SPOILER WARNING: DO NOT READ IF YOU STILL PLAN ON WATCHING THIS SERIES OR HAVEN’T FINISHED IT YET!!

Love Alarm
(좋아하면 울리는 / Joahamyeon Ullineun / Ring If You Like)
MyDramaList rating (for both seasons): 7.0/10

Hello everyone! I’m back with a new review! It hasn’t been that long since my previous one, but I managed to finish this quite fast despite it having two seasons, since neither season has that many episodes and I had more free time last week. I had been curious to watch it for a while, because I noticed that it was hyped pretty much when it came out, but also that people overall weren’t very enthusiastic about it. I wanted to make my own decisions about it, so I decided to give it a try despite other people’s opinions. And I have to say, I’m probably going to be one of those people that actually have some good things to say about it. I actually liked it. I think it had a really good message in the end. I’m not sure why people weren’t satisfied with it, but I could really relate to the characters and their feelings and I think the ending was wrapped up really nicely, leaving me with no further questions. This review might be more positive than others, so if you’re up for that, let’s get going!

Love Alarm is a Netflix K-Drama with two seasons, Season 1 consisting of 8 episodes and Season 2 consisting of 6 episodes, and each episode is about an hour long. The story is about Kim Jo Jo (played by Kim So Hyun), a high school student. She lives in a time where a certain app is very popular, the Joalarm (Love Alarm) app. When you install this app, it synchs with your heart, and it can ‘ring’ the Joalarm of the person you like if you’re in a 10 meter radius of them and vice versa. It’s a very handy way to determine whether you have feelings for someone and the other way around. No wonder it’s very popular among high school students, because it elevates the excitement of school romance. The Joalarm doesn’t lie, it will ring when someone near you likes you, but it doesn’t give you a name, it’s just a signal detector. Jo Jo doesn’t have this app initially, mainly because she has more important things on her mind. I’ll explain more in detail later, but in a nutshell: she lost her parents when she was very young, she’s been living with her grandmother ever since. When her grandmother got sick and they had to move to Seoul to get her into a good hospital, she moved in with her aunt and cousin from her mother’s side. She’s been doing nothing but pay off debts to her aunt and her grandmother’s hospital bills, and she works two part-time jobs after school in secret. Since she officially isn’t allowed to work part-time as a high school student, she even lies to her friends about it, says she’s attending an afterschool academy to study harder. So yeah, she’s having a tough time and she doesn’t really have time to think about Joalarm because there’s not even anyone she’s interested in. She does have a boyfriend in the beginning of the series, but she can’t seem to put effort in their relationship and he’s the only one showing his affection. As if her life isn’t already stressful enough, it only gets more extreme when Hwang Sun Oh (played by Song Kang) transfers to her school. He’s the handsome rich son of a politician running for mayor and a famous actress, and he’s a model who just returned from America.
Sun Oh lives in a very big house with his parents, and also with Lee Hye Yeong (played by Jung Ga Ram) and his mom. Hye Yeong and his mom have been living with Sun Oh’s family since the two boys were little, they needed a place to stay and they are helping around the house in return for staying there. Hye Yeong works at one of the part-time jobs that Jo Jo works at, and we immediately see that he has a thing for her. He always looks out for her, and while he doesn’t approach her directly or even talk to her, he always makes sure that she gets home/on the bus safely and he’s satisfied by just watching her smile from a distance. When Sun Oh returns, he immediately notices his best friend’s behavior towards this girl and he also becomes interested in her. Although it first seems as if he just wants to know what Hye Yeong sees in her, he ends up falling for her as well. In contrast to Hye Yeong, Sun Oh is VERY straightforward with his intentions, and he manages to sweep Jo Jo off her feet within the first week of meeting her. Hye Yeong sees this happen and silently resigns. He won’t even admit to Sun Oh that he has feelings for Jo Jo because he doesn’t want to get in his friend’s way (even though he liked her first). Jo Jo eventually installs Joalarm and through the app, her and Sun Oh’s feelings for each other are confirmed.

This is where it all starts, with Jo Jo and Sun Oh falling for each other.
In the beginning, I was a bit confused as to what everyone’s intentions were. I didn’t understand why Hye Yeong kept denying that he had feelings for Jo Jo even though it was so obvious. And I also wondered why Sun Oh went after Jo Jo in the first place. At first, I really thought he just wanted to check her out as his best friend’s wingman to see what kind of person she was, to see if he could see what Hye Yeong saw in her. But then he came on so strong and even kissed her like that in the first episode, and that really made me go… Okay, what? Because it almost seemed like he was seducing her on purpose, while knowing Hye Yeong had feelings for her, maybe to prove to his friend that she wouldn’t be suitable for him because she’d agreed to kiss him so easily? Or something? These were explanations that went through my mind. But apparently, he’d already become romantically interested in her within a couple of days. Jo Jo’s narration at this point did say that the kiss came before the feelings, so even if she’d had the Joalarm, it wouldn’t have rang, and neither did his. But it did all happen pretty fast after that.

The kissing thing then blows up at school because Jo Jo’s friend Kim Jang Go (played by Z.Hera) sees them and sends a picture to Jo Jo’s boyfriend, Il Shik (played by Shin Seung Ho), since she is in love with him herself. Because of this, and the fact that Jo Jo had been hiding so many parts of her private life from her friends, Jang Go starts ignoring her at school. Jo Jo becomes completely isolated and Sun Oh is the sole person to give her solace. As we see it from Jo Jo’s perspective, he is like the one light at the end of the dark tunnel for her. He is so sweet and caring at that point and I was so happy for her that she at least had one person like that because apart from him, she was all alone in the dark.
In the meantime, there’s also her cousin Park Gul Mi (played by Go Min Shi), one of the most popular girls in school, who keeps blaming Jo Jo for everything that goes wrong in her life. Gul Mi develops a crush on Sun Oh, as does everyone else, but when he and Jo Jo get together, she blames Jo Jo again for ‘taking him away from her’.

