically, Tae Hee’s parents divorced when she was a teenager because her mother loved another man. Tae Hee was more on her father’s side and stayed with him in Germany for a while. After coming back to Seoul, her relationship with her mother got worse, and one day after a fight Tae Hee ran out and got involved in a car accident, leaving her physically, but mostly mentally traumatized and it took her a long time to recover from it.
The details of the car accident were: she ran out after the fight and discovered a car in the middle of the road with a seemingly sick woman behind the wheel. Tae Hee promises her that she’ll find help, runs away again and then gets hit by another car coming around the corner (the driver was on the phone, but it was night so they didn’t expect anyone to pop up on the road unexpectedly like Tae Hee did). The person driving the car got out, made sure Tae Hee was alright, promised to come back for her, but drove away and never actually came back. This person later turns out to be Soo Ji’s mother, who was looking for the sick woman in the car, who happened to be Si Hyun’s mother.
Si Hyun’s mother later passed away because of this action – she had been too sick to drive by herself in the first place. The reason she was driving: she was on her way to see Tae Hee’s mom, because she discovered that her husband (Si Hyun’s father) was having an affair with her (Tae Hee’s mother).
SO BASICALLY. Tae Hee eventually finds out her mother cheated on her father with her boyfriend’s father. One legit reason to break up with said boyfriend? You tell me.
Anyway, Tae Hee has had a hard time because of her parents’ divorce and she has always blamed her mother for making her and her father suffer. When she finds out about her mom’s past relationship with Si Hyun’s father, she blames her even more for even making Si Hyun’s family suffer as well.

Okay, so the major thing that made this drama so ‘full’, to me, was because the stories of everyone’s parents were crammed into the narrative almost as prominently as those of the main characters. Of course, it’s not like the parents became main characters, but their connected pasts linked almost all of their children together and at some point their stories started to almost overtake their childrens’.

Let me make the narrative of the parents clear because here it becomes complicated to write a review:
Si Hyun’s father, Kwon Seok Woo (played by Shin Sung Woo)
Si Hyun’s mother (played by Choi Ji Na)
Soo Ji’s mother, Myung Mi Ri (played by Kim Seo Hyung)
Tae Hee’s father, Eun Myung Ryul (played by Kwon Hyuk)
Tae Hee’s mother, Seol Young Won (played by Jeon Mi Sun)

First of all, as I’ve already given away earlier, Si Hyun’s father and Tae Hee’s mother are in love with each other/had an affair while they were both married. When they meet again, their feelings are rekindled, even though Si Hyun’s father is just getting engaged to Soo Ji’s mother for business purposes. Let’s start there.

4. The relationship between Si Hyun’s father and Soo Ji’s mother
Si Hyun’s father and Soo Ji’s mother Myung Mi Ri are planning to merge their two respective companies, JK Group and Jungmyung Hospital, by getting married. This would result in Si Hyun and Soo Ji becoming siblings. Of course, initially the kids rebel against this – possibly also because of still-budding feelings that exist between them in that period.
However, the engagement of their parents seems to be unyielding. Even though Myung Mi Ri is struggling to keep a hold of her hospital after a scandal and is tormented by her future mother-in-law (Si Hyun’s grandma). It’s a purely business-related marriage, but despite that she does try to start acting like a wife to her fiancé. Kwon Seok Woo, however can spare little of his attention to her after he is reunited with Tae Hee’s mother.
Honestly I don’t think he treated Mi Ri well at all. In the end, I’m glad they didn’t get married and Mi Ri chose to build her own independent clinic that wasn’t desperate for sponsors she couldn’t find.
I have to be completely honest when I say that Mi Ri’s storyline was one of the least interesting ones to me. I didn’t really pay attention to what she was going through because I was too invested in the romance part of the story (can you blame me?). But that’s also why I definitely felt like they were trying to put too much content into the drama.
And also, coming back to Si Hyun’s father, the whole thing in the beginning where he told Si Hyun he wasn’t his biological father, leaving Si Hyun completely alone in the world except for his two friends – and then in the end this turned out to be a lie that Si Hyun’s mom told him to punish him for the cheating? What was that about? She hated her husband so much for cheating that she actually forged a DNA test to take his son away from him? No matter how much I stand for female independence (and I’m not saying Kwon Seok Woo did a good job at parenting), I still think that went a bit too far for just a vengeful prank. Si Hyun completely lost his sense of belonging because of this, while his relationship with his father was already bad.
If Tae Hee hadn’t saved him and brought him home where he truly belonged (which wasn’t even with his friends as he first thought), he would’ve maybe ended up in even worse circles.

