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

Extraordinary Attorney Woo
( 이상한 변호사 우영우 / Yisanghan Byeonhosa U-yeong-u)
MyDramaList rating: 7.5/10

Hiya! Back with a new review before the end of the month, and this was a very much anticipated one! I decided to watch it in-between my to-watch list items simply because I got so many recommendations and I just really didn’t want to wait. I’m glad I made that decision! Even though law dramas are usually not really my cup of tea, I can say beforehand that I still was able to enjoy this drama. I will go into more detail in the body of my review, but I just want to mention in advance that even for people who are not into law themes, this can be a very insightful and enjoyable drama. It’s very interesting that they created this story about someone with a handicap taking on the challenge of such a representative job as an attorney. Showing the viewer the world through the eyes of such a person, through her experiences and perceptions that ‘normal’ people cannot fully comprehend, it creates such an immersive and interesting story. The fact that we are shown how much the protagonist struggles with her own issues, how much she is aware of it, and how much she would like to communicate properly with others, just makes her impossible to get frustrated with. Let’s get on with it, shall we?

Extraordinary Attorney Woo is a 16-episode Netflix K-Drama with each episode lasting about 1 hour and 20 minutes. It tells the story of 27-year old Woo Young Woo (played by Park Eun Bin). Woo Young Woo has ASD (autism spectrum disorder), and lives with her father, Woo Gwang Ho (played by Jeon Bae Soo) who owns a kimbap shop. Despite her handicap, from a young age on it became clear that Young Woo had a strong affinity with law. Even though she didn’t talk for the first couple of years of her life, when she started talking, the first words that came out of her were law-related; as it happens, she had memorized one of her dad’s old law books from beginning to end. When her father was first confronted with the fact that his daughter was autistic, he struggled a lot by himself. His daughter wouldn’t even look at him, talk to him or hold his hand, and as a single dad this made him feel very lonely. Imagine his relief when she started talking, and about law at that. As he himself has been a law student, he finds a way to communicate with his daughter through legal terms, and it works out somehow.
When the story starts, Young Woo has just been hired as a rookie lawyer at a big law firm called Hanbada. From there on, she will have to face many trials, both professional and personal, as she keeps struggling with her social and emotional skills, while she simultaneously has to learn how to confidently represent clients in the courtroom. At her new job, she meets a couple of new people she will regularly work with, such as the team she becomes a part of. The team is led by Attorney Jung Myung Seok (played by Kang Ki Young), and further consists of fellow rookie attorneys Choi Soo Yeon (played by Ha Yoon Kyung) and Kwon Min Woo (played by Joo Jong Hyuk). She also becomes close with Lee Joon Ho (played by Kang Tae Ho), who works in litigation in the same office and often goes with her to help secure evidence.
Young Woo has one close friend, Dong Geurami (played by Joo Hyun Young), who works at a pub and is kind of the comic relief character of the series as she always tries to help Young Woo get out of her shell in funny ways.

Let me say in advance that in multiple ways, this series reminded me of Move to Heaven. Not just because of the autism spectrum disorder that both protagonists of these series have and their mutual interest in aquatic creatures, but also because of the structure of the series: every episode features a different case, with two 2-part stories as the exception. In every episode, the protagonist faces a new challenge, both personally as professionally, and they both have their own ways of maintaining their daily work routine. The only difference I would point out is that in this drama, they added a romantic aspect between the protagonist and another person. I found it very interesting that they chose to do this, as you don’t often see representation of an autistic person committing to a romantic relationship. I did like that the romance, as important as it was, was kept as a side story. The main plot is really about Young Woo, and how she handles cases, grows from her experiences, and how this also affects her ability to learn about the feelings of the people around her.
Still, there were definitely some aspects that reminded me of Move to Heaven. And that’s why I would like to structure my review similarly to the one I wrote for that one, by briefly going through all cases one by one, pointing out the lessons that Young Woo learned from each case. Before I do that though, I would like to write a bit more about the main characters individually.

First of all, Woo Young Woo herself. As I have established above, she’s had an affinity and interest in law ever since she was young. The rules and regulations that the law offers make her feel comfortable as she can always rely on it to make sense of the world around her. She claims to love the law and is willing to challenge her own disability to be able to perform confidently in the courtroom, which is admirable. Simultaneously, she has one other big passion: whales. When she’s not talking about law, she’s talking about whales. How exactly this interest came to be is not clear to me, but whales are a major part of her life. Not only is her room filled with drawings, figurines, plushies and other stuff related to them, she also uses a lot of whale analogies to relate to her personal life (like how she feels like a narwhal in a tank full of belugas), and also to make sense of her clients’ situations at times. Whenever she has a ‘Eureka’ moment, as an alternative to a light bulb flickering on, it’s illustrated by some kind of whale or dolphin jumping out of the water. Besides these specific interests and preferred conversation topics, there are various quirks that keep coming back. Her favorite food is kimbap, as it shows all the ingredients and she won’t be alarmed by any unexpected flavors, and it’s all she’s ever seen eating throughout the show (at some point I seriously started wondering if she ever ate anything else), she always wears headphones when she’s on her way to work and back (even though it’s not revealed what she listens to exactly – maybe whale sounds or maybe nothing at all?), she has to count to three before entering a new room as she needs to prepare herself for the transition of moving from one space to another, she doesn’t like holding hands (the longest she’s held her dad’s hand is 57 seconds and that’s already a lot for her), and she panics when people start screaming or get violent with each other. In those situations, it helps for her to be held really tightly, as pressure on her body will help calm her nerves. And, what’s probably most characteristic of her, she always introduces herself in the same way: “My name is Woo Young Woo. Whether it’s read straight or flipped, it’s still Woo Young Woo. Kayak, Deed, Rotator, Noon, Racecar, Woo Young Woo.” This of course refers to the spelling of her name, that whether you flip it around, her name is always read as ‘Woo Young Woo’, and she illustrates this with other examples of reversible words. In Korean, of course, she uses other words, but it must’ve been hard on the translators/subtitlers to literally translate it. Anyways, they brought the point across well enough. I suppose having a name like that must also be comforting to her, in a way, as it has a solid structure and people will always read it the way it’s meant to be read. In regard to her appearance, Young Woo has a clean bob cut hairstyle and she always dresses really plainly, slightly old-fashioned even, in a grey-coloured jacket and knee-length skirt.
As a child with ASD, it was hard for her to fit in at school, and she was also bullied a lot as no one seemed to be able to understand her. There was this scene that made me really mad. I mean, I’m sure at least the teachers were aware that she has ASD? And even if not, it was blatantly obvious that she must’ve had something like it? So when Young Woo was tricked into reading a note out loud offending the teacher, the teacher should have known that she was being pranked and set up. It was SO obvious, as she seemed oblivious and the others were all snickering behind her back. But no, instead, the teacher actually SLAPPED Young Woo in the face. Like, WHAT?! Literally NOTHING was done to give her additional support, it was like no one even knew what was wrong with her, everyone just thought she was being weird for no reason. I can’t imagine the staff wasn’t informed of her condition at all when she enrolled, that shouldn’t have been kept a secret. Anyways, the only person there willing to stand up for Young Woo was Geurami. Geurami was kind of the ‘punky delinquent’ kid in class, but Young Woo was strangely comforted by her and started following her around and the two became close friends after that. Young Woo sometimes visits the pub that Geurami works at to ask for her advice on social situations when she’s not sure how to handle them. The two have their own iconic greeting as well, the by now famous “Woo to the Young to the Woo” – “Dong to the Geu to the Rami”.

Despite her occasionally detached behavior, it’s clear enough when Young Woo cares for a person. She might not be able to show affection by skinship or verbal communication very well, but she has a very clear sense of justice and she’s able to at least try to empathize when people spell out to her how they feel. Especially when the relationship between her and Joon Ho starts to develop, Young Woo is prepared to step out of her comfort zone if it means she’ll be able to relay her true feelings to him properly.

The main dramatic plot twist surrounding Young Woo occurs when it’s revealed that she’s actually the illegitimate daughter of Hanbada’s rival law company Taesan’s CEO, Tae Soo Mi (played by Jin Kyung). She and Young Woo’s father had been dating in secret as teenagers, but as Soo Mi was from a wealthy family, it was considered a scandal that she’d gotten pregnant out of wedlock with a poor guy, so she gave the child to him after she’s given birth and he was asked to disappear from her life, even if that meant that he had to give up his own law career. So he did, and mother dear never ever even bothered inquiring after her daughter again. As it happens, Hanbada’s CEO Han Seon Young (played by Baek Ji Won) has always seen Tae Soo Mi as a rival, and also somehow is an old friend of Young Woo’s father. Honestly, I’m not exactly sure about this as their relations to each other weren’t elaborated on in detail, but it just seemed like they all knew each other from law school or something. Anyways, Han Seon Young eventually finds out about Young Woo being Soo Mi’s daughter and plots to use this against Soo Mi, as she’s just about to be elected Minister of Justice. Both women try to get Young Woo and her father out of the picture when they find out, to “protect them”, but we all know everything they do is to just protect their own images. I couldn’t really sympathize with either of them, I’m just glad their feud kind of blew over in the end (at least for now). But more about that later.

Let me go over Young Woo’s Hanbada team mates one by one.
First of all there’s Jung Myung Seok, who is like her senior or mentor, if you like. He is basically the team leader and although he’s skeptical as soon as Young Woo steps in, he’s the first person to change his mind about her after seeing her skills. He’s able to see through the complications her disability may bring after just a day, and keeps giving her new tasks to develop herself. Throughout the series we find out some more details about his personal life, especially when he gets sick. He’s diagnosed with Stage 3 stomach cancer, possibly caused by being a workaholic. He’s always been so fixated on work that it even ruined his marriage, and even though his ex-wife comes back in the picture after he is diagnosed, in order to give their relationship another chance she actually asks him to quit Hanbada as she won’t be able to take it again if nothing changes when he gets discharged, giving him some serious food for thought. Anyways, Myung Seok is a good guy and a respectable lawyer, although he’s faced the duality of the job more than once. Even when you find out your client is in the wrong, you have the responsibility to defend them, even if it goes against social justice. It’s up to each lawyer to decide in that, but he has always chosen the client’s needs before justice, as he claims when Young Woo asks him for advice towards the end of the series. He’s a good mentor, he doesn’t tell Young Woo what she should do but encourages her to choose what kind of lawyer she wants to be by herself.

Then there’s Choi Soo Yeon, Young Woo’s classmate from law school, who initially is a bit annoyed by Young Woo’s appointment to her team as she’s always seen her as a rival, but who eventually opens up to her more and becomes a good and loyal friend to Young Woo. She initially has a crush on Joon Ho, but chooses to step away when she finds out his affection for Young Woo without too much resentment – she even starts supporting the two of them. I’d describe her personality as trying to be tough while she’s actually really sweet. We also see some out-of-office scenes with her, and this only helps to gain more sympathy for her as we see her struggle with blind dates. She even goes on a date with the owner of the pub Geurami works at one time, but he creeps her out with his relentless food-related dad jokes. When they meet more often on other occasions, it seems like they can put it behind them, though. While struggling through her own stuff and cases, Soo Yeon gets another shock as she suddenly finds herself attracted to her co-worker Kwon Min Woo.

Kwon Min Woo, nicknamed Tactician Kwon Min Woo, is the team member who remains suspicious of Young Woo for the longest time. He doesn’t treat her as an equal, but as a rival, and he even strives to work her out of Hanbada for a while. When rumors start spreading about Young Woo being hired by Hanbada because of the CEO’s connections to her father (and the fact that her mother is Tae Soo Mi), Min Woo adds fuel to the fire by starting to write posts on the company’s bulletin board. He doesn’t seem to be a very sympathetic guy until the end, especially when he makes a secret deal with Tae Soo Mi herself to get Young Woo to either quit or get fired from Hanbada. However, Soo Yeon seems to have a good influence on him, as he starts to adapt more and more to behavior that she finds attractive in a man, and in the end he also gives up on his deal with Tae Soo Mi, as he claims he ‘wants to start living like a fool’ – another quote derived directly from something Soo Yeon says to him. So yeah, it seems like he turns around a little at the end, but I still don’t trust him completely.

