Disclaimer: this is a review, and as such it contains spoilers of the whole series. Please proceed to read at your own risk if you still plan on watching this show or if you haven’t finished it yet. You have been warned.

Somebody
(썸바디 / Seombadi)
MyDramaList rating: 6.5/10

Hi y’all! The weather is so bad here right now, it’s been raining and snowing and it’s just cold and wet all the time. AKA the best weather to cuddle up with a blanket and a cup of hot tea and watch some K-Drama! Honestly I feel like even though this might not become a very lengthy review, I’ll still have a hard time constructing my arguments. All in all I have very mixed feelings about this and when I read other people’s reviews and comments online, I’m glad to say that at least I’m not the only one that got hella confused. It started out really good and interesting, but the more it progressed there were just more questions and less answers. I’ve debated a lot on how to rate this, because the acting and the cinematography were very impressive but, the story in itself left some things to be desired in my opinion. There were a lot of random events and I kept feeling like they weren’t really getting to the point. I hope I’ll be able to convey the way I felt about it clearly, so let’s just get on with it!

Somebody is an 8-episode Netflix K-Drama with episodes of about 55 minutes each. It’s about Kim Seom (played by Kang Hae Rim), a young woman with Asperger’s who is a genius at programming. We see her as a student in the beginning, helping out some game hall owner by rigging his arcade machines so it’ll be even harder to win any money with them. Seom makes it clear from the start that, as long as it won’t cause people to die, she doesn’t mind helping out even though it’s still considered to be illegal to do so. At a science fair she participates in, Seom’s self-made AI chatbot ‘SOME ONE’ is discovered by Samantha Jung (played by Choi Yoo Ha) who is impressed by the intricate detail in the observation and recording functions that Seom programmed in it. Skip to a while later, the two have started a popular social meeting/dating app called ‘Somebody’ together, with Samantha as the director and Seom as the co-director. However, the app has been suffering from some bad reputation, as it starts being associated with more rape and even murder crimes. When Seom, with her mad programming skills that allow the app to even recognize patterns in the way people chat with each other, is ordered to look into the account that’s suspected to be involved with one of these crimes, and she discovers that this same person has about 6 different accounts on Somebody. When she likes all of them in an attempt to get in touch with this mystery person, she immediately feels a connection with the way this man talks to her through one of these accounts. Seom, who has always felt very estranged from the people around her because of her Asperger’s, actually finds a kind of kindred spirit in this guy, especially after she meets him in real life.

I’m just already going to end my summary of the story here because I already can’t stop myself from inserting my own comments. Basically, what it comes down to, is that Seom is asked to look into a person that’s using Somebody, the app she developed, to meet young women, gets them to meet up with him in real life, and then murders them.
When Seom gets to talking with this person online, she immediately feels like he understands her like no one has ever understood her. He doesn’t blame her for killing an injured cat on the street because she took pity on it and couldn’t reach anyone to come save it. He even seems to encourage it, telling her he knows how she feels. They meet up already in the first episode, and that’s where we meet the guy, who is Sung Yoon Oh (played by Kim Young Kwang). Even though Seom is aware of the fact that he might be behind those murders, she can’t help but feel attracted to him, and he also seems to treat her differently, he’s kind to her and he doesn’t harm her in any way. After meeting him in real life for the first time, Seom slowly but surely gets pretty obsessed with him, even to the point of recording herself repeating what few conversations they had (both in-chat as in-person), and uses those recordings to masturbate to. She keeps wanting to talk to him more, but then he stops responding for a while and she’s left to think about their (imagined?) connection by herself.

In the meantime, Yoon Oh is not sitting still. We see that he is constantly busy, keeping in contact with several different women on the many phones he keeps from his victims, which he keeps almost everywhere, in his office, in saves in his house, in his car dashboard, etc. He uses a clever system in which he keeps deleting his own footsteps, so to say, by keeping his victims’ phones and creating new Somebody accounts with those using random pictures of sceneries or objects. Keeping himself mysterious but interesting, as there will always a curious person that’s drawn to one of these pictures that he can lure in. This also works for Seom’s closest human friend, Yeong Gi Eun (played by Kim Soo Yeon).

Seom still keeps the prototype version of SOME ONE, her self-made AI chatbot, in her home office and chats with it from time to time, referring to it as a friend. Through her conversations with SOME ONE, we learn that she used to have a close friend that came to her house a lot, but it’s mentioned that she ‘doesn’t come over anymore’. This friend is Gi Eun. She’s a police detective, but she has recently been in an undefined accident, and now she’s in a wheelchair. It’s never really explained what this accident was, and only later we learn that her friendship with Seom became strained after Seom spoke a bit insensitively to her after she got the accident (saying that it was her own fault or something). Anyways, the two aren’t that close anymore.
Gi Eun incidentally finds an account on Somebody that has a wheelchair as its profile picture and matches with it. Just like any other victim, she’s intrigued and immediately feels like it’s meant to be to find such a perfect match, a guy who also claims to be in a wheelchair.
They meet up one time in a forest where there’s an abandoned empty pool – Gi Eun has told him she misses swimming and would like to try it again, so he invites her there. It’s quite a long way away, and there’s zero people around. Yoon Oh reveals to Gi Eun that he’s not actually in a wheelchair and though she’s initially alarmed and startled, she still doesn’t see any red flags and they even end up having sex in the abandoned locker room of the pool.
After which he leaves her by herself and throws away her wheelchair.
Gi Eun manages to get back home, miraculously, crawling all the way back to her car and then managing to get back to a place where she can stop a taxi. Determined to find that bastard who threw away her wheelchair, she summons her other close friend Im Mok Won (played by Kim Yong Ji). Mok Won is a young woman who grew up at a temple and now works as a shaman, claiming she’s been possessed by a certain General. She can feel certain vibes and spirits from people. After having a dream in which a bunch of her friends appeared, she calls them all one by one to make sure they’re okay, but then gets super anxious when Gi Eun doesn’t pick up. Gi Eun goes to Mok Won’s house after the pool incident and asks her for her help. With this, they have no other choice to also contact Seom, as it involves a meeting that took place through Somebody.

I just couldn’t figure out what Seom’s deal was, to be honest. She knew about Yoon Oh’s truth, she knew he killed people, but she still felt a really deep connection to him and didn’t want to lose him because she feared she might never find someone like him again, someone so much like her. However, after hearing that her own close friend fell victim to him, no matter how much she probably didn’t want to believe it, it still felt like she didn’t want him to get caught. She kept telling Mok Won that the person who did that to Gi Eun wasn’t the person she was seeing, based purely on Gi Eun’s remark that he was ‘impotent’ during their intercourse and he wasn’t when he had sex with Seom. At one point I was really like, come on girl, are you that naïve or are you just really conflicted? Shouldn’t it be enough to stand up for your friend in this case? He literally came after both Gi Eun and Mok Won, and she still chose to follow her own feelings. I guess in this case her social handicap really came through – she just couldn’t relate to other people’s feelings, she couldn’t use her head and think of the right thing to do when her heart was telling her something different, even if it wasn’t the right thing. I get how desperately she wanted to hold on to him, because the connection she felt with him was that special to her, but still, priorities should be priorities here. She got in the way when Mok Won wanted to take a picture of her and Yoon Oh together to check with Gi Eun if he was indeed the same guy, and she just dragged some random colleague with her instead of Yoon Oh. I kept getting confused by Seom, I just couldn’t figure out what she was thinking.

Also, Gi Eun. Holy freaking moly. As a police detective, how could she be so incredibly reckless. When she got out of the woods the first time, I was kind of impressed, thinking ‘heck yes, she survived’. But then we see that he didn’t actually physically harm her, he just left her behind, so her being pissed at him didn’t come from fear or horror, but more from a place of genuine annoyance. She wanted to get back at him just for being a bastard that threw her wheelchair away. Honestly, how could she have underestimated him like that?
She did all that effort to sneakily get back in contact with him, even if it meant transferring some kind of bitcoin to an anonymous source who could get her info, only to just immediately give away who she was the second he responded to her message. It was basically like saying, ‘Hey there! Remember me, I’m still here!’ And then he just asked her to meet up again and she went, AGAIN, BY HERSELF. It seemed like she had some sort of plan to let someone know where she’d gone, but nothing really happened in the end.
He asked her to meet up at a neighborhood that was about to be demolished. The second she arrived at their meeting place, some construction workers came and repeatedly told her to go away, it was dangerous here, all the more because she was in a wheelchair and the alleys were really narrow. That should have already been the biggest red flag, the only she’d need. ‘He asked me to meet up here so I’d get caught in this demolition and wouldn’t be able to get out’. It was CLEAR AS DAY. BUT NO. She kept going back. She was literally told to leave by construction workers THE ENTIRE TIME. But no, she still thought, ‘Nah, but he’s gotta be around here somewhere’. In the meantime Yoon Oh just kept sending her vague messages about how long it was taking him to get coffee. Like, HOW MANY RED FLAGS DO YOU NEED. I seriously kept screaming to Gi Eun this whole part, I just couldn’t believe how stupid she was. She kept going further and further into that maze, the alleys got narrower, all around her buildings were being demolished and she still didn’t think it might be better if she went back. It would have been the most logical thing to do, even if she was that bend on meeting him. ‘Oh, I guess it’s dangerous here, I’ll just tell him I’ll meet him somewhere else in case he doesn’t know that our rendezvous place is getting demolished right this moment’. Like, he left her all by herself and threw away her wheelchair, but she still trusted him enough to just show up with coffee in a place like that? So yeah, at one point her wheelchair inevitably gets stuck and she is locked inside a closed-off neighborhood, she can’t even crawl her way out of there as it’s literally falling apart around her.
And then Yoon Oh suddenly appears in front of her, and she’s like ‘Oh, wow, he’s actually a psychopath.’ GIRL. She was miraculously lucky to have a psychic friend like Mok Won who just smelled that she was in trouble and they actually ended up finding her amongst the rubble. Gi Eun survived again, but still, it’s just like it couldn’t get through to her how dangerous this guy actually was. She kept talking about ‘catching this bastard’ while it seemed like she still didn’t fully recognize how genuinely dangerous he was. Just because he didn’t kill her, doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have done it eventually. I don’t know, it was from this point on that this series started to get really frustrating to me.

Mok Won is a very unique character in itself. She has very distinctive looks, she’s very androgynous, and she’s also revealed to be a lesbian (she’s shown meeting another woman at a bar and getting intimate with her). Despite her ‘cool’ appearance and attitude, the whole motorbike lady image, Mok Won is very calm-natured and she’s very concerned about the people she cares for. Seeing her wear her traditional shaman hanbok stood in really stark contrast with her everyday outfits. In any case, as we’re not given too much information about how she got possessed or how she became a shaman at all, it does seem that she’s one of the few people who could actually get the truth out of people. Without even having met Yoon Oh, she can already feel that he’s got a lot of evil spirits about him from an object that Seom got from him (a small razor blade). However, despite her probably having the most information about Yoon Oh’s true nature even when everyone around her is keeping the truth from her, there was also only so much that Mok Won could do about it. She sets out to help Gi Eun with her quest to ‘catch the bastard’, but she usually just ends up hopping on her motorcycle to drive people around and save her friends’ asses from the guy.
She has one inside guy, nicknamed 79NewMoney (played by Lee Ki Chan) who ends up getting her the final evidence she needs (all the mobile phones from Yoon Oh’s house), and with this both Spectrum, the company that houses Somebody, and the police could actually do something to lure Yoon Oh out. But before that, basically the entire show, it was just talking about how they wanted to catch him but not actually taking any real action.

I have to agree with the comments out there that I think there were a lot of random things going on in this story. Sometimes a piece of truth was revealed which had all the effects of being a dramatic plot twist but didn’t make any sense to me.
I’ve read comments saying that the writers completely misunderstood the notion of Asperger’s and that they could’ve just made Seom someone who struggled in social situations – the Asperger’s in itself wasn’t actually that crucial to her character, it was crucial that she felt like a social outcast and had trouble communicating with people. The only reference made to autism was in her flashbacks as a child where her mom was teaching her how to recognize facial expressions in association to certain emotions. Seom kind of reminded me of the female lead in Murata Sayaka’s ‘Convenience Store Woman’. This woman doesn’t mention anything about having some sort of autism, but she’s just an ‘alien’ because she just can’t be on the same wavelength as others and ends up adapting to the people around her so she won’t get found out. There’s also mention of her acting a bit sociopathic as a child, so I felt like this might have been the same for Seom as well. In any case, Seom’s whole deal was that she felt alone and misunderstood and Yoon Oh, in his craziness, made her feel like she wasn’t alone for the first time ever.
As for Gi Eun, the fact that a guy leaving her naked and vulnerable by herself in an abandoned pool in an abandoned forest and threw away her wheelchair wasn’t enough of a red flag to make her cautious enough of him when he then asks her to literally ride her wheelchair into an active construction site. Gi Eun being a police detective ended up having nothing to do with the story, as she didn’t even manage to track him down. She tracked Seom’s phone as it was being driven around in a taxi while Seom herself was going off to Yoon Oh by herself without even noticing that it might be a red herring.
Furthermore, and I also thought this during the scene between her and Yoon Oh in that demolished neighborhood, maybe I didn’t read her expression right, but it still seemed to me like Gi Eun was strangely attracted to Yoon Oh even after what he did to her. After all that went down, one time Gi Eun is seen lying in her bed, repeating the swimming movements with her arms that Yoon Oh made her experience at the abandoned pool. At the end, after Yoon Oh has been killed, it’s almost as if she’s reminiscing him, she even kept the two lollipops he left her, even though they were pretty much signs of a threat to her before. She was dressed all in black, as if she was mourning him. That was just really strange to me.

By the way, didn’t anyone have a lock on their door or something? How he did he just walk into Mok Won’s and Gi Eun’s houses? Honestly, again I couldn’t shake my head at Gi Eun. They’d literally talked about him probably knowing where Gi Eun lived by now, and then when she suddenly hears someone coming up to her door in the middle of the night and opens her door and throws a lollipop inside, her first reaction is to go, ‘MOM IS THAT YOU’. Seriously, what the heck was up with that?! She should’ve been calling the police the second she heard any kind of noise, knowing that a serial killer was after her.

Mok Won being a shaman was also quite random. I mean, it was definitely handy to have a psychic person there, and I personally liked Mok Won’s character a lot as it seemed like she had a lot of trumps up her sleeve where her powers were concerned. One part that was kind of unnecessarily intense for me was that exorcism ritual. At one point, Seom asks her to perform a ritual for her and Yoon Oh (?) and then Mok Won has to do this whole intense ritual which ends with her jumping up and down barefeet on two metal cutters, basically. Like, what was up with the intensity of that? It did result in Mok Won’s awareness of Gi Eun’s dangerous situation (it was happening simultaneously to the rendezvous at the soon-to-be demolished neighborhood) and it also seemed like she got possessed by the spirits of one of Yoon Oh’s previous victims for a moment. In any case, that’s where Mok Won somehow became aware of the fact that Gi Eun and Seom’s guys were the same person. But yeah, that scene really got me going like o_O I was scared she was going to slice her feet open!

