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.

Repeat
(リピート / Ripiito)
MyDramaList rating: 6.0/10

Hello~! Back with a new review, and although it was a short drama I took some time to finish it. Unlike the previous Japanese drama I watched this series is surprisingly angsty and intense, so I didn’t want to rush it.
I don’t remember why I put it on my list, but it probably had to do with the time travel aspect – as soon as I read something about time travel in a summary, my interest is naturally peaked.

Repeat is a 10-episode Japanese drama about a group of people who are exclusively invited by some mysterious man called Kazama (played by Rokkaku Seiji) to travel back 10 months into the past.
Among them, protagonist Shinozaki Ayumi (played by Kanjiya Shihori), an introvert librarian who prefers books over social contact. She does have a boyfriend and she’s waiting for him to propose to her. One day, she gets an anonymous phone call from Kazama, who announces an earthquake bound to happen later that evening. When the earthquake actually happens, he calls again to ask her if she believes now that he knew this would happen because he has travelled back in time multiple times and knows exactly what happens between February 24, 2017 and January 11, 2018. He tells her that he has picked her at random, and invites her as an exclusive guest to join him on his next trip to the past, or as he calls it, ‘Repeat’.
When she turns up at the meeting point, she finds out 7 other people besides her have also been ‘randomly’ picked by Kazama to join on this mysterious trip. Among them, Mouri Keisuke (played by Hongo Kanata), a young man suffering from debts and involved in a very toxic relationship with his ‘girlfriend’. Another person in the group is Tendo Taro (played by Gori / Teruya Toshiyuki), a single bar owner. The group further consists of completely unrelated people from all ages, from truck driver Takahashi (played by Fukuda Tenkyu) to food scientist Oomori (Adachi Yumi), from salaryman Gohara (Shimizu Kei) to grad school student Tsuboi (Ino Hiroki) and elderly housewife Mrs. Yokozawa (Tezuka Satomi).
Kazama officially invites all of them to join him on his trip to the past, which will allow them to fix any regrets or mistakes they may have made in the past 10 months and find a chance on a better life.
Initially, Ayumi refuses to go because she is content with her life and is positive her boyfriend will soon propose to her. However, when her boyfriend suddenly breaks up with her, she changes her mind and joins in on the Repeat.
On January 11, all 8 of them are taken to some secret cave in an unknown location, and are exposed to a mystic light – and Ayumi wakes up again on February 24, 2017. She is able to fix her previous mistake that caused the break-up and her boyfriend proposes to her. Ayumi couldn’t be happier. When the Repeaters meet up again for the first time after the Repeat, everyone seems to look much better and happier. However, one person is missing, the truck driver.
Kazama enters and from the start informs them that the truck driver has sadly passed away in a road accident just after he Repeated.
Though shaken by this first ominous news, everyone starts re-living their lives, making up for old regrets and mistakes – but as it turns out, their new lives aren’t that much better as they would’ve liked and the Repeaters are somehow eliminated one by one, through accidents, incidents, assaults etc.
I realize I’m going into way too much detail already, so I’m going to conclude the summary by saying that everyone, no matter how happy in the beginning, slowly starts realizing that there’s something wrong with the Repeat and Kazama and Ayumi, Keisuke and Tendo-san join forces to find out exactly what’s going on.

Okay, so, I have to say that the story really grabbed me in the beginning. It started off real exciting and interesting and thrilling, although I could’ve predicted that something was bound to go wrong. When the truck driver didn’t show up the first time, I was already like… ‘yeah, he’s definitely dead and they’re probably all going to die one by one, shocker’.
So, while the concept of the story was interesting, there was a lot of predictability in the characters and events. Which made it very Japanese. It was the ultimate type of angst that only Japanese dramas have.
And they only added more and more drama. Some people developed feelings of romance and trust amongst each other, others went a little crazy because having this new kind of control over their lives got to their heads; everyone’s respective motives on why they wanted to Repeat became clear.
Contrarily to what I said about Love Rerun, in Repeat you really get to see everyone’s point of view at some point. It’s not just about Ayumi, you really find out what everyone’s motives are, what everyone is thinking. Which made it nice, because everyone got a proper storyline that way.

There were a lot of heartwarming scenes in this drama. For example, the scene where the elderly housewife, Mrs. Yokozawa, was able to dance with her husband one last time before he would be diagnosed with terminal cancer. She Repeated because they were planning on entering a dance competition together, but then her man got sick and passed away very quickly afterwards.
The other one, of course, is Tendo-san’s story. He was my favorite character in this series. He wanted to Repeat to make sure his 10-year old son wouldn’t die in a bus accident and they managed to save him.
However, apart from the heartwarming parts, most of the happenings were merciless and cruelly ironic.
At the very end, when the few remaining Repeaters have finally worked out what has been going on killing all of them one by one, they confront Kazama. As it turns out, this whole inviting others to join in his Repeat was no generosity or coincidence of any kind.
Kazama chose these particular 8 people because they were destined to die in their original lives. He Repeated 8 times before and each time, the 8 of them died. So the 9th time he decides to prevent their deaths and ask them to join him in Repeat with the idea of a Survival Battle; who would survive the longest after escaping their originally planned death. A sick game, indeed, especially as everyone still ends up dying. That’s why, in the end, the ‘serial killer’ they’re after… turns out to be ‘fate’.