Honestly, I cannot think of a character that I’ve pitied more than Jo Jo. In reviews I only find people commenting on that they find her unrelatable and annoying, but I could really see where she was coming from. Despite seeming like a cheerful person, Jo Jo carries a deep trauma with her, one that has such a strong hold on her that she can never seem to escape from it no matter what she tries. She’s always felt like a burden, and the reason for this is so completely unfair and not her fault. At some point we find out that her parents attempted to commit a family suicide with her when they were still living on Jeju Island when she was little. By chance, she survived because she woke up in time and vomited out the stuff they gave her, but it was too late for her parents. After walking and running for a long time, she reached her grandmother’s place, but ever since she started living at her aunt’s, she’s always felt like she was imposing, because they always make her feel like she’s imposing and even mooching off of them.
It made me SO mad how Gul Mi talked to her, putting everything on her like that and even making her feel like she was the one who killed her parents. She kept threatening to ‘tell them what happened in Jeju’ as if Jo Jo committed some sort of crime. Gul Mi didn’t even fully understand what had happened and how Jo Jo was feeling about it, but she stopped at nothing to make her feel horrible.
So yeah, Jo Jo doesn’t exactly have a very warm environment and I’m still surprised at how she kept going. Some people would’ve already given in to depression and despair, and Jo Jo might have been dealing with these things as well, but she never let them get so far that she’d harm herself and this is something that makes her very strong. However, every person has a limit and people constantly kept pushing her towards hers.

In the first couple of episodes, everything seems to be smooth-sailing for Jo Jo and Sun Oh, it’s clear they like each other very much and they make a cute couple. But then, everything changes when they get into an accident during a school trip to Jeju Island. After finally deciding to go on the trip (Jo Jo initially doesn’t want to because of the bad memories she has of the place) they decide to go for each other. After a small fire breaks out in Jo Jo’s dorm which triggers her trauma, they go on a drive on Sun Oh’s motorbike but they crash. After this, Jo Jo can’t get in touch with Sun Oh for a few days and beats herself up over hurting him like that. It is in this desperate moment, where she is very triggered and overwhelmed, that her classmate Chon Duk Goo (played by Lee Jae Eung) gives her an exclusive item to install on her Love Alarm, a Shield. If you install this, your signal won’t reach the person you like, so it’s a way to protect your feelings from being exposed. She chooses to install it. She regrets it the minute she does, but it can only be taken off by the developer. So when Sun Oh finally appears in front of her again, she has ‘proof’ to break up with him – she doesn’t ring his Joalarm anymore.
The reason why she had to break up with Sun Oh is until this moment not very clear to me. In my opinion, it didn’t have to get to that. But I do understand that she was triggered enough by hurting the one person that got close to her, that she felt like she had to hide again. I think it was mainly a trauma response, but it was a real shame how it went.
Of course, Sun Oh is the most shocked of all, because how can her feelings for him suddenly be gone? He asks her time and time again to open the app again, to try again, but it’s no use. Jo Jo ends up breaking Sun Oh’s heart.

Some time goes by, I believe it’s now somewhere after high school graduation and before college admission. By this time, Joalarm 2.0 is about to be launched, and only members of the Joalarm Badge Club (people with a minimum of 3,000 hearts) are allowed to join. In the meantime, Jo Jo has started an Instagram account where she uploads beautiful but eerie illustrations under the name ‘The Ringing World’. These drawings are based on her own past, and story, but also inspired by the effects of Joalarm on society. As the artist she remains anonymous, but her drawings become very popular.
It’s around this time that she meets Sun Oh again. He is now dating a famous influencer/fashion designer, Lee Yook Jo (played by Kim Shi Eun), but he can’t ring her Joalarm. As Jo Jo tries to avoid Sun Oh, Hye Yeong comes back into the picture. He spots Jo Jo a few times and is determined to take his shot the old-fashioned way, without using the app. He tries to get to know her by simply approaching her personally. At this point, Jo Jo only knows him by face and name as Sun Oh’s friend from high school.
Sun Oh finds out that Hye Yeong is approaching Jo Jo and the two guys also start to grow apart.
Although this part of the series doesn’t last very long, it’s important to note that around this time, more and more controversy is happening around Joalarm. There have been several murder cases that were allegedly inspired by the app, and even a mass suicide of a group of more than 20 people, causing Anti-Joalarm protests to arise more frequently.

I will talk about this more elaborately later, but I think this was a very important part of the story. Because of course, there are multiple sides to everything. This Joalarm app, however romantic and exciting it might sound to some people, can also drive you crazy with loneliness. If it works out for you, it’s nothing but great. But it can also make you feel like an outcast if it doesn’t. It can make you feel unloved. I mean, it literally says ‘no one in a 10m radius loves you’, which can be quite depressing to hear. At this point, people are waging so much on this app, it’s become a part of society, people are using it for everything. Even at weddings it’s now become custom that, everyone shuts down their Joalarm at the end of the ceremony except for the bride and groom so that they can make sure they actually love each other for real. It’s become such a defining thing. And this is what made this series so Black Mirror for me. It did from the start, and especially when the mass suicide happened and things started going sideways as people started getting the wrong kind of inspiration from the app, but it really shows us the dark side of technology. The side that is masked by all the excitement and all the hype that buzzes around it. The app becomes the thing that determines how you feel, not the other way around, and this is very dangerous.