I was waiting for there to be this really intense backstory about Yoon Oh, about how he became the way he became. And then, that was kind of an anti-climax in itself. All the more when it was revealed it all just started one year earlier. There were all these signs that it might have something to do with his mom, as he didn’t reveal anything about his past but his expression changed whenever it was mentioned. So yeah, basically his first experience with Somebody one year prior ended in accidentally murdering the women during sex and then also taking on the guy that she additionally called for a threesome. The woman had literally asked for Yoon Oh to strangle her, in a rough sex play kind of way, and then he ended up using too much force. And I guess after that he just got used to that feeling? He started doing it again and again? And that’s how it came to be? For an origin story, I found it kind of disappointing, although of course it’s still not a joke how he ended up killing all those women. Like the woman he cut up and left in that silo, I mean, damn.
In the end, the employees from Spectrum/Somebody manage to create some impressive footage of Yoon Oh’s previous victims (they manage to create a moving image made from remaining pictures of the people’s Somebody accounts or something?) and then Yoon Oh suddenly keeps getting video calls from his former victims, which is understandably upsetting to him. This is the first thing that actually manages to set him off into an unstable condition, one where he isn’t the one with all the power.

I kept being really confused about Yoon Oh’s true feelings for Seom. In the beginning it felt like he indeed felt a bit differently about her, as he didn’t hurt her and I don’t know, the way he looked at her was just different. But he did set up that whole rape role play which victimized Seom, even though it resulted in her killing one of her assailants herself. He still set up that incredibly triggering situation for her, so in that way he did treat her like he did his usual victims, he just didn’t do it himself. I honestly thought for most of the show that Seom was idealizing their relationship and that Yoon Oh wasn’t actually romantically attracted to her, but just thought she’d be of use to him as the developer of Somebody and all. But then at the end he built her that space and he kept saying how much he liked her even when he was bleeding to death? So I guess he did have real feelings for her? The build-up in their relationship was just very vague to me. At one point Seom was completely head over heels for him, but then started doubting him again after seeing how he smashed up SOME ONE when he found out it recorded messages he typed but deleted before sending them. She knew the bad things he’d done, but after experiencing a sort of euphoria herself after killing her assailant that one time, she felt like she understood him as well. It was like the both of them kept going on and off where their mutual feelings were concerned, and that’s what made the slowburn very slow. That’s why, when Seom killed him, I was still not sure what had driven her to that decision, as she’d just admitted to Gi Eun on the phone earlier that he was such a special person to her, someone she’d never find again if she chose to give him up.
From other people’s comments, I’ve understood that the way she murdered him had a connection to the way she murdered that injured cat in the beginning, to stop its suffering. However, in what way exactly did she feel like he was suffering? Also, it probably had to do with the fact that he used her precious app, Somebody, to kill people. Just like she confirmed with that game hall owner in the first episode that what he was trying to do wouldn’t end up killing people, I guess she did ultimately have enough justice in her left to feel that that was wrong? It didn’t seem to bother her in the beginning, I mean she knew from the start that he was the murderer using Somebody to meet his victims. But somehow, after he openly admitted to her that he’d been using her app to do so, suddenly it became intolerable? As I said, I have more questions than answers here. Even though killing him off seemed like the only way to solve everything (the way she did it though, slicing him through the eyes with the razor blade he gave her, yikes), it still didn’t solve a lot of questions I had. And I guess now I’ll never know, haha.

One final event I want to mention which just confused me even more was the whole deal with that Hong Gong Joo (played by Kang Ji Eun). She only appears briefly before as the owner of a restaurant that Yoon Oh delivers Gi Eun’s phone to after Mok Won manages to reach him on it and asks about the whereabouts of her friends. He claims Gi Eun left this phone behind in that restaurant and that she can pick it up there. Hong Gong Joo claims like she doesn’t know anything, and only reveals a little more after Mok Won pays her.
Her restaurant is also in that neighborhood that gets demolished, and when Gi Eun is confronted by Yoon Oh in that state, she discovers a body among the rubbish that’s left there, although it’s not immediately revealed who it is.
At the end of that episode, we suddenly get an entire flashback of Hong Gong Joo and how she met Yoon Oh. He was a regular at her restaurant and she treated him very warmly, and in return he taught her how to use Somebody. Through Somebody, she met the 79NewMoney guy and they ended up in a relationship together (?) even though they’d seemed completely unrelated when we saw them in a scene together before. When 79NewMoney started spying on him for Mok Won and he went after him, I guess Yoon Oh felt like Gong Joo was also in on something and then he just strangled her and it’s revealed that she is the body lying under the rubbish. The moment the flashback started I got really excited, thinking it would reveal a whole new plot twist, about how that woman was in cahoots with Yoon Oh or something, but when it ended I was just like, ‘Okay… so…. What?’ Like, I didn’t even see how it mattered what he did with this woman, how it had any additional value to the story. It wasn’t important what their relationship had been, and she could’ve just disappeared along with the restaurant without it being explicitly shown that Yoon Oh also killed her because that would’ve been anyone’s first guess. So I really didn’t understand that flashback, especially the part where she apparently met and started dating 79NewMoney through Somebody. It seemed really irrelevant.

Talking about ways this drama showed its controversy, I can’t leave out that I was pretty astonished by the amount of sex and nudity. It took on a pretty arthouse kind of style, which kept me engaged, but yeah, lots of sex and nudity. I did appreciate them normalizing a lesbian relationship for once, because that really doesn’t happen a lot in K-Drama, but the R-ratedness of it sometimes did make me a bit uncomfortable, especially when it just became repetitive. Yoon Oh is shown having sex with several different women in the show, each time equally intense. They definitely didn’t shy away from showing a lot of boobs and butts! I can only say that this is probably a certain taste that you need to have in movies or series. I personally didn’t care for it so much, it did give the series an additional sense of maturity and reality, and I’ve seen people actually being grateful for it in comparison to regular K-Dramas in which people get all fidgety about even holding hands or calling each other by their first name. This show deals more with people’s feral instincts than with pure feelings in relationships, and in a way I think it was good for them to put a dating app like Somebody in such a light, less romanticized and more of a tool to enable spontaneous booty calls. After all, that’s mainly what these apps are used for in real life.

I just kept wondering how these women, Yoon Oh’s victims, could be so gullible. How they just went out to meet up with someone they just talked to for 10 minutes on an app. This is personally the reason why I can’t do dating apps. People always ask to meet up within one day, or even a week of chatting. I’ve personally experienced being invited out by a guy to come visit him on the other side of the country after only talking for a week. I just instinctively don’t trust these situations, and the way Yoon Oh approached his victims was so full of red flags that I couldn’t understand how all these women were so gullible. Apart from Gi Eun, who took good faith to an entirely new level, I’m just talking about the women that Yoon Oh killed in-between. Okay, he was sneaky and maybe you wouldn’t expect someone to already have an ulterior motive when you ‘incidentally’ match with them on an app like that. But doesn’t anyone just have a basic sense of caution when they register on these apps in the first place? I thought that by now, everyone knows that everything that happens online has potential danger, that you always have to be careful with people you meet online because you can never know their true intentions for sure.

My rating of this drama actually dropped from a 7.5 to a 6.5 after the first couple of episodes. From the trailer, it had looked so promising and interesting, I thought initially Seom was a detective of some sorts herself who found herself attracted to a serial killer and that in itself was kind of refreshing? As in, it would make for a pretty conflicting but refreshing story, one of its kind. I also couldn’t wait to see Kim Young Kwang as a serial killer. I don’t like how this series kind of romanticized Yoon Oh, as in, who it tried to make you feel for him while he was being a first-degree creep and murderer. And yeah, a lot of the story was kind of messy and confusing and random. Apart from that, I couldn’t help admiring the arthouse style. I felt like I was watching a movie and this kept me watching. I kept hoping for some sort of all-explaining final plot twist, something that would finally explain everything, but it didn’t happen. The acting was good, the characters were intriguing despite being occasionally frustrating as heck, and I still think it had a lot of potential. The first couple of episodes were really interesting to me, but at some point it just felt like they were going in circles with how they were going to deal with Yoon Oh, or if they were going to deal with him. It didn’t work directly towards a concrete solution or ending point, and the build-up of that was a bit too slow and took a lot of (random) detours. I really find it a pity, I had pretty high expectations of it to be honest.

I’ll make some cast comments before concluding this short review. I feel like I went through it pretty fast for a change!

Kim Young Kwang was my main reason for wanting to watch this. I was initially kind of scared that this drama would change my perspective on him, as I’ve always found him and his smile adorable. While this drama definitely put him and his smile in a different light, I think he was a really good casting choice for Yoon Oh because he was able to portray the duality to his character so well. He’s extremely charming, but then you forget to notice how big/tall and strong he actually he is, and how he can just take you into an unescapable headlock within one second. It’s definitely one of the more impactful roles I’ve seen of him, in the sense that he’s showed me a side I hadn’t seen of him before. I know him from things like White Christmas, Pinocchio, Gogh The Starry Night, Lookout and Room No. 9 and the movie On Your Wedding Day in which he starred with Park Bo Young. I’ll definitely see more shows with him in the future, so I think I’ll just have to delete him as a psycho killer from my brain so I can at least see him smile without feeling anxious, haha. But yeah, despite my dislike for the romanticization of his character, I also felt myself hoping there was something inside him that could redeem him.

I hadn’t seen Kang Hae Rim in anything before, but I kept thinking I knew her from somewhere. She just fit in so well that I assumed she was an actress, but I found out she’s only done 2 dramas so far. Interesting to see her casted in such a peculiar role as Seom as one of her first acting jobs. I think she definitely succeeded in making Seom into the social alien that she was, she has a really fresh and innocent look but as soon as she’s released to her instincts, she’s definitely a wild one. It was interesting to see her character plunge into that wildness after meeting someone she connected with so much, how it immediately went to wanting physical intimacy rather than first exploring the boundaries and being healthily cautious, she just jumped right in. There were several things I couldn’t understand about her, as I’ve mentioned before, like how she kept choosing heart over head even when she knew her boyfriend serial killer was targeting her best friend, like you’d think she’d be a bit more conflicted to say the least. But I could also very well understand how much it meant to her to finally have found someone she could relate to so much, and who could relate to her like no one else could. I get that she wanted to hold on to that, but the fact that he was a serial killer didn’t change. All in all, I think she did a great acting job here, I kept trying to find out what was going through her head.

This is actually Kim Soo Yeon’s first ever drama role! Again, I hadn’t seen her in anything before, but I can’t believe that this was her first acting job. In the first couple of episodes, I really liked Gi Eun, I really admired her for crawling her way home from that abandoned people being all like ‘I’m gonna kill that bastard!’ but then how she acted after that just didn’t make sense to me, it was like she was continuously underestimating Yoon Oh while she should have known, or at least had her police instinct to tell her that the guy was a walking red flag/warning sign. I just didn’t find it credible to make her go through that while she should’ve known better, and how it seemed like she kept forgetting that she was in a wheelchair. I couldn’t really figure out what she was thinking in the end, and how she even thought of dealing with Yoon Oh even when she caught him. So in that case, making her a police officer didn’t really have any influence on her character and it only helped in the sense that she had some people from work that she could ask for favors from time to time.

Not me almost spitting out my tea when I realized Kim Yong Ji is Na Ri from The King: Eternal Monarch ?! Talk about an image change, hallelujah. I honestly didn’t even recognize her, although her distinctive features did made me feel like I’d seen her before. But Na Ri?! Nah, I wouldn’t have thought of that. It’s impressive how she turned into a completely different person. I mean, The King: Eternal Monarch is the only thing besides this I’ve seen her in so I can only refer to that one as an example, but I was really flabbergasted when I found out. I find it a very interesting choice to make her a shaman with such a wild night life on the side, and I also liked how much the writers normalized her attraction to other women, and the relationship with her eventual girlfriend. The shaman aspect, the fact that she was spiritually able to sense danger around her friends, was very convenient, almost unrealistically convenient in this case. I have a lot of questions about her character too, although I think her priorities were the clearest of all, as was her expression of concern for her friends. I want a friend like Mok Won, too, haha. Although her ‘help’ also didn’t really result in anything in the end, either.

I’m only now realizing how full of actors-I-don’t-know this series is! Even though everyone looked so familiar. I had the same with Choi Yoo Ha, aka Samantha. She was also quite a peculiar character. I couldn’t really put my finger on her relationship with Seom either. It seemed like she cared about her a lot, but on the other hand it also sounded like she just needed Seom to keep Somebody going, but that she didn’t really care that much about her personally. In the scene where she planned to corner Yoon Oh at her office and he just told her Seom already knew everything, I did feel like she wanted to keep Seom to herself because she kept seeing her as that socially awkward high school student from that science fair where they first met, someone who would always be a child and needed someone to protect her.

All in all, I guess I just really couldn’t figure out what the characters were thinking, in general, haha. Unlike regular K-Drama we don’t get to hear their thoughts out loud, no one is talking to themselves. Of course, that’s what makes it more unpredictable and realistic. In many a sense, this drama really does the reality of contemporary society justice, because if there’s one show that doesn’t romanticize anything, from life to work to relationships, it’s this one. It also didn’t romanticize the Somebody app, like for example what they did in Love Alarm. It shows a dark and feral side to people that seek comfort in casual meet-ups and one night stands, rather than basing a whole story on the build-up of one seemingly perfect relationship. Highlighting the imperfection of human beings using this kind of cinematographic arthouse style was something that still kept me curious, because I was expecting for there to be some sort of concrete wrap-up at the end. However, I couldn’t help but get disappointed and frustrated and confused. I ended up with more questions than answers, and even when the final threat was eliminated at the end, I still felt like he got away with everything that he did, that Seom gave him an easy way out. I would have liked to get a bit more backstory on all the characters that would’ve explained their responses to things, because now a lot of things they did seemed really out of character for me. I wish I could’ve rated it higher because I still think it had a lot of potential, but it just wasn’t executed in a way that pleased me, personally. I’m still glad I gave this show a chance as it’s completely not my usual genre. I like that Netflix is sharing more of these unconventional Korean shows, because I honestly had no idea they also made these kinds of K-Drama besides all the romanticized usual ones. I can totally understand how this show would come as a breath of fresh air for people who’ve always rolled their eyes at the sometimes unbearably pure and immature nature of regular series, and I do appreciate its depiction of harsh reality as well, as it can’t always be covered up. In any case, I’m going to go back to my list now, which undoubtedly is filled more with more ‘regular’ shows. I personally can’t deny that I’m more of a light, casual, romantic show lover, as that’s the kind of comfort I personally seek for in Asian drama series.