Anyways, as mentioned before, Soo Ji’s mother Myung Mi Ri turns out to be the one who accidentally hit Tae Hee with her car so many years ago and she left her there in her search for Si Hyun’s mother who’d driven off in search of Tae Hee’s mother (caught up yet?). She kept the accident a secret and even covered it up, lying to Si Hyun about it when he comes asking questions.
When Si Hyun finds out the two cases of his mother’s and Tae Hee’s car accident are connected, Myung Mi Ri goes so far as to tell him that his mother may well have been the one who hit Tae Hee, causing Si Hyun to push Tae Hee away because he feels so guilty about this. I would like to thank the K-Drama Lord again for making Si Hyun and Tae Hee clear up their misunderstandings.

But honestly, “car accident”. They were making such a big fuss over it, and from the fragmented flashbacks and the way Tae Hee talked about it I was really expecting a terrible accident with blood and trauma and all. But when they eventually showed the entire flashback, I was kind of underwhelmed. I thought that Mi Ri had actually been responsible for the car accident of Si Hyun’s mother, but it turns out that Si Hyun’s mother drove off on her own while being sick. Mi Ri was only coming after her because she was aware that she might’ve been responsible for Si Hyun’s mom to drive off, since she tipped her off about her husband’s affair.
And Tae Hee really just happened to be there. And from how it looked, she wasn’t directly hit by Mi Ri’s car, she grazed the side of the car and fell.
Yes, it was really inappropriate of Mi Ri to leave a hurt and traumatized teenager at the side of the road while she could’ve easily taken her with her in her car and brought both her and Si Hyun’s mom to the hospital. But Mi Ri was really distracted at the moment and she could only think of finding Si Hyun’s mom. I’m not trying to dismiss Tae Hee’s traumatized view of the incident, but I could kind of understand Mi Ri’s position and thinking as well. In any case, the accident seemed less bad than I had thought after the foreshadowed glimpses we got from it. And the flashbacks Tae Hee had when she was almost hit by a car at some point and went all shock and tears. So I guess, in hindsight, I have to admit I did find the accident that tied everyone together a bit anticlimactic. I thought Mi Ri had actually hit both Si Hyun’s mother AND Tae Hee and had been hiding the fact she killed Si Hyun’s mother or something. So that made me go kinda ‘eh’.

5. The relationship between Si Hyun’s father and Tae Hee’s mother
Now that I’m writing this it occurs to me how much (past) drama was centered around Si Hyun’s father while he wasn’t even a major character in the show. Sure, create some past story around the kids’ parents for background-filling purposes, but to keep the parents’ drama alive so far in the future that it even starts to impact their kids’ lives…
Again, I will confess, it still has to do with the fact that I was so invested in Si Hyun and Tae Hee’s love story that I cared for little else haha.
Anyways, Kwon Seok Woo and Seol Young Won (Tae Hee’s mom) met each other a long time, when they were both married. Seok Woo’s wife, Si Hyun’s mother, was sick and being treated at Myung Mi Ri’s hospital. Young Won was a famous pottery artist.
After Si Hyun’s mother passed away, the two were separated and didn’t hear from each other for two years. Then, Young Won had an exhibition in the same hall where Seok Woo and Mi Ri’s new cooperation and engagement were announced. Seok Woo saw a poster for Young Won’s exhibition and found her. Young Won, no clue that he’s engaged, went along with rekindling their mutual feelings for each other, even after all this time.

I have to say I couldn’t really blame Young Won. She honestly didn’t know he was getting married – he didn’t find it important to mention, apparently. She lived in constant regret of screwing up the relationship with her daughter, and said daughter kept blaming her for every single bad thing that happened. She genuinely loved Seok Woo – but still she immediately stepped back when she found out about his engagement to Mi Ri. She literally went back to her gallery in the countryside to take her distance.
As I’ve written in length in my review of Valid Love, I have come to a new perspective when it comes to people having affairs. When is something an affair? I keep calling Seok Woo and Young Won’s thing an affair, but it’s never mentioned they actually cheated on their spouses. It’s just mentioned that they were in love with each other despite being married to other people. And the way Young Won immediately left when finding out about Seok Woo and Mi Ri made me think she really didn’t have any interest in their love becoming ‘an affair’. I don’t know, I understand Tae Hee needed a scapegoat and someone to hate after her parents’ divorce, but I honestly didn’t dislike Young Won.

I would like to take a moment here to say a special something about the actress who played Tae Hee’s mother, Jeon Mi Sun. I was shocked to hear she committed suicide last year, she was only 48 years old. She portrayed so many moms in K-Dramas, she was such a familiar face and a talented presence. In this drama too, she was such a calm presence, even through all the drama her character was going through with her secret affair and everything. Depression is absolutely atrocious and it takes away the best people. May you Rest In Peace, dear Jeon Mi Sun-sshi. Rest in well-earned peace.