Now what we have figured out by now, is that Chon Duk Goo, Jo Jo’s former classmate, is actually the developer of Joalarm. He created it in order to confess his feelings to the girl he liked, which happens to be Gul Mi. But after Gul Mi shows her disgust when Duk Goo rings her Joalarm, Duk Goo also becomes concerned about the use of the app, and we even see him jump out of his own window one time, suggesting that he ends his own life. It turns out that this was a failed attempt, but he did have to recover and left Joalarm in the hands of his older brother while he was recovering. His older brother, Brian Chon (played by Ki Do Hoon) is the one who goes along with the Joalarm 2.0, even though Duk Goo actually told him not to. The new function on Joalarm 2.0 is that you can see all the people who will come to love you in the future, so people who have budding feelings for you. The idea is to stop people from feeling lonely when there’s no one in a 10m radius, to give them hope that they will still meet people who will love them later on.
The presentation of Joalarm 2.0 is where Season 1 ends, with excitement going on inside the hall whereas outside a bunch of protestors (led in megaphone by someone who I still think is Duk Goo) makes a fuss.

Tiny point of critique: the transition from Season 1 to 2 isn’t very smooth. Season 1 ends with a very clear cliffhanger, them all coincidentally meeting at the presentation of Joalarm 2.0. Season 2 suddenly starts some time later, at a random different moment in time. I kept thinking that I wanted to know how that meeting at the end of Season 1 had ended! Suddenly we are somewhere else, and even though they do talk about it, that the meeting happened, I would’ve liked it if Season 2 had just picked up directly from where Season 1 had ended.

Anyways, Season 2 starts just after Joalarm 2.0 has been launched and by now we’ve had another time jump – Jo Jo is now in college and Hye Yeong has moved out of Sun Oh’s house. The two have started dating. Hye Yeong is the sweetest boyfriend ever, he’s so incredibly patient and considerate. He’s even fine with the fact that she can’t ring his Alarm. He doesn’t know about the Shield, but he is willing to wait for as long as it takes to gain her affection. Meanwhile, he makes it his personal goal to ring Jo Jo’s Alarm 10 times a day to make her feel loved. In other words, he’s too good for the world.
Jo Jo’s feelings towards him are definitely growing, but she still can’t seem to open up to him 100%. She still has too much holding her back. She’s still living with her aunt and Gul Mi, she still hasn’t dealt with her trauma, Sun Oh starts approaching her again about what happened in high school. She can’t seem to move on as she’d like and just focus on her relationship with Hye Yeong. She knows that ultimately, she will have to tell him about the Shield and why she installed it in the first place, but she keeps putting it off. In the meantime, she tries to track down Duk Goo, as she now knows he’s the developer, to ask him to take off the Shield. But Brian Chon says it’s impossible to take it down and Duk Goo himself is still nowhere to be found. Now Jo Jo is in a pickle because she regrets installing the Shield so much. If only she had Joalarm to figure out her feelings for her, but now she can’t do that. What she does get from an anonymous number (again, thank you Duk Goo), is another exclusive item to use on her app: a Spear. With this Spear, she can send a Joalarm signal to a person of her choice, one that pierces through the Shield. She decides to send it to Hye Yeong, and by doing this she unknowingly creates a shift – she uses her own volition to send it to someone of her own choice, without using the app’s instructions of whom to send it to.

I really don’t want to go into too much summary details, I think I’ve already done that enough up until now, so this is where I want to move on to my analysis of the story. Starting with the event that I just described, of Jo Jo using her own volition. When he returns to Joalarm, Duk Goo tells his brother Brian the reason why he didn’t want him to continue with Joalarm 2.0 and he uses Jo Jo as a case example.
However romantic and exciting the idea of the app might be, fact remains that it takes away people’s own volition in choosing who to love. The app, although it’s just meant to be a signal indicator and detector, is starting to interfere with people’s decisions. Also with the Joalarm 2.0 function to see people who will love you in the future, Duk Goo emphasizes that people are not willing to look past the possibilities that the app provides. They won’t look further than these indicated recommended people. He compares it to an algorhythm that shows us what movies to watch, we won’t look past it and just choose from the suggested assortment. People were unconsciously eliminating hundreds of possibilities by choosing to follow exactly what the app was showing them.
The fact that the developer of the app came to this conclusion after carefully observing what it did to people was just so powerful to me. You could see that Duk Goo had really reflected and learned from his own experiences. He wasn’t just some bitter guy that couldn’t deal with the fact that the girl he liked, the girl that inspired him to create Joalarm, didn’t like him back. He went as far as to help people like Jo Jo who got caught up in it as well. Hearing his character say these things just made me nod my head in agreement because that’s exactly what it was, it just analyzed the full picture of Joalarm, the good and the bad. As I mentioned before, when Jo Jo was regretting the Shield and thought that without Joalarm, she wouldn’t be able to make a decision, it just became clear to me how much everyone in this story was depending on it. How convenient to not even have to look inside your own heart anymore to determine how you feel – now you have a machine to do that for you, too. It might be a great invention, but it also takes away people’s will to actively pursue someone regardless of the feelings of both parties. It takes away the thrill in the chase. And most of all, it takes away the need to tell each other that you love them. The words ‘I love you’ have literally been replaced by the sound of Joalarm. And that’s why I found it so beautiful that at the end of the series, when Jo Jo and Hye Yeong confirm their feelings for each other for real, Hye Yeong reminds her that they shouldn’t forget to tell each other ‘I love you’ as much as possible. Because by then, it has become such an unfamiliar phrase. It has become something that people didn’t say anymore because Joalarm said it for them.