Thanks for reading all this way, and I’ll be back (probably next month) with my next review. I still have so much to watch, I can’t get more behind than I already am.

Until next time! Bye-bee! ^^

Disclaimer: this is a review, and as such it contains spoilers of the whole series. Please proceed to read at your own risk if you still plan on watching this show or if you haven’t finished it yet. You have been warned.

First Love: Hatsukoi
(First Love 初恋)
MyDramaList rating: 8.5/10

Hello everyone! I’m back with a new review and those who’ve watched it can probably agree with me that this was a very fitting watch for this season. At least where I live it’s been incredibly cold and I’ve been craving some genuine warmth in more than one way. I’m really glad I moved this series up on my list because it really gave me just that: warmth, in more than one way.
I just want to start out by saying that this really is one of the best Japanese dramas that I’ve seen in a very long time. I will give my comments and arguments in more detail below, of course, but I just wanted to put that out there before I start. This really was my kind of drama in terms of pace, story, build-up, character development and chemistry. It was like watching a movie in 9 parts, as the whole thing is visualized so beautifully and the cinematography was really impressive. The whole show was heartwarming and it made great use of some powerful tools like nostalgia and music. Let’s get on with it, shall we?

First Love: Hatsukoi is a 9-episode Netflix J-Drama that tells the love story of two people that spans over 20 years from when they first meet in high school to when they meet again as adults. Their story starts in Hokkaido, 2001, when the then 15-year old singer-songwriter Utada Hikaru brings out her debut album called ‘First Love’.
As a teen, Noguchi Yae (played by Yagi Rikako) is perceived as her school’s goddess in both beauty and academics. She receives love confessions from class- and schoolmates all the time, but she doesn’t really seem to be interested. In truth, she secretly has the hots for school troublemaker Namiki Harumichi (played by Kido Taisei), who is popular in his own way. His troublemaking tendencies also give him a certain charm that also attracts a lot of the female students’ attention. However, as it happens, these two are completely smitten with each other. When they end up confessing their feelings there really isn’t anything or anyone able to break them apart. It’s like they’re meant to be together, soulmates, whatever you wish to call it.
Yae lives with her mother Noguchi Kihako (played by Koizumi Kyoko). Her parents got divorced after Yae’s father chose to live with his second family. Kihako doesn’t have a high educational background, she always did factory work and worked herself to the bone to fend for her and her daughter. The fact that she has such an outstandingly smart and beautiful daughter is her big pride, and she really does everything she can to make sure Yae is happy. When her daughter starts dating Harumichi, she doesn’t forbid it, but she still is kind of cautious of his possible influence on her. Harumichi comes from a big and lively family, he grew up with his parents, grandfather and deaf younger sister Yuu. His best friend and classmate is Kawano Bonji (played by Wakabayashi Jiei), who’s almost always hanging out at his place as well.
For the two teens, their backgrounds of course don’t matter at all. They just relish in their affection for each other and enjoy their first love without regrets. Their portrayal of such a pure and genuine first love is the foremost heartwarming thing about this show. Against the backdrop of snowy and cold Hokkaido, they don’t seem cold at all when they’re together. And of course it’s not just about physical attraction or anything like that, they really trust each other like they trust no one else. Harumichi is the only person Yae entrusts her secret dream of becoming a stewardess with, and Harumichi is always Yae’s number one supporter whatever she does, whether it’s when she participates in an English public speaking contest or when she shares her dream with him. When they plan a trip together, Harumichi ends up taking Yae to visit her father instead, as he just notices that she wants to meet him, even though that endeavor causes him to be put in a bad light towards Yae’s mother, as they ended up spending the night together without informing her that they wouldn’t make it back home the same day. After graduation, Harumichi signs up to join the Self-Defense Forces’ aviation division – he ignored it when his family suggested he join the SDF but immediately signed up after seeing how much Yae admired the airplanes crossing over Hokkaido all the time. Yae manages to get into university in Tokyo and even gets the chance to study abroad.

The scenes depicting this wonderful love story are intertwined with scenes from adult Yae (now played by Mitsushima Hikari) and adult Harumichi (now played by Satou Takeru), about 15 years later. Although they both live in Sapporo, their lives are not connected anymore. Yae works as a taxi driver and Harumichi is part of the security team for an apartment building. As we switch between past and present, we can’t help but wonder what happened to them, what made them end up with these jobs and, more importantly, without each other?
We are shown that Yae has a teenage son but isn’t together with the father anymore. She still wires money to her ex-husband, and we see that when her son comes to visit her, she’s incredibly fond of him. When her son eventually becomes a link to reconnect her with Harumichi, we see her greet him without a single shocked expression – it’s like she doesn’t know him, even though Harumichi is seemingly taken aback. In fact, we’ve seen him try to chase her before after spotting her in a taxi, seemingly recognizing her on the spot. Yet he doesn’t even clarify to her who he is. What is going on here?

Let me just talk about the characters in chronological order, starting with teen Yae and Harumichi. I loved their relationship so freaking much. Especially when we find out at the end how far Harumichi actually came, that he’d fallen for Yae way before she even learned about his existence, and how he studied so hard to get into their local school in Hokkaido purely because he wanted to meet her again. He knew from the moment he saw her that destiny was at play, and although people may find this cringy, it just made me love Harumichi all the more for his pureness. In the end, it really made think, get yourself someone who feels for you the way Harumichi feels for Yae. And it was just so adorable how, even though he was head over heels for her, he didn’t even immediately get the hint when she started giving him signs back.
I loved that part where he got to witness several love confessions to Yae as he was smoking on the school roof during lunch break, how he told her that asking for someone’s favorite food meant that they liked you, but then didn’t get it when she asked for his favorite food and only went O___O when he got home and Bonji told him how dense he was. He legit went from ‘Napolitan 8D’ to ‘WAIT A DAMN MINUTE’, haha. It was just so cute to see them cuddle in their poofy padded coats in the snow, how just looking at each other’s face tangibly made their hearts swell up.
I just loved how sincere Harumichi was, but he never ceased to maintain his quirkiness. He really made me laugh out loud multiple times with his antics and his facial expressions. When his family was like ‘Join the Self-Defense Forces’ and he went ‘Nah man’ and then a plane flew over and Yae was like ‘So cool~’ and he was like ‘!!!’ He really was all-in for Yae, and it was adorable. I think that he managed to express his love for her the most, even though Yae’s feelings were equally strong.

Harumichi’s decision to join the SDF is the first thing that makes them start drifting away from each other. He isn’t allowed to use his phone during the day, so he can only call her during a specific time in the evening, and it starts to happen more frequently that she isn’t able to pick up as she starts participating in college activities and such.
However, it comes as a blessing for both of them when Harumichi secures a break and he will come to visit her in Tokyo. As Yae has just heard about her approved application to start studying abroad in Canada, she wants to wait until they meet so she can tell him personally rather than over the phone.
But when they meet, things have definitely changed a little. I must admit I found it a little bit inconsiderate of Yae to just invite her friends to join their dinner – Harumichi literally came all that way just for her and now he couldn’t even get a moment alone with her. Not only does he not get along with the people that join them, he ends up hearing the news of Yae’s study abroad from someone else and this angers him. He says some hurtful things to Yae, and this in turn hurts Yae even more as he was the first person she wanted to share her happy news with, because he was always the most supportive person to her.
He initially runs away from her then, but then he regrets his behavior and calls her back – and this is when tragedy strikes. Honestly, when it happened, I didn’t immediately grasp what was going on. The sound that came from the other side sounded more like someone screaming to me than someone being hit by a car. I thought at first Yae may have been attacked or something. Anyways, as Harumichi runs back he finds Yae lying on the ground with a head injury – she was hit by a car by being distracted by Harumichi’s phone call (supposedly). But that’s not the worst part, and here’s where a big part of the confusion from the adult scenes was lifted – Yae, indeed, doesn’t recognize Harumichi anymore. The major lingering side effect of her car accident has caused her to lose her memories of the past couple of years. Even though she still remembers her childhood, it’s really only the past couple of high school years that she doesn’t remember, which unfortunately includes her entire encounter with Harumichi.
When Yae is discharged, her mother also actively starts keeping Harumichi out of her life, she doesn’t want Yae’s memory to be triggered in a painful way. He writes her a bunch of letters, which her mom eventually returns to him unopened when he finally finishes his aviation training and comes back to see Yae a couple of years later.
In the meantime, Yae has fallen in love with her doctor in charge at the hospital, Kosaka Yukihito (played by Mukai Osamu), and she’s already gotten pregnant with his child.
Just seeing Harumichi take in this news, and taking into account that he went on with his training, all the while thinking that if he left Yae alone for now and went back to her when he got his life in order (as her mother told him to do), she would remember him again eventually and they’d get back together, was absolutely heartbreaking. To think he went on with his life without ever stopping to think of Yae, while she had completely left him behind (involuntarily, of course) was just so cruel. Yae herself is struggling with her memory loss just as much. She can’t even remember her best friend and just gets upset when she looks at past pictures of her high school time so she eventually decides to stop trying to remember and just go on with her life. Which is fair, of course, but it’s just so sad for Harumichi. He just had to watch as his destined love was ripped apart by a single car accident.
From Yae’s behavior when they meet again as adults, we can establish that she still isn’t able to remember him. However, as soon as they meet again, there is a spark in Yae that makes her unable to forget about him. It’s like she inexplicably becomes interested in him the second they meet, and when they start texting each other a bit and meet up more frequently, she can’t help but feel like this person, this ‘Namiki-san’, is unbelievably her type.

Yae got married to Yukihito and they had their son Tsuzuru (played as a child by Iwakawa Haru). However, as in love she was with her handsome doctor husband in the beginning, Yae starts feeling like she doesn’t belong in the kind of world that he lives in. She’s now part of a very rich family and gets to live in a big house, but her husband rarely has time to spend together anymore and always dismisses whatever she wants to talk about when he comes home because ‘it can’t possibly be more important than all the work he did at the hospital that day’. Furthermore, his mother keeps looking down on Yae’s background and even lies to her acquaintances that Yae is from a really wealthy and respectable family. When she openly looks down on Yae’s mother by stating that she won’t be invited to their next party, how Kihako is too eccentric and won’t fit in because of her low social status and the fact that she likes to drink, Yae finally stands up to her, applies for a divorce, and takes Tsuzuru back to Hokkaido with her, to live in her childhood house with her mom. Even though she loves having her child with her, she has to start working the way her mother used to in order to fend for her family and this causes her to be away for work all the time. She keeps rejecting Yukihito’s suggestions to take over the main care for Tsuzuru as he’s aware of her dire situation, but in the end she can’t help accepting it as she cares about her son’s upbringing more than anything. The scene in which Yukihito and his mom come to take Tsuzuru away from her, how the child is crying for his mom and she starts running after the car, broke my heart into a thousand little pieces. I actually cried at this part.
In the present time, Yae lives by herself in Sapporo while serving as a taxi driver for the local taxi service as the only woman in her team. She gets along well with her male colleagues and doesn’t suffer from any kind of gender-based discrimination, luckily. One of her colleagues, Urabe Otaro (played by Hamada Gaku) is seemingly interested in her, and even though she’s not exactly romantically interested in him, she still gives him a fair chance and they become a bit closer throughout the series. He’s the person who first took her under his lead when she started at the taxi service, and he’s overall very kind to her. They get along well despite their respective quirky demeanors. She meets Harumichi again ‘for the first time’ when her now teenage son Tsuzuru (more about him later) incidentally introduces the two of them.

After learning about Yae’s marriage and pregnancy, Harumichi returned to the Self-Defense Forces and finished his training to become an aviator himself. He even went to serve in Iraq for a couple of years. When he comes back, he’s obliged to take some mandatory therapy sessions in case of PTSD, and he’s assigned to psychological therapist Arikawa Tsunemi (played by Kaho). Despite his initial reluctance towards opening up, he and Tsunemi hit it off pretty well and they start seeing each other after Harumichi is discharged from her sessions. Despite their apparent feelings for each other, Harumichi still doesn’t want to commit to a real relationship, or actually put a label on it, even though Tsunemi does. After meeting his family and learning about the hardships he went through with his first love, Tsunemi is initially a bit worried, but relaxes when she learns that this ‘first love’ is already married to someone else.
In present time, Harumichi and Tsunemi are engaged to be married soon, but Harumichi keeps missing appointments to meet her parents. Especially after he meets Yae again, his will to marry Tsunemi just seems to fade more and more and even though Tsunemi becomes aware of this, she keeps wanting to keep up appearances and avoid bringing up the subject.
I will say a bit more about their relationship later as well, but first I want to talk about Tsuzuru.

In present time, Tsuzuru (now played by Araki Towa) is 14 years old. Even though he officially lives with his father, he occasionally visits his mother Yae in Sapporo. As a teen, he’s a bit secluded and doesn’t express himself. We can see him act a bit distant while his mom is overly excited to see him. As it turns out, Tsuzuru is really passionate about making music, as in, producing it himself. He spends his alone time in his room with music-making software even though his father wants him to concentrate on studying and even has him tutored by esteemed private teachers. As a teen with easy access to social media, Tsuzuru has come to admire a girl named Uta (played by Yamada Aoi). She streams videos of herself dancing in random public places and Tsuzuru is mesmerized by her, both in appearance as in dancing skills. He actually starts making songs inspired by her and keeps trying to track down her location so he can meet her.
One time, he manages to track her location but misses her, only to find that she left her hairpiece behind. The building she was dancing at just happens to be the building where Harumichi works as a security guard and he arranges for Tsuzuru to meet Uta to return her hairpiece to her. After meeting her in real life, Tsuzuru completely falls in love with her. She keeps fascinating him and as she also really appreciates his music and wants to hang out with him more, he can’t believe his own situation. Besides his mom, Uta is the first person that really makes him feel good and at ease with doing what he loves, making music. He goes through an experience of heartbreak after she starts dating someone else, though, and that’s when he also throws his music ambitions aside for a while. He starts living his life the way his father wants him to, focusing purely on his studies and making his family proud. But he can’t help himself, his feelings for Uta are too strong and he keeps thinking about her. The urge to make music, accelerated by thinking of her, becomes too strong too and he eventually succumbs to it, making one final song for her and chasing after her when she’s leaving to Tel Aviv to join a dance company tour. This scene gave me some real Love Actually vibes, how he went after her at the airport and then managed to confess his love and she actually reciprocated them and he went back to his mom with that face like, ‘who the man’, haha.
I think adding Tsuzuru’s story of first love story to be entwined with the main leads’ story of first love was really clever and meaningful. It just shows that first love can happen in any generation, regardless of the changing times. Tsuzuru had music to express his feelings and they eventually got through to Uta, who couldn’t ignore his sincerity. I really liked her character too, she was really genuine, free-spirited and open-minded. Personality-wise you’d say she was the complete opposite of Tsuzuru, but maybe that’s why he admired her all the more, she was so free in what she did, she really followed her heart and he was pretty limited in doing that himself, what with his father’s family’s expectations of him. In the ‘3 years later’ time jump, he’s even made it as a professional producer at 19 years old, so we can only be glad that he decided to follow his heart.