6. Hye Jeong and her family’s situation
So, as I mentioned before in the main summary of this drama (we’ve already dived too deep into the many side stories and I’m in a hurry to finish this review, haha), Park Hye Jeong was one of the main targets of the original revenge plan Soo Ji made up. A naive little princess, she has always been home-schooled by her dominant mother. She doesn’t know anything of the outside world, is a big ditz and is bad at studying. She has a pet turtle she calls ‘Turtle’ (100 originality points). And through business arrangements (her mother owns a food company), she is newly betrothed to Lee Ki Young.
Soo Ji offers to be Hye Jeong’s friend and help her study. When she ultimately gets out more, Hye Jeong even meets a guy (the bartender at a pub they frequent) and falls in love with him. Slowly but surely she becomes more aware of her potential and right and wrong.
Even Soo Ji, who is initially just out for revenge, starts feeling a certain affection towards her, and ultimately she stops using Hye Jeong for the plan as well.
I actually really liked Hye Jeong’s character. Even though in the beginning her role wasn’t completely clear to me (so much happens in the 1st episode that it took me some time to figure out she was also someone they wanted to take revenge on). She was a nice and refreshing character.
It was the whole story with her mother around it that was too much for me. I mean, it could’ve been enough that her mother was an influential person and needed support from bigger companies, but in my opinion they gave her too much story. Just like with Kyung Joo’s mother, whom I will discuss after this, there were several characters that were enough as supporting plots for the side characters but that didn’t need to be further involved in the story. Hye Jeong’s mother was one of those people for me. And then they also introduced her brother and gave him a story as well and all the while I was just like ‘this is leading me so far away from the actual story! I don’t need all these extra unnecessary characters that don’t directly contribute to the plot!’ I’m sorry, nothing personal, but that’s how I felt.
The only thing that mattered to me was that, in the end, Lee Ki Young, she, and Tae Hee were officially brought together as the initial ‘victims’ of the original plan. At that point, I was really reminded that, right, this was what it all started with, these three.
Hye Jeong became her own person, told her mother that she didn’t want to marry Ki Young and follow her own path. And she and her boyfriend were so cute together!

7. Kyung Joo and her mother
I haven’t talked about Kyung Joo yet at all. Go Kyung Joo (played by Jung Ha Dam) is Tae Hee’s best friend. She has a major crush on Se Joo in the beginning and eagerly jumps to the chance to ‘befriend’ Soo Ji if that increases her chances with him. However, she remains a loyal friend to Tae Hee. She just doesn’t know she’s also being used in the plan because she’s too naive to notice and an easy target because she admires The Three so much. She also unknowingly gets dragged into the plan by Soo Ji pretending to be her friend, and somehow (again, I’m not sure anymore) she also ends up helping Hye Jeong study and ultimately introduces Tae Hee to her as a tutor as well.
Okay. A best friend for Tae Hee. Fair enough. But the thing with her mother still puzzles me, as I’ve also mentioned before. Kyung Joo’s mother (portrayed by Lee Young Jin) is introduced more prominently than Kyung Joo herself in the first episode, as someone who looks way younger than she is, who used to be a former model, and as someone that Si Hyun has made out with at a club one time. It’s also revealed that she’s not Kyung Joo’s biological mother, but nothing more (which makes me wonder why they would even reveal that when it has literally nothing to do with the story whatsoever: just to add extra drama to the story with already 384637438 things going on?)
Anyways, after that first introduction that suggests that Kyung Joo’s mother is going to get some special attention, she completely disappears from the drama. You see her maybe two times trying to comfort Kyung Joo when she comes home crying/upset. So, in short, Kyung Joo’s mom gets this puzzling special introduction, and thereafter she doesn’t contribute anything to the drama anymore. I ask why.

But, as I keep repeating, this was my main issue with this drama. There were too many minor characters that got more attention than necessary. For me, the main characters were The Three: Si Hyun, Soo Ji, Se Joo, and Tae Hee. Kyung Joo and Hye Jeong etcetera were side characters. Their parents/family situations should’ve been active in the background. I don’t even know who all those people in Se Joo’s household were, to be honest, except for the older brother that teamed up with Lee Ki Young at the end.
But in this case, the whole issue with the parents taking over the main story at some point bothered me a little bit.
I think they should’ve stuck to the revenge plan going wrong because Si Hyun developed real feelings for Tae Hee as the main story.
When I originally saw the trailer for this drama, I was under the impression that the whole drama was about this guy taking a bet to seduce a girl that had no interest in romance. In the drama itself this only turned out to be a small part of the plot.
Still! I didn’t dislike the drama because of this. Even despite the parents’ drama, the story of Si Hyun and Tae Hee didn’t lose its spotlight. They were still prominently the main characters and overall it was balanced very well.
But there were just a lot of storylines that I didn’t find as interesting or necessary.