I want to talk a bit about a couple of main characters in more detail before I move on to the cast comments. One thing I liked about this drama is how well it showed that everyone and everything has multiple sides to them. You may see a story from one side, but there’s always a truth from another side somewhere. You never know what people are carrying with them, so don’t judge a book by its cover.
I’ll start with Jo Jo. As I said before, she is probably one of the most pitiful characters I’ve seen in a K-Drama in a long time. Her life just seems so unfair. As if it isn’t enough that she went through something so traumatic as a child and is still suffering the repercussions of that daily, the people around her also don’t go easy on her at all. It really seems as if she can’t catch a break, as if everything she touches falls apart. That’s what it looks like to herself, and that’s why she can’t seem to stop beating herself up. Even when she finds happiness in her relationship with Sun Oh, and then with Hye Yeong, she can never get herself to fully acknowledge that she deserves this happiness. She’s constantly reminded of her past and she constantly feels like she’s a burden to other people and it’s horrible that a person should feel like that.
I didn’t read that many reviews, but I read enough to learn that many people seem to have been annoyed by Jo Jo’s character, that they didn’t like her and when I started, I was worried that I might feel the same. I was worried that it would get super frustrating, that she wouldn’t be able to make up her mind and remain passive throughout it all. But she actually got her act together! It takes a while, yes, and it takes two final bombs to drop. The first one is Hye Yeong finding out about the Shield. He overhears a conversation between her and Brian Chon and loses faith in her sincerity. The second one is that some guy is arrested for the Joalarm-inspired murder cases. He claims that he was inspired by Jo Jo’s Ringing World illustrations, believing them to be some sort of prediction or prophecy that he had to fulfill, causing Jo Jo to even be partially blamed for these murders. And this is where she decides to get herself together. She writes a public post in which she openly reveals herself as the illustrator and what the drawings mean to her, she even opens up about her past. She meets Sun Oh to have a closure talk. She then messages Hye Yeong that she will come clean to him about everything after doing one last thing, and for this thing she has to travel back to Jeju. She participates in a marathon and during this marathon, she finally confronts her trauma.
The most beautiful thing about this is, again, the plurality of it. First, we hear Jo Jo’s narration say, ‘It’s not because I hated you, you were just too heavy’, played over a scene where young Jo Jo leaves her teddy bear behind as she’s walking away from her house. But after actually facing her trauma in the form of her younger self, these words are repeated and it’s like she’s saying it to herself, to the young version of herself. And this made so much sense. Instead of carrying that young girl, that trauma with her all the way while hating it and wanting her/it to go away, she ends up literally embracing her. This scene really made me tear up a little, because despite Jo Jo’s slightly passive and anxious behavior throughout the series, this was the time when she showed the most determination to get her act together. She finished the marathon and there was Hye Yeong waiting for her at the end. She managed to overcome her own issues by herself, and she managed to get with Hye Yeong by her own volition. She may have installed the Shield for Sun Oh, but Hye Yeong made her want to take it away.
And of course the final most gratifying scene was where we get to see Jo Jo’s Joalarm log, so we get to see in which cases she would’ve rang Hye Yeong’s Joalarm if she didn’t have the Shield, and we see all these scenes between her and Hye Yeong. All these scenes in which she wondered if his signal would’ve gone off if she’d had the Alarm. And I also liked that she had a final talk with Duk Goo, and that he told her that the only thing keeping her from giving in to her love for Hye Yeong was that she was afraid because she couldn’t ring his Alarm. She didn’t have that confirmation, and that made her doubt her feelings. Because the signal wasn’t there, she couldn’t be sure if it would’ve rang if it had been there. And that’s exactly what I mentioned before, that’s what Joalarm took away from people, that certainty in their own feelings.
Anyways, I just want to say that even though at some points I did feel like she had to express her feelings more clearly, I was not annoyed by Jo Jo whatsoever. Her responses seemed legit if you looked at where she was coming from, I completely understood that it was hard for her in particular to be honest about that sort of thing when she felt like her whole existence was a burden to the world. I think it’s important to focus on how well she managed to get out, despite suffering from trauma and depression, how she kept going on her own and eventually managed to face her past and her trauma all by herself and got to go back to the most loving guy in the world.

As a child, Sun Oh has also had it tough. His family may be famous, but they’re definitely not a happy close family. The family dynamic reminded me of the one from Radio Romance, where they were just pretending to be a happy and perfect family, but it was all scripted. At least Sun Oh didn’t lead a scripted life, he did everything he could to rebel against his parents, he had enough freedom for that. Hye Yeong really is the closest person he had, it’s like he has a personal bodyguard in his best friend. So I can understand that, when Hye Yeong shows interest in a girl, Sun Oh would also be interested in her, as a brother would be interested in his younger brother’s crush. But I still don’t understand what made him confront Jo Jo like that. Of course, in the first episode we don’t know about Sun Oh’s back story yet, so I have to say that when he first appeared, I didn’t have a lot of sympathy for him. He seemed pretty snobby, like he just assumed that everyone would fall on their knees for him. He didn’t blink twice at receiving 10+ hearts as soon as he walked into his new school, and when he approached and kissed Jo Jo like that in that alley, a red flag went up because he was doing it while knowing that his best friend had feelings for her. I’m still not sure what he was thinking there, if it was because he really was romantically interested in Jo Jo already at that point, or because he was trying to test or prove something (but what, then?). It just didn’t feel right. But after that, suddenly his charms just became undeniable. He wanted nothing but for Jo Jo to be happy, he may have flaunted his privilege around a bit but his intentions turned out to be really good. You could tell he really loved Jo Jo, and this didn’t change even going into Season 2, where he still couldn’t ring anyone else’s Alarm because of this.
I felt bad for him when Jo Jo suddenly broke up with him like that, because it really was a one-sided decision and she didn’t explain anything to him (one of my least favorite tropes). But then when he just didn’t seem to be able to move on, even when she got together with Hye Yeong, and he kept approaching her even though he knew he was making her uncomfortable… I mean, I understand, I really do, he needed the closure as much as she did, but I still found myself thinking that he should just let it go. He had a really cool girlfriend who, like Hye Yeong, didn’t even mind waiting until he would be able to ring her Alarm. I’m glad he managed to save his relationship with her, in the end, but it did take having that closure talk with Jo Jo for him to decide that he could finally move on and that he wanted to make an effort for Yook Jo.