When Yae and Harumichi meet again as adults, the flashbacks of what happened between them as teens make it abundantly clear that this doesn’t automatically mean their happy ending. Yae still doesn’t remember Harumichi, and Harumichi is engaged to Tsunemi. However, the both of them can’t help their almost instinctive attraction to each other. As soon as Yae appears back into his life, it’s like Harumichi never even lost sight of her, it immediately puts a strain on his relationship with Tsunemi. He seemed to be doing fine without her, knowing she was moving on happily with her new family, but seeing her there and then, it just put him right back where he was as a teenager with no one but Yae on his mind. If he had been trying to let go of her, then this just put an end to that. He tries to talk with Tsunemi several times but she keeps avoiding the subject, although we see very clearly from her expression that she knows exactly what he’s going to say.

I honestly felt very bad for Tsunemi. She was a really cool person, she was very confident and mature. It’s just that she fell in love with the wrong guy, the guy that wasn’t right for her. The guy who would never be able to forget his first love, and she became a victim of that. She kept trying to hold onto him while he was trying to break free. I did admire how she decided to eventually accept the rejection but never let him diminish her pride. She did break down crying after he left, of course, but she was able to face him confidently until the very end, as she was telling him to leave because she was choosing this for herself. And admittedly, fair enough. I mean, if she’d insisted on getting married, she would’ve just remained miserable for the rest of her life, being confronted every single day with the fact that she wasn’t his number one person, that there was always someone else on his mind. No one should force themselves into a marriage like that.
I also found it a very powerful decision of Harumichi to not immediately run to Yae after breaking off his engagement with Tsunemi. Even though she’d asked him out, he ended up rejecting her as well even after she told him she was in love with him. He just couldn’t bring himself to be with Yae like this. I wonder if it really had to do with the fact their shared memories still meant the most to him, and that he wouldn’t be able to endure getting her back while she still didn’t remember him. For her, it would just be starting a new relationship, but for him it would be a completely new kind of start-over, and I can understand very well how that would’ve been too painful for him.
In the end, he accepts her back without hesitation once she comes to find him after remembering him again, so that was why I felt like their shared memories were so important to him. It was like he couldn’t be with Yae as long as she didn’t remember their past together, and as soon as she did, he welcomed her back with open arms.

Before moving on to my analysis, I want to devote one final paragraph to Harumichi’s younger sister Yuu (played as a teen by Nagasawa Itsuki and as an adult by Minami). Yuu has lost her hearing in an accident that Harumichi also blames himself for (seriously, this guy blames himself for everything that’s happened to the people he cares about). Anyways, she ends up marrying Bonji (as an adult played by Nakao Akiyoshi) and they have a cute little daughter together, Airu (played by Niitsu Chise). Harumichi is a very loving uncle to Airu, and she adores him back. The siblings are still close to him, and Harumichi often hangs out with her and Airu when they come to visit. Yuu used to be against her brother dating as a teen, but after meeting Yae she completely changed her mind about her. Yae even learned sign language because she wanted to be able to talk to Yuu, and they got along very well. She is also very nice to Tsunemi when Harumichi brings her home, and doesn’t even hesitate to tell her about the ‘first love’ issue. She only has her brother’s happiness in mind, she wants him to become happy, especially after seeing what happened to him after he lost Yae. So she’s genuinely rooting for Tsunemi and wants to help her in understanding her brother better. She never becomes spiteful, she never acts like she doesn’t want her brother to end up with anyone else besides Yae or something like that, she really just tries to support him the way he supports her and Airu.
After Harumichi ends up at the hospital for injuring his back while saving Yae from falling down the stairs at the apartment he works at, Yuu meets Yae there and immediately recognizes her, but also instantly sees something’s amiss as Yae doesn’t seem to know who she is and Harumichi is trying to make her stop talking to Yae as if they are acquainted.
This is where things start happening to Yae too, because she starts using sign language automatically even though she doesn’t remember ever learning to do that.
Yuu doesn’t really get involved too much in their relationship afterwards, but I did want to give her a special mention since I really liked her character and she was so important to Harumichi.

I think I’ve covered the story’s summary more than enough with this, so I would like to talk a bit about messages and references that I liked in this show.
One of the many great things about this story was how it so intricately weaved all the characters together and how it paid such great but subtle attention to detail. It really fills in all the gaps of the main leads’ respective storylines bit by bit until they meet again as adults and eventually everything falls back into place. It kept me curious until the end, I kept wanting to know everything that had happened and most of all, I just wanted the universe to pull some strings to ensure that Yae and Harumichi could finally be together without anything or anyone ever getting in their way ever again.
So first of all, the reference to the title. It’s mentioned in the opening credits of each episode that this series was inspired by Utada Hikaru’s two songs, ‘First Love’ and ‘Hatsukoi’. While the titles mean the same thing, the two songs were released exactly 20 years apart, and this is the first link that’s made between the two parallel stories introduced in the first episode. In the teen arc, Utada has just released ‘First Love’, in the adult arc, Utada has just released ‘Hatsukoi’. Both songs are featured in the soundtrack as much as they are actually listened to by the characters in the story. As a fan of Utada’s songs as a teen, Yae listened to ‘First Love’ a lot, especially after getting together with Harumichi. In the end, I found it only more than fitting that this song was the thing that finally triggered her memory and made her remember him. I honestly thought they’d make it more of a big deal, the moment that she’d remember, but it was kept quite small and intimate. As Harumichi had moved out, Tsuzuru had been allowed to take some of this stuff as he was going throw it out anyway, and Tsuzuru chose Harumichi’s old Walkman. As Yae joins him in listening to it, she realizes it has Utada’s ‘First Love’ CD in it, and everything comes back to her. She starts crying, but it’s also like she quietly accepts the truth that is suddenly being revealed to her, that this man she developed feelings for was her first love this entire time.
I don’t understand exactly how it happened, I guess Uta took a trip to Iceland? In any case, she comes back from a trip and shows Tsuzuru a picture she took there in which Harumichi is seen walking in the background. Yae manages to track him down somehow, traveling to Iceland which is kind of familiar to their snowy backdrop in Hokkaido, maybe the snow was just meant to be there for them as well. Anyways, Yae finds him at a small airport in Iceland and reveals she remembers him and then becomes a stewardess on his plane and it’s all just very satisfying and full-circle.

I really loved how the writers made use of these nostalgic themes to link the different time periods together. Besides the Utada Hikaru songs, they really managed to create a timeline, mentioning several important cultural and political events that happened on the news, to emphasize even more the passing of time. The war in Iraq for example, how the Japanese Self-Defense Forces were made to interfere even though they were meant to just be a defense force should anything happen to Japan. The protests of people wanting to stop the SDF to get involved in that. And then the big tsunami in 2011, on the exact day 10 years after Yae and Harumichi buried their time capsule together and promised to meet back there 10 years later. The earthquake and tsunami actually made Harumichi turn around from going back there, as he realized he didn’t want to leave Tsunemi in the dark by herself. And then, they even covered the outbreak of Covid in 2020, just when Yae managed to get a 40-day leave from work to travel and find Harumichi. They used several important and actual historical events to back this story, to give it credibility and support, and I really liked that.
I also loved how incredibly humane they made every single person in the story. Seriously, the way every character was written was so realistic. I always appreciate it when this happens, when there’s this story in which everyone responds in a different way.
For example, Yae’s mother. Although I definitely resented her a little bit for pushing Harumichi away from Yae after she had the accident, I think it’s important to understand that she was doing it purely out of concern for her daughter’s wellbeing. At that point, she probably wasn’t trying to think too much of the feelings between them, but her daughter’s happiness and recovery was more important to her than Harumichi’s broken heart. She might not have had a great impression of Harumichi from the start, but she never stopped the two of them from dating and she always smiled when she saw her daughter get all giddy by herself because of her crush. I did find it a bit double sometimes, because she kept agreeing that forcing back Yae’s memories would only be painful, but she still for example encouraged her best friend to come visit, even though Yae didn’t remember her either. Maybe she thought remembering her best friend would be okay, but remembering her boyfriend wouldn’t? It probably also had to do with the fact that Kihako may have partly blamed Harumichi for what happened, as they were supposed to be together in Tokyo and it might not have happened if he hadn’t ran away from her after their fight. But still, while in the beginning I didn’t like Kihako’s decision, after finishing the series I have no doubt in my mind that everything she did was for her daughter’s goodwill. She was really supportive when Yae started falling for Yukihito, and kind of pushed her into that direction. When Yae decided to move to Sapporo by herself, her mother also says something like, ‘I’ve always wondered whether I made the right choice for you’, and I think that’s just what it was. She felt like she needed to make a choice for Yae in her state of memory loss, which memories to keep and which to let go of. At the time, she thought it would be better if she just got a stable life with Yukihito, but of course she couldn’t have known it would turn out like that. She may have also regretted sending Harumichi away when he came for Yae after finishing his training. But that’s life; we don’t know where our choices will lead us. Something may seem like a good idea one moment, but it can always go either way. So in that, I found Kihako a very well-written character as well. She may have made a wrong decision, but she came to reflect on it in time, even when it was too late to change anything. She made an estimation when her daughter wasn’t able to make her own, she put her hopes for her daughter’s future first, and that’s just something a really devoted and caring parent would do. In the end I can forgive her because Yae and Harumichi still managed to find each other, the universe still brought them together.

Also, the issue of Yae’s father. We are introduced to him once in a flashback, when Harumichi takes Yae on a trip to meet him when they were supposed to only take a one-day trip together somewhere. While Yae’s father Akihiko (played by Iura Arata) is barely in her life, she knows him mostly because he always sent her letters from places he visited. He travelled a lot and always sent her souvenirs and this is also something inspired Yae’s love for travelling and seeing the world. He chose to leave Kihako and Yae to live with another woman he’d gotten pregnant and be a father to his daughter from that family. Kihako broke off all contact with him, but of course can’t forbid Yae from reaching out to him every once in a while. When we meet Akihiko, it’s clear that he does really care about Yae. I liked the scene where he gave her that pen and told her that the words that he always used to test if a pen works was her name. When he tells her to also pick a word like that, to write something when testing a pen, she writes Harumichi’s name. I liked how her love for him was even in reading/seeing/writing his name and it was really nice how it came back when she was an adult, that she somehow got butterflies when she’d read certain characters – the characters of Namiki’s name. It was a really nice part in which Harumichi officially got acknowledged by her dad, and I think it really meant the world to Yae. You could see how conflicted she was because part of her still resented her dad for leaving their family for that other one, she still thought he did a bad thing but she still couldn’t help missing him. It was a really important moment for her character development, and it was all the more important because Harumichi was there to support her. It definitely had a big impact on her, sharing that with him. She even initiated sleeping together for the first time that night after they missed their last flight, and that was a really big step for Yae to take and I’m 110% sure that Harumichi would’ve waited until eternity if that’s what it would’ve taken for her to decide she was ready for it.
I don’t know, I just always find it so heartwarming to see young people act like this in love, so mature for their age. They were still so young but their feelings for each other were so real and serious, it wasn’t just about physical intimacy, it’s just that they could share everything together, they really were each other’s soulmate and that’s what made it so painful to think of how Yae forgot about all of that after her accident, and how it must have messed Harumichi up. This is not the kind of relationship anyone should be allowed to forget, it was really cruel what happened and how they were torn apart. It could’ve only happened through something out of anyone’s control, and that’s exactly what did it. It wasn’t anything or anyone’s fault, it really was just an accident. A life-altering accident that took a merciless toll on two lives.

And then there’s Yukihito. I just found it so interesting that in his case too, while I didn’t particularly like his character for the way he treated Yae after they got married, I still didn’t think he was a bad person. His mother just had a very strong hold on his life and the people he mingled with, and he couldn’t really do anything about her disapproval of Yae. That is, he just never said anything about it, but also didn’t stand up for Yae. He just kind of left their feud to them while he focused on work. But what I did appreciate about him was how considerate he remained of Yae’s living situation after they got divorced. As much as I encouraged her will to take Tsuzuru’s care upon herself and prove that she could provide for her child by herself without needing his family’s money, he just wanted to lighten her situation without looking down on her. I think he could also see that she had gotten miserable in their marriage but just felt like there was nothing he could personally do about it anymore. He just offered to take Tsuzuru in to help her, and he even told her that she didn’t have to keep sending him money as a contribution to Tsuzuru’s care. He also immediately agrees to her request to see Tsuzuru more often, it’s not like he wants to keep the two from meeting or something, she’s still the mother of his child. So in this way, even though I couldn’t read a lot from his character in terms of thoughts/feelings/psyche, I didn’t think he was a bad person. He did what he could as Tsuzuru’s father, but when his son finally decides to go into music and become a producer, he also doesn’t stop him. In that final ‘3 year later’ time jump, it was funny to see how he suddenly got all these female colleagues flocking to him to ask for his son’s autograph, lol. He didn’t seem particularly bothered by it.

There are so many beautiful scenes and dialogues in this show, the way it’s filmed is really beautiful and cinematic, and it really feels like every single character and scene has a purpose and meaning. Nothing feels unnecessary and everything is very neatly wrapped up when the different timelines presented in the story start coming together. I thought it was a very simple solution to have Yae’s memory ultimately triggered through Utada Hikaru’s song, because I did hear about this before, that in cases of people with dementia music it did happen that they suddenly became lucid again after hearing a specific piece of music. It was only a tiny bit anti-climactic for me, because it was really like, the solution was there in that song all along! If only she’d listened to it earlier! As obvious and simple a solution it turned out to be, I was just happy that she finally remembered. I also thought it was good that she took her time after that to process everything before she instantly started looking for Harumichi again.
That’s another thing I want to praise about this series. Even though it deals with typical dramatic tropes like memory loss, the events are never ‘overdramatized’.
Adding a little anecdote from my personal experience with acting, I personally think that when a scene or mono/dialogue is already very heavy and dramatic in itself, using very dramatic acting to act out the scene will often diminish the effect rather than strengthen it. I once did an audition with a very heavy and emotional monologue, and I also acted it out as such, with very dramatic and heavy expressions. But then I was given the enlightening feedback that in many cases, adding even more drama to a scene that’s already dramatic in itself doesn’t necessarily make it better. My point is, the way that everyone dealt with the dramatic events in this show was all the more powerful because no one got overdramatic. People tried to tackle these things by themselves, in their own quiet ways, sometimes without even talking about it. Sure, occasionally someone bursts out crying or screaming, but it never became too exaggerated and that’s how for example the quietness in which Harumichi dealt with his pain hit me even harder. I would’ve had a different view of him if he’d constantly been crying and acting miserable about what had happened to him. So that’s what I wanted to compliment, the fact that the characters all maintained such integrity, even in the face of dire situations. It just made me aware of how unnecessary it would’ve been if they had been crying and screaming the whole time, that would’ve made for a very different review, haha.