And then of course there’s Lee Joon Ho. He’s not an attorney himself, but he’s basically the standard litigation officer for Young Woo’s team, as he often helps them out with their cases, drives them to witness interrogations and helps to secure evidence for them. From day one, he’s nice to Young Woo and seems to find her very interesting. He becomes her first friend at the office, and he agrees to have lunch with her every day, giving her an opportunity to talk about whales in her free time. He also helps her concur the revolving doors of the office (the ‘One, Two, Three’ dance they do T^T) and at times when she feels discouraged about representing her clients properly, he’s always there to remind her of her qualities. As he falls for her he’s not even bothered by her ASD, but it does cause a certain tension between them, especially when they visit his sister and Young Woo overhears her telling Joon Ho that he can’t date ‘someone like her’, because it’ll mean he’ll just always have to ‘take care of her’. Because of this Young Woo becomes aware of the fact that, just like with her father, she might make the people she loves feel lonely because she can’t return their affection in the same way. She decides, with her own logic, that it would be better for Joon Ho if they break up, but when she sees that it breaks his heart, she doesn’t know how to deal with it. Seriously, that breakup was one of the most heart-wrenching ones ever because you could just understand both sides so well. Young Woo just states her conclusion to the situation, the resolve she deems most appropriate, as if it were a case. Also, something suddenly reminds her of the case while she’s in the middle of her breakup and she just goes on to talk about the case, as that’s how her mind works. Joon Ho, shocked by the sudden declaration of break-up, is heartbroken to see her move on from the topic to something else so quickly and spells out to her that it really hurts his feelings how she just changes the topic like that, to which Young Woo can only give a simple apology. You can’t be angry with either of them because you know that Young Woo can’t help the way she is, the way her mind works, but on the other side you also really understand Joon Ho’s feelings and frustrations. I’m glad they were able to work it out though, at least Young Woo was able to explain to him her reason for breaking up, making Joon Ho understand that she did it out of concern for him, to which he is able to reflect better on his own feelings. I really liked how they finally got back together, how they had that talk in the car where Joon Ho compared their relationship to that of a cat and its owner, how the cat also doesn’t always return the affection, and how sometimes it can make him feel lonely, but it can also make him feel very happy when they do get chances to connect. And the way Young Woo then says, ‘that’s not a fair analogy because the cat also loves the owner very much’, before she slipped out of the car and how they smiled at each other through the car window while processing that this meant that they were getting back together, that was really cute.

I now would like to go over all the episodes one by one to give a brief summary of how every case taught Young Woo something new and valuable.

The first episode concerned an elderly couple, Young Woo’s old neighbors from her childhood. It was a case that worked out in her favor, as she was able to prove that the wife did not actually cause her husband’s death. The thing here was that these neighbors happened to be the people present when Young Woo uttered her very first (law-related) words as a child. The husband was always very hot-tempered and got in a fight with her dad at the time, which caused her to panic and start yelling law jargon. When her dad found out about her skill to memorize law terms and rules, the wife was there to praise the fact that she might become a lawyer one day. This case ends victorious for Young Woo, and it was so impactful that I couldn’t help but celebrate with her – this was the case that initially proved her skills to her team members.

The second case was about a feud between two families – a daughter from one side and a son from the other were getting married, but as they walked away from the altar, the bride’s dress slipped off, causing a big scandal. Everything regarding this case was handled by the bride’s father, but it was very clear that this was nothing but a political marriage, the bride and groom didn’t even love each other. In fact, the bride turned out to be in love with another woman, and the case ends when she personally calls off the lawsuit altogether to make an escapade with her true love. This case just really proved to me that some rich families only care about throwing around their money on big scandal spectacles and they don’t actually care about the real problem – the daughter never wanted any of it, and was just miserable that she was continuously set up with marriages she wasn’t interested in.

The third case was one of the heaviest, in my opinion. Young Woo was asked to defend another autistic person, but this person’s case of ASD was on a completely different level than hers. It just really showed that some people might see all cases of autism as the same, that people who have autism all automatically understand each other, which isn’t the case at all. This was one of the most frustrating cases to watch for me, honestly. A severely autistic young man is accused of murdering his older brother, but he can’t communicate anything properly, and as soon as people start asking him questions, he just starts screaming. In the end, it becomes clear that the older brother committed suicide, and the autistic brother was just trying to save him, but as the defendent wasn’t able to testify properly because of his severe autism and just said ‘Yes’ to everything, they couldn’t help him. After this case, Young Woo temporarily loses her confidence and even quits her work for a while as she’s distraught by the knowledge that she’s not able to defend someone like herself properly, that she can’t be dependable as a lawyer. What really pissed me off during this case was that the prosecution really crossed a line by drawing a comparison between Young Woo and the defendent. Seriously, what was his deal making it so personal? He was one of those people who just saw autism as one and the same thing for everyone, and he just went on about how the fact that the defendent couldn’t properly testify meant they should also question the legitimacy of Young Woo’s performance as an attorney. It was disgusting.

The fourth episode was about Geurami’s father, who got himself in a pickle because of a deal made with his two older brothers after their father passed away. They basically tricked him into signing an agreement that would lead to him getting the least profit of the heritage. They used some alleged law rule as an argument to persuade him to sign it, and this was against the law, but they had a hard time getting anyone to witness that they had actually used this argument. This was frustrating because the two brothers just seemed to bribe anyone who could testify against them, even after Young Woo’s team managed to get them to agree to testify. However, here they managed to still get their way as Geurami and her father went to provoke the two brothers into attacking them. Honestly, those two brothers were despicable. They literally used their status as older brothers against their youngest brother so he couldn’t refuse them, and then tricked him into suffering the most less and gaining the most debt, even though he had a family to support. And then when he came to confront them, they only scolded him being disrespectful while THEY had made him lose everything, financially. It just makes me so mad when people who did a bad thing make others feel like they are the bad ones. Like, at least own up to your bad deeds. Anyways, when all was settled they suddenly came crawling back, saying stuff like ‘we also don’t have much, please forgive us’, like, yeah, go to the moon.

The fifth case, the one about the ATM companies, didn’t interest me much content-wise, but it was definitely a case that proved how being a lawyer can be difficult, as you can’t let your own judgement play a part. This is the first case that Young Woo encounters in the series in which it turns out that her client isn’t actually the truthful one, and the outcome leaves a bitter taste. Despite being able to identify all the blatant signs of someone lying, Young Woo still looks past it, and she blames herself for it afterwards.

Then the sixth case, another frustrating one, about a mother that wants to be reunited with her daughter. The mother just happens to be a North Korean defector who is in jail for alleged assault on a woman who supposedly had money that belonged to her. The most frustrating thing here was that there were so many unfair forces working against them. The assaulted was already bruised up because of her abusive husband, but the doctor making the autopsy report just happened to be very biased against North Korean defectors, and he manipulated the report according to his own views. Luckily, the judge they worked with for this case saw the facts for what they were and they managed to acquit the mother of her charges, but not without any emotional process. This was a case Soo Yeon was in charge of in which Young Woo was assigned to help, and this was a good cooperation as Soo Yeon was quite emotionally involved by the mother’s story, and Young Woo was able to look at it more objectively.

The seventh case and the first 2-part arc of the series was about a group of inhabitants that objected a highway being built right through their village. In this case, for the first time in the series, Hanbada was set opposite Taesan, and this is where Young Woo meets her biological mother Tae Soo Mi for the first time. They eventually manage to win the case by proving that the procedure of applying for the village’s beautiful tree as a natural monument was sabotaged, and that with this approval, the highway construction would not be allowed to happen. At the end of this 2-parter, Young Woo confronts Tae Soo Mi with the fact that she’s her daughter, leaving Soo Mi in complete shock.

The eight case was about the self-proclaimed leader of a children’t liberation movement who hijacked a bus of kids on their way to their after-school academy to take them to the mountains and play to their heart’s content instead. This one hit differently as it involved children, mainly children who were denied any playtime, even when they weren’t even teenagers yet. Their parents only wanted them to study, even after school was out they had to go straight to the academy to continue studying. The kids that were on the hijacked bus actually had the greatest time of their lives for once, but the entire focus went to this guy (who was even said academy’s director’s son) being a kidnapper. He just wanted these kids to be able to play and let them be kids, as he also didn’t get that luxury when he was little. His mother, the academy’s director, was forced to reflect on the fact that she was too busy caring for other children’s education than to make sure her own child was doing okay. This case really highlighted a common aspect of South Korean society – the education system that basically forces children to put their academics before everything, even their own physical and mental health. The duality of this case was that this guy, who even changed his name to ‘Fart’ just so he could make children laugh when they said it, was shamed for rebelling against a system that was just wrong. I’m glad at least they got to show everyone in the courtroom this in the end.

The ninth case again hit differently, as Young Woo is asked to defend a client who is accused of sexually abusing a mentally handicapped girl. Despite the fact that the two were in a relationship, the girl’s mother had twisted the story so that it would seem the guy took advantage of her child, just because she didn’t approve of their relationship and there were rumors of him pulling the same trick with other mentally handicapped girls before (we don’t find out if this is true or not). The girl comes to Young Woo to tell her that it wasn’t abuse, that she consented and that she loved the guy and vice versa, but once in the courtroom the pressure becomes too much for her and she’s not able to give the same statement to the judge, not with her mother there. Here again, it becomes clear that a handicapped person will always be seen as some sort of victim, especially when it’s a woman. In the earlier case of the autistic brother, people were quicker to accuse him because of his build and aggressive tendencies, but I think that even if the handicapped girl had been able to testify that she had consented, her mother would have still made sure her story was turned around.

The tenth case was another frustrating one, it was about three mates who had promised to share the money if one of them won the lottery, but when one of them did, he ended up denying this promise. While it was initially hard to back this case up since it seemed to be just a promise between friends that wasn’t fulfilled, one of these three men takes action to show the lawyers just how much he depended on that promise. He even brings his wife to the office to show how much he loves her and wants to be able to support her financially. As they help him get his share of the money, however, he makes the worst transformation. As soon as he gets his hands on the money, he turns on his wife, files for a divorce, and starts spending it on expensive stuff. It’s also revealed that he’s had an affair all along with another woman, and he becomes increasingly aggressive. The case ends rather dramatically as the guy dies in a car accident when he frantically wants to chase after his wife, but I do think it ended for the best because his wife and their two kids got all the money in the end. Seriously, this man creeped me the heck out.

The eleventh case was about a company that suddenly started prioritizing firing female employees as opposed to their husbands (in the cases of married couples working at the same company), even though several of these women had given their entire lives to the company, even at the cost of not taking full advantage of their maternity leave. Here Young Woo is faced with a very eccentric lawyer who defends these women, who is an activist in female rights herself. The judge from the North Korean defector case returns here as well, but in this case it doesn’t end favorably for the women, on the contrary, all their accusations are dismissed. Young Woo is flabbergasted when she finds out how casual the women and their eccentric attorney when it comes to preparing for their next trial, and how optimistic they remain even after losing the case. At the end of this case, Myung Seok finds out that he’s sick.

The twelfth case of the series, the second 2-parter, involves the team taking a trip to Jeju Island. Myung Seok is by now aware of his diagnosis and therefore has a different motive of taking a trip there with his team, taking the opportunity to visit some places he holds dear from when he went there on his honeymoon. The trip becomes kind of like a holiday, in which Joon Ho also introduces Young Woo to his sister who lives there. But of course there’s also still there for a case. One of Young Woo’s dad’s regular customers has complained that he had to pay 3,000 won just to enter a certain area in Jeju because it was close to a temple with a cultural heritage status, even though he wasn’t even visiting that specific temple. He claims that he’s willing to issue a lawsuit just to get his 3,000 won back (to each his own). Anyways, they will have to defend this dissatisfied man opposite a legion of monks from the temple as the defendants. During this trip, a lot of things happen also outside of the case, such as the breakup between Young Woo and Joon Ho, and the blossoming feelings between Soo Yeon and Min Woo. In the meantime, Myung Seok gets hospitalized there after collapsing in the courtroom, and it becomes Young Woo’s personal mission to track down the chef of a certain meat noodle restaurant that Myung Seok wanted to visit but couldn’t because it closed down. The case closes in their favor at the end, as Myung Seok suggests a service at Hanbada to the abbot through which they can get special funding for their cultural heritage area.

The final two episodes feature the thirteenth and final case of the series, and here Young Woo isn’t just confronted with a very tricky case, but she also has to work with an attorney who goes against everything she stands for – and vice versa.