On how many occasions can we say that the second male lead actually got the girl? I don’t think there are many, but Hye Yeong managed to do it! He really worked himself up from nowhere! Honestly, he was the person who loved her the most from the start and he let so many people go first, he didn’t even become petty when Sun Oh snatched her away from him (not that she was his, but you know what I mean, it would’ve been a normal response to get petty and jealous). In the beginning, when they were already making a love triangle out of them, it felt wrong because Jo Jo didn’t even know Hye Yeong yet, she knew him by face from school and her part-time job, but she’d never talked to him before and she definitely did not know he had a crush on her. So in the beginning it just seemed like Hye Yeong didn’t even stand a chance against Sun Oh. But I really love how the tables turned and how Hye Yeong found a way to bypass Joalarm. In regular K-Drama, the second male lead never gets the girl especially because he chooses the old-fashioned way of being patient. In this scenario, this actually worked out for the best. He managed to leave such a big impression on Jo Jo through his sincerity that even she decided to disregard what Joalarm may or may not have been telling her and she voluntarily chooses him of her own accord. It’s hard to believe that there’s any real person out there as kind as Hye Yeong. Honestly, he had so many reasons to be angry and to spite people but he never did. He always chose to be kind. Even when his back story was revealed and it turned out that his father was in prison for murder and that he might get out on parole, and he actually started doubting his own good nature because he was scared he would be like his father, and I was just like, ‘Bro… you literally have 0,00000% evil in you!!’. He was so unbelievably good and I felt so anxious for him whenever it seemed like Jo Jo would take a step back.
I love how they managed to put that one scene in perspective by the way, when Jo Jo suddenly disappeared from Hye Yeong’s list of people who would love him in the future. He interpreted it as that she suddenly wouldn’t be able to love him anymore – and as it happened because Sun Oh kissed her at that moment, we’re all led to think that it’s because she’s going to choose Sun Oh after all. But at the end it’s clarified that that was the moment where Jo Jo’s feelings for Hye Yeong were confirmed. Sun Oh kissed her, and all she could think about was Hye Yeong. The reason that she disappeared from the list was because she wasn’t someone who ‘would love him in the future’ anymore. She’d started loving him in the present. That was such a great revelation. It’s quite smart of the writers to reveal in hindsight how much she actually already loved Hye Yeong without even being aware of it herself.
Anyways, Hye Yeong is a saint. Even when he finds out that Jo Jo hid the story about the Shield for him, he doesn’t even get angry with her, he just tells her that he wanted her to be sincere, that was enough for him. And as soon as she figures her stuff out, he’s right there, back by her side again. All I can say is that I’m happy for both him and Jo Jo that they managed to find each other, that they managed to actually slowly build up an ‘old-fashioned’ romance in a world where love is normally determined through an app.

Park Gul Mi is, until the end, my least favorite character in this series. While she did become kinder to Jo Jo and even started standing up for her more, the way she treated Duk Goo until the very end was just unbelievable to me. She is a very selfish person. From the start, when she’s still in high school and practices to become an idol trainee, it’s clear that she only cares about appearances. She joins the bandwagon of Sun Oh fangirls without hesitation and doesn’t even want to consider the possibility of him not reciprocating her feelings because, after all, “she’s so pretty”. That’s really all there is to her. She is disgusted by Duk Goo and when he keeps ringing her Joalarm, she even gets a little threatening to him. Despite her own life in which she’s allowed to do whatever she wants by her mom, even though they don’t have a lot of money, she blames everything that doesn’t go as planned on Jo Jo. She’s always yelling at her, always saying mean things and her mother always just happens to come in whenever Jo Jo tries to say or do something back, so it’s never Gul Mi’s fault. Until her mother does walk in one time when Gul Mi is cussing Jo Jo out and then the dynamic changes a bit. Gul Mi becomes a bit of a disappointment to her mother when everything she tries fails, first the trainee thing, then the online shopping channel.
Gul Mi’s sole goal becomes to meet the developer of Joalarm, to join the Joalarm Badge Club. For what purpose, who knows, she’s not thinking ahead of that, she just wants to be in the center of attention. However, in order to do that, she’ll need to gain 10% of 3,000 hearts (which is the minimum amount to get into the Badge Club) and then he’ll let her on the Hot People list. She goes for it, fakes it until she makes it to make people send her hearts. Only to be confronted with Duk Goo when she actually makes it into the club. And instead of reflecting on her actions, reflecting on how she treated Duk Goo and how fake her ambitions are, she treats him the exact same way as she did in high school. I was too stunned to speak during this scene. Like, it’s not that I expected her to suddenly like him, but to at least feel some humility? I mean, come on, SHE was the initial inspiration for Joalarm! Without her, the whole app wouldn’t have been made! But no, she doesn’t get humble. Rather, she goes into another direction to ask for attention by continuing to spread the news that she is in fact the “muse” of the developer to create Joalarm, even after cussing said developer out in his face because he still isn’t worthy of her.
I really don’t mean to be disrespectful about the character, but to me Gul Mi showed the least change and maturity of all the characters in this series. She literally didn’t care about anyone else’s feelings, she just wanted the virtual proof that people ‘loved’ her. Popularity and fame meant everything to her, and she was obsessed with getting hearts, she didn’t even care from whom she got them as long as they got her up in the ranks. You could say that she was one of the sheep that just went along with the virtual technology without really feeling the need to make their own decisions when it came to finding what they truly wanted to do. She was someone who didn’t mind remaining empty inside as long as she could fill that void with virtual hearts.