It’s time for some cast comments! Honestly I really liked the cast, the casting choices were really refreshing and well-chosen. I couldn’t believe it when I looked up the young main leads and found out they hadn’t even done that much yet! I really hope this series brings them a lot of great future acting opportunities, because they really outdid themselves here.
My biggest compliments to every single cast member for making this such a memorable watching experience for me, I really felt like clapping for a movie at the cinema when I finished it.

I’ve only seen Mitsushima Hikari before in Quartet, and I remember her because she was my favorite character there. I didn’t really know what kind of actress she was, what her usual style was, but I really liked her sincere performance as adult Yae. I loved her integer she was, but at the same time so quirky. When she fell in love with ‘Namiki-san’, it was just like how she acted when she first fell for Harumichi as a teen, and how she was completely confused and zoned out after discovering he had a girlfriend. She was really kind to everyone, from her important people to her taxi clients, and that made her a really good fit for the job. Until the end she remained so genuine and pure, she didn’t poke her nose into anyone’s business, she really just followed her instincts when it led her somewhere. She just went and texted Namiki-san when she felt like it, unafraid to ask him out for dinner, and even though it took her some time and courage, she also just set out to travel to freaking Iceland to find him. I love how she still ended up becoming a stewardess on Harumichi’s plane. It was just so satisfying finally seeing them together in the end, fulfilling all the feelings that were left between their teenage selves when they were separated. I liked her timid yet impactful acting, the subtle details in her expressions. I couldn’t help but notice that she has such a tiny face but I really like her eyes, they have a sort of depth to them? I can’t really explain it well, but anyways, I really liked seeing her in this, it’s made me like her even more! I hope I’ll be able to see more of her acting in the future!

I recently saw Satou Takeru in Koi wa Tsuzuku yo Dokomademo, and it’s funny to think that this was actually the same person. His portrayal of Harumichi seemed to come much more natural to him, and it was nice to see this side of him. I haven’t even seen that much with him, so I like to get more than one perspective about an actor. In this show he manages to show quite a wide variety to his personality, and I think he did a really good job as he didn’t lose all of the bubbliness of teenage Harumichi, but became more of a quieter, subdued version of his young self, I thought that was very realistic. You could just see he was still the same person, but that he’d grown up and went through some hardships in the process as well. It was really nice to see him act all lovey-dovey with his niece Airu, he really just became all smiles with her, that was really cute. I think we learn a lot about Harumichi in particular throughout the series, from the way he behaves when he’s a teen to when he gives that speech on his sister and best friend’s wedding. He may have initially been kind of a delinquent, but there was never anyone more pure-hearted than this guy. I really loved Harumichi’s character and Sato Takeru’s performance was very good as someone who was trying to leave the past behind him and move on, but just kept being pulled back to that irreplaceable memory of his first love. I really felt for him, for all that he went through and no one ever really acknowledging how hard it must have been for him. It was really nice to see him act with Mitsushima Hikari, and their chemistry when they were finally reunited in the end was just all I’d been hoping for the entire show. I’m very curious to what kind of other projects he will take on in the future!

The following two youngsters deserve all the praise in the world because it was mainly because of them that I was so incredibly invested in the main leads’ relationship. The foundation that they build for their adult versions couldn’t have been established better.
Yagi Rikako is only 21 years old! She was actually born in 2001, so portraying this time period must have been very interesting for her, lol. I LOVED her. Not only is she gorgeous, but the way she portrayed teenage Yae left really little to be desired. I was just rooting for her character all the way from her first appearance. I distinctly remember her first shot was her walking along a pathway practicing a stewardess-speech towards the sky. I loved that they made her so internationally-oriented, she really wanted to study English and travel the world, which I guess is uncommon for most people growing up on an island like Japan. Anyways, she had such great energy in all her scenes and her chemistry with teenage Harumichi was TO DIE FOR. Seriously, she made me envious of not having a first love experience like that myself when I was a teenager, haha. She really faced a tough situation, I can’t even start imagining what it must feel like suddenly not remembering the past couple years of your life. I thought the way she acted out Yae’s frustration with it was very realistic, and also her decision to try not to think about it too much because it just upset her. Of course she wasn’t aware that just moving on without remembering would hurt her most important person, but she really stuck to what she believed was her best option in that situation, and that was very brave of her. Trying not to linger too much on feeling sorry for the people she may not remember and focusing on how she would go on from that point herself can’t have been an easy thing to do. I really liked her here, and I hope she’ll get many more opportunities after this, she was really amazing.

Moving on to my favorite boy, Kido Taisei! Honestly, this guy warmed my heart to the max. I didn’t think I recognized him from anything before but now I see he was in the movie LDK… which I watched not too long ago but wasn’t really that memorable so I probably deleted it from my memory ^^” Anyways, I want to give him all the praise in the world for his portrayal of teen Harumichi. He was so incredibly sweet and pure, despite his troublemaking demeanor, he was really such a good guy and he didn’t deserve something so horrible to have the girl he loved so uncontrollably with all his heart taken from him like that. The look on his face when Yae’s mom told him she’d already gotten pregnant with another man’s baby in the time he was finishing his aviation training thinking ONLY of getting back to her as soon as possible… He really moved me to tears of both joy and sorrow, and ugh that SMILE. I really loved his performance to bits and I hope that he gets to do more and more from now on. I think I saw this was actually his debut role as a main character in a drama! Good for him! I also saw that there’s actually a 5 year age difference between him and Yagi Rikako, I could’ve sworn they would’ve been the same age! To be so young and already capable of portraying such mature love for someone, he really pulled my heartstrings and was the main reason I got emotional throughout the show. He was amazing, I wish him all the best with his future acting endeavors.

It was nice seeing Kaho in a drama again after such a long time! I’ve seen multiple things with her, both dramas and movies. In Otomen, Nobunaga Concerto, Love Song, Sunadokei and Umimachi Diary. I liked seeing her again, and with such a powerful role as well. I liked that this series didn’t have any kind of ‘typical’ characters. Like, in a ‘typical’ drama, Tsunemi might have been a kind of bitchy character, the second female lead who would’ve been spiteful towards Yae for coming back and taking her fiancé away from her. But I liked that they kept her so humane as well. It didn’t even occur to her to become spiteful towards Yae, even though her appearance back into Harumichi’s life may have a direct cause of his request to break off the engagement. I think she must have been very mature to consider all the aspects of the situation, including the fact that she couldn’t do anything about Harumichi’s lingering feelings for his first love, and that she also couldn’t do anything to keep him at her side, no matter how much she wanted him to choose her. The fact that she didn’t become petty but just accepted the situation as it was and became determined to choose her own happiness over a marriage in which she’d always remain miserable despite her love for Harumichi was very powerful. I couldn’t help but feel sympathy for her, she also didn’t choose to end up in this situation and she still dealt with it the best she could. I thought Kaho did very well in this role, you could see her emotions very clearly on her face. I also liked that she had that mantra about her name and she applied it to several different situations. It didn’t just mean that she’d always be there for Harumichi to light his way back to her, but it also applied to her determination and perseverance to get through dire situations. It was pretty original to have them meet as therapist and client, initially, I didn’t see that coming. And the way they got attracted to each other also happened really naturally, if I hadn’t been so dead invested in Yae and Harumichi as end game I don’t think I would’ve minded Harumichi moving on with Tsunemi, they made a good pair in their own way. I was just happy that she really wasn’t just a rebound for Harumichi either, he really grew to like her a lot at some point, but she just didn’t stand a chance against Yae. Anyways, I liked Kaho, I hadn’t expected her to be in this so it was a nice surprise to see her again.

Apparently Minami was in the movie Sakuran and she was Mizuki’s foreign friend in the Special of HanaKimi?! It’s been too long but I definitely wouldn’t have recognized her from there. That’s such a throwback! Apparently, Minami Bages is part French! I was thinking something about her face looked European, she’s really pretty! I liked the addition of a deaf character, I can’t really say why but it just added to the deepness of the story as well. Yuu’s relationship with her brother had always been good and she never blamed him for the accident she got in, but her deafness always made Harumichi feel guilty. Because of that in itself, Yuu was a major character in terms of Harumichi’s personal story, and I think it was a big development in both of their lives that she and Bonji got married. The speech that he gave was really meaningful as well, it was a very heart-wrenching but beautiful scene. I liked how she really grew out of that younger sister role and started supporting her older brother as well, and also how friendly she was in general. She and her daughter Airu made a really cute pair, I loved their mother-daughter moments, that Airu was also able to use sign language even as a child, and that she’d pull her mom out of the way when a bike came towards her and she didn’t hear it coming. Just the way everyone in the story accepted her this way and never made her feel like she was a bother or that they were ashamed of her handicap or something (it happens, you know). Despite her handicap she really turned out great, and I loved her and Bonji together as well. She performed really well, I really wanted to hug her on several occasions.

The fact that teen Bonji was one of the students from 3-nen A-gumi! I feel like I now recognize so many young actors from there, haha. I thought Bonji was really well-casted and the young and old versions looked so much alike? The resemblance was uncanny!
I see that Nakao Akiyoshi was in Watashi ga Renai Dekinai Riyuu, and I also see he got casted in the Japanese version of Itaewon Class in Seung Kwon’s role! I haven’t seen anything else with him, though. Anyways, even though Bonji didn’t appear that much, I think teen Bonji mostly appeared in the flashbacks in the beginning, he also was a very important person to Harumichi. He was like a rock, the loyal best friend who’d never leave his side. He knew all there was to know about what Harumichi went through with Yae, and even though he was rooting for him to become happy and move on from his painful memories, he was just there to support his friend all the way. That scene when he and Yuu got married and he had that rooster head hairstyle, lol! They definitely remained true to themselves until the end, haha.

So I thought I didn’t know Araki Towa from anything, but apparently he was in Shinigami-kun?! Again, too long ago, but it’s just funny to me because that series is OLD, lol. Anyways, I liked his portrayal of Tsuzuru! His story really stood on its own legs and it wasn’t just that he was the female lead’s son, he really was his own person and I respected that. Growing up the way he did, with his parents separating and his dad mainly having such high expectations of him, I get that that couldn’t have been easy and that he never felt free to show his dad what kind of music he’d been working on. The fact that he had this passion for something but didn’t feel like he was able to express it or even talk about it with other people. He really needed some peers, and he found one in Uta. The way he fell in love with her was also so natural and logical, in a way, she was literally floating when she danced and she was so free-spirited and uncomplicated. I guess he really needed to be pulled out of his shell by someone like her to finally admit to music being his calling. I liked to see how his relationship with his mother also visibly improved, he seemed kind of awkward with her in the beginning but when she started supporting him in his music-making, it really didn’t take that long for him to open up to her more. I don’t know if he even knew about his mother’s amnesia, maybe she never told him. But it was nice to see that he also supported her in getting to know Namiki-san, he even gave her a cute cardigan telling her she should start dating again, haha.
In any case, Tsuzuru was such a relatable character, he went through something so familiar, I guess everyone has felt like at least at some point in their life. The thrill of having a crush on someone for the first time, but also the heartbreak when you realize the other person doesn’t see you that way. And then again the thrill when you put in real effort to pursue them and your efforts pay off and you’re able to express yourself through the one thing that you’re best at. His story was a really endearing addition, and again gave some really good opportunities to a couple of young and talented actors!

I’m not even surprised that Yamada Aoi is a professional dancer, but I didn’t expect this to be her one and only drama acting role to date! The acting seemed to come so natural to her! But yeah, she is definitely a dancer, the way she moved wasn’t just someone playing the role of a dancer. I’m glad she got to shine so much with her dancing skills in this series, her performances were really amazing. I can imagine why Tsuzuru would get mesmerized by her! I really liked Uta-chan (I saw in some cast list her full name is actually Komori Uta, which means ‘lullaby’, that’s so cute!). She was a breath of fresh air, a bright and dazzling addition to this show’s cast. I liked how she didn’t remain as just the object of Tsuzuru’s fascination, that she really was given a chance to respond to his heartfelt confession. As she was mostly running out enjoying her carefree life, it didn’t seem like she’d be the type to want to deal with emotional and serious situations, but I’m really glad she gave Tsuzuru an honest chance. She was so charming in her own quirky, bubbly way. I really liked how much her personality stood in contrast to Tsuzuru, but in that aspect they were matched really well. I hope she can do some more acting like this in the future, she is really talented!

Apparently I recognize Hamada Gaku from Nobunaga Concerto as well, but it’s been a long time since I watched that. In any case, can we just appreciate the performance of this guy as Yae’s colleague Urabe Otaro? I just loved what they did with this guy’s character. From the start he seemed to be kind of a comic relief character, and when Yae agreed to having dinner together I was initially kind of like, ‘no way, right?’, but he ended up being such a great supporting figure to Yae. Even if they didn’t date, he really had been supporting her from the start and he wanted her to follow her heart so badly as well. That final monologue he had when they said goodbye at the train station that one time, when he reminded her of her first taxi driver days and told her to hold her head up high, that was really touching. I just loved how he made Yae realize she’d had such a supportive person in him all along, I don’t think anyone ever spoke to her like that before, with such encouragement and admiration. And I really loved him for manipulating their boss into approving Yae’s 40 days’ leave of absence. I mean come on, she was their best employee and she hadn’t asked for a single day off before and now he was going to put punishment regulations on her leave of absence request? I loved how he just went, ‘Eh, I didn’t know this was that kind of company where they don’t even allow their best employee a well-deserved break…’, that was a really nice comeback of him. He just turned out to be a much better person that I thought, so mature how he dealt with his own rejection and how he didn’t become bitter but kept rooting for Yae. I liked him.