And this is exactly what I believe to be the major theme of this series. Fate, destiny. It comes back in multiple ways, not just the symbolical kind.
‘Fate’ is what keeps chasing the Repeaters, and even though they get another chance on life after escaping it once, it keeps getting back to them.
I believe that the message of this series is that you can’t escape your fate. Even if you temporarily evade it, it will come back in another way, or it will hit someone else instead of you. Some things are bound to happen.
Like with the accident involving Tendo-san’s son, even though they save him, they find out later that another bus that same day was in an accident and another young boy passed away because of it.
They were only postponing their fates, as it turns out. And in other cases, it went in another direction. But it still always came back to them in the end.
I think this was interesting as well, the relativity of fate. It worked in many ways.

Another example is Ayumi’s ‘fate’ with her boyfriend. In the original timeline, her boyfriend breaks up with her. He says that it’s because she couldn’t make it to their date on her birthday when he was planning to propose to her, and when he went to a bar after being stood up, he met another woman. He tells Ayumi he thinks it was ‘fate’ that he met her like that.
When Ayumi Repeats, she makes sure she makes it to the date (originally she missed it because stuff happened at work and a child got injured at the library and her phone died and all of that coming together), and her boyfriend proposes to her like he planned and she was prepared for it. Her boyfriend then calls it ‘fate’ what he and Ayumi have.
However, she later sees him kissing another woman in a car. Screw you and your so-called ‘fate’, Kazuki!! Man, that guy was a jerk. And when Ayumi gathered her courage and broke up with him, he started thrashing on her that she caused him to lose face and stuff like that… honestly, masculinity was very fragile in this series.
The fragile masculinity thing also went for Tsuboi, the grad school student of the group. Before Repeat, he couldn’t get into Tokyo University and was therefore treated as a minority by a lot of people. His parents pressured him, girls didn’t want to go out with him because he wasn’t in TU, stuff like that (it wasn’t actually because he wasn’t in TU, it was because he lied about being in TU while he wasn’t – get your facts straight, bro, girls just don’t like frauds). All of this made him go a little nuts and he created a website called Nemesis in which he would express his darkest thoughts of revenge.
After Repeat, because he knew all the answers to the exams, he gets into TU and instead of bettering his life, he decides to take revenge on the people that would look down on him before. He meets with the girls who rejected him before, drugs them and then records how he threatens and abuses them and posts these videos on his website.
When he’s found out and confronted by Ayumi and Keisuke, Ayumi slaps him and scolds him for abusing Repeat like that.
He couldn’t take that and even kidnaps Ayumi later on to take revenge – he just couldn’t handle being told the truth by a woman; I say fragile.

And then, of course, we cannot skip this one, there was Keisuke’s ‘girlfriend’. I keep putting it in quote signs because for the most part, she made herself believe she was his girlfriend, even after Keisuke broke up with her.
Machida Yuko (played by Shimazaki Haruka) was a young girl with a lot of money – she and Keisuke dated for a while, and one time when Keisuke was in trouble for money, she lent him some on the condition that he would become like her pet and would do as she said. Like this, Keisuke was bound to her by money and was even treated like a dog (she legit put a collar on him in episode 1). After Repeat, he breaks up with her from the bat so that wouldn’t happen. But. Big but.
Machida Yuko ain’t no quitter. She was the scariest person I have seen in a drama in a long time. She made a spare key, one time when he came home she was literally in his kitched holding a butcher knife, sprinkling her own blood from accidentally cutting herself onto a piece of raw meat. She didn’t know where to stop. She’d keep sneaking into his house, heck, she installed a hidden camera in his place so she could spy on him; and this is how she came to know about Ayumi and Tendo-san.
She started showing up at Ayumi’s library, started to befriend her before trying to KILL her, again, with a butcher knife.
But to be honest, Ayumi was really really stupid to trust her so easily. One look at her face and you could see she was creepy – she creeped the hell out of me with her sweet-psycho voice and creep-ass smile.
After making the whole ‘don’t trust anyone’ promise, she not only let Yuko into her house, she even went out leaving Yuko in there alone *facepalm*
Yuko then went through all of Ayumi’s stuff and notebooks and found her notes which she kept about Repeat, including all the events that were supposed to happen and the other people. And then Yuko started to threaten that she would reveal this big secret to the media.
Keisuke found out she was bothering Ayumi and did all those things in his house (he was stupid for believing he got rid of her so easily, he knew how she was for God’s sake).
I know how Ayumi was this super forgiving and sweet person, but it crossed its boundaries. Even after learning the truth about Yuko and how crazy she was, when she turned up at her house crying and asking for forgiveness, she STILL OPENED THE DOOR. I mean, I knew she would, because it was Ayumi and it was predictable because that’s who she was. Blaming everything on herself, forgiving even the psycho-est of people.
But I had a tiny bit of hope she wouldn’t because she should’ve known.
Anyway, she opened the door and Yuko swung a knife at her and Keisuke also showed up and then they accidentally killed Yuko.
And then they started discussing doing Repeat again to bring her back and I genuinely didn’t understand why.
Anyway, that was Yuko.