Which leads me to introduce Attorney Jang Seung Joon (played by Choi Dae Hoon). Honestly, when he was introduced the first time, I thought he was really eccentric and funny. The way he and Myung Seok seemed to have this bromance thing going on, how he turned this electric chair upside down in his office. But when he appeared after that, he only just seemed to be intolerable. He first publicly humiliated Myung Seok in the cafeteria after Myung Seok’s case caused him to lose a specific contract he had with a client. And when he has to take over Young Woo’s team when Myung Seok undergoes and recovers from surgery, he just became the most ridiculous person ever. He turns out to be the classical example of a corrupt lawyer who won’t hesitate to commit to bribes and take advantage of connections in order to get people on his side. As he’s from the same university as Min Woo, he immediately takes a favoritism-based liking to him and even urges Min Woo to follow him into using their alumni status to make a good impression on other seniors from the same college. It aggravated me so much when Seung Joon went along with the plan of the defendant to bribe the judge simply because he was also from the same college – it was only more than right that the judge immediately recognized what was happening and got really offended and walked out. Seriously, what the heck were they thinking, he even asked Min Woo to tag along, dragging him through the mud while he wasn’t even aware of the plan!

The case they are faced with concerns a big investment company (I believe) that gets hacked, losing about 4 million people’s personal data. The plaintiffs want to focus on the fact that the company should have had better security software installed, and Young Woo’s team keeps trying to bypass their arguments, but it’s not easy. And then we find out that Tae Soo Mi’s own son, a 17-year old computer science prodigy, is responsible for the hacking, and that he was urged by the company’s co-CEO himself. Choi Sang Hyun (played by Choi Hyun Jin) feels really bad about what he’s done, especially after he finds out the other co-CEO attempted suicide out of despair and it was never his intention to let it come that far. He comes clean to his mother about it, but Tae Soo Mi tells him to keep quiet as she’s just about to be elected Minister of Justice and this really can’t happen right now. But Sang Hyun is determined to give himself in, and after various attempts (all of which obstructed by his mother), he comes to Young Woo, as he already figured out they are half brother and sister by then. However, entering his confession as evidence goes against their client’s defense, so this is where Young Woo has to decide what kind of lawyer she wants to be. Tae Soo Mi also gets involved in trying to send her son away so he can’t testify in person, but Young Woo manages to persuade her. She even steps away from her Minister of Justice position to focus on being a good mother to her child. In the meantime, Han Seon Young herself also got involved in the case as she reckoned this would bring more shame to Tae Soo Mi and she wouldn’t even have to publish the article about Young Woo being her illegitimate daughter. In the end, she just lets Tae Soo Mi ‘get off easily’ after she watches her renounce her political position.
The story reaches full closure here as Young Woo and her dad don’t have to go anywhere, no one’s reputation will be ruined, and Young Woo and Joon Ho get back together. The series ends with a victorious moment of Young Woo as she finally manages to tackle the revolving doors of the office building by herself and proclaims that she identifies the new feeling/emotion she has unlocked as a ‘sense of fulfillment’.

All in all, I really liked that this series dealt with all sorts of cases. From murder suspects to copyright infringement cases, from emotional to political cases, all sorts of themes came by and that was very interesting to see, as each case of course asks for a different kind of approach and defense that can be used. I also liked how for every case, the judge and opposing parties were different, it just gave a very real insight in how they’re faced with different people with different mindsets and approaches for every single case. Some prosecutors are more complacent, some judges are more susceptible to kiss-assery, some people let themselves get bribed, others are more lenient. It’s always so easy to think in black and white, to feel like ‘justice should be served’, but this drama definitely showed that that’s not as easy in practice. As a lawyer, you must be able to set aside your own feelings and thoughts about a person, you must be able to defend someone even if you know they’re in the wrong without feeling bad about it. And even if you do, you must be able to justify it as you’re ‘simply doing your job’. It’s definitely not an easy job and I’m still flabbergasted at how Young Woo was able to take this challenge on, especially since being an attorney is such an important job. You have to be representative, you have to present eloquently and confidently, and she is not even able to look people in the eye directly. I can imagine how that would not seem very trustworthy, how people wouldn’t opt for her as a person to defend them, and that’s just one thing that she has to prove to the world, and to herself. It’s heartwarming to see how she wants to challenge herself in that, how she strives the become a dependable lawyer to her clients, and how simultaneously the strives to be a good romantic partner to Joon Ho, even though she knows she will never be able to return the affection in the same way. In this way, her romantic life and professional life drew a kind of unexpected parallel, as she was exploring them both equally at the same time.

I went through many different emotions while watching this drama, one moment I would be so frustrated and mad, and the next I would be enjoying myself so much. I felt the butterflies between Young Woo and Joon Ho, how they gradually got closer and it just felt right. There were a lot of interesting characters, both main and side roles, and it was just really interesting to see so many people in such different situations and how everyone always responds differently to things as well. I remember also mentioning this in my Move to Heaven review, that it was very realistic to see how simple-minded some people could be, how money sometimes meant more to people than other (seemingly) more important things.
How laws and rules can be so convenient until the point where they are used against you, and you have to figure out a way to get around it as they can also be relentless against less fortunate people that can’t fight for their own justice.

I will make some cast comments before I conclude.

I only know Park Eun Bin from Age of Youth because she was my very favorite character there, but even between her role there and here, there is an ocean of difference. I’m more interested to see other dramas with her now, because I feel like she has really impressive versatility in her acting. My first choice would be The King’s Affection because it’s a historical drama and it would again show her in a completely different setting and concept which I’m excited for. I think she did a really good job, I can’t imagine it must have been easy at all to portray this kind of ability when you don’t have any personal experience with what it must be like. As I mentioned in my introduction, people with ASD are usually not considered to be ‘normal’ people, and I have to admit that I too am not very good with certain autistic people because I also tend to get frustrated and impatient with them easily. However, there wasn’t a single moment that I got frustrated with Young Woo because it was so clear that she was aware of her own issues and she really did her best to still challenge herself in them, she put herself outside of her comfort zone multiple times in order to do her job as an attorney and to convince the guy she liked that she really liked him. Even during their breakup, while from our perspective Joon Ho’s feelings would seem to be most understandable, I couldn’t help but feel really bad for Young Woo as well when she simply apologized, because it was just so clear that she didn’t know how else to respond to hurting someone else’s feelings as she’s just wired differently. I think this series did a really good job on putting in perspective the whole notion of handicapped people being seen as an inconvenience, as a burden. No person is the same, even within the autism spectrum, and it’s not right to just dismiss them just because they don’t experience things the same way as ‘normal’ people.

Have I mentioned before that I love Kang Tae Oh? I believe so, in My First First Love, Short, That Man Oh Soo and Run On. There’s also still plenty of dramas he’s in that are on my watch list, so I won’t have to say goodbye to him just yet, haha. Boy oh boy, if ever there was a good guy, it’s Lee Joon Ho. I’ve seen so many reviews and comments referring to him as ‘walking Mr. Green Flag’ to show just how perfect he is. I loved how uncomplicated he was, he didn’t have a real backstory or baggage, and he just was instantly drawn to Young Woo, not even bothered that she was autistic. He was just so sweet, always. And so helpful in the cases, as well. He wasn’t just a love-struck puppy either, he really contributed to the show in his own way. I’m really glad they’re going to wait for him to return from military service before they proceed with season 2, because he can’t be left out!

I was really happy to see Kang Ki Young in this drama. As I’ve mentioned before multiple times, I’ve become so used to him being cast as the comic relief role that I sometimes forget what a great serious actor he can be. I’ve seen him in several things, like High Schooler King of Life, Oh My Ghostess, Let’s Fight Ghost, W- Two Worlds, Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok Joo, the Three Colors of Fantasies series, Tunnel, While You Were Sleeping, I’m Not a Robot, What’s Wrong with Secretary Kim? and Wife I Know. With his role as Jung Myung Seok he definitely proved his quality again, not just as a comedy actor, but as a real serious actor. I wasn’t sure what kind of character he would be, but I really liked that he become Young Woo’s mentor and that he was immediately prepared to change his way of thinking as well, he was the first person at Hanbada who put aside his bias about her as a person with ASD to give her chance based on her abilites. I really liked his character and I hope to see more of him in future dramas!

I didn’t know Ha Yoon Kyung from anything yet, but I’ll probably see more performances of her in the future! I really liked her as Choi Soo Yeon, how her character grew as much as the main character, and how she also had to deal with her own issues, both personally as in her career. It was really nice to see her become such a supporting figure to Young Woo, and even though I didn’t like Min Woo I still couldn’t help myself finding it cute if they’d end up together, especially seeing her fight it so much, haha.

Apparently, I know Joo Jong Hyuk from My ID is Gangnam Beauty and Clean With Passion For Now but I can’t remember him from either drama (whoops). I did feel like I’d seen his face before, so I guess that’s why. His character was very interesting in his duality, because I just couldn’t find him sympathetic until the end, but I still kept hoping he would change and I still liked that he would change himself for Soo Yeon. I think he let go of his stupid intentions at the end of the series, but I still am not 100% sure about it. If a second season comes, I would like to see the relationship between him and Soo Yeon deeper, that’ll be interesting to watch! He was kind of the antagonist, the rival that Young Woo wasn’t even aware of, trying to bring her down behind her back. I do like that Young Woo never gave him any kind of attention, even when she found out that he’d been spreading rumors she never fully let it get to her, and she didn’t go all desperate on him why we would do that to her, either. I guess he could only just give up in the end because it wouldn’t make anything better, and I’m glad that’s what he chose to do.

I haven’t seen anything with Joo Hyun Young before, but Geurami was definitely one of my favorite characters in the show. It was nice to see Young Woo having a friend that was so innately different from her and still allowing her to step into her comfort zone. Like, Geurami even occasionally just hugged Young Woo and she let her – that must be a next level of comfortability for her. I liked that we got to see how they became friends and that Geurami always has Young Woo’s back. Also, when she and the pub owner joined them on their trip to Jeju Island, she just made everything better. I cracked up when she started moving to the sounds of the temple ritual while they were supposed to pray, lol. Her eccentricity and casual attitude just softened a lot of the tension in certain situations, and it really helped make things more entertaining and enjoyable. I also found it funny that she had a small crush on Min Woo in the beginning, even though it never turned very serious and she was forced to step back when she saw him and Soo Yeon caught in a gaze this one time, she was just like ‘looking at the way they’re staring at each other, it’s over for me’, lol. I really liked her, hopefully she’ll do more dramas in the future!

I realized I knew Baek Ji Won from Encounter, where she played Park Bo Gum and P.O.’s mother and I remember because I thought she and P.O. looked so much alike, haha. Anyways, I didn’t realize it before because her character was so different there, but I know I was also very frustrated with her character at that time. Here, she was next level frustrated, though. At first I was all like, hell yeah, a female law firm CEO, and she seemed nice enough too when she took in Young Woo at Hanbada, but then her whole rivalry with Tae Soo Mi came out and that she hired Young Woo knowing she was her daughter because no one else would hire her… and then she actually wanted to use Young Woo to get back at Tae Soo Mi. Honestly, I don’t even know what this feud was about, and I don’t even think Tae Soo Mi ever even acknowledged her, like they never actually came to stand face to face or anything, so what was this about, really? I hope they will get in more detail about this in season two, as the ending did not give me the feeling it was over between them. Anyways, I liked how, despite her kind her face can like, there was a darker side to her acting and it made me really notice her for it.
On a side note, I now see she was also in Fight For My Way, Reunited Worlds and About Time and I don’t remember her from those series, so I should really pay better attention.

It’s been a while since I saw Jin Kyung in a drama! I don’t even remember what the last drama was I saw her in, but I know her from Pinocchio, Blood, Oh My Venus, Gogh The Starry Night, Uncontrollably Fond and Romantic Doctor Teacher Kim (season one, still haven’t seen the second one yet). I guess it’s my first time writing a review on a drama with her in it. Despite my dislike for her character, she really blew me away with her acting in this series, especially in the scene when Young Woo revealed to her that she was her daughter. The way her face changed was incredible. I had hoped that that would’ve made her respond differently, especially when she asked Young Woo if she ever resented her for leaving her, but then the next thing she pulled was visit Young Woo’s father and try to get them to move to Boston?! Like, seriously?! She even went as far as to go all, ‘you promised you would disappear, why are you showing your face again’, like WOMAN. He DID disappear, he gave up his entire law career just so you wouldn’t get into any scandals, what gives you the right to come to him with this BS now?! Damn. At least she decided to be a better mom to Sang Hyun than she ever was to Young Woo, but damn. Anyways, in Jin Kyung’s case I’ll just say that, again, if you hated the character, it just means the actor did a good job. And nothing can make me hate Jin Kyung, so there’s that.