I was surprised to see Mukai Osamu in this as well, I’ve seen him in a bunch of stuff before like Mei-chan no Shitsuji, Hotaru no Hikari 2, Nobunaga Concerto (again!), and the movies Hanamizuki and Paradise Kiss. I think he was a good fit for the role of doctor and father-figure to Tsuzuru. What redeemed him for me was really his continued support for Yae, how he just wanted her to have an easy life even if he didn’t get involved with her anymore. He kept being considerate of her living situation, even if it was just because she was the mother of his child and he felt obliged to do so. I think it showed good manners. On the other hand, I thought he really should’ve said something about his mother’s treatment of his wife, because now he just made it seem like he agreed with whatever she said to Yae. He could’ve stuck up for her more, like he fell in love with her, got married to her and had a child with her even though he knew about her background, right? He must’ve done that because he accepted her the way she was, so hearing his mother talk to Yae like that should’ve gotten some sort of reaction out of him, in my opinion. In any case, even though he appeared pretty strict to Tsuzuru when it came to his studies, it did seem like in the end he let him choose his own path, which I appreciated. All in all I thought it was nice that Mukai Osamu got casted for the role, although I like to see him as more sympathetic characters, haha.

I’ve seen Iura Arata before in Rich Man, Poor Woman, Tantei no Tantei, Unnatural and in the movies Air Doll, Hanamizuki and Kimi ni Todoke. I was surprised to see his name appear in the opening credits and I was really curious to see what role he would play, and it turned out he was Yae’s father. He only appeared one time, in the flashback where Yae and Harumichi visit him, and I liked his fashion style, haha. I also liked the duality about his character, like he seemed like a good enough person even though he hadn’t been much of a father to Yae. Was he a bad person for choosing that other family? It’s all about perspective. His current family probably thinks of him as a good person for making that choice. Anyways, he made a nice guest appearance, I liked his performance, even though it was short.

I feel like I should know Koizumi Kyoko from something but I don’t! She looks so familiar, though… Anyways, I really liked her as Yae’s mother. She seemed like kind of an eccentric lady at first, but in a good and fun way. Not the kind of mother you’d expect from Yae, though, as she was such a model student and exemplary daughter, haha. But I liked that Yae developed that kind of quirkiness her mother possessed a bit more herself as well as she got older. As I mentioned before, I didn’t think that she made the right choice in pushing Harumichi away from her daughter under the excuse of ‘triggering her memory in a hurtful way’ but didn’t think to do the same with Yae’s other close friends who were close with Harumichi as well. Maybe she did kind of use the situation to get rid of Harumichi because she wanted her daughter to end up with someone with a bit more of a social status. But I can forgive her because she was purely thinking of Yae’s wellbeing. In this situation, when it all comes to your decision on what to do and you have to make a choice for your child that won’t hurt her any more than she’s already been hurt, what would a normal parent do? I have absolutely no idea. In any case, I think it’s safe to say that Kihako also had enough time to reflect on the choices she made, and it really doesn’t make her a bad person. I liked her personality, she was much so relaxed with Yae and while she’d only applaud her daughter when she came from with A’s from school, she never pressured her into overachieving or anything like that. She was just a really warm mom who’d always be there for her daughter. She welcomed Yae back with open arms when she moved back into her childhood home with her, taking Tsuzuru along after her divorce. She really did all she could to stand by her daughter. I liked how humane her character was, Koizumi Kyoko did a really good job portraying a mother being put into a dire situation like that.

One final shoutout to Harumichi’s parents, who were played by Watanabe Makiko and Okabe Takashi. They may not have appeared that many times, but they contributed so much to the scenes of teen Harumichi in his interactions with his family. I loved how they didn’t even scold their son even after he made a mess at school for hitting someone who talked ill of Yuu’s deafness. That scene where they were called into the teacher’s office and blatantly faking their apology and the teacher was like ‘Apparently the guy he hit made fun of your daughter’ and they went ‘Oh, well in that case’, haha. I just really liked their performances, even in the background. You could see where Harumichi got his easygoing nature from, and I love how they just accepted him and all his flaws and when they scolded him it was never really serious.

So I think I’ve said what I wanted to say about the story and the characters!
As I mentioned, this drama really was straight up my alley in terms of pace, story and character building. I love a good romance story, and this show really got me hooked from the start. I put my rating on an 8 quite early on, but I wanted to add a little extra to it because the cinematography and soundtrack were also so great and I just really loved the attention to detail in the references. Heck, it even made me nostalgic of listening to Utada Hikaru songs! Utada Hikaru was still everywhere when I first started watching Japanese dramas, so it was kind of throwback for me as well. I loved the build-up in the story, how they used historical and political events to build the timeline, and the chemistry between the leads, both young and old, was really satisfying. I really enjoyed watching this, it really made me feel like I was watching a movie, it was a different experience from the usual drama series I watch, even in quality. I’m really glad I moved it up on my list, because as soon as I saw the trailer I was just like, I can’t wait too long with this!! And then I heard some other people were watching it and that just set off my impatience with it, haha. So yeah, higher rating than usual for this one! I really hope they will continue to make gems like these, it really is one of the best Japanese dramas I’ve seen in a very long time. The balance in the themes, from light to heavy, the sincerity of everyone’s performances, I want to give medals to everyone who worked on this. Even though some parts may have been a bit predictable, it didn’t take away from how well-written it was. I don’t care for any negative comments on this one, I loved it.

Next up is something entirely different which I’ve also been hyped ever since I saw the trailer. It’s not the kind of series I’d normally watch in terms of genre, but I really want to give it a chance. Thanks for reading until the end again and I’ll be back with my next review soon! Just to let you know, I’m going to be switching it up a bit more between more recent released and older ones, so stay tuned!

Bye-bee! ^^

Disclaimer: this is a review, and as such it contains spoilers of the whole series. Please proceed to read at your own risk if you still plan on watching this show or if you haven’t finished it yet. You have been warned.

True Beauty
(여신강림 /  Yeoshin Gangrim)
MyDramaList rating: 6.0/10

Hi everyone! First of all I want to wish everyone a very Happy New Year! I am very curious to see what kind of things 2023 will bring. For my first review of the new year I chose this series which had been on my list since the trailer came out, because I happened to be reading the webtoon and was really curious about the drama adaptation. I ended up putting it off until I finished the webtoon (right now it’s just the final spinoffs, but the main story has ended). I moved it up on my watchlist as soon as I finished the webtoon. In hindsight, I don’t think it was actually necessary to finish the webtoon first, because this drama proved itself to be really different from the original cartoon. There were a lot of changes in characters, situations and dynamics between people, so that was interesting to see. I will say from the start that unfortunately, I didn’t like it as much as I hoped I would. I think it focussed more on trivial (needlessly) dramatic situations and comic-purpose fillers that distracted from the powerful message that the webtoon conveyed. Of course, there’s only so much you can include in a 16-episode drama series when the webtoon is almost 200 episodes.

True Beauty is a 16-episode K-Drama that focusses on the personal journey of Im Joo Kyung (played by Moon Ga Young) as she discovers her own ‘true beauty’ after being relentlessly bullied at school for being ‘ugly’. From childhood on, neighbors have commented on the fact that she alone must take after her mother (who is apparently perceived as being not so attractive), while her two siblings take after their handsome father. Despite being a really sweet and good-hearted person, Joo Kyung is often not even given the chance to prove what a nice person she is because people instantly judge her based on her appearance. When she enters high school, she starts getting severely bullied and treated like a slave by her classmates. One day, she musters up the courage to confess her feelings to a guy she likes, but her bullies record it on camera when he harshly rejects her, and they make fun of her again, even making one of Joo Kyung’s ‘friends’ participate in the bullying. Joo Kyung’s spirit is crushed badly and she becomes very insecure. Fortunately for her, it’s around this time that her family is forced to move back to their old house and she gets to transfer schools. When asking for online advice about what to do about her appearance, Joo Kyung is introduced to the one thing that will bring her solace: the world of beauty and make-up. It’s like a new world opens up for her, as she now finally discovers a way to cover up her ‘ugly’ face. She starts watching tutorials and teaches herself the basics of make-up and by the time she arrives at her new school, she finds that her newly found make-up skills make an incredible difference. Not only is she not bullied, she becomes insanely popular from the first day on because people find her so pretty. She immediately makes two friends, Kang Soo Jin (played by Park Yoo Na) and Choi Soo Ah (played by Kang Min Ah), and it’s like a dream come true to her. For the first time ever she can actually hang out with friends after school, she’s invited to karaoke parties and she’s added to chat groups. Of course, she remains anxious as she doesn’t take it for a granted. The more people start complimenting her looks, the more she feels like she’s betraying everyone. She’s scared that when her newfound friends discover her real face, they will start bullying her as well. In order to avoid that from happening, she sees no other way but to keep her natural face a secret.
Meanwhile, there’s Lee Soo Ho (played by Cha Eun Woo), the son of a famous actor who dislikes being in the spotlight and therefore keeps his relation to him a secret. He’s considered to be really handsome but also quite anti-social in class. He doesn’t have a good relationship with his father in general. Soo Ho’s mother passed away when he was quite young and he repeatedly discovered his father moving on with other women. Apart from being a famous actor, Soo Ho’s father is also the CEO (I believe?) of Move Entertainment, an entertainment agency that manages many idol trainees as well. One of Soo Ho’s best friends, Yoon Se Yeon (SF9’s Kang Chan Hee) used to be an idol at this company, but he got caught in a bullying scandal shortly after debuting and committed suicide because he couldn’t deal with the cyberbullying. This happened on the same night that Soo Ho’s father got into a scandal himself for being spotted with a much younger actress. Too distracted by this news, Soo Ho didn’t pick up what turned out to be Se Yeon’s final phone call to him and he’s been feeling guilty about it all this time. This event also didn’t exactly improve his relationship with his father, as he never did anything to stop the scandal spiralling out of control.
On the other hand, there is Han Seo Joon (played by Hwang In Yeop), who also used to be friends with Soo Ho and Se Yeon and who also used to be an idol trainee at Move Entertainment. Because of a misunderstanding, Seo Joon has always blamed Soo Ho personally for Se Yeon’s death, as he believed that Soo Ho conveyed to Se Yeon that he didn’t believe him in terms of the scandal.
Soo Ho and Seo Joon grew apart after Se Yeon’s death and are now on bad terms with each other. Seo Joon quits being an idol trainee and goes back to school, but what people don’t know is that he has simultaneously been taking care of his sickly mother in the hospital. Seo Joon has quite the intimidating exterior, he acts like a delinquent and people tend to stay away from him because of his bad temper, but he’s actually a good person. He just really changed after Se Yeon died.
Soo Ho and Seo Joon separately meet Joo Kyung for the first time before they actually meet her in school – Soo Ho pulls her back from a rooftop edge one time and Seo Joon is able to escape some hoodlums with her help.
As it happens, Soo Ho and Joo Kyung have also met before as children. There’s a bookstore in their neighborhood that rents out comic books, and Joo Kyung went there frequently as she got into horror comics. One time, a young sad Soo Ho was there after he discovered his father with another woman again, and Joo Kyung managed to cheer him up.
All in all, Soo Ho becomes attracted to Joo Kyung before he ever sees her with make-up on, and he’s the first person to point out to her that she’s beautiful the way she is. Seo Joon also eventually falls for Joo Kyung, and even though he only knows her with make-up on, he falls for her personality more than her looks, so even when he finds out about her real face, it doesn’t matter to him at all.

In summary, the main story is about Joo Kyung and how she manages to overcome her insecurity as she learns that it’s really not the outside that matters and that she shouldn’t let her spirits get crushed by other people’s opinions about her. True beauty resides within, and the right people will come to see that in due time.
In this sense, I initially expected this series to be a bit similar to My ID is Gangnam Beauty. Both series are about a young woman who is bothered by other people’s opinions regarding the way she looks, and who both decide to overcome their insecurity by changing their appearance, even though they find that this still doesn’t solve their deep-rooted insecurity. In Joo Kyung’s case, her problem is solved pretty easily with make-up. Apart from that, they’re not that similar. I’m not just talking about the specific situations that the main characters are in, but also in terms of the way in which they eventually come to terms with themselves.
I think there’s something to be said about the relativity of the premise of this story. First of all, isn’t the main reason why people use make-up that they want to look prettier and cover up bad-looking skin? So what’s the big deal? Why would you bully someone for having bad skin and then using make-up to cover it? The whole premise just seems ridiculous to me. Even more so because that’s exactly what I thought about Joo Kyung. She wasn’t ugly. She just seemed to have a bad skin condition. Truthfully, I think they exaggerated her looks in the beginning a lot. Like, what was with the caterpillar eyebrows? It was like they were trying to make a caricature of her, also with linking her fascination with horror stories to the fact that she only listened to typical hardcore music.
The way she was treated by her bullies was extra frustrating because it was just so pointlessly cruel. They really had nothing better to do and just decided to crush the spirit of a girl who was only trying to make it through high school happily without bothering anyone else. I believe that if they hadn’t started pointing out her ‘ugliness’ to her, Joo Kyung would’ve managed to stay happy and unbothered, just as she was when doing her own thing. It’s because they started confronting her with it that she became so insecure and self-conscious. She gets really traumatized, so much that even in her new school, she occasionally gets nightmares of accidentally turning up at school without make-up and being immediately ostracized by her new friends.

I will make some references to the webtoon in order to point out some major differences that the drama series made. As I mentioned before, I was less impressed with the drama than with the webtoon. In hindsight, I actually think it wouldn’t even have mattered if I had finished the webtoon before watching this. I wonder if my opinion of the series would’ve been better if I hadn’t read the webtoon at all, because now I can’t really help comparing the two.
In general lines I would say that the webtoon really digs out Joo Kyung’s long journey to self-acceptance, and it uses the theme of make-up much more prominently than the drama does. One thing I liked about the webtoon was that it was quite educational when it came to beauty and make-up. Every time Joo Kyung puts on make-up it’s depicted like an actual tutorial in itself, and it really shows her growing expertise on certain products. Her dream to become a make-up artist is explored much further in the webtoon. From quite early on she already becomes a pretty popular beauty influencer on social media and is asked to sponsor beauty products and stuff. She also gets a lot more experience in helping people out with her make-up skills. At the very end of the webtoon, she re-encounters one of her ex-bullies who also became a beauty influencer, and she’s the one that puts Joo Kyung’s old pictures online out of spite. In response to that, all Joo Kyung’s friends and all the people she’s helped before reach out to defend her, and this is what ultimately helps Joo Kyung overcome her trauma and finally gives her the courage to reveal her real face to the public.
In this shortened drama version, I found that the beauty and make-up themes remained relatively in the background compared to other (in my opinion less significant) dramatic events. I felt like the focus was much more on Joo Kyung’s anxiety of having to hide her face, her continuous confrontations with her past, and the slow buildup in her character development. It felt like it just got stuck at the point where it was one ‘comical’ situation after another in which she had to avoid having the truth about her face revealed. It kind of caused a delay in her character development in my opinion, it just felt like she wasn’t moving forward. Even in her relationship with Soo Ho, when they started misunderstanding each other, a lot of time went into a series of situations in which the misunderstanding only grew and Joo Kyung kept running away instead of talking about what was going on. This was a very annoying part of the series, especially because Joo Kyung was the one with issues and worries she didn’t communicate while Soo Ho wasn’t aware of anything that could be wrong. Whenever he wanted to talk to her to clear things up, she just went ‘I’m tired, I’m leaving’ and it was just dragged on tediously long.