But let’s get back to the Repeaters.
Although I said before that I found the diversity of the characters and their respective motives interesting, there were a few things I just couldn’t understand/accept and that made it a bit too weirdly dramatic for me. Again, it was a very typical Japanese drama.
Of course, the whole idea of lying to people about giving them a second chance while actually having the motive of watching them unknowingly play a sick game of life and death is inhuman. Kazama most definitely had a god complex to just be playing with people’s lives like that.
The food scientist of the group, Oomori Chie, turns out to be Kazama’s accomplice. She Repeats with him and for the past few times reported to him about the fated deaths of the people in the group.
When Tendo-san, who develops a bit of a bond with her, is talking with her about why she did that, and her motive for wanting to keep doing Repeat, she said something really weird. She only wanted to keep Repeating to watch people struggle with the same things over and over again, not even because she had a will to live herself. I just couldn’t comprehend how people could be so disconnected from life. I mean, she did have a terminal illness so maybe she was already disconnecting herself from other people’s lives in a way, but to assume a role in which she only enjoyed watching other people like puppets in a play… I found it hard to sympathize with that. And in the end she was one of the more interesting characters because you didn’t know what her motives were for a long time.

Let me quickly go through the Repeaters’ original ‘fated’ deaths and how Kazama prevented them from happening.
Takahashi the truck driver was originally destined to die in a self-caused fire – he would smoke before going to sleep and leave a cigarette lit. Kazama calls him before smoking to prevent this.
Yokozawa Sachiko the elderly housewife was supposed to die in a series of arson attacks caused by a high school student. Kazama prevented the student from lighting the fire.
Tsuboi Kaname the grad student was originally killed by a former policeman because of his involvement with an illegal website which he used to post videos of him abusing young women on camera. Gohara the salaryman was also involved with this website and gathered intel for money because he was in so much debt – he was also originally killed by this same policeman for evading punishment.
Tendo-san was also originally meant to be killed by this policeman because he was falsely accused of killing a man (this turned out to be a suicide case). Kazama called the policeman, warning him and thus preventing him to kill these three men.
As mentioned before, Oomori turns out to be an accomplice of Kazama – she has Repeated before as well. Despite her refusal to use Repeat as a chance to live her life to the fullest, her desperation to keep Repeating has two major reasons: 1. she’s working on research that might solve famine and saves hundreds of children of dying, and 2. she has a terminal illness which gravely limits the time she has to finish this research.
In the end, due to Ayumi and Tendo-san, she changes her mind about helping Kazama and accepts that she wants to live the life she has left and will do everything on her research she can within her limited time.
Keisuke was originally destined to be killed by Yuko (what a surprise). He would start dating a new girl from the hostess club he works at and Yuko would find out and kill him in a fit of jealousy. This didn’t happen after Repeat because Keisuke never got involved with the new girl because of everything going on with Repeat, and they ended up killing Yuko themselves.
Ayumi was originally destined to die in a tragic traffic accident along with several young children that were coming to visit the library. Keisuke finds out just in time and warns her – in the end she barely escapes a fatal accident with one child and they survive.
However, and I haven’t come to this part yet because I want to thoroughly build my case yet, she does lose her unborn child in the accident – again, my argument about the ‘fate’ topic, if one destined to die survives, it comes back either to that person later or to someone else. I believe in this case, this baby was not meant to be born.

Which brings me to the relationship between Ayumi and Keisuke. I don’t know if this will be an unpopular opinion, but I strongly disagreed with it. There was no build-up, I didn’t think they fit each other, and in the circumstances it was really unwise to start a relationship like that with a fellow Repeater.
Hear me out. The first thing that bothered me was that Keisuke, or rather his actor, despite being 29(?!), looks like a teenager. Ayumi/Kanjiya Shihori looks like a proper 30-something. I just couldn’t get used to the two of them together. The way it looked, she could’ve been his mom.
And Keisuke was super cold to her in the beginning, then there were maybe 2 occasions where they sort of accidentally touched/embraced/got physically close and there was tension there (though I didn’t feel it), all of a sudden Keisuke was like ‘Ayumi I love you I always want to be with you’ and she was like ‘omg me too’ and they kissed and then suddenly the next morning it turns out that actually slept together and I was like HEY WOAH HOO WHAT THE FRECK–
And then in a random conversation a little later she starts gagging and my head just went ‘oh god no she’s preggo’. It was just very typical.
So, yeah, for a short time she was pregnant with Keisuke’s child. And then she lost it. But the thing is, she was never supposed to end up with Keisuke.
From Keisuke’s perspective we see that after the Repeat, a new girl that wasn’t there before the Repeat, starts working at the hostess club where he works parttime. This girl was supposed to be his new love interest that would ultimately get him killed by Yuko. However, because Keisuke fell in love with Ayumi, this didn’t happen, and the whole thing with Yuko changed as well.
IN SHORT (I gotta stop trailing so much), I was not a fan of the ‘romance’ between Ayumi and Keisuke. And I wasn’t too affected by the accident where the baby was lost (call me heartless) because I just didn’t think it was going to work out anyway. The whole pregnancy thing was a little too much unnecessarily added drama for me.