I would like to move on to some comments on the casting and then to my conclusion.

First of all, Woo Do Hwan, who played Kwon Si Hyun. He looked SO familiar to me! I kept thinking I knew him from some other drama, but this is the first I’ve seen of him. I think he was cast really well, his acting was really good. He’s also handsome and really sexy (hot damn those lips?) and in his scenes with Tae Hee he’s super sweet. The way he looked at her and smiled when she wasn’t looking was enough to pull some heartstrings. And even though he acted like a jerk a couple of times, his actions were justified by his struggle between staying with his friends and his growing feelings for Tae Hee. He was just trying to figure stuff out and what matters is that he always came through. I think he performed really well.

Secondly, yes I’ll say it again (I find I’m repeating myself a lot in this review but I have to): I was so impressed by Joy in this drama! Her acting in The Liar and His Lover was abysmal and I don’t wanna speak of it again, but I’m so glad that I saw this drama of her. She was cute and sweet, but still not a pushover. She stood her ground when it was needed. I was so happy when Tae Hee didn’t accept Si Hyun pushing her away and literally cornered him in order to tell her the truth.
Really, her chemistry with Woo Do Hwan was amazing and all those kisses!
Very well done. I’m glad I gave this drama a chance even after renouncing Joy before. Her acting really did get much much better in my opinion. I wasn’t irritated by her even once!

I have seen Moon Ga Young (Soo Ji) in a couple of dramas before. In Jealousy Incarnate, she was also part of a friend group with two guys and she was kind of a rebellious teenager. In EXO Next Door she was the main girl who had this blushing thing going on, which was completely different from Soo Ji. Soo Ji was a queen, gorgeous, elegant, dressed like a princess wherever she went, but also sharp and even poisonous at times. You really should not get on her wrong side. But on the other side she also had a really vulnerable side. Soo Ji was a very intricate character. I have to admit, at some point I was a bit done with how apathic she became when Si Hyun quit their friend group. She became so numb and she even attempted suicide and I was just like ‘Girl… what are you doing’.
But I really liked Moon Ga Young’s performance, her presence was really strong and she owned that dominant side of her character. Plus, did I already mention she is stunning?!
Her newest drama ‘Find Me in Your Memory’ is also on my list, looking forward to seeing more of her talent and beauty!

And of course, I cannot forget about Kim Min Jae. I love Kim Min Jae. I don’t know why or since when. I don’t think I’ve even seen that much of him, but his face is just so loveable. The last thing I saw of him was Busted, where he turned out to be a serial killer and I was just like ‘NOO not my baby!!’ Haha.
I only know him from Goblin and Romantic Doctor, Teacher Kim (I still have to watch season 2). And probably The Producers, although I don’t remember who he played there. But anyway. He has such an adorable flower boy face so it was a nice change to see him as a kind of rebellious bad boy character. Even though I briefly disliked Se Joo for telling Tae Hee the whole truth about their original plan out of revenge towards Si Hyun. I mean, at that point, the whole plan didn’t even matter anymore and it just complicated things even more. I always think: it’s not important where you started, but how things developed and at that point Si Hyun really was in love with Tae Hee. Of course, in the beginning their intentions were not good at all, but for my part the initial reasons could’ve been buried somewhere they’d never see the light again.

All in all, I enjoyed the drama (especially the romance <3 ) but I think they crammed more stories and characters into the drama than necessary. The main storyline was very simple: a group of three close friends want to take revenge on a guy that wronged one of them and in the process of seducing the people around that guy, they become personally involved with them and their intentions and feelings change until they no longer control them.
I was impressed by the level of affection and passion depicted in the drama, starting from episode 1. Asian dramas don’t usually show this much sexual tension and skinship between characters, but I think in that aspect it may have been effected a little bit by the original novel (I just found out the story is loosely based on the 17th century story Dangerous Liaisons (or Les Liaisons Dangereuses), which is kind of cool! I think!).
There were a lot of aspects that I found very modern and almost Western for a Korean drama, also in the behavior of the characters. I’m so used to the innocently budding love between characters in Asian dramas that I was kinda shook when right off the bat Si Hyun and Soo Ji pretended to start making out and they got soooo close to each other. In that aspect as well, it sets itself apart from other typical K-Dramas.

Anyways, I’m very glad I was able to finish this review, it took a couple of days haha. I also purposely left some more details out because it was just too much content and in the end not everything was as important to mention. But please let me know what you thought!
I will continue with my list now, the next one is also an old classic that I still need to watch! See you next time with the next review! Bye-bye!