I really liked Jeon Bae Soo as Young Woo’s dad. I know him from Fight For My Way, Revolutionary Love, Thirteen But Seventeen, and The King: Eternal Monarch, and in ALL these dramas he played the female lead’s father, lol. He has a really friendly face, and I liked that in this series we also got to see how much he struggled with raising Young Woo as a single father, how hard it must have been for him to raise a daughter that wouldn’t speak or even look at him, and that didn’t like to be held by him. And still, he’s her father, so he can’t get frustrated with her. He still is the single most supporting figure in her life, whether she will acknowledge it or not. I liked his character, also how he got justifiably mad at Han Seon Young and Tae Soo Mi for trying to mess with him and Young Woo, because he just wanted to stay out of that feud, and with good reason. It was sad that he even started considering taking Taesan’s offer to move to Boston, even if it was just to get away from the shit that would hit Young Woo and would make it impossible for her to get another job at a respectable law firm. He had no choice but to let Seon Young take her for the reasons she had because he knew his daughter wouldn’t be able to get such a chance anywhere else. There were some serious layers to his role, he wasn’t just the happy supportive dad, he also got his own backstory explained, and I really felt for him.

Now that I looked it up, I see that I know Choi Dae Hoon from Big, Are You Human Too? and Crash Landing on You, and I guess I remember him mostly from the latter because his face looked really familiar to me (also, I’ve suppressed most of Big since it was just so bad). As I mentioned before, I initially thought he would be a really cool eccentric attorney when he appeared in the first episode, I loved his bickering love-hate relationship with Myung Seok and I had no idea that he would actually be such an insufferable person. Seriously, what DIDN’T this man do that wasn’t bad? He tried to bribe a judge based on connections, he took credit for his employees arguments even after initially dismissing them himself, he left his juniors to the journalists while sneaking away by himself, he screamed at Young Woo for correcting him on his jargon even though later on the judge in court did exactly the same – he just seemed really incompetent at his job in practice. The cases where he defended his client that we get to see, he was constantly slipping up and getting in over his head, and then when his juniors would step up to correct him, he would just get mad at them for challenging his authority, like, seriously man? I had hoped he would be a cool character, but he was one of the most frustrating recurring characters in the whole show. But yeah, I guess that means he also did a good job as an actor, haha. I bet that if he’d been like his first appearance during the entire show, he would’ve been really cool. Now his eccentricity from the beginning kind of stopped making sense to me when he turned out to be such a jerk.

Lastly, I just want to mention that the opening sequence was so soothing but addicting to watch. I never skipped it, purely because it’s so satisfying, even with the happy little music in the background. It just gives such a clean and innocent view of Young Woo’s daily life and how structured it is, from her breakfast kimbap to how she makes her way to work. I also liked the recurring element of whales, orcas and dolphins flying through the air, and how they popped up whenever she had a brilliant idea. It reminded me of that scene from It’s Okay to Not Be Okay, in which they showed the older brother’s excitement through pictures on the street coming to life. He also had ASD, if I remember correctly. The use of whales to add to her perspective and the way she analyzed things and people was very refreshing. I hope that she’ll get to see some whales in real life in the second season, because I was so sad that she and Joon Ho didn’t get to see them when they were in Jeju Island because of their breakup.
Regarding the title, I also want to add that I like how they interpreted the English translation of it. I believe the Korean word ‘isanghan’ can be translated to a variety of words, from ‘strange’ to ‘suspicious’ to ‘unusual’, but many of those words have a slightly negative connotation if you ask me. I think a translation like ‘extraordinary’ fits it much better, because it immediately gives a more positive feel to it, rather than the title referring to the main protagonist as ‘unusual’ or ‘weird’.

With that, I would like to conclude my review, it took me a whole day to write this, haha. I think I’ve now managed to write down the main points I wanted to make about it, and I hope it’s worthwhile to read.
All in all, I found it a very interesting series. I understand the recommendations I got, and although I was prepared to be underwhelmed – as often happens when a series gets overhyped – this wasn’t the case. I find it very impressive how the series was structured, and how, despite its unusual protagonist, it didn’t necessarily became ‘funny’. There’s much to be said about Woo Young Woo’s character, and I get that there may be a funny or amusing aspect about how she was portrayed, but I never stopped taking her seriously. It was fascinating to me how someone with such a handicap would be able to take on such a challenging and representative job as an attorney. It was very insightful to get a different type of look inside the career of a lawyer, even though I’ve seen other law-themed dramas before, but this one still hit differently. I’m very curious what they’ll make of the second season, because I believe it’s been confirmed there will be one. I hope the relationships between Young Woo & Joon Ho and Soo Yeon & Min Woo will be further explored, as well as the origin of the rivarly that Han Seon Young has towards Tae Soo Mi, because that still isn’t clear to me.

All the different cases and the different people and situations featured in those cases just made me realize again how relative everything is. Situations and stories are never black and white, there are so many grey areas and you just have to see who is telling the truth in the end, even after it’s too late. For sure this is a big reason why I’m not that interested in law, because it’s never just about justice, it’s about so much more than that. I liked how this series dealt with all these different cases, and also how there were good and bad ones, and how it wasn’t just about winning a case, but more about becoming aware and learning from your own experiences and mistakes to grow as an attorney, no matter what kind of attorney you wanted to be. To place a person with ASD in such a position seems tricky to me, but I think the writers did a very good job. I haven’t seen any experts or people with ASD react to this, so I can’t say for sure if it’s all entirely accurate, but from the ASD characters I’ve seen portrayed in K-Dramas so far, there are always at least several similar aspects that keep popping up, so I suppose they do have a general idea of certain known symptoms that these people cope with.

I will now go on with my ever growing to-watch list, moving on to a slightly older series from 2018. I hope my reviews remain to be interesting enough to read, I will keep putting my hard work into them! It was nice spending a day on a review again, it’s really felt like a long time since I wrote my last one even though it was within the same month – I’ve just been dealing with a lot of stuff in the meantime, which also caused me to finish the final episodes of this series later than I planned, as I initially went through it quite fast. Anyways, I will keep taking my time to write worthwhile reviews and I’ll be back soon, so stay tuned!

Bye-bee~

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

Drunk in Good Taste
( #좋맛탱: 좋은 맛에 취하다 / #Jotmattaeng: Joeun Mase Chwihada)
MyDramaList rating: 6.5/10

Hiya! Told you I’d be back soon! You know how nice it can be to just watch a short drama in-between lengthier ones? It really feels like a palette cleanser and a breather and gives me new energy to start on something lengthier again afterwards. So here we are! I can’t say for sure how this one ended up on my list but I probably noticed it somewhere, thought it looked cute, and added it. Sometimes it’s as simple as that. And it definitely was cute! This will be a pretty short review, not everything needs to be equally elaborate, and since this was such a short show, there’s not too much to discuss! I still wanted to share my thoughts on it though, so I hope I can still make this one as worthwhile to read as any other review I write.

Before I start, I just want to share that I’ve now found a new website to watch K-Drama on. I used to watch on DramaCool and other sites like that, but it always bothered me how many pop-ups and ads those sites brought with them. Now I discovered HiTV (www.gohitv.com). It has great quality, no pop-ups or ads, and it’s very up-to-date with new shows. It also has some variety shows on it! Even though it doesn’t have the Netflix K-Drama on it (since, you know, they’re Netflix K-Drama), I was able to find a short Naver drama like this on it! I could watch it in HQ without any disturbance. All in all, I would definitely recommend! I thought it might also be nice to share the platforms I use from time to time. I still have to explore it a bit more, but so far I’m really liking what this site has to offer.

Drunk in Good Taste is a Naver drama which you can either watch as 10 episodes of 15 minutes, or 2 episodes of each about an hour. I actually couldn’t find the 10-episode version anywhere, so I watched the 2-episode version on HiTV. Anyways, the story is about a 20-year old sophomore girl called Jung Choong Nam (played by Kim Hyang Gi). She’s just starting at her new college and is determined to blend in, although she feels a bit awkward. She doesn’t really have friends, she just moved in with her older sister but they’re kind of estranged from each other. Choong Nam’s big passion is desserts, as she’s been infatuated with sweets since she was a child. She is even a dessert influencer, so she has a “Stargram” account on which she posts pictures of all kinds of sweets and desserts, and she has a pretty big amount of followers, too. Sweets are what helps her through the day, like when she’s awkward to meet new people, she pictures them as desserts (to each their own, I guess). On her first day, she mistakes a fellow sophomore for a sunbae, and this leads to them actually becoming close friends. This fellow sophomore is Lee Yeon Nam (played by Kim Min Gyu). He seems to be interested in Choong Nam from the start, and looks out for her a lot, especially towards a certain senior she can’t shake off.
When Choong Nam gets bothered by some negative comments on her Stargram, she decides she needs to improve the quality of her photos and decides to join the Photography Club, dragging Yeon Nam with her. In this club, they meet Tae Yi (played by Lee Yoo Young) , a popular female sunbae who immediately develops an interest in Yeon Nam, even though he doesn’t have eyes for anyone else but Choong Nam. Tae Yi is the kind of girl who only cares about appearances. She seems to be pretty shallow in the beginning, she shares her entire life on Stargram and basically only uploads selfies. She’s gotten used to people admiring her, calling her pretty, and sending her gifts, like fans to a celebrity. She’s rumored to get herself a new boyfriend every month, and that’s why it never seems to be very serious. When she obviously goes after Yeon Nam, he also immediately notices it for what it is, and judges her for it too. Even though Yeon Nam already has feelings for Choong Nam from the start, Choong Nam is not aware of this initially. When Tae Yi asks her to help her out with him, she just agrees. In the meantime, she secretly has a crush herself, on the manager of her favorite sweetshop Daldaguri (also her Stargram account name). This manager also happens to be the person who introduced her to sweets when she was a child.
The other part of the story is about Choong Nam’s sister Seo Hyun (played by Noh Eul), who is dealing with her own issues. She works at a publishing company, but she has trouble coming up with new interesting ideas for a book. She’s also pretty stoic/emotionless, so she’s not very skilled at opening up to people. This also doesn’t make her reunion with her younger sister any easier, as she also doesn’t like sweets – they have very little to talk about. However, Choong Nam manages to get her sister to open up to the concept of desserts, and Seo Hyun takes enough interest in it to decide to make this her new publishing project. She starts meeting up frequently with Daldaguri’s manager to interview him, and in the meantime she also becomes more comfortable with Choong Nam and her colleagues at work. When Daldaguri’s manager eventually admits his feelings for her, she ends up rejecting him as she has by then realized how much she likes to be focussed on her work. There’s also another person at her company who starts showing interest in her, but the show ends without her ending up with either of them.

All in all, it’s a very simple and cute romance story, with desserts and social media as background themes. As the subtitle on the poster says, it’s exactly that, ‘a romance sweet like a dessert’. That’s pretty much all there is to it. It’s mostly about Choong Nam and Yeon Nam getting together, and mainly him supporting her with her Stargram account. On the other hand, he also helps her see that she doesn’t need to change who she is – both in terms of her social media and in real life. He’s always the person pointing out to her that she’s perfect the way she is, awkwardness and all. And for social media, he shows her that, if there are 2 negative comments among a 100 positive ones, she shouldn’t have to change her style just to please those 2.
Despite the story being about them as a couple, Choong Nam is definitely the main character. Yeon Nam doesn’t get any backstory of his own, and he mostly just goes along with whatever Choong Nam wants to do. Like, I’m glad that in the end he starts to define his own dreams of working at a publishing company, but he never mentioned anything about that before then. Also, when the Daldaguri’s manager turns out to be his uncle and they live in the same house, nothing is further explained. We don’t get any information about his background, and this makes him a very uncomplicated character, almost too uncomplicated.
Admittedly, besides Choong Nam’s story with her sister, she also doesn’t really get a backstory. Nothing is mentioned about their parents or how they end up living together again. I just assumed that Choong Nam went to live with her sister since it was close to her new college, but I don’t believe they actually explained it.

The story seemed to lack depth, in general. Even when it came to Choong Nam’s ‘crush’ on Daldaguri’s manager, it still didn’t seem to be more than just a childhood crush. He was the first person to introduce her to desserts as a child, but in the flashback he seems to be the exact same age (at least, it’s the same actor) as when Choong Nam is 20 years old. Therefore I immediately thought this was never going to be a serious thing. Especially when it was revealed that he was Yeon Nam’s UNCLE, that definitely made me go, damn… how old is this guy! So yeah, she probably just got attached to him as the charming guy who put sweets in her life. I didn’t actually realize that her crush on him was real, because she never even says that she likes him out loud. When Tae Yi asks her if she does, she just giggles a bit, but doesn’t really respond or confirm it. I don’t know, it didn’t seem that sincere to me. Also, why was she so vague about it towards Yeon Nam if it was really an unrequited love she was struggling with? In the end, she didn’t even mind the guy going after her sister, so it can’t have been such a heavy crush.