All in all, it was an interesting drama but I still have mixed feelings. It had an open ending – Ayumi ends up Repeating by herself because Keisuke and Tendo-san don’t make it in the end, and she finds herself in a world where Keisuke doesn’t recognize her because he didn’t Repeat and doesn’t have any of the memories they shared in the Repeated time anymore #sadness.
Ayumi does run into Kazama, whom she thought had died, but despite his discouragement, she still shows determination to save everyone in this new Repeat. And that’s how it ends, with her determined face as the last shot.
So I’m not really sure what message I can take from this story, except that you can’t change your fate. Again, we can’t time travel so we don’t have any scientific proof that ‘fate’ even exists and/or works in a certain way. But it’s fascinating to think about. I think the series is also a little about how people choose to use the (extra) time that’s given to them.
Will they indeed use it to make up for regrets/lost time, or will they be opportunistic and use it to bring other people down?
It’s very relative and different for everyone.

And with this I will end my review. I hope it was enjoyable to read and I will be back with another review when I finish my next drama.
Bye-bye!

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.

Love Rerun
(ラブリラン / Rabu Riran)
MyDramaList rating: 6.5/10

Hello! It’s been a while (or at least it feels like it’s been a while), but I’m back with another review! It’s been a crazy couple of weeks, I’ve been taking interviews for a new job and then suddenly there were a few deaths/accidents in the family and I also had a holiday planned – I went to South-Korea for a week (yes, way too short and my jetlag is insane). I never really have jetlag, but I think it really had to do with that it was such a long journey for such a short trip – I definitely want to go back for a longer time in the future. Anyways, I just got back a couple of days ago and I’m still not quite getting used to going back to normal life, so I’m just going to watch some dramas until I settle down again (always the best medicine).

This time I watched another short Japanese romantic comedy, I probably put it on my list because the story sounded interesting. It’s a really simple story, so the summary won’t take too long.

Love Rerun is about 30-year old Minami Sayaka (played by Nakamura Anne) who doesn’t have any experience with men because she’s had an unfailing one-sided crush on her childhood friend Sagisawa Ryosuke (played by Otani Ryohei) for 15 years. They agree to meet up on her birthday and full of determination to finally confess her feelings the next day, Sayaka goes to bed.
When she wakes up, she’s suddenly in a strange house, wearing really fashionable clothes (unlike her normal style) and there’s a strange man walking around claiming they live together. This guy, Machida Shohei (played by Furukawa Yuki), tells her that they’ve been going out for the last three months but are now broken up.
Completely confused, Sayaka checks her calender and finds out that three months have passed and she has lost her memories of these past three months.
Her new lifestyle and the fact that she apparently got a boyfriend in such a short time and doesn’t remember any of it puzzle her so much she decides to try her hardest to remember everything that happened. After all, it turns out she has even slept with Shohei and not remembering that freaks the hell out of her, as she still feels like the 30-year old virgin she remembers herself to be.
However, whenever she remembers fragments, it only seems to make things more complicated.
The feelings she forgot she had for Shohei come back while Ryosuke comes back on his rejection of her confession, but Sayaka needs to ‘rerun’ through her lost memories to recall whom she really loved before she forgot.

Okay, so most of all, even though acute amnesia is a way too common theme in dramas, it’s always caused by some sort of accident (usually an actual (car) accident where they hit their head or something). But in Sayaka’s case, it seems to not have been caused by anything at all, except maybe stress about her situation. It’s only explained as temporary amnesia in the beginning, but the actual cause remains ambiguous. A few people in the series suggest that maybe ‘she lost her memories to gain a second chance’ with whoever she really likes, either Shohei or Ryosuke.
I think that in the end this could have been the case, because there seemed to be some misunderstandings concerning her break-up with Shohei and she managed to fix that by eventually remembering everything (even the truths that Shohei didn’t know), causing them to get back together.
Other than that, it felt like they could’ve used more plot to build the story. It feels like they dragged on the miscommunications for longer than necessary, because now the happy ending seemed very sudden and although it was ‘happy’, it wasn’t completely ‘satisfying’.

To be honest, I was all Team Ryo-chan in the beginning. I thought he was way better, sweeter, and more good-looking than Shohei (sorry bro). He was the best childhood friend crush guy ever – he just realized his feelings too late. He seemed like the obvious option for her to end up with, but of course in dramas the girl usually doesn’t end up with the guy she likes in the beginning – however, I thought it was a pity.
Shohei is really stiff and standoff-ish, he rarely smiles and has a slightly harsh way of speaking (is what I thought). In the end it made sense why he treated Sayaka that way, because he was angry with her and had all the right to be. But before we find out the truth it was really hard for me to understand what she found so attractive about him.

On a side note, as far as Furukawa Yuki goes, I find it a pity that they type-casted him into another Irie-kun. His face naturally doesn’t have a lot of emotion, but he can absolutely do it, I’ve seen it before, most recently in Erased. But he was literally Irie-kun in this drama, and they could’ve given him a few more layers.

There are two more characters that I need to discuss, first of all Ogasawara Kyoko (played by Oomasa Aya). She is a top model and Shohei’s ex-girlfriend who is determined to get back together with him. In the end, it turns out that she is also indirectly responsible for Shohei and Sayaka’s break-up. But she isn’t all bad and bitchy, because she does reflect on her behavior. She does realize that what she’s done to them is wrong and she still wants Shohei to follow his heart.
I knew this actress from other series, such as Yamato Nadeshiko Shichihenge – I always thought this was Toda Erika for some reason but it’s her, lol. I mixed up their names and faces, I guess.
The other person is Aoyama Mizuki (played by Katase Nana). She is Ryosuke’s love interest before he realizes his true feelings for Sayaka. Mizuki is a really kind character. Even though she loves Ryosuke and has some selfish characteristics, she is really mature and when she sees that he really is in love with Sayaka, she sees she’s fighting a lost game and lets him go. I really liked her character, she was in every way very supportive of the people around her but was still strong enough to keep going her own way.