One of the major changes that were made in the drama version was Soo Jin. In the webtoon, Soo Jin isn’t even a classmate or a friend of Joo Kyung’s. She’s another beauty influencer who uses Joo Kyung’s popularity to her own advantage and pretends to be her friend while she actually just wants to make her look bad. She comes back in the end with a whole backstory of an abusive relationship and after coming out with the truth about that, she finally becomes a supportive friend to Joo Kyung.
It seems that in the drama, they merged Soo Jin with Joo Kyung’s other classmate friend in the webtoon (I believe she’s called Chae Rin). Anyways, in the drama, Soo Jin is in Joo Kyung’s class and becomes close friends with her from the first day on, together with Soo Ah. She’s also childhood friends with Soo Ho, or at least she’s known him since childhood because of their rich parents’ connections. But Soo Jin is suffering from a lot of pressure. Her father hits her a lot and constantly pushes her to be the best of her class, but she’s almost always beaten by Soo Ho, and her grades actually start dropping the more stressed she gets.
Soo Jin is introduced as such a sympathetic character though, she’s the first one to discover Joo Kyung’s real face during a school trip and immediately proves that that doesn’t mean anything to her. She even starts helping Joo Kyung out in situations where she’ll be forced to reveal her face in public. From the get-go it is clear that Soo Jin is not a fake friend, she continuously stands up for Joo Kyung and we get a lot of empathy for her when her problematic home situation is revealed.
However, and I really feel like this was added purely for the sake of creating drama, a wedge is created between Soo Jin and Joo Kyung when Soo Jin suddenly starts developing a romantic interest in Soo Ho. Even when she already knows that Soo Ho and Joo Kyung are together, she uses the fact that Joo Kyung hasn’t told her yet to her advantage and confesses her feelings to her friend, causing the situation to become really awkward for Joo Kyung. Soo Jin puts Joo Kyung in a really bad position by acting like this, and her jealousy eventually reaches the point where she ‘teams up’ with Joo Kyung’s old bullies to post Joo Kyung’s old pictures online, and also the video that was taken when she was so harshly rejected by that one guy.
Honestly, I didn’t quite get this part. On the one hand, it was really predictable that Soo Jin would be made into the standard petty bitchy character at some point, but at the same time it was also unexpected because they started out establishing her as a really cool and relatable character. I just kept hoping she wouldn’t become petty because it wouldn’t fit the character she was made out to be. When they still went ahead with making her petty, it just felt unnatural to me. I didn’t believe Soo Jin had any evil intent, she even confessed to Soo Ho herself that she really liked Joo Kyung. So then why did she still let herself get swept away in her own jealousy like that? Even in the final part, after two years passed, she immediately came to Joo Kyung to apologize for her past behavior, making up for it by saying she just ‘wasn’t in her right mind’. Like, I understood where she was coming from and I mostly blame her dad for putting her in that position where she just felt like she had to be the best at something, but it still didn’t make sense that it would suffice to steal Soo Ho away from Joo Kyung. I don’t know, I found it weird. I’m glad she did turn out to be a good person in the end, but it really felt like they made her temporarily petty just to add some additional drama to Joo Kyung’s love life. Knowing her friend’s feelings only caused Joo Kyung to start acting so annoyingly evasive towards Soo Ho, who wasn’t aware of anything. Honestly, there were so many things that could’ve been resolved so easily if it weren’t for Joo Kyung making a huge deal out of everything.
On a side note, Soo Jin’s father really was a bastard. There was this one scene where she literally just walked into the room and he just hit her for no reason. Like, the poor girl really needed a break. I also hated him when they were meeting with Soo Ho’s father and he just kept talking shit about Soo Jin, his own daughter, how she was so disappointing and all that, while she was sitting right there. I’m glad Soo Ho found a way to get her away from that situation. It’s not surprising that Soo Jin felt a stronger connection to Soo Ho, as he was the only one who knew about her home situation, he was the only person who could comfort her in that respect. But it still never really felt as if she was really in love with him, and I also thought they were much better off as friends. In any case, Soo Jin’s father really sucked and I felt really bad for Soo Jin, because even her own mother didn’t actively try to stop him.

As we’re on the topic of changes that the drama made, I can’t leave out the stories of Joo Kyung’s siblings and their respective love interests. Im Hee Kyung (played by Im Se Mi), Joo Kyung’s older sister who works at Move Entertainment, may have been blessed with her father’s good looks, but she has a whole story of her own. She’s a very independent strong woman, so dependable even that she doesn’t let men take care of her. She’s the type of woman that just carries a toolbox around with her in case something needs fixing on the way. She’s quite outgoing and confident, and for some reason she falls at first sight for Joo Kyung’s homeroom teacher Han Joon Woo (played by Oh Ui Shik), even though he is the complete opposite of her, very emotional and sensitive. The relationship between them is something that doesn’t even exist in the webtoon. It’s only in one of the final spinoffs that Hee Kyung meets some random guy from her work who shares her love for camping and that’s it. They created Han Joon Woo from scratch and although their scenes did make for a lot of comical situations – they were a cute couple, undeniably – I still felt like it was one of the things that distracted from the main story’s development, especially when they got a lot of attention as a couple, and progressed even more passionately than the main couple.
I really liked Hee Kyung and Joon Woo’s characters, though. Hee Kyung was so badass when she found out how the scandal regarding Se Yeon came to be and she just went and confronted Soo Ho’s father with it without even caring about her own reputation. As she’s in charge of taking care of new groups that are about to debut, she discovers at some point that one of Se Yeon’s unpublished songs is distributed to a new debuting group without even crediting Se Yeon as the original artist, and she doesn’t stand for it. It was really cool how she stood up for Se Yeon like that and how she ends up taking care of Seo Joon as well when he agrees to resume his singing activities at Move Entertainment.
On the other hand, I really liked Joon Woo for the way he addressed his class after Joo Kyung’s old pictures got posted and everyone started ousting her. It was so great that there was at least one person who told everyone, ‘What the heck are you guys doing? You just saw how your friend and classmate has been treated in the past and you’re not even worried about her when she skips school for an entire week? What a bunch of great classmates you are.’ It was kind of sad that they needed this reprimandation to come to their senses, though, I’d hoped from certain people that they wouldn’t have hesitated to support Joo Kyung.
In the webtoon, when Joo Kyung finally decides to show Soo Ah and Chae Rin her bare face, they don’t make a big deal about it at all, they’re only like ‘why did you hide this for so long’ but never actually get angry with her. So I really hoped that at least Soo Ah would be the first one to stick with Joo Kyung as soon as it was revealed, but she initially responded just like everyone else. Admittedly, she was the first person to go back to her side, especially after discovering Soo Jin’s involvement, but I would’ve liked her to just show her loyalty from the get-go.
Talking about Soo Ah, in the drama she is part of a very lovey-dovey couple with fellow classmate Yoo Tae Hoon (played by Lee Il Joon). In the webtoon, she only gets together with her childhood friend Tae Hoon in one of the final spinoffs, and he doesn’t even appear in the main story. More than that, he’s a very timid introverted gamer, so his character is also nothing like the drama adaptation. Anyways, they were a fun couple, be it on the in-your-face-aegyo-cringy side.

Another change when it came to a character was Selena. Selena (played by Go Woo Ri) is the beauty specialist that Joo Kyung becomes a fan of. Because of her tutorials Joo Kyung learns about make-up and she eventually even starts working at Selena’s own beauty agency that manages the make-up for celebrities. Even when meeting her in real life, Selena is really strict towards Joo Kyung, she’s not favorable towards at all, and she’s basically just her mentor and someone Joo Kyung strives to be like.
In the webtoon, Selena is actually Soo Ho’s older sister, who is closely involved with everything concerning his father. She goes with Soo Ho when he has to go to the States and everything. She’s much more involved in Joo Kyung and Soo Ho’s relationship and becomes an actual sister-figure to Joo Kyung. So that was also an interesting change, how they actually kept her character seperate from the main story.

Let me just go back to Joo Kyung’s siblings. Besides Hee Kyung, there’s also her younger brother Im Joo Young (played by Kim Min Ki). He wasn’t that different from the webtoon in that he was the annoying little brother, but he definitely gets a bigger role, especially when he falls for Seo Joon’s younger sister Han Go Woon (played by Yeo Joo Ha). The funny thing is that Go Woon isn’t that different from Joo Kyung when it comes to natural looks, she’s even in a similar position where she gets bullied for her looks by her classmates. Joo Kyung sees this happen one time and immediately reaches out to Go Woon. Go Woon, just like her brother, has great singing skills, so when she gets the solo part of her choir recital, she asks Joo Kyung for help with her make-up and Joo Young falls for her on the spot when he sees/hears her perform. He keeps following her around, even when she makes it repeatedly clear that she’s not into him. It was kind of funny that, even after teasing his own sister for her looks so much, he ends up falling for a very similar looking girl, haha. I thought that was kind of a nice twist. The little brother was pretty funny.

Let me talk a bit about Joo Kyung’s parents now that I’m on the topic of her family.
Joo Kyung’s mother Hong Hyun Sook (played by Jang Hye Jin) is quite the aggressive type. She is very hard-skinned, having to deal with comments regarding her handsome husband, but she never seemed to have acknowledged the fact that people made a deal about her being not as attractive. She is the typical ‘tough love’ kind of mom who doesn’t cut her children any slack until she realizes they’re really struggling with something. She’s really hard on Joo Kyung as her grades aren’t that good and she feels like her daughter is just ‘wasting her time on that make-up stuff’. She even throws away Joo Kyung’s make-up products several times in order to punish her. The only time she changes is when she finds out how much Joo Kyung has been bullied, and then she’s suddenly the most caring mother ever. One thing that I did think was weird though, was that, the day after she found out about her daughter’s bullying, even after comforting her so warmly, the first thing she did was to bring Joo Kyung to a plastic surgery councellation. That really made me go, excuse me? Like, is that the way you want to deal with her issues? Instead of making her see that other people’s opinions of her don’t matter, instead of properly comforting her, now you’re just basically confirming her insecurites and have her get plastic surgery, as if that’s going to make her problems go away? That was kind of an unexpected decision, like, you really want her to stop using make-up that badly? But I’m glad they ended up walking out of there after realizing that Joo Kyung might as well just keep using make-up, because that’s more than enough to make her look better. After that she finally approves of Joo Kyung’s dream to become a make-up artist as well.
The father was something else. Im Jae Pil (played by Park Ho San) was popular in the neighborhood for being such a handsome and generous man, but in the meantime he was unemployed because he got scammed out of all his money. He’s trying to track down the guy who scammed him, but in the meantime he tries to find something to sell to earn some money, although it never really works out. I found the father’ character’s storyline another example of something that mainly distracted needlessly from the main story. He was a funny character, admittedly, but I honestly wasn’t that interested in what he was up to.
In general, Joo Kyung’s parents and family as a whole got a lot more individual attention in the drama then they did in the webtoon, and I didn’t necessarily find that it contributed that much to the story. I would’ve preferred seeing more development in Joo Kyung’s personal journey rather than seeing a whole scene in which her father chases some guy down the street and consequently getting into trouble for spending too much money on a cab.

I feel like I’m having a bit of a hard time constructing my arguments, because I have to admit I didn’t expect the drama to be so different from the webtoon. I just hope I’m getting my points across properly. What I mean to say is that if it had been up to me, out of all the events that happen in the webtoon, the drama could have made a better selection on which scenes/chapters to add to to the series. They could’ve chosen to give Joo Kyung a couple more opportunities to improve her make-up skills and use those skills to help others. Scenes that would’ve made a bigger contribution to Joo Kyung’s character development and the reason she ultimately felt confident enough to come out to her friends about her natural face rather than being forced out by a leaked video. Instead they brought way too many minor storylines into play and made them bigger and more important than they needed to be.
There was too much focus on the fact that Joo Kyung couldn’t escape her past of being bullied, because the bullies kept coming back. Hye Min, the girl who used to be Joo Kyung’s ‘friend’ but who was used by the bullies to take advantage of her, also transfers to Joo Kyung’s school (I believe) in the webtoon, but after becoming her friend there she starts becoming obsessed with Joo Kyung and starts copying her in everything, resulting in her becoming Soo Ho’s stalker, she actually starts believing she is Joo Kyung, like it turns into a pretty disturbing thing. To not keep something like that in but create completely new scenarios of characters that aren’t even in the webtoon for example, turning it more into a filler arc than an actual meaningful one that tests Joo Kyung’s confidence and ability to stand up for herself, that’s basically what bothered me the most.
The whole car accident that Soo Ho and Seo Joon get involved in after finding out about Soo Ho’s father’s presumed involvement in Se Yeon’s scandal, doesn’t happen in the webtoon either, and I really felt like they only put them in the same hospital room together to create an occasion in which they could finally make up. I wasn’t interested in how the comic book store owner was preparing for a blind date, or how Joo Kyung’s father was trying to sell scented candles to old ladies in the neighborhood, or how one of the other teachers suddenly started poking her nose into Joon Woo’s relationship with Hee Kyung. A lot of events were really dragged out while they didn’t need to be, and they exaggerated some situations to the extent that they became really unrealistic. Honestly, when they both smashed into that car window and Seo Joon just fell to the ground while Soo Ho kept dramatically flying through the air with a single tear seaping from the corner of his eye, like I just couldn’t take it seriously.
Situations that in the webtoon only took up a short time because they were only supporting tools to help Joo Kyung get over her insecurity, took up most of the space in the drama, rather than focussing on how Joo Kyung developed herself along with her make-up skills. It just felt like in the end she didn’t undergo a really big character development. It seemed like she just decided one day that she wouldn’t put up with people talking behind her back anymore, and that’s when she started talking back to them. I did think it was really brave of her to just show up at school again with no make-up, that was a bold move and I was glad that everyone respected that move.
But all in all, the buildup was just unclear to me, especially when they still went ahead with Soo Ho going to the States and then having to wrap up everything in just the final two episodes. Soo Ho going to the States is only the end of the first part in the webtoon, because in the webtoon he actually doesn’t come back for a very long time and Joo Kyung actually ends up dating Seo Joon for a pretty long time. She is the one that inspires him to pick up music as a career again, and then they are painfully forced to break up when he becomes a trainee again and is discouraged to date because it will distract him from his career prospects. It isn’t until after they break up and both have to get over their heartache that Soo Ho comes back and finds his way back into Joo Kyung’s heart. She actually gets over Soo Ho initially, when he doesn’t come back. I get that they couldn’t fit all that into the series, but that’s why I was surprised that they still added in the part where Soo Ho left. It was so close to the end of the series and I didn’t know how things were going to be wrapped up within the two remaining episodes. I didn’t expect they would’ve included it at all since originally it’s the bridge to the second main part of the story – Joo Kyung and Seo Joon – and it was clear that they weren’t going to include that relationship in the drama.