This actually brings me to a point that I thought was quite inconsistent. As I said, it seemed to me from the start that Choong Nam was the real main character. However, sometimes we’d switch over to Yeon Nam’s point of view and find that there were several things that Choong Nam was being mysterious about. I thought the way they switched perspectives wasn’t as effective as it could have been. If they wanted to go with Choong Nam as the real MC, the viewer would also have been aware of her real feelings towards the Daldaguri manager, and it wouldn’t have become a secret to us why she suddenly started working part-time at the sweet shop, or why she kept stuff a secret from Yeon Nam. Looking at it this way, it felt like the MC was keeping secrets from us too. We assume that we know her, as she’s the MC and we see her side of the story, but then suddenly there’s a bunch of things going on with her that are revealed through Yeon Nam’s point of view. It just felt a bit inconsistent to me sometimes.

Generally speaking, I’d say the only ‘deeper’ and more serious message in the story was given to us through Tae Yi. She learns the hard way that it’s not wise to put your entire life on social media. She ends up getting a stalker, and her SNS reputation blows up in her face when people start accusing her of promoting fake products. She learns a real lesson, and therefore I would say she has the most character development. She really comes face to face with her own shallowness and decides to become more humble. She changes her profile to private and stops the whole ‘one-month lover’ thing. She even meets up with Yeon Nam to officially tell him that her feelings for him weren’t fake, as he’d claimed they were. She gets over it like an adult. I think that, out of every character in the show, she may have learned the biggest lesson.

I also had a hard time warming up to Seo Hyun, simply because she seemed so stoic. I could never really read from her what her intentions were, or what she was feeling. I think it was good to make her realize that she wanted to put in more effort at work, but creating a love triangle for her and then not playing it out seemed to ultimately create a bit of a loose end. Of course it was fine that she didn’t end up with anyone, but to me it seemed more like they were going to make her choose between the manager and the co-worker – and then they just dropped it.

It may lack depth, of course it’s a very short drama and I can’t say I was completely bothered by the lack of heaviness in the show. The thing that happened to Tae Yi was the one thing that caused some seriousness, and it honestly surprised me a little in-between all the fluffiness of the story. It almost seemed a little out of place, but I did like how they managed to turn it into a plot tool to get Tae Yi’s character to develop and become more mature.
For a short Naver drama, it was cute and romantic. I liked Choong Nam and Yeon Nam, they were adorable together. The way Yeon Nam’s eyes started to shine whenever he looked at her got me going like, ‘Awwww~~’ every single time, and Choong Nam herself was such a cute bunny, too. I liked how awkward they were, it didn’t bother me at all. The only thing that slightly cringed me out was when he sang to her, but that’s just because that kind of stuff cringes me out by default, lol. It must have also been a very cringy scene to film (in the blooper reel that followed the final ending credits, they showed how Kim Min Gyu couldn’t stop laughing while recording it), so I guess I just became conscious of that awkwardness as well.

The final thing I’ll mention is that I loved all the K-Drama references they used. I spotted Secret Garden, The Heirs and Goblin in there, and maybe more. It gave a fun twist to the events and it made me laugh out loud whenever they inserted one. The fact that they used the Goblin scene of them coming through the misty tunnel at the moment of saving Tae Yi from her stalker also lessened the heaviness of the scene, even though it had been pretty intense up to that moment. I liked how they utilized these references for a comic relief effect. And I’m also glad I was able to recognize them.

I think with this I’ve actually mentioned all there is to mention about the events of the story, so let me just get on with some cast comments and my conclusion.

Even though I knew Kim Hyang Gi’s face, I realize I haven’t actually seen her in anything before! The exception being the movie Space Sweepers, where she only had a very small appearance at the end. Anyways, she’s such a cutie patootie! I can’t disagree with Yeon Nam calling Choong Nam a mochi rice cake, because she really does like one, lol. For some reason she reminded me a bit of Yahagi Honoka in Itazura na Kiss, maybe because of her awkward expressions. I liked how she was just a normal girl, she didn’t try to appear particularly pretty or anything like that, but she still got hit on by guys telling her she was ‘just their type’. She was just really cute and also didn’t drag the obliviousness on for too long, which I could appreciate. I liked that she took the initiative with the second kiss, although I was too distracted by the The Heirs reference that had just been made, haha. Anyways, I know she recently starred in a new historical drama with Kim Min Jae, and all in all I just want to see more sides to her acting, so I’ll keep my eyes and ears open for her!

Kim Min Gyu is in almost everything I watch these days, he has a habit of appearing when I don’t expect him, haha. From the series I’ve watched so far, he’s been in Who Are You – School 2015, The Sound of Your Heart, Because This is My First Life, Just Between Lovers and I’ve mostly recently seen him in Backstreet Rookie and A Business Proposal. He was such a fluffy boy here! I really liked his chemistry with Kim Hyang Gi, they were adorably awkward and sweet together. I can never really say anything bad about him, he’s always such a nice familiar face to see. I hope to see more of his dramas in the near future, I know I’m going to see him soon in some of my still-to-watch list series!

The funny thing is, I didn’t recognize Lee Yoo Young from anything, and even when I look at the things I’ve seen from her, I just don’t remember her! Apparently I’ve seen her in Who Are You – School 2015 and Circle, but I really wouldn’t know! I liked how they managed to turn her character around. She seemed like such a typically written female character in the beginning, all about looks and reputation. I hadn’t thought they’d actually give her a wake-up call like that, but it did change her for the better. In the end I didn’t find her as annoying as I thought she would be in the beginning.

I’ve only seen Noh Eul before in A Business Proposal, where she played the real Shin Geum Hee character from that TV series. I couldn’t stop thinking how much she and Xiaoting from Kep1er look alike, either. Anyways, I see that she used to be an idol, and she also hasn’t done that much acting. I don’t know if it was her lack of experience in acting, or that it really was the lack of emotion that Seo Hyun was able to express in the show, but her acting didn’t really stand out to me. She was an interesting enough character, and I get that it might have been the intention to make her open up more, and this did happen, but I still found her too stiff, overall. I would have at least liked to get an explanation on why her character turned out like that, but now it was just like ‘this is her personality, no further details’. Which again, suited this drama in particular, as no character had real depth. But still, I would’ve liked to get a bit more of a warmth to her personality. Let’s see if she’ll show us more in the future!

I don’t know why, but I can’t find any information about the Daldaguri manager. He’s not even credited on any of the sites that I refer to for cast members, so I have no idea who the actor is! I could swear I’ve seen him before, though… Nowhere, not even on AsianWiki where they usually are the most up-to-date about the cast members, was his name even mentioned. I really want to find out where I know him from, so if anyone has an idea, please comment!

And with that, I’ve already come to the end of this short review! As I said, it was a cute and funny little romance story, but I’ll admit that as a drama in itself it wasn’t particularly that good. It lacked depth and left some loose ends. Even for such a short story, they didn’t wrap up every single storyline they showed, like how Yeon Nam and the Daldaguri manager were related and ended up living at the same house, and how Seo Hyun was going to proceed with her career. Leaving out those details made the story a bit too uncomplicated, and I believe it wouldn’t have done anyone any harm if they’d included at least a few of these plots. Besides that, I enjoyed watching it well enough, with its references and cute fluffiness. Just looking at all those Desserts made me less Stressed. And I think it was interesting that they added in a warning about social media privacy as well, since I wouldn’t have thought they would address something like that. Of course, showing what you love and what you do in your daily life on social media can be fun, but we always have to remember that it can reach more people than we’d expect, and that it’s never wise to reveal too much of yourself on there. No matter how convenient and ideal it seems, the Internet will always be a dangerous and risky place as well.

So now I will finally start on the new series that has just finally been completed on my country area’s Netflix. It won’t be too hard to guess which one, and I’m definitely wary of how much it’s been hyped, but I still want to take my time and give it a fair chance.

Until next time!

Bye-bee!!

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

Something in the Rain
(밥 잘 사주는 예쁜 누나 / Bap Jal Sajuneun Yeppeun Nuna / Pretty Noona Who Buys Me Food)
MyDramaList rating: 7.5/10

Hi everyone! Summer is almost over and here we are with a new review. I actually meant to finish this one in August, but with my holidays and especially how crazy busy it got once I got back to work afterwards, I wasn’t able to. So unfortunately, no reviews in August! But on the other hand, this felt like a perfect drama to end the summer and to start the autumn season with! I was going to start on a newly hyped series first instead, but since it wasn’t completed yet, I decided that in the meantime, I would continue on with my list and this was also one that kept piquing my interest. I’m glad I finally got the chance to watch it, because it was certainly something! It has been on my list for a while, and I didn’t know anything other than that it was about a relationship between two people with an age gap, but there are definitely multiple things to say about it, so I’d say let’s get started!

Something in the Rain is a 16-episode Netflix K-Drama, with each episode lasting about one hour and a half. The story is about Yoon Jin Ah (played by Son Ye Jin), a 35-year old woman who works at a chain coffee company. The company, called Coffee Bay, basically manages several coffee stores throughout the city. She’s a supervisor, which means that she has several stores under her supervision that she has to monitor and occasionally inspect in case there’s a decrease in sales or when they receive any complaints. She still lives at her parents’ house with her mother (Gil Hae Yeon), her father (Oh Man Seok) and her younger brother Seung Ho (Wi Ha Joon), a college student who prefers to spend his time gaming. Her best friend Seo Kyung Seon (played by Jang So Yeon) works at one of the coffee shops that Jin Ah owns. The two of them are like sisters, always meeting up after work, drinking together, taking care of each other. One day, Kyung Seon’s younger brother Seo Joon Hee (played by Jung Hae In) returns from the US branch of the game developing company he works at. Jin Ah and him have also known each other since they were young, and they get along very well. After meeting again (he works in the same office building as Jin Ah and lives on the same floor opposite Kyung Seon so they walk into each other a lot), they start hanging out more after work as well, getting dinner together, walking home together, etc. They’re not using any words to describe their relationship, but it’s pretty obvious to see that at least Joon Hee has a crush on Jin Ah, probably already had it for a while. Jin Ah is a bit more restrained at first, but it’s undeniable how comfortable she feels around Joon Hee. Everything just clicks so well between them, and it also doesn’t take that long for her to confirm the feelings between them.
What follows is the story of a heartwarming relationship between a younger guy and an older woman, who just really look like they’re meant to be together, but aren’t given the chance to silently and peacefully enjoy each other’s company once people start finding out. Especially Jin Ah’s mother becomes a very big nuisance, and of course the relationship also puts a strain on Jin Ah’s friendship with Kyung Seon. In the meantime, Jin Ah also has to deal with a couple of other annoying situations, such as a persistent ex-boyfriend and a sexual harrassment situation at work.

When I finished the first episode of this series, I was pretty mindblown. I thought it was SO good. I really just sat there thinking, ‘Seriously, how is it already THIS good?!’ And this opinion lasted until about halfway through the series. I’m not saying that it all suddenly went downhill for me or anything, but from some point on (from the point that people started finding out about their relationship and the real drama started), the ridiculousness of the situation took away some of the joy for me. The drama was dragged out and just became frustrating. I just couldn’t understand why people were making such a big fuss about Jin Ah and Joon Hee’s relationship. All the more because I just found out that they were literally only FOUR years apart. From people’s reactions in the show I thought there must’ve at least been a 10-year difference or something, but people were seriously judging them because she was only four years older than him?! This just confirms to me how ridiculous the whole thing was. Of course I’m going to go into much more detail, but I just wanted to have this explained from the start. My ranking after the first few episodes was a bit higher than what it is now after finishing the entire series.