I really like Nakamura Anne. Not only is she gorgeous, this was the first time I saw her as the protagonist in her own drama and the ‘old’ Sayaka she portrayed looked so different from her usual look! You can see the difference in the poster above, I think she did a very good job. I mean, of course, the story wasn’t that powerful or special and Sayaka’s character didn’t exactly stand out that much from other female protagonists in other dramas, but I was positively surprised because I hadn’t seen this side of her before. That’s why I’m praising her. I’ve only ever seen her as cameo/guest actors in other series and she is always kind of the same pretty fashionable woman, so it was nice to see her versatility in acting as well. It reminded me a bit of the girl from Fated to Love You (her ‘old’ look reminded me a bit of the girl from the Taiwanese version).
As it turns out, Sayaka changed her appearance because she wanted to move on from Ryosuke’s rejection and she desperately wanted to change herself. Shohei helped her in this determination and in the process he fell in love with her when he saw how much she thrived when she did.

Two side characters that I also liked were Sayaka’s friend Yumi (played by Satsukawa Aimi) and Shohei’s junior Hayato (played by Ichikawa Tomohiro). I liked how chill Yumi was in the whole situation and she always remained loyal to Sayaka. I liked how she was a loyal friend and still kept out of the drama herself (that’s also difficult to do sometimes when a friend is in trouble). What I liked the most about Hayato is that they broke the cliche with him. In the beginning we are fooled into thinking that he played around with Sayaka, but in the end he tried to take revenge on her because HE WAS IN LOVE WITH SHOHEI. Like, I have never seen any Japanese drama cover such a natural case of homosexuality. No-one had any freak comments or anything about it, no one reacted weirdly about it – I thought that was really great.

I didn’t like Sayaka’s mom. She only appeared in one episode and in the end I guess she was okay, but I just couldn’t get over the fact how rude and tactless she was when they had that dinner with Ryosuke and Mizuki. She was just poking around other people’s business, asking everyone about marriage even though it was a sensitive subject for literally everyone in the room. That really ticked me off. Don’t just go telling people ‘shouldn’t you get married soon, you’re not that young anymore’ when you don’t know their circumstances? Isn’t that common sense? Mind your own business please? Sorry, that was just really a no-no for me.

The main issue in this drama for me was that it took me a very long time to warm up to Shohei, mostly because the miscommunications between Shohei and Sayaka dragged on for so long. The reasons why she didn’t stick with Ryosuke were fair enough but I still found it hard to accept it because of my personal opinion. And because it personally took me so long to sympathize with Shohei, I didn’t really feel their chemistry until the end and then it was suddenly happy ending and done.
So they could’ve built a little more in their chemistry to make it more believable. We only see Sayaka’s part of the story, and it would’ve really helped for me to see more of Shohei’s part to at least get more confirmation how he truly felt about her, because we only learn about this from other people and not directly from him himself.

In the end, Sayaka and Shohei’s relationship of the missing three months is fragmentarily pieced together, until the part where the misunderstanding surrounding their break-up occurred and Sayaka lost her memories.
But when you find out the truth, Shohei’s behavior and hesitation to start over with her is very logical, I mean, she may have forgotten but he still has all the painful memories – it makes perfect sense that he wouldn’t be thrilled to start over as if nothing had happened. In that sense, Sayaka was a little selfish because she only cared about her own. She thought ‘it doesn’t matter if I regain my memories, we can just start over and it doesn’t have to be the same’, but she really did have to recall what happened first.
Because she broke up with Shohei with the lie that she was still in love with Ryosuke, but in truth Kyoko had manipulated her by telling her about Shohei’s big chance to work in London. Sayaka didn’t want to stand in the way of his career, so she decided to break his heart and let him go where he was supposed to go.
Sayaka remembers this just as Shohei is about to go to London, while Shohei hears it directly from Kyoko, who finally comes clean about what she knows and what she’s done.
This vital piece of information was what was needed to fix their relationship – because she needed to re-live her love for Shohei from the beginning and re-evaluate what happened to see that she’d made a mistake. And in a way, it was good for her. Because she literally learned new things about herself and learning about those things she gained more confidence to do it again and better.

It wasn’t the best drama I’ve ever seen, but certainly not the worst either. It’s a simple love story in which some things needed to be re-evaluated to make the love between two people even stronger. You could see growth in the characters, and even though there could’ve been a little more depth, it was entertaining enough.
As I’ve realized, Japanese dramas usually don’t have as much depth as Korean dramas. In Korean dramas, there’s always these hundred side plots tying a lot of people together from childhood or acquaintances or whatever, and the relationships in Japanese dramas are usually way more one-dimensional. It has its charm, but in this drama I really missed a little more intrige.

I’m going to watch another Japanese drama now, very curious. Since coming back from Korea I really want to get into K-dramas again, but I’m obediently going down my list now.
Sorry for the short review (it’s partly jetlag), and I hope to be able to come back into better shape writing-wise. Until next time!

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.