I just felt very bad about Seo Joon because in the drama, they really just made him the typical second male lead that didn’t stand a chance from the start. Joo Kyung never once develops feelings for him, and he’s just left by himself. This hit especially hard since he was my favorite character in the webtoon, and his relationship with Joo Kyung in the webtoon goes so much deeper than in the drama – the drama doesn’t even scratch the surface of the significance that Seo Joon holds in Joo Kyung’s life in the webtoon. So that was a bit of a bummer. I actually shipped Joo Kyung with Seo Joon the most in the webtoon, and I was really curious what he would be like in the drama. I actually expected there to be a little bit of chemistry between Joo Kyung and Seo Joon, like, that she would be swayed by him at least temporarily to indicate a tiny bit of the bond they develop in the webtoon, but there was none of that. It was just really painful to watch Seo Joon make that final attempt of asking her for three dates when he just knew his chance was gone forever when Soo Ho came back. I felt for him a lot.

I think I’m just going to get on with my cast comments, having mentioned most of my remarks about the series itself. I will definitely go over it again later to make sure the construction makes sense, but for now I kind of just jotted down my thoughts.

The thing I like most about Moon Ga Young is her duality when it comes to portraying different types of people. She can really go two different ways, timid and insecure like in EXO Next Door, or the typical pretty but snooty princess-type like in Jealousy Incarnate and The Great Seducer. Honestly, the difference between her character in TGS and True Beauty is hilarious because she’s a completely different person. So I like her versatility. I was really curious to see her portrayal of Joo Kyung, and I have to say she reminded me a lot of Switch Girl, a Japanese drama with basically the same kind of concept. I do feel like she added some elements which she could’ve done without, such as the animated high voice, like she could’ve portrayed Joo Kyung with a bit more sincerity rather than making a caricature out of her. I was really curious to see how they would create the transformation of Joo Kyung on Moon Ga Young, who seems to just be naturally gorgeous, so I felt kind of an anticlimax when they went as far as to give her those caterpillar eyebrows in an attempt to make her look ‘ugly’. Like, it just made it a bit less realistic or something.
So yeah, this is definitely not my favorite drama of hers, but I think she can do much better, I’ve seen her do better, so I will not give up on her.

One reason why I couldn’t help but expect something similar to My ID is Gangnam Beauty, was because Cha Eun Woo played the male lead. His character here just seemed so similar to his character in My ID, the only guy that sees through the FL’s ‘mask’ and sees her ‘true beauty’ from the start. I do like that he wasn’t the exact same person, though. Soo Ho definitely had more emotion and expressed his feelings way better. I liked how straightforward he was, and when Joo Kyung started acting evasive, he just kept following her around until she finally talked to him, because he didn’t want there to be any misunderstandings between them. I’ve seen him more recently in Rookie Historian Goo Hae Ryung, and I have to admit that, again, I saw a different side of his acting in True Beauty. He was really cute when he got drunk, lol. The way he started singing that aegyo love song to her while half-asleep was adorable. He really acted out Soo Ho’s love for Joo Kyung very well.

I’ve only seen Hwang In Yeop before recently in The Sound of Magic, but I remember him becoming a big new hype because of his role as Seo Joon, so I was really curious to his performance. I really liked him. I may have been a little biased by my love for Seo Joon in the webtoon, but I definitely saw Hwang In Yeop’s charm in his performance of him. I just felt really bad for him, lol. I would’ve liked to see him get at least one chance with Joo Kyung, or at least an indication that they became as close as they get in the webtoon, but even at the end of the drama, it still felt like Joo Kyung didn’t feel a 100% comfortable around him, knowing that he had feelings for her, and that was too bad. Seo Joon is such a sweetheart, he really loved Joo Kyung so much but never got the chance to express it. I also didn’t like the fact that he was confronted with Joo Kyung’s natural face so indirectly, by being shown the video by a friend. He actually already found out before that, when Joo Kyung came to visit Soo Ho in the hospital without wearing make-up and they tried to hide it from him. In the webtoon, she finally ends up showing him when they’re dating and it just makes sense because it’s such a personal thing for her to reveal to him as a sign that she really trusts him. So in the drama he doesn’t even get a chance to personally address the issue, and that was kind of a pity. I really liked him here, he was possibly still my favorite character, even though the whole adaptation in itself didn’t really sit right with me.

I only remember Park Yoo Na from My ID is Gangnam Beauty, and I really liked her character there. I just can’t really picture her as a bad person because she just comes across as so cool and mature. I initially liked what they did with Soo Jin’s character, because I really thought she was going to be the classic bitch character, but then she was so cool. Until they still made her petty. I don’t know, I can’t help but feel that it wasn’t natural to have her make that decision, even when she was bitter about not being able to meet her father’s expectations, it just felt wrong to go about it that way. I liked how she kept standing up for Joo Kyung, even after everything that happened. I hope to see a new side of her acting one day, because I generally like her whenever she appears in a drama. She was also in Sassy Go Go, The Package and Hotel Del Luna, but I would like to see her in more!

I really liked seeing Jang Hye Jin in this. I immediately recognized her as the eccentric North Korean mother from Crash Landing on You and it was funny seeing her as another eccentric mother character, be it in a different way. Because of her initial lack of compassion I found it a bit hard to warm up to her, because she always found something to nag about. I initially didn’t know that she wasn’t even slightly aware of her daughter’s bullying, I thought she knew about it but maybe didn’t know it was that severe? But anyways, the one moment where I really saw her as a mother was when she saw that video of Joo Kyung being humiliated. Right then, she really was a mother witnessing her child going through something horrible and I’m glad she changed her mindset after that. I guess I will see more of her acting in the future, I’m really curious to see more sides of her acting.

I’ve only seen Park Ho San before in My Mister, but it’s been a while so I don’t remember a lot from his performance there. Anyways, as I’ve mentioned I think he was one of the characters that occasionally got more screentime than necessary. In my opinion, no matter how interesting and funny his character was, he could’ve remained more in the background. Not to say anything bad about the actor per se, but I just didn’t think the character was that significant in terms of Joo Kyung’s story, besides being her dad. I don’t really know what to say about him other than he was occasionally funny, although I sometimes also couldn’t quite make out what his thoughts were. The scene where he was stuck in Soo Ho’s house and interrupted him as soon as he saw him kissing Joo Kyung reminded me of that scene in Parasite where they’re hiding under the couch while the lord and lady of the house start getting it on, lol. I did like that he was such a sensitive dad when it came to his daughters spreading their wings, like how emotional he got when Hee Kyung got married.

I’ve seen Im Se Mi in several things before, like Heartstrings, Shopping King Louie and About Time. I really liked her character here, I think Hee Kyung may have been one of my favorite characters because she was so badass. She was so different from the typical female drama character, and I loved her dynamic with the homeroom teacher. It was a really refreshing relationship the two of them had, so I didn’t mind that change in the adaptation. I actually liked that she got a bit more screentime, the only thing was that at some point, there was more romantic progress between her and Joon Woo than there was between Joo Kyung and Soo Ho, so their relationship kind of seemed to take over from the leads’ in a way, haha. I actually found myself thinking multiple times how much more interesting the Hee Kyung X Joon Woo couple was compared to the main couple. They may have given it a bit too much attention in that sense. But yeah, I really liked Im Se Mi as Hee Kyung, she was one of the few characters that remained mostly the same to her webtoon counterpart. I’m curious to see more from her!

I thought Kim Min Ki might also be an idol or something, I thought I recognized him from somewhere, but I don’t see anything I’ve seen him in. Same as with Hee Kyung, I liked that they gave Joo Young a bit more story, but at some point his love story with Go Woon also started living a life of its own that I didn’t really find necessary to explore too much. I mean, it was cute enough, I’ll admit that, but yeah, there were too many side storylines that were distracting from the main story, and his was one of them, unfortunately. I did like his performance though, he initially seemed to be so much ‘cooler’ than Joo Kyung but he definitely was her little brother alright. He became a real troll at some point. I couldn’t help but laugh out loud when someone randomly mentioned ‘a piece of trash’ and he would just pop up, ‘did someone call me? :D’ haha, he was really weird and funny.

I realize I haven’t mentioned much about Soo Ho’s father in person yet, but I think it’s important to mention that he really was a good person after all. It turns out that he never knew anything about what happened with Se Yeon, as it wasn’t his job to keep a close eye on the rookies. It turns out that someone else from the company published Se Yeon’s bullying scandalin order to cover up Soo Ho’s father’s scandal of dating that younger actress, but he was never aware of that, just like he wasn’t aware that they were planning on giving that debut song to a different group without even crediting Se Yeon for it. He really wanted to become closer with Soo Ho again, and I did feel bad for him when he got that heart attack. He was really looking forward to spending time with his son, he’d already searched for good places to eat together and stuff. He was a good person, so I’m glad Soo Ho made up with him again in the end. As for the actor that played him, Jung Joon Ho, I haven’t seen him in anything before, but I probably will. He looks familiar though, maybe I’ve seen him somewhere but not in a major role, anyway. It was a nice twist that he wasn’t a typical jerk dad, but that he actually had no control over what had happened. In that sense, Soo Ho also had to change his prejudice about him, just like Seo Joon had to change his prejudice about Soo Ho.

I really liked what they did with Go Woon’s character. She also didn’t change much from the webtoon version, except the fact that Joo Young fell for her and she actually got an admirer of her own. Apparently Yeo Joo Ha also appeared in Itaewon Class and Love Alarm S2, but I don’t recognize her from there. I really hope that was her own singing during that recital, because she has an incredible voice! I liked how strong she was, she had less difficulty standing up to her bullies than Joo Kyung, and I really liked how she just had this natural confidence about her, despite her looks. I liked her performance!

Oh, how I love Oh Ui Shik. He always makes me smile and he is always such a welcome addition to any cast. Even though his character was created anew for the drama adaptation, I’m glad it was performed by him. As I mentioned also in Im Se Mi’s bit, even though I loved his character, sometimes I felt like he stole the spotlight just a little too much, haha. For example when the whole drama happened with Joo Kyung’s pictures and video being leaked and he was just worrying that Joo Kyung was skipping school because she wasn’t okay about him dating her sister… that was a moment where I really felt like, why are they using this to distract us from the issue at hand? That was a major event for Joo Kyung’s character development, and adding something funny to it kind of diminished the effect for me. But I have nothing bad to say about his performance. I really liked his chemistry with Im Se Mi, they got more passionate kissing scenes than the main couple, haha.

I guess I recognize Kang Min Ah from Sassy Go Go, but I don’t remember a lot of people from there. In any case, she looked familiar. I think she was also kept mainly the same as her webtoon counterpart, also in terms of looks. It was a funny addition to make her a couple with Tae Hoon, at least it gave her more to do in class than only hang around Joo Kyung. I just mean to say, it just gave her the chance to be her own person with her own life, without purely existing as Joo Kyung’s supporting friend. It can’t have been easy for her either, because she is kept out of Joo Kyung’s secret most of all, even after Soo Jin, Soo Ho and Seo Joon have all found out about Joo Kyung’s real face. So I get that she may have been a little indignant about that, but I was glad that it didn’t last long. She still remained a loyal friend to Joo Kyung. She had a nice energy about her, she was a nice presence to have in the drama, and very positive. She also immediately accepted Hye Min as a friend when she transferred to their school.

I really wished I would’ve already seen Extraordinary You, because there was a reference/cameo appearance of two characters from that series at some point and I wasn’t able to understand it. I just saw a lot of enthusiastic comments under the episode about it, haha. But it’s coming up on my to watch list, so it won’t be too long before I’ll be able to understand the reference (hopefully).
(Edit 280823: I finished watching Extraordinary You and revisited the cameos in True Beauty to gain a new understanding of them. You can find my updated reference to the cameos in my EOY review here.)

So yeah, it may not have been a very lengthy or detailed review, but that’s kind of how I felt about this series. It is what it is. I’d hoped more of it, as I was really curious how they would adapt the webtoon into 16 episodes. I didn’t expect them to leave out so many important parts and replace them with a lot of irrelevant side stories. I just didn’t really feel it, unfortunately. Even though there wasn’t a problem with the acting per se, I just didn’t get why they chose to change certain things, or why they chose to add certain things that weren’t in the webtoon. I assure you that there is A LOT happening in the webtoon, about 200 episodes worth of stuff, and in the webtoon nothing felt irrelevant because it was all really meaningful to Joo Kyung’s growth and it all came back to help her in the end as well. Like the part where she helps a woman with burn scars on her face with her make-up so she can still make a grand appearance at her daughter’s wedding. There are so many situations in the webtoon that push Joo Kyung to learn things the hard way and become better at standing up for herself, even with Soo Ho and Seo Joon loyally at her side. I feel like this series let a lot of good opportunities slip to have the same effect. Now the story was as much about Joo Kyung as it was about Hee Kyung and several other people, there was a distribution of storylines instead of focussing on just Joo Kyung’s story, which was the most important one. I wish there could’ve been a more gradual change, in which you could really see her grow and develop.
Again, I understand that an adaptation is always risky because you can never put in everything, but still, I was hoping for more.
I felt like there was too much distraction from the powerful message that Joo Kyung needed to learn, the message about her own true beauty, and that it lay in her kindness, her good heart and her ability to see the good in people even after they’d hurt her. It was so typical of her to forgive Soo Jin just like that, and even Hye Min. The progress she makes in recognizing her own worth was much more clear in the webtoon, while in the drama I didn’t feel that much difference throughout the story.
Still, I’m glad I gave it a chance, but I’m also glad I can now move on to some other (more recent) things that I’ve really been looking forward to, and of which I also have some expectations. All in all, I think it’s actually better to watch True Beauty before or without reading the webtoon altogether. It may have been a bad decision of me to first read the webtoon, because that way I already formed certain opinions and expectations in my head, which weren’t met by the drama adaptation. I really don’t want to say that the drama adaptation is bad, so I’ll just keep it at that I like the webtoon better.

[Edit 170723: I just learned that there will actually be a second season of True Beauty, which will hopefully give more development into the story of Joo Kyung’s growth, and when it’s released and I’ve written my review, you can find it here.]

I will be back soon with a new review, and I’ll also keep adding some more Japanese and Chinese dramas to the mix, so stay tuned!

Bye-bee!

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