When we meet Jin Ah in the first episode, we immediately get to see that she’s dealing with several annoying things. We see her get dumped by her boyfriend for not ‘exciting him anymore’. We see her get blamed at work for something that actually happens because a male director forgets to look into it and doesn’t admit to his mistake. We see her get pushed around and touched by male seniors during work dinners and karaoke parties. We see her get nagged by her mom as soon as she gets home. She doesn’t have it easy, but she also doesn’t go against it. It’s like she just doesn’t have the energy to fight it, so she just kind of rolls with it without addressing the real issues. She seems pretty easygoing, but in these situations, she’s a bit TOO easygoing. Honestly, in that sense, Jin Ah can be seen as a bit of a pushover. When her ex-boyfriend starts bothering her, she keeps agreeing to meet and talk with him, even though she should’ve known that it was only going to make things worse. When she finally decides to fight back against the sexual harrassment at work, she comes face to face with the fact that she’s been going along with it for about ten years. In the beginning it really seemed to me as if Jin Ah wasn’t as strong and independent as she initially came across as. She’s a 35-year old woman still living at her parents’ house, she can’t say no to people (especially toxic people), she can’t rebel against injustice even though she’s aware what’s going on. The only moments we see her be truly at peace is when she is with Kyung Seon and Joon Hee.

After their mom died and their dad abandoned them, Kyung Seon and Joon Hee have always been welcome at the Yoon house. Their parents knew each other, as friends of acquaintances (I’m not sure), and Jin Ah’s mom felt partially responsible for taking care of them after they were left alone. She would always cook for them when they’d visit and referred to them as her own ‘other’ children. Jin Ah and Kyung Seon are best friends, Joon Hee and Seung Ho are friends, they’re all like one big family and that’s how it has always been. So of course, when Jin Ah and Joon Hee start dating, in secret at first, that’s one thing to consider. Also, people at work would start looking at them different… Things would just change. Jin Ah seems to be a bit more occupied with this than Joon Hee. When they’re together, everything is perfect. When they’re around other people, Jin Ah definitely tends to care more about what other people are going to think. Admittedly, Joon Hee manages to persuade her not to think or care too much about it, for example when he takes her on a trip to meet his friends, who also don’t make a big deal about it. But still, there’s a duality about Jin Ah’s feelings towards her relationship with Joon Hee that I still can’t quite put my finger on. Even though it seems like she wants everyone to just leave them alone, she wants to just show her mom that she can’t force them apart and all that, it still seems to be a thorn in her side that she can’t get everyone to just be okay with her and Joon Hee’s relationship. And this eventually leads to a conflict between them in which it’s brought up that, after all, Joon Hee might be more ‘immature’ than her in the sense that he doesn’t (want to) care about this stuff while she finds she’s unable to fully ignore it. Whether this truly has to do with maturity, IDK, but that’s what it came down to.

Let’s talk a bit more about their relationship, starting from the beginning. Honestly, I thought it was a nice twist from the start to find out the two leads already knew each other. It wasn’t established from the get-go that they were acquainted, so when they met for the first time -as shown in the series- (that beautiful scene of him riding his bicycle in circles around her and her just bursting with laughter), it really felt like a nice and comfortable reunion between two old friends that hadn’t seen each other in a while. Even when they’re not together yet, and let’s be clear: Joon Hee REALLY respects her boundaries while they’re still figuring stuff out, we get to see that even though they’re not trying to get too involved in each other’s business, they do throw sideway glances when they hear the other is going out with another guy/woman. They’re not stopping each other but they’re definitely already ‘minding’ each other’s business. And then, when Jin Ah finally (literally) grabs Joon Hee’s hand, he’s ready to just dive right in. What starts as a series of dinners and aiaigasa walks in the rain, evolves into a series of late night phone calls, late night drives and visits to Joon Hee’s house, any opportunity they can get to meet up and talk and share the small details of their daily lives with one another. It’s a truly heartwarming relationship, and I loved each of these scenes. It’s just so fluffy and soft and sweet, and they just click so well together. You can really see all Jin Ah’s worries fall off her when she’s with Joon Hee, she enjoys his company so much. From their hugs and kisses to their walks and other interactions, it just made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Looking at them, you’d wonder how anyone could be against this.

Seung Ho is the first to find out about it, although I don’t completely remember how it happens. He has a conversation with Joon Hee earlier in the series, when the two aren’t together yet, in which Joon Hee tells him that he has a crush on a 35-year old woman and Seung Ho is like ‘Ewww, that’s like, my sister’s age!’ Little does he know, of course. He seems to be kind of disgusted by it at first, but it doesn’t take long before he (reluctantly) accepts it.
Jin Ah’s dad is the second one to find out, and he is actually told about it by Jin Ah’s ex-boyfriend, who means to use it as a way to sneak his way back into her family’s favor after they separated. This guy is going to get his own paragraph later on, but for now let’s just say that his plan doesn’t work, as Jin Ah’s dad actually seems pretty cool with the idea of his daughter dating a good guy who he’s known since childhood. I think his initial reaction was just to throw off the ex, but he did seem relatively cool with it, overall. I feel like people want to make him look like another toxic parent, but he was nothing like the mom.
When Kyung Seon finds out, they have a whole other issue on their hands. Because this isn’t the same as a random person discovering their secret, this is the person closest to the both of them. For Kyung Seon, there is definitely a factor of betrayal in this relationship. I don’t know how it would’ve been if they had been honest with her about it as soon as their relationship started going that way, so that she would’ve been aware of it from the start, but she actually finds out about it when she discovers Joon Hee’s sketchbook full of drawings of Jin Ah (one with a lipstick kiss on it), and starts connecting the dots all by herself. She’s pissed about it for a while, and even after she and Jin Ah make up and seem to move past it, something definitely breaks in their friendship. I don’t quite understand why Kyung Seon chose this kind of behavior toward Jin Ah, because she must’ve known she never had any malicious intentions towards Joon Hee, but she becomes pretty quick to judge her best friend whenever there is even the slightest suggestion that what is going on between the two of them isn’t serious. For example, the way she reacts when she busts Jin Ah at that blind date and doesn’t even give her a chance to explain what she’s doing there. She just immediately accuses her of toying with Joon Hee’s feelings and looking down on him, while she should’ve known there had to be a reason. She knew how much Jin Ah loved Joon Hee and that she wouldn’t just throw him aside for a blind date after they’d just gotten Kyung Seon’s approval. It just didn’t make any sense to me, the only thing I can think of is that she was already on edge because she was meeting her father at that moment, and she just snapped or something. But even after that, she continues to be angry with her, all the more after facing the consequences with Jin Ah’s mom, although she also knows that that doesn’t come from Jin Ah. She just puts the whole Yoon family in one box and that isn’t fair. All in all, their friendship never becomes completely the same again.
And then there is Jin Ah’s mom, the biggest obstacle of them all. She just doesn’t want to accept it. The only thing she cares about is for Jin Ah to marry a guy who is from a good (wealthy) background and who has a good (stable) financial status. Those are her criteria, feelings aren’t as important as status. That’s probably also why she keeps nagging Jin Ah to make up with her ex-boyfriend, even after he cheated on her, sexually harrassed, stalked and threatened to kill her. I mean, there’s a limit to being conservative and wanting a good and stable marriage for your child. Treating your adult child like they can’t make their own decisions… the gaslighting was NEXT LEVEL. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever seen such a gaslighting character in a K-Drama before. Everyone else was being crazy and unreasonable, and she was the victim because no one could see her point of view. It didn’t occur to her that maybe that was because her point of view was just ridiculous. Seriously, at some point the entire family was so done with her behavior, it was almost amusing. They’d go through this whole drama, explosive fight and all, then she would crawl into bed wallowing in self-pity for a while and you’d just hope she would come to her senses, and then she’d just come back to Jin Ah and tell her she set her up on another blind date. Like, just refusing to accept the situation as it was. It was crazy. She was crazy.
And the worst part was that she was HORRIBLE to Kyung Seon and Joon Hee after finding out. Even though she used to act like a second mother to them, as soon as she found out about her daughter’s involvement with Joon Hee, she couldn’t just calmly tell them that she wasn’t at peace with their relationship. Nah, she had to drag the Seo siblings through the mud, disrespect and look down on them where they stood, telling them they didn’t deserve to become a part of their family. They could never be on the same level as them, with their poor background and lack of stable foundation. Just because their mother died and jerk father abandoned them, as if that was any of their fault. It was disgusting. I really couldn’t believe this woman. She literally caused Jin Ah to break up with Joon Hee right in front of her, just to shut her up. Jin Ah even agreed to go on a blind date just so her mom would stop bringing it up. Of course it didn’t mean anything, it was just a way to keep her mom off her case for another while.
Seriously, her mom ruined everything. And she just wouldn’t admit it! She’d keep saying that Jin Ah was the one who created ‘this mess’, and everyone else was treating her like the bad guy while she just ‘wanted the best for her children’. She was the kind of person that, whenever someone corrected or tried to educate her on something, she would just scoff. The scoffing was excruciatingly annoying, because it just proved that she would never change her mindset. Even when she suddenly ‘apologized’ to Jin Ah in the final episode, I didn’t buy it. I put apology in brackets because it was pure BS to me. ‘I’m sorry, there are just things I need to do as a mom, I couldn’t bear you suffering the consequences of your own decisions.’ Seriously?! Fuck off. And I couldn’t believe Jin Ah actually HUGGED IT OUT with her. Like… what the heck was that?!

After going through a lot of shit regarding Jin Ah’s mom, Joon Hee suddenly decides to move back to the US and work at his company’s branch there again, intending to take Jin Ah with him. This, however, comes at the worst possible time for Jin Ah, since she’s just trying to become independent. She moves out of her parents’ house, finds her own place, and also at work the sexual harrassment case she’s fighting is at its peak. She can’t just abandon everything now and flee to the US. So the two break up.
Some time later, probably a few years (there wasn’t any “….years later” mention as far as I know), they meet again at Seung Ho’s wedding. Joon Hee is just temporarily back in South-Korea for a holiday, and Jin Ah is dating another good-for-nothing guy who’s constantly on the phone for work and doesn’t care to make any time for her. He is, of course, exactly the kind of guy her mom approves of. Anyways, as soon as Jin Ah and Joon Hee see each other again, they both know it was never over between them. Jin Ah wants to try going back to how they were before they even started dating, but they both know that’s not possible. She only suggests it because she doesn’t want it to be awkward when they’ll run into each other. In any case, Jin Ah decides to take up an offer from a friend to live with her on Jeju Island and help her out with her coffee business there.
Just to give another example of Gaslighting Mom: she actually calls Jin Ah “childish” for moving to Jeju Island all of a sudden. Like, seriously? Your nearly 40-year old daughter finally moves out of her parents’ house to start her independent life as an adult away from all the toxicness of her home environment. Sounds like the most mature decision ever to me. Her mom just had a really backwards way of thinking, I guess. After Jin Ah moves to Jeju, Joon Hee comes across the ‘I love you’ voice recording she once left him, officially decides he can’t live without her, goes after her and they make up and stay at Jeju together. Happy ending.

Let’s address some stuff that has already been mentioned before but that I will now talk about more elaborately.
First of all, Lee Gyu Min. Lee Gyu Min (played by Oh Ryoong) is Jin Ah’s boyfriend in episode 1, the one who breaks up with her. Jin Ah is very hurt, since they were together for a pretty long time (a couple of years, at least) and her family loved him. But then she finds out that he’d actually been cheating on her with a younger woman, someone who probably ‘excited’ him more (nice cameo of Z.Hera, by the way). She pulls a revenge plan and causes a situation that makes Younger Woman break up with Gyu Min. Honestly, she could’ve let it slide, but I definitely don’t blame her for wanting to expose him for the cheating bastard that he was. The Younger Woman was better off without him, too, Jin Ah was just helping her out! Anways, for some inexplicable reason, Gyu Min then comes crawling back to Jin Ah, twisting the situation so that it almost looks as if SHE was the one that dumped HIM and he needed to persuade her to get back together. Like, he literally pulls the desperate ‘I will win you back!’ on her. He freaking cheated on her and dumped her himself! Jin Ah isn’t having any of it, and she tells him very clearly, multiple times, that it is over between them. Even Kyung Seon, who also knows him (I believe they all went to college together or something), gets involved and tells him to back off, but he just won’t take the message. He even goes straight to her parents behind her back trying to get back their approval. Her parents don’t even know about the cheating at this point, and he just uses their existing affection for him to his advantage. A tricky situation occurs when Jin Ah tells him and her parents she likes someone else and just then Joon Hee enters with Seung Ho. Gyu Min sees this as his way out. Jin Ah was ALSO cheating on HIM, so she didn’t have any right to accuse him of cheating! This guy, seriously. If that wasn’t enough, he turns up at the coffee store Jin Ah temporarily works at (she gets demoted at work to personally help out at one of the stores she manages) and forces himself on her. Even after already losing all of his dignity, even in front of her parents, he keeps coming back to her. He sends her a flower bouquet with a picture of them in bed together. When Joon Hee finds out and visits him at his house, he finds all these pictures of Jin Ah half-naked from when they were still together. He loses it and beats Gyu Min up. This just strengthens Gyu Min in his mindset of ‘being wronged just the same’. Every single time he bothers Jin Ah and she tries to talk to him again to convince him again that it’s over between them, it’s just another opening to him. In the end, he uses a situation in which Jin Ah actually needs his help (she can’t cut the contract of her old phone without his agreement because it’s under his name) to kidnap her in his car. Instead of driving her to the phone store, he starts speeding on the highway and tells her ‘we’re going to die together’. Jin Ah even gets injured as a result, and STILL he’s not locked up. Until the very end, he keeps treating Jin Ah like SHE’S the person being unreasonable. When they finally part ways after he signs the agreement to cut her old phone contract, and Jin Ah actually EXTENDS HER HAND TO HIM to part ways as adults, he just scoffs and walks away like SHE’S the crazy person. He was a delusional piece of shit. I was more than happy when he finally disappeared off screen.