Chon Duk Goo is definitely one of the key characters of this series. In high school, he is this short and geeky looking guy who just wants his crush to be happy, but then can’t help but feel hurt when she expresses her disgust for him. All the more because he can’t stop loving her. Even when they meet again in the end, years later, he still rings her Alarm. It’s so ironic that the person who created Joalarm ends up as one of the ‘victims’ of it. I mean, he did jump out of his window. They didn’t elaborate on why he did that per se, and how he disappeared and then suddenly came back, but his brother took over the company in his absence. Duk Goo learned his lesson with the app and even objected the idea of version 2.0 because he realized how it took away people’s own volition to determine their own feelings. I think he was a very responsible developer, he really thought about the good and the bad, and not just about making money out of it. He was really thinking of the feelings of the people who would use it, and that made him a very kind person. I liked that he had this sort of kindred spirit thing going on with Jo Jo, it’s like they just understood each other and he even gave her those Shield and Spear tools to help her figure her stuff out. He didn’t use her as a test subject, he really wanted to help her. And I also like how he was able to face Gul Mi after all that time, although I couldn’t blame him for being surprised when she still cussed him out like that. I mean, you’d think a person would’ve changed at least a little since high school. Anyways, Duk Goo was really important and he may have steered Jo Jo a little in her decision to use the Shield, but in the end it was really the right decision for her to do so since it allowed her a way out of the system, as you could say.

Let me move on to my cast comments!

Kim So Hyun, my girl. I’ve been watching dramas with her since she was still a child actress and I think I say this every time, but I’m so proud of how much she’s grown. She’s her own lead actress now, still only 22 years old, but she already has mastered such layers of emotional acting it still surprises me. I’ve seen her in a bunch of stuff, as a younger version of a lead character in The Moon That Embraces The Sun, Rooftop Prince, I Miss You, I Hear Your Voice, The Girl Who Sees Smells, Goblin, and then as a lead character in Who Are You – School 2015 (in which she played a double role), Page Turner, Let’s Fight Ghost, Ruler – Master of the Mask, and Radio Romance. The Tale of Nokdu and River Where The Moon Rises are still on my list as well. I think she did really well in this series. Although I can understand where people are coming from with their critiques, as her way of acting can leave things to be desired and I remember I personally wasn’t very impressed with her performance in Radio Romance, but I think that she did very well in portraying the layers of Jo Jo’s character. I think she portrayed very well the cautiousness of feeling happy while expecting it to fall to pieces at any time, and when it did, the need to immediately pull back and hide. She has very expressive eyes as well, and I feel like she always has to do a lot of crying (her role in I Miss You, oh my god). I would like to see more different sides to her acting, that’s true, but I can’t say that it bothered me in this case and I was just glad that her character chose to be strong and determined in the end. If she’d only remained passive and gloomy, it would’ve been more frustrating for me to watch, but the way it ended made up for a lot.

This is actually the first drama I’ve seen of Song Kang! (edit: Okay, I need to take this back because I see that he was in The Liar and His Lover, but I kind of reppressed that one.) There are still a couple of dramas with him on my to watch list, so I’ll be looking forward to those! I think he was a good choice for the role of Sun Oh, not just because of his looks, but I think he also showed a lot of variety and layers to his character. He has the most adorable smile, but he can also look so hurt and angry it’s almost intimidating. I’d really have to see more of his acting performances to make a good judgement, but I did like him in this. Even though I said that I thought he was kind of snobby in the first episode, I also couldn’t blame Jo Jo for being enticed by him because he was definitely very charming even though he seemed a little dominant and I didn’t completely trust him. I am looking forward to seeing him in Nevertheless and Forecasting Love and Weather, and I might even watch Navillera if I’m in the mood for it because it seems pretty good.

Love it when a hyped K-Drama has a bunch of actors that I’ve never seen before. Jung Ga Ram is such an actor, I haven’t seen anything of him but I loved him in this series. As I said, I was beyond excited to find out that the second male lead would actually get the girl this time. We’ve all been waiting for this to happen! I just really like how he portrayed Hye Yeong, he was so kind and patient and he has such a kind face, too. I can hear people argue about that his looks may not win over Sun Oh’s, but that made it all the more satisfying to me because that’s what it was going for. Looking past the surface, looking past the screen. It took time for Jo Jo to completely fall for him, as it’s supposed to go. Loving someone shouldn’t be decided by a ringtone, it takes time to get to know each other and as you fall in love with a person, they’ll become more and more attractive in your eyes automatically. That’s how I’ve experienced it, in any case. That’s what made their relationship all the more real to me, you could really see that his efforts paid off, he had won Jo Jo’s feelings because of who he was, his kindness, how he was always there for her no matter what. No forcing, just someone willing to take it as slow as needed, and that’s what made him the most ideal guy to me, too. I really liked his performance in this, I hope he’ll do more dramas in the future!