Hana Nochi Hare
(花のち晴れ / Hana Nochi Hare)
MyDramaList rating: 7.0/10

Hello~!
It hasn’t been that long since my last review (which took me a long time to finish), but I just couldn’t wait to finish this as soon as I started it. After a short break after the first two episodes I pretty much binged the rest in a couple of days. It’s been a while for me since I watched a Japanese drama but this brought back all the reasons why I used to like them so much.

Anyhow! I guess it won’t be much of a surprise when I say that this was on my list because of Hana Yori Dango. I did have some doubts at first because I really wasn’t sure whether it would be just some lame remake of the original, but actually from episode 1 on it brought back all these old HYD feels and I just loved it. The cheesiness, the dorky romance, the anime-based characters… I didn’t realize how much I missed those. Japanese dramas have a completely different vibe from Korean dramas, and I realized that I want to start watching more Japanese dramas again. There’s a couple more on my list after this one, so I will stick to them for a while.

So, this story is a sequal to the classic Hana Yori Dango from 2005/6, it takes place quite a while after the F4 has graduated and the main setting is the same academy, Eitoku Gakuen. Ruling the school now is a 5-member group that calls themselves C5 (Correct5), whose members have devoted themselves to keep order and respect at the school and keep it the way it’s meant to be – for rich elite kids only. Whenever a student is found out of actually being poor, there is a tradition of ‘peasant-hunting’ in which the C5 comes after you and forces you to quit Eitoku. This also involves public bullying from the other students (the same way as it used to go in the F4 times).
The leader of this group is Kakuragi Haruto (played by Hirano Sho), the only son of a nation-wide conglomerate. His father has always treated him very harshly, always saying that he’s not worthy and he has no use for him if he’s not ‘perfect’, so Haruto has always been trying to gain his father’s approval.
The other members of the group are Maya Airi (played by Imada Mio), Taira Kaito (played by Hamada Tatsuomi), Narumiya Issa (played by Suzuki Jin) and Eibi Sugimaru (played by Nakata Keisuke).
On the other hand, we have Edogawa Oto (played by Sugisaki Hana), a girl from a formerly rich family whose father’s company went bankrupt and has caused them to lose all their wealth. Her father is now out on the sea trying to make some money while she and her mother live in a small house in a scrappy neighborhood. She’s trying hard to remain out of trouble at school, and not just because she doesn’t want to be peasant-hunted.
When she was still rich, she was betrothed to her childhood friend Hase Tenma (played by Nakagawa Taishi). Their mothers were best friends and before Tenma’s mother passed away, she made Oto promise to stay with her son forever and remain at Eitoku until she was 18 before they would get married.
So now Oto’s goal is to make it through her Eitoku days until she turns 18. But of course things don’t always turn out as you plan them and she gets involuntarily involved with Haruto as they both discover something about each other that can reveal something really big if made public. They decide to make a pact, but Haruto falls for Oto quite fast.
Also, while Haruto is the leader of Eitoku Gakuen, Tenma is the leader of rivaling school Momonozono so there is already enough rivalry between the two guys. With her feelings growing for both guys, who will Oto eventually choose? Will she go for the ‘hana’ or the ‘hare’?

I discovered something interesting about the titles of both HYD and HNH. I was looking for an English translation of ‘Hana Nochi Hare’, but it’s quite different from Hana Yori Dango, which is an actual expression in Japanese (although used as a wordpun for the series).
In Hana Yori Dango, the ‘hana’ is a direct reference to Hanazawa Rui, the second male lead in the series. The way ‘dango’ is written, in some indirect way leads to Domyouji, so the series is basically ‘rather Domyouji than Hanazawa’. In the case of Hana Nochi Hare, this exact same logic is used, where ‘hana’ is an indirect indication to ‘Hase’ and ‘hare’ refers to ‘Haruto’ – causing the series to be titled ‘From Hase to Haruto’.
The symbolic meaning of the original expression is ‘rather something you can eat (eg. dumplings) than something you can look at (such as a flower)’.
It’s clever that they came up with this expression and start to apply it to people: both Hanazawa Rui and Hase Tenma are the female lead’s first love interests because of how they look and the vibe/appearance they give off. They seem beautiful and gentle. And then there Domyouji/Kakuragi that bring all these extra things into their relationship and make her go for what’s inside rather than what’s on the outside.
Maybe this is old news for some, but it keeps amusing me. I think it’s really clever.

Anyways, although the premise of this story is a little different from Hana Yori Dango, the relationship between Haruto and Oto is almost a direct parallel to Domyouji and Makino’s. But with the little differences that made it not identical to the original, it remained interesting to watch. All the characters, no matter how much of a caricature they were, had a real and sympathetic side to them. Even though Airi was a complete psychopath in the first three episodes (and honestly I didn’t buy it for a second when she suddenly started acting nice), she turned things around for herself.
Same goes for Tenma’s stepmother Rie (played by Takaoka Saki), whom I was sure was going to turn out to be the evil bitch trying to break Oto and Tenma up, suddenly became nice as well, confessing that she did it all because she was jealous of Tenma’s deceased biological mother etc.
In these two cases, it came a bit unnatural to me because they depicted them as such bad characters in the beginning and then just dropped it.
Anyhow, I’m glad they did it with Airi because after that she became this great supportive friend to Oto.