The level of gaslighting that Jin Ah was facing didn’t just stop at Gyu Min and her mother. It’s time to now address her work situation.
So as I explained before, Jin Ah works at Coffee Bay, a coffee trade company that manages a chain of Coffee Bay stores throughout the city. (I would definitely think twice about joining a company that has as its slogan ‘Roasting One Dream At A Time’, but hey, that’s just me.) When she’s not out to check in on the store managers she works with, she’s in the office. There are a few colleagues to introduce here, starting with the Two Scumbags.
Scumbag No. 1: Mr. Nam (Park Hyuk Kwon). I believe he was a director or something. Anyways, he’s the person responsible for a mistake that Jin Ah has to pay for during the promotional event of a new coffee product at one of her stores in the first episode. He forgot to approve the document for it while she’d handed it in perfectly in time, and then just pretended he never got it. Heck, he SHREDDED the thing so they wouldn’t be able to accuse him. And then just went on in her face like ‘hey what happened, you’re usually so good at your job’. Seriously, the audacity of men in this series still baffles me. Anyways, he’s a typical coward guy who just wants to exert the power that he has in the company without ever getting criticized for it. The thing he has going for him is his rank, because it assures that no one of lower rank can go against him. Everyone knows that he’s responsible, without a doubt, but no one says anything and that’s how he thrives. The only person capable of reprimanding him is Mr. Jo (Kim Jong Tae), the CEO (I guess?). I just felt like he knew he was responsible too, but he just wasn’t able to do anything without evidence, either way it was frustrating. Anyways, Mr. Nam is the coward scumbag who shows his true colors once Jin Ah starts her case against the sexual harrassment: he literally has someone create fake screenshots of fake Line conversations in which Jin Ah sends him messages. This way he is able to show that she went along with everything he ever said to her, it was disgusting how he abused his position.
Scumbag No. 2: Mr. Gong (Lee Hwa Ryong), Jin Ah’s team leader who always enjoyed reprimanding his female employees on how incompetent they were at the office (still can’t get over the fact that they’d just put earplugs in whenever he summoned them to his office, as a standard precaution), only to get really drunk and touchy towards those same employees during work dinners. And there were a LOT of work dinners. Jin Ah would be their usual victim, as she would initially just smile, come over from three tables away just to pour their drinks and cut their barbecue meat for them, and laugh it off as they ‘accidentally’ pulled down her bra straps while she was dancing along to the karaoke sessions. It makes all the other female employees very uncomfortable as well, but we see that Jin Ah is not the only one ‘playing the game’. The nasty thing is that for the majority of them, it’s just something annoying that they feel like they have to deal with as it is ‘part of the job’. It’s nauseating.
At some point, Ms. Jung Young In (played by Seo Jung Yeon) – I don’t exactly know what her position in the company is, but she is close to Mr. Jo and higher than Mr. Nam – issues an initiative through which all female employees can write down their experience with sexual harrassment on the work floor. As a result, all male employees become very anxious to find out more about what they will write down – I guess they are partially aware of their own actions after all.
Let me just go over Jin Ah’s fellow female colleagues. First of all, there’s Kang Se Young (played by Jung Yoo Jin). She’s Jin Ah’s top competitor and very eager to get a promotion. She’s also very proactive when it comes to pursuing what she wants, especially when it comes to guys. She develops an interest in Joon Hee, and even goes so far as to take over Kyung Seon’s store from Jin Ah after she gets demoted, partially to get to know Joon Hee’s sister and suck up to her a bit. After she finds out Joon Hee and Jin Ah are together, she definitely harbors some grudgy feelings towards Jin Ah. I’m not sure if it’s because of these grudgy feelings, but she even accepts a deal with Mr. Nam to keep him informed on the female employees’ actions regarding the sexual harrassment case, just because he promises to get her a promotion. She seems to be someone who, like Jin Ah, also just grins and bears it, but doesn’t find it worth the aggravation to try to fight it. Because of her deal with Mr. Nam, she even starts demotivating a couple of female employees to share their experiences because it will just backlash and they’d risk losing their jobs. Also, because Jin Ah is first in line at the firing zone, they risk getting associated with her and how she always just went along with it. All in all, even though I didn’t think Se Young was a bad person per se, she wasn’t too sympathetic either. In the end, she didn’t even get the promotion even though she snitched on her own team, which was a bit sad for her. But she and Jin Ah end things on a fairly positive note when Jin Ah resigns.
Then there’s Geum Bo Ra (played by Joo Min Kyung). She’s the snarkiest of the colleagues, but mostly because she’s the most aware of the male employees’ behavior, recognizes it exactly for what it is, and doesn’t bother to even try as if she’s okay with it. She actively tries to get out of work dinners or any kind of situation in which she’ll have to spend time with these men, and for good reason. She’s one of the most active participants in trying to get all female employees to share their experiences in the case, even though she also doesn’t know if it’ll make any difference. She clashes with Se Young the most, and is actually the first colleague to find out about Joon Hee and Jin Ah’s relationship as she accidentally walks in on them during a restaurant date. Instead of judging them, she relishes in the fact that she now has a way to tease Se Young, because she knows she has a crush on Joon Hee. Bo Ra becomes a good friend to Jin Ah, and she’s also the person who invites her to come live with her in Jeju, where she starts her own café.
Then there’s Lee Ye Eun (played by Lee Joo Young), the ‘maknae’ of the team. She looks up to Jin Ah a lot and always comes to her after work dinners to complain about the male seniors being all touchy again. Especially in her case, as the youngest of the team, this was hard. She was in the least ideal position to speak up, and even though she wanted to back Jin Ah up in her case, she did get affected by Se Young’s words as well and still tried to not get associated with Jin Ah for a while. She does remain close to Jin Ah’s family, as she’s also invited to Seung Ho’s wedding and by that time she even has a baby already.
There was this one guy, Mr. Choi (Lee Chang Hoon) who seemed to be acting as a kind of spy as well. I think he wasn’t particularly as guilty as Mr. Nam and Mr. Gong were in the case, but he saw the situation as a way to redeem himself and get a promotion as well. He agreed to help Ms. Jung to get evidence of the sexual harrassment from the male seniors. He literally went to have dinner with them and try to get them to talk while wearing a recording pen in his breast pocket, lol. He gathered a bunch of video evidence as well, of the male seniors ‘accidentally’ falling on top of Jin Ah and grabbing her arms and legs under the table etc. As viewers, this is also the first time we see how much Jin Ah has had to deal with, and I could just feel to the core how Ms. Jung reacted to it, with a sigh and a heartfelt ‘…oh, Jin Ah…’ It was really bad. And at to the moment Jin Ah was in the middle of it, when Joon Hee proposed going to the US together, it really did seem like she wouldn’t win the case.
I thought it was nice how they revealed she did, though. When she came to the office that last time to hand in her resignation, the way Ms. Jung reacted almost felt like she’d build up a bad reputation and Ms. Jung just wanted to keep her on because she’d always liked her so much. But then when she went down the elevator with Mr. Jo and he just casually mentioned that ‘Mr. Nam still claims to be innocent even after the verdict’!! I was like, ‘wait, does that mean she DID win?!’ So that’s good, at least. It really can’t have been easy for her, especially after Joon Hee left and she had to deal with it all by herself.
The only thing that was amusing to me about this whole thing was how antsy all the male seniors became when the whole case started and how Mr. Nam and Mr. Gong kept trying to throw each other under the bus. Mr. Gong kept claiming that he did everything just because Mr. Nam had ordered him to, it was so lame it was almost entertaining. I LOVED the part where Jin Ah asked them each separately to join her at the movie theatre but then just made them go there together and they couldn’t face each other at work the next day. It was very satisfying.

The last story arc I wish to talk about before concluding is the one about Kyung Seon and Joon Hee’s father (played by Kim Chang Wan). From what we learn, he abandoned his family and is already onto his third wife after the Seo siblings’ mom. What exactly happened, I don’t know, but Kyung Seon and Joon Hee resent him. When he suddenly turns up back in South Korea (he resides in Canada), Kyung Seon only agrees to meet up with him once, as a kind of obligation she has to her father, but Joon Hee refuses to even take a look at his face. As he is an old friend/acquaintance of Jin Ah’s parents, he contacts her father as well and this unfolds into a very dramatic outburst of emotions at Jin Ah’s parents’ place (also the scene where her mother does her whole disrespectful rant towards Kyung Seon and Joon Hee). Jin Ah meets their dad a couple of times without Joon Hee knowing, and he’s pretty pissed when he finds out because she shouldn’t get involved in it. However, she manages to persuade him to have one final talk with his dad before he leaves for Canada again.
I can’t really figure out what the dad’s deal was, honestly. He never contacted his kids, but then when he suddenly came to South Korea he just expected them to greet him normally. He also doesn’t oppose Joon Hee and Jin Ah’s relationship for a second, on the contrary, he reprimands Jin Ah’s parents for being so against it, only making things worse in the process. There was the one scene in which he suddenly burst out crying in his hotel room and I was like ‘???’ I guess it was just about seeing the kind of situation his kids were in with the whole love affair? But I didn’t quite get it. I guess the most important thing was that he eventually was able to make amends with Joon Hee, and that it became clear that he didn’t stop caring about his children completely.

Can I just remark on the VERY satisfying soundtrack of this series? It was an all-English soundtrack with very jazzy, bluesy tracks and I thought that was a very original choice. I kept singing along to the opening sequence track ‘Stand By Your Man’ by Tammy Wynette, and I also loved the tracks by Rachael Yamagata, ‘Something in the Rain’, ‘La La La’, and ‘Be Somebody’s Love’. The soundtrack really did the show justice. Heck, they even chose ‘Something in the Rain’ as the show’s English title! Speaking of which, I want to comment on the show’s title, both the English one and the Korean one (‘Pretty Noona/Lady/Sister Who Buys Me Food’). I get where they come from. For the Korean title, this is where the relationship between Jin Ah and Joon Hee starts. At the beginning, instead of asking her out, Joon Hee blurts out if she’ll buy him dinner more often. When they have a fight at the end, he literally uses the phrase ‘do you really want to go back to the time where I was just your younger brother’s friend who’d ask you to buy him dinner?’. The Korean title is clearly written from Joon Hee’s perspective, even though Jin Ah seems to be the main protagonist as we see most events through her eyes. It’s interesting how they used the starting point of their relationship as the title, while the story goes much further than that.
For the English title, if you look at the lyrics of ‘Something in the Rain’, it really fits their relationship when they’re together, and they also take quite a few walks in the rain.
Now that I’ve considered both titles more, I can better understand the choices for both of them, but in the beginning I honestly didn’t feel like either embodied the full essence of the story. Yet, as I say, I can see where they might’ve come from and there’s probably a logical explanation for why they chose these titles in the end.

On to the cast comments!