Go Min Shi seems so familiar to me, but I can’t figure out where I know her from! The only two things I’ve seen her in are Age of Youth 2 and Go Go Waikiki, but I remember her from neither. Anyways, as we say, if you hate a character then it means that the actor did a good job. I really wanted to like Gul Mi, I wanted to find an aspect of her to like, to say, ‘See! She’s a good person after all!’, but it didn’t really come this time. I guess it just shows that there’s different kinds of people! If she’d been like everyone else, it would’ve been boring, and this way there was even a comical aspect to her character because she was just so obsessed with her ranking that she just went a little crazy, haha. I see that she and Kim So Hyun actually differ 5 years from each other, I wouldn’t have said that. Anyways, as an evil step-sister turned slightly less evil in the end, I suppose she did well, haha.
And I’ll immediately go on to point out Park Sung Yeon, there she was again! I’ve been seeing her in every drama series I’ve watched the last month. In this series she played Jo Jo’s aunt, and while she was a bit of an unpleasant character in the beginning as she always chose her daughter’s side, she did become more apologetic and sympathetic towards Jo Jo eventually. I love how she ended up being able to go on a group hiking trip and was all excited about it. She must have felt really limited in her freedom as well with these two girls to take care of and she may not have always dealt with it so well, but in the end it was clear that she changed perspectives and didn’t blame Jo Jo for her sister’s death anymore. Just to clarify, I’ve seen Park Sung Yeon recently in Abyss and Arthdal Chronicles. She’s also in some series that I’m interested in watching, so I hope I’ll be able to see more of her. By the way, I noticed that she doesn’t even have her own DramaWiki page! D:< She’s done more than enough to earn one so I might even make it myself. Don’t let this actress be unacknowledged!

I also hadn’t seen Lee Jae Eung anywhere before, but apparently this is the only drama series he’s done so far, he’s more of a movie actor. I found him a very interesting choice for this role, because following typical K-Drama standards, his visuals would automatically nominate him for the ‘loser’ role. I really don’t want to sound mean when I say this, I actually see it as a good thing. This is what Duk Goo was made out to be in the series and I just want to appreciate that they’re not solely choosing actors based on their ‘good looks’. I was really happy to find out he didn’t actually die after jumping from his window, and that he was able to re-emerge as the influential person that he’d become – the founding developer of Love Alarm, the app that had taken over the country. It’s just a bit of a shame that he created it for Gul Mi and was then treated like that. I would probably feel like that was a bit of a waste, haha. Anyways, I like how genuine he portrayed his character, he was really timid but also very sharp and he saw things exactly the way they were, he wasn’t naive or anything like that. He saw things that the main characters maybe felt but hadn’t even mustered up the courage to put into words yet. I really liked his talk at the end about people losing their own volition to the app and how they weren’t looking beyond the surface anymore, it was really strong and accurate. It’s certainly something we can learn from today as well.
Taking another side track here, Duk Goo’s brother Brian Chon was actually played by Ki Do Hoon, the guy who played Yangcha in Arthdal Chronicles!! I remember I’d seen that he was in Love Alarm, but it still took me a while to recognize him without his face mask on, haha.

I feel like it’s been ages since I saw Song Sun Mi in a drama, but it actually hasn’t been that long, haha. She was in Start-Up playing Suzy’s mom, and I also know her from Personal Preference and Lookout. She was pretty enigmatic as Sun Oh’s mom, because initially it really didn’t seem like she cared much for her son, but she did seem to choose his side more than her husband’s, especially when the latter turned out to be cheating on her. She even suggested on mutliple occasions that she’d help Sun Oh get Jo Jo back, and I was concerned she’d actually pull some strings to get involved in her son’s business more, also when he’d told her that Jo Jo chose Hye Yeong and she was eyeing Hye Yeong’s mother in that specific way… But she ended up doing nothing. I think she kind of found her own peace in the way she was living, even after being humiliated by the news of her husband’s cheating. It was nice seeing her act a little more warmly towards Sun Oh at the end, but they still never became a really warm family.
In this she was the complete opposite of Hye Yeong’s mother, played by Shim Yi Young. I see that she was in Mary Stayed Out All Night but I barely remember anything from this series, it’s been way too long. She was also in Legend of the Blue Sea, though, and in Thirty But Seventeen. I recognized her face, but I suppose I remember her slightly from the latter. Anyways, she was such a warm and loving mother to Hye Yeong. I still don’t know exactly what happened that made them end up at Sun Oh’s family house, except that it had something to do with Hye Yeong’s dad going to prison, but it didn’t seem like there was any weird or bad tension between them. Hye Yeong’s mom was so sweet, and the only time we see her show any kind of sorrow is when they’re talking about his father. You can really see where Hye Yeong gets his good manners and kind nature, he may have been worried about resembling his dad visually, but he got his character from his mom and we’re all glad he did.

I just flipped out when I realized that Sun Oh’s manager Kim Min Jae was played by the same guy who played the female lead’s mentally challenged brother in Melting Me Softly! I kept wondering where I knew him from, I’m so sorry mister Yoon Na Moo. T^T

Also, although she only appeared in Season 1, I was really happy to see Z.Hera again! She played Jo Jo’s friend Jang Go who had a crush on her initial boyfriend. It’s been ages since I saw her, the last thing must have been School 2017. I’ve also seen her in Moon Lovers: Scarlet Heart Ryeo (my heart still aches from that) and Ruby Ruby Love. I’ve missed her! The only thing I found a pity was that she never gave Jo Jo a chance to explain herself. Like, I get that she was mad at her, but Jo Jo really wanted to make amends with her, and she just completely shut her off while she (probably) knew she didn’t have anyone else. She could’ve given her a chance to make up for lying. I’m not saying it was good of Jo Jo to lie about it, but I just wished there had been a way for them to make up. They were really good friends before it all happened in the beginning and you could tell she meant a lot to Jo Jo. I hope to see more Z.Hera soon!