I also liked the complexity of Oto’s feelings. Because it wasn’t just that she started liking the one more than the other – her feelings for Tenma were real until the end and she was willing to suppress whatever she felt for Haruto to be with him. When Tenma told her to go to Haruto at the end she actually cried because it hurt her so much to hurt him.
Despite these kind of feelings, it did bother me how much Oto took on herself and with that I mostly mean her habit of apologizing. I mean, it’s okay to apologize. But come on, she seemed to be turning every single thing that happened into something that might have been her fault. There were a lot of things in there that didn’t have anything to do with her and still she found a way to blame herself for it. I know this is very Japanese, but at a certain point it went too far. Sometimes you just need to think, ‘wait, no, this is actually not by fault/responsibility, I don’t need to apologize for it’.
And Tenma just had to keep repeating himself with, ‘why are you apologizing? I wish you wouldn’t apologize all the time’. I think it was actually pretty exhausting for him to keep repeating the same thing again and again but he still did it because he loved her so much. He loved her so much and he still looked out for her the most, he still considered her feelings above his own. He still told her he wouldn’t keep her by his side because he saw how much she liked Haruto.
Tenma was a really good character. Besides being portrayed as the knight in shining armor, he was just so incredibly sweet and way too considerate.
The sad thing in Asian dramas is that the second male lead is always the one who waits for the girl to settle her feelings and therefore always misses out in the end. It surprised me that Oto was so bend on staying with Tenma until the end and chose to suppress her feelings for Haruto (because why?).

Haruto was just like Domyouji, this clumsy but determined bean who has a talent for pushing through when he focusses on one thing at a time. I think they used that double date at the batting center as a great example to show this quality of his, he kept trying the hit the ball all day and at the end he managed to hit a homerun through pure determination, even though he couldn’t even hit a ball a few hours earlier.
They did a good job of showing both Oto and us viewers these sides to him, because these sides are what make us fall in love with the character. And the way he looked at Oto was just so heartwarming, whenever she smiled he would be like ‘heck yes she smiled, score!’
And I also liked how Haruto and Tenma also didn’t seem to genuinely hate each other. They were ‘forced to’ because of the rivarly between their schools, but Haruto was constantly looking up to how great Tenma was and Tenma was insecure of losing Oto to Haruto as well because he saw how straightforward he was about his feelings for her. I don’t know, there was a lot of humanity to be found in both their characters.

And can I also say that Haruto’s father was the biggest jerk that ever called himself a father in a drama ever? Honestly, the way he talks to his son as if he’s some sort of puppet or robot who just has to perform well or else he’s of no use to him – do you seriously consider yourself a father? I’m just sad Haruto’s mother wasn’t around, because now he grew up with this monster and it never even occurred to him that he didn’t need to be treated this way. He always just accepted the criticism and kept trying to prove him wrong. But that is no way to talk to your child. Your child needs to make mistakes in order to grow, you can’t walk up to your 8-year old after he got so nervous at a recital that he threw up and say ‘you’ve disappointed me, I don’t need you if you’re not a 100% perfect’. What the freck? That was so wrong.

I want to say something about the other C5 members apart from Airi, because I’ve already discussed her. I wish we could have seen some more personal development from the remaining members as well. Just as with Sojiro and Akira in the original series (although they had a second season for more background story), Kaito, Issa and Sugimaru kind of remained blandly in the background. They were sort of constant characters but they didn’t really contribute a lot. I think initially this had to do with the fact that it was explained that the C5 weren’t really ‘friends’ as much as they were ‘comrades’. Kaito was this guy stuck-up with the rules who initially cared more for the reputation of Eitoku Gakuen than for the fact that Haruto had feelings for someone. Issa (whose face strangely reminded me of Min Ho from SHINee?) was this typical flirty guy and Sugimaru was the athletic guy whose lines only consisted of quotes from famous athletes. Fun fact: you only ever see him lift weights and do push-ups, I don’t actually remember him doing any sports to prove that he’s an athlete, except perhaps for when his character is introduced. While Issa was a pretty direct reference to Sojiro (with the traditional ikebana thing and such), I’d actually thought that Sugimaru would’ve been the one helping out the most when it came to the sports match Haruto had to face against Tenma. Although, now I do remember him helping out in the judo department, my bad. But still, these characters are introduced as a stereotype in a specific field, but it never becomes more than the stereotype. I would’ve liked to see some more depth in these characters.

Another thing that I loved: the cameo appearances of the original HYD actors. I mean, I was already excited when Tama and the butler guy showed up, imagine my reaction when Rui and Sojiro appeared! I really liked how they brought back the whole nostalgic feel of the HYD universe by directly tying it to the original series. Of course it would’ve been the best to see Domyouji and Makino in it, but hey, you can’t have everything, I guess and this much already made me happy enough.