I was excited to see something with Son Ye Jin after Crash Landing on You, even though of course Something in the Rain is from a few years earlier. I just don’t think I’ve seen her in a lot of things, so I always like to see different performances from actors in different shows. I think she made Jin Ah an incredibly beautiful, vulnerable woman. Even though she starts out as kind of a pushover, and I might’ve gotten a little frustrated by her passiveness when it came to talking things through with some people, I couldn’t stop rooting for her. Especially after seeing how much gaslighting she had to deal with, everyone from her mother to her colleagues making her feel like she was the one being unreasonable and crazy, I just really hoped she would manage to break free from them all. I definitely loved her the most in her scenes with Kyung Seon and Joon Hee, because that’s when she came apart and showed herself without restraint, that’s where she felt safest and most comfortable. The fact that I didn’t understand where she came from all of the time – like there were moments when I was like ‘Jin Ah, WHY?!’ – just made her all the more human to me. Our emotions don’t always make sense. There are always bits of immaturity and selfishness that may come out at the wrong moment. But I really felt like she was trapped in every single situation in her life, at home, in her relationship with Gyu Min (even after it ended), at work, and Joon Hee helped her fully come to herself and embrace the power she had within to fight her way out of those prisons. Her acting was very natural and I liked it.

So this is the drama that made everyone fall in love with Jung Hae In! I honestly hadn’t seen him in a main role before, only in some side character roles, like in Blood (he was the ML’s best friend who got killed by the bad vampire man T^T), While You Were Sleeping, and of course his guest appearance in Goblin. It was nice seeing this new side of him. His smile is so endearing, and I loved how he just couldn’t stop himself from smiling whenever he saw Jin Ah, like it was just a cause-and-effect thing. I think Joon Hee was a pretty uncomplicated character, even with his family background, it didn’t really seem to leave a very dark side in him. He was easygoing and hist loyalties lay in the right places. He really went for what he wanted, both in his relationships and in his career. There’s a few more of his dramas on my list, so I’m curious to see more sides of him now! I really loved his chemistry with Son Ye Jin, it didn’t look unnatural at all and I also wasn’t bothered in the slightest by their (minor) age difference.

The funny thing is that I’ve seen Jang So Yeon before in Touch Your Heart and Crash Landing on You, but I remember her as a middle-aged lady? And here she seemed so much younger? Like, I suppose Kyung Seon and Jin Ah were around the same age, but she definitely didn’t feel like 40 to me! It was some years before the series I just mentioned, so maybe it really is just a matter of her getting older, lol. Anyways, Kyung Seon was a really chipper and energetic lady. I liked her character, and also her friendship dynamic with Jin Ah. She really was like an older sister to her, also in how she felt like she needed to protect her from Gyu Min and everything, because Jin Ah just didn’t seem to be able to stand up for himself against his antics. I also get how she’d feel like Jin Ah and Joon Hee betrayed her trust by going behind her back like that, but I did find it disappointing how she was determined to stay mad at Jin Ah, even though she ought to know her best friend would never be so heartless as to treat them the way her mother did. I found it a pity that she put Jin Ah in the same box as their parents, as in that their whole family was like that. I just wanted the two women to be like they used to be, the bestest of friends, and even in the end it felt like there was still a lot to fix, even though Kyung Seon seemed more forgiving already. It was nice to see a completely different side from her than I’d seen so far, to see her be more goofy and energetic and youthful.

I had no idea Wi Ha Joon was in this!! The first episode gave me so many nice surprises, there were all these actors in it that I knew and loved. He was the typical younger brother to Jin Ah, the one that was coddled by his mother the most even though he was spending his time on gaming more than he did on his studies. Despite his attitude, he did care for his sister, as became clear how he started acting towards Gyu Min when he found out what he’d done to her. His friendship with Joon Hee was a bit more casual than the one between the two women, which was probably for the best in the whole love affair thing because Seung Ho came around much easier than Kyung Seon. I mean, finding out your friend is dating your older sister would probably throw everyone off in some way, and for him it was just at the level of ‘do your thing, just don’t make out in front of me’. I’ve only seen him before in Romance is a Bonus Book, but I liked him so much there that I cheered when I saw him appear here, haha. I feel like he has so many sides to his acting as well, so I’m looking forward to seeing more of him.

Jung Yoo Jin has this strong vibe around her, I feel like she always gets clever and confident roles. She’s still stuck in side characters that never get the guy, though. I’ve seen her in W – Two Worlds, Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok Joo (although I don’t remember her from there), Thirty But Seventeen and Romance is a Bonus Book. Anyways, I thought her performance as Kang Se Young was good because for the first time I didn’t find her to be very sympathetic, but that also made the character interesting to me. You always have different types of people who react in their own way to situations, and I guess she was more interested in securing success in her career no matter the means, than she was in standing up for women’s equality on the workfloor. To each her own, I suppose. I’m still waiting for the day that she gets her big break and maybe even a main role!

I really liked Joo Min Kyung as Geum Bo Ra. I hadn’t seen her in any drama before yet, but her character probably went through the biggest change of all, simply because she really became Jin Ah’s person. At the beginning, it didn’t seem like she was particularly interested in becoming friends with anyone in the office, but the events just brought them together and I love how they became so close that they’d even start living together in Jeju. I thought she brought a really good and important energy to the show, because she was the only female employee who from the start spoke up about what was really happening while the rest was still trying to swallow their pride. I’m really curious to see her in more shows!

This is probably the most feminine role I’ve ever seen Lee Joo Young play in a show. After Weightlifting Fairy and Itaewon Class I wondered if she’d ever get a role in which she wouldn’t be cast as a short-haired tomboy, but here we are! I thought she was very cute in the beginning, as she kind of attached herself to Jin Ah but also really looked up to her and respected her. It must have been hard for her to continuously back Jin Ah up, especially when being driven by the fear of losing your job and getting a reputation when you’ve just started out. I felt really bad for her whenever she was left unable to escape from the male seniors forcing her to stay and have dinner with them, but it was purely because she didn’t have the courage to stand up for herself yet. She was always just tagging along with the bigger group. It was much easier to leave together with the other women as a collective than when she was by herself. I didn’t know she was in this drama, and she had a completely different presence from what I’d seen from her so far, so I hope she can keep surprising me!

I was BEYOND happy to see Seo Jung Yeon again and I LOVED her the instant her character appeared. She’s such a queen. Again, I don’t even remember exactly what her position in the company was, but she definitely saw all the male seniors for what they were, even though she didn’t speak a word out loud – she would just give them this resigned but disappointed and judging look, lol. And I loved how, even though what she could do was limited, she always had Jin Ah’s back and she really wanted to bring those scumbags to justice for her. I really, really love this actress, and I have already written many cast comments about her but I will always mention her because she deserves to be acknowledged for the amazing actress that she is.

I didn’t know Oh Man Seok from anything else, but from all the male characters in the show, he was someone I didn’t despise as much. I feel like everyone was always talking about Jin Ah’s parents as one, that they were on the same page about Jin Ah and Joon Hee’s relationship etcetera, but I kept correcting them in my head, that it was just the mom. I think the dad did a good job of trying to go against her, but there was just no correcting her mindset. I liked the dad! I think he was really easygoing and he really didn’t seem to see it as such a big deal when he found out about the love affair. I like how he held the biggest grudge against Gyu Min, and when the latter came to him to ‘reveal’ Jin Ah and Joon Hee’s involvement as a way to regain his trust, the dad was just like, ‘Actually, I’m glad that it’s Joon Hee, I’ve known him forever, and now at least I know that my daughter is with a good and trustworthy man’. BURN!! I thought it was pretty funny how different he was from his wife, it kept me wondering how the heck they ended up in a marriage like this together. At least he was trying to make the most of his retirement, haha. Anyways, despite what other people might think, I thought he was the least bad of Jin Ah’s family.

After seeing her as the FL’s mother in Melting Me Softly, I wrote the following about Gil Hae Yeon:

“I want to give a final shoutout to Gil Hae Yeon (…) I thought this actress was really good. She wasn’t overdramatic, I think she portrayed her emotions very realistically and it really touched me. (…) the duality of her thoughts and feelings was just very human in my opinion. I was impressed by her acting, even as a relatively minor character. So well done, madam!!”
– Melting Me Softly review, January 20, 2022

After seeing her as the FL’s mother in Something in the Rain, I will write about how much I hated her character, haha. No, but seriously, I guess it just means that she performed very well! I will never talk bad about actors, let that be clear. Her character was just unbearable to me, like if she were my mom I wouldn’t even be able to live in the same house as her for as long as Jin Ah did. I can’t remember I’ve been this baffled by someone’s disrespect and inability to self-reflect before. I still can’t understand where she’s coming from, even after pondering the story again. When I told my friend about her, she said, ‘Oh, like the mother in Boys Over Flowers’, and I actually replied with, ‘I dare say she’s worse’ and I stand by it. It wasn’t just about not accepting someone because of their poor background, it went so much deeper than that.
On the other hand, it was really interesting to see this actress portray this kind of character, as I’ve only ever seen her as a ‘normal’, sweet and caring mother before. It definitely must have given the actress a challenge, and that I can respect.

Same went for Kim Chang Wan, to be honest. My first association of him is from You Who Came From The Stars, where he stole everyone’s heart. After that, I’ve seen him in several things, like 1st Shop of Coffee Prince, Hwarang, 20th Century Boy and Girl, Jugglers and It’s Okay to Not Be Okay. I can never get used to seeing him as an unsympathetic character, he just looks so kind! I’m glad that in the end he didn’t seem to be such a bad dad after all, like I actually am still wondering what he did to make his kids resent him so much. It might’ve been solely the fact that he left them after their mom died, but I almost got the impression that he did something else that was unforgiveable. Anyways, it was nice seeing him as another familiar face in this show.

To make a last mention of the great actors who portrayed the worst characters! I’m not even gonna lie, whenever either of these men came on screen, I legit pulled my sock off just so I could throw it at their faces! I’ll repeat, if you hate a character, that just means the actor did a great job! I know Park Hyuk Kwon from Dream High and Producer, apparently, and I see he’s also going to be in some dramas that are still on my list, so I hope he won’t be such a bad character in those. Same goes for Lee Hwa Ryong, who I’ve just found out is in Arthdal Chronicles! I’ll have to pay better attention next time, although at least there he’s a sympathetic character, haha. I can’t say much about Oh Ryoong since I haven’t seen anything else of him, but he definitely set my teeth on edge as Gyu Min!

And with that I’ll end my cast comments!

For my conclusion, I just want to say that this was a commitment of a series. The episodes are pretty lengthy, and you really have to love a slow-paced series without too much action that is mostly focussed on emotion and character development. It really is, first and foremost, about Jin Ah and Joon Hee’s relationship and how their love fights to thrive in a world full of prejudice. It’s about going against social standards and conservative mindsets, including ones that lead to people being treated inequally in any kind of situation, be it in terms of gender or background. Every person needs to make a way for themselves in this world, no matter where you come from is. But love, that just bloody does whatever the heck it wants. It might be inconvenient, it might be messy, and people might think of it what they want, in the end it still always comes down to the two people involved in the love, not the people watching in from the outside.
I really loved Jin Ah and Joon Hee together, it was like two pieces of a puzzle, they just fit and clicked perfectly. I loved how natural and playful their acting was from the start, and the scenes in which they took walks together, had late night phone calls together, and especially when they just went out to see each other in the middle of the night, those scenes brought me so much comfort. To have a person like that. Someone that you can literally just run to whenever, not caring what anyone else might think. Isn’t that the dream? I’m not even talking just in a romantic way, I think it’s even a dream to have a friend or other kind of soulmate like that, who is just always there for you with open arms, whenever, wherever. So that’s what I really liked about it. The whole drama that was created and dragged out became a bit ridiculous to me, especially since there literally was no reason whatsoever why they shouldn’t be together. The people who needed to ‘get used to it’ (or rather, ‘get over it’) weren’t even directly involved in the relationship. It just didn’t make any sense to me how a bunch of outsiders seemed to claim so much ownership over their love.
As I mentioned before, even though my ranking of this show dropped a little towards the end, I still thought it was a good series, especially the beginning had me completely hooked. I also really appreciate how it dived so deeply into the sexual harrassment issue, since I feel like this is still very much a taboo thing. I feel like this really exposed something that happens a lot in real life, and I hope it also educated a lot of people that need to be educated in that aspect. I will always appreciate themes like this to be addressed, all the more in K-Drama since they still seem to hold back a lot when it comes to calling stuff out.

I saw that this year, a Chinese remake of this series came out called Love The Way You Are. I’m not sure if I’ll watch a remake of this one. I think the original one was unique in its own kind.

Before finally starting on my long-awaited, finally complete, hyped new release Netflix K-Drama (huh, which one could it be?), I will watch a short drama in-between that will serve as my palette cleanser. Then we’re off to a couple of more watchlist items and then I’m probably going to catch up on some more Netflix releases because they just keep piling up and I can barely keep up with them!
Anyways, I hope this was a worthwhile review to read and I promise I will be back soon.
Bye-bee!