I didn’t think I knew Kim Shi Eun from anywhere although she did seem slightly familiar to me. Turns out she was in School 2017 and Room No. 9! In the latter she played the younger version of a minor character who appeared only briefly so I may not have made that connection, but at least I was right to think I’d seen her face before. She has a really cute smile! I was worried that she might become the spiteful new girlfriend who would confront Jo Jo with the fact that she needed to back off from Sun Oh because he was with her now, but she was none of that. She was really cool, as I mentioned before. She was definitely hurt by the fact that Sun Oh didn’t ring her Alarm, but she never saw it as a reason to give up. She wanted to make him ring it and was willing to put in all the necessary effort. There came a point where it seemed hopeless and she actually broke up with him and then left with another random guy who did ring her Alarm and I was like, ‘You’re just gonna go with the first best person now?’ but in the end hers still only rang for Sun Oh. And I was really glad that he chose to go after her, as well. In a way, Sun Oh also made his own choice there, he chose to ignore the Alarm that only rang for Jo Jo, he chose to put in effort to make it ring for Yook Jo. I’ve compared her to Hye Yeong before, because she was to Sun Oh what Hye Yeong was to Jo Jo. She was patient, she didn’t get mad, even though she was hurt or disappointed she kept smiling and she was over the moon when he started making effort as well. She accepted that he would need time to get over Jo Jo, it was clear to her that she’d meant a lot to him. She chose not to be the bitchy new girlfriend, she chose to be patient with him and respect his decisions and that made her a very mature character. I liked her!

And of course I’m always happy to see Kim Young Ok, the ultimate K-Drama grandmother, as Jo Jo’s grandmother. She didn’t even have a speaking role and only appeared in flashbacks or while she was barely conscious in the hospital, but it was clear how much she meant to Jo Jo. Everything Kim Young Ok does works for me, she’s such a precious lady.

Okay! So now for some concluding comments before finalizing my review. As I said, I was a bit worried that I might not like this series after hearing some disappointed comments and reviews about it. The ones that are on the top on MyDramaList are also very negative, but I was actually positively surprised. I guess I saw something in it that others didn’t, and the other way around.
I just think this series expresses so well how important it is to keep thinking and feeling for yourself and not to let other people OR things determine your feelings for you. Yes, it can be hard to figure out what it is you’re truly feeling, but we all have to deal with it. As I’ve said multiple times before in my reviews, I believe that feelings are uncontrollable. They just happen and they tell you how you feel whether you like it or not. Joalarm took away people’s own ability to do this, to feel what they feel without control, and to decide for themselves what they had to do in order to act on those naturally occurring feelings.
I’ve mentioned this before, but it really reminded me of Black Mirror, especially of episodes like Nosedive and Hang the DJ. First of all, because it’s about feeling validated. The people obsessed with hearts might be seen as an equivalent to people who are obsessed with getting likes on social media. If you don’t get any, you may get demotivated and insecure and you might start to feel that no one likes/loves you. Secondly, because love is regulated through a system, people aren’t even trying to listen to their own hearts/feelings anymore. They just follow the app’s guidelines because that’s what will tell them who they supposedly love and there’s no reason to look further once you ring someone’s Alarm.

In hindsight, I thought it was a pretty good series. It had a good and clear message, and I believe it’s also a warning to modern society as we are starting to be led by technology more and more. It might not always be a bad thing, but we have to keep in mind that our own feelings and thoughts are still the most important, and that we shouldn’t let those be determined by machines. I think Jo Jo was a very inspirational character in that she had to deal with a very real trauma and felt very alone and isolated in a world where all people cared about were hearts and appearances. No one was willing to look deeper than the surface/screen, no one was willing to look past the limited possibilities that the app gave. No one felt the need to make any additional effort because everything would be taken care of for them. Jo Jo had to figure out her life all by herself. She was lucky enough to find someone like Hye Yeong, who was also willing to lay down the technology and go about it the ‘old-fashioned’ way. I think it would not be easy to go against the system like that, to lead such a guided life with an app and then still be given the opportunity to make your own choice and really make it. Jo Jo was brave enough to choose her own. She was brave enough to direct her feelings to the person she wanted to direct them to, and to send them to Hye Yeong as one would a regular confession of love. If she hadn’t installed the Shield, she would’ve probably stuck with Sun Oh just because the app told her to, and she wouldn’t even have considered Hye Yeong as a possibility, no matter how much he would’ve tried to pursue her.

I’m glad I gave this series a fair chance despite my prior expectations, because it did surprise me in a good way. I can say now that I don’t fully agree with most of the negative responses, I actually understood where the main characters were coming from and I was able to find logic in their behavior. I think it’s really important to keep in mind in what kind of world they were living and how pressuring it was for some people, some people who were not able to enjoy the good aspects of the Joalarm app. It’s also important to consider Jo Jo’s trauma and how deeply rooted it was, and that it was a normal response for her to take a step back, because everyone around her treated her like a burden and she wasn’t used to being loved by anyone besides her grandmother ever since she lost her parents. I think there’s definitely a lot of logic to find in it. People may not agree with the fact she chose Hye Yeong over Sun Oh, but I only thought that was a refreshing decision to make. It just made sense to me and I was really proud of Jo Jo at the end, because she still managed to face her past and embrace it and no longer feel it as something weighting her down. The ending was just really satisfying to me, everything just fell into place and all the questions I had towards the end were answered. So for me, it was a good one!

I’m actually not entirely sure what I’ll watch next because besides my list I do have a growing urge to catch up on some more recently trending series that I can’t wait for to watch. So the next one will probably be a surprise for all of us, haha. At least now I finished my batch of trending K-Dramas from 2019, woohoo! xD

See you next time! Bye-bee! ^^