So, to talk a bit about the casting.
I’ve seen Sugisaki Hana in a few others dramas (although I don’t remember much in detail), but I think this was the first time I’ve seen her play this really sweet kind-natured girl. I remember her in Gakkou no Kaidan where she was a part of this C5 kind of group and was kind of a bitch (lol). And I know she’s been doing some voice acting (I still have to watch Mary and the Witch’s flower). Anyways, apart from her hairstyle in the series I don’t have a lot to comment on (I mean, come on, it looked like nothing). I think she had great chemistry with both her male co-stars, that’s why I was lowkey shipping both couples, lol.
I haven’t seen anything of Hirano Sho but I just found out he’s a member of an idol group and hasn’t actually done a lot of dramas. But I think he pulled off this part really well.
The last thing I’ve seen of Nakagawa Taishi is Minami-kun no Koibito, which I didn’t like so much. Even so he was one of the best actors in that series and I’m really glad to have seen him in this too, because his performance restored some more faith in me. I was able to reconfirm that he’s a pretty good actor and he showed some different sides as well. His character had more layers than in the other series, he wasn’t just the kind second male lead but he really struggled with everything that was going on, even though he didn’t want Oto to notice.

Someone I haven’t mentioned yet is the character of Nishidome Megumi, nicknamed ‘Megurin’ (played by Iitoyo Marie). She’s this super popular idol who falls for Haruto because he reminds her of this prince-like character in a otome game she’s hooked on – she does fall for him genuinely later. She was definitely a parallel to the character of Shigeru in the original series, this eccentric girl who also comes from a rich family who falls for Haruto and is strung into an engagement with him but eventually takes it upon herself to end their relationship because she sees how much he’s in love with Oto. I liked how likeable they made her character, even though everyone was annoyed with her in the beginning. But she was really precious, even when Haruto stumbled upon Oto and Tenma agreeing to go out with each other, she was actually crying because she felt so sorry for Haruto.

Oto’s mother (played by Kikuchi Momoko) was also a bean. She was this rich lady who was suddenly forced to live and earn money on her own and I felt really sorry for her because she was so unfamiliar with everything and she just wanted the best for her daughter. When she was reunited with Oto’s father in the end she was so happy – she was still this young girl inside. Not really a very mature mother figure, I would think, but she was really sweet.

Another nice side character was Konno-san, Oto’s colleague from the convenience store. Konno Arisa (played by Kinami Haruka) was this constant figure of familiarity for Oto. She was goofy and kind of an airhead, but she was the big sister she needed to fall back on whenever she didn’t know what to do anymore. I really liked her, even though I’m not sure if it was the writers’ intention to give her character such a meaning (maybe it’s just me, lol).

Lastly, my heart really went out to Kobayashi (played by Shiga Kotaro), Haruto’s elderly butler. He was such a precious man! They made him go through so many errands even though he was so old and frail and they made him proof-eat Megumi’s terrible food and everything and I was like ‘Why you do this to an old man??’ But he refused to throw away all of Haruto’s precious superstitious artefacts, and how he hid them all in his jacket was just precious. Also how he made him do the jigsaw puzzle with him and how he was like the father (or grandfather) Haruto never had… Loved him.

And I also loved Washington (lol). They are without a doubt selling this as merchandise somewhere. The little golden pig with the big belly who could suck away all your bad luck. He did a lot of good.

In the end, I think it was a really nice sequal, it tied together perfectly the original series and the next generation, therefore the sub-title ‘HanaDan Next Generation’ is well chosen. I think it also serves as a good series to re-introduce the new generation to the feeling and the story of the original Hana Yori Dango series (which will always be a classic in dramaland).
I realized that this story also didn’t have the focus on the difference in social class – whereas in HYD it was constantly about Makino being poor and Domyouji being rich and that being the reason they weren’t allowed to be together – this story stopped caring about that halfway through and just focussed on the relationships between all the people.
It was interesting to see how the story was moved to a more modern period. The whole bullying tradition at Eitoku seemed even more cruel because in this time and day it just seems barbaric and unreal to gang up on one person with the whole school. I mean, to see those guys actually hit a girl with no restraint and laughing it off – I was disgusted all the more because it was set in modern-day times. Ways of bullying also extended to the use of social media and non-stop spamming on Line – they even followed her home and filmed her mother to make fun of her for being poor – that’s just not human behavior. So that went a bit far.
But it didn’t go as far as it did in the original series, because Haruto was confronted with how crazy their approach was with the whole ‘peasant-hunt’ thing and he came clean about it and forbade it from happening again. The change in their behavior, where they learned from their silly actions, was very natural.
Even though it was only 11 episodes long, it didn’t feel rushed. They didn’t take too many plotlines on their plate and they wrapped everything up nicely. However, I really REALLY wanted to see a kiss between Oto and Haruto at the end. I mean, their chemistry was sizzling throughout the entire series and I was really looking forward to when they would finally both face their feelings for each other – but then all we got was this cheesy illusion in which Haruto sang a super corny song and the frame froze just before their lips touched. Oto had a wonderful kiss with Tenma, but they couldn’t show her and Haruto in their final romantic confrontation?
That was a bit of a bummer.
But I liked the series overall, it made me very happy and it made me realize that, when it comes to these kind of series, I really do miss Japanese dramas sometimes.

So prepare for some more Japanese drama reviews coming up!
I hope you liked my review, I’ll keep them coming 🙂

Bye-bye~!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Hotel Del Luna
( 호텔 델루나 / Hotel Delluna)
MyDramaList rating: 8.5/10

Hello everyone! I’m back with another review! I try to create a better overview of the series I watch in a certain period of time, so I was looking for a drama that I could wrap up October with and I ended up picking this one. Because, honestly: what better way to end the month October and wrap up Halloween by finishing this spooky drama?
Hotel Del Luna was originally later on my list because it’s a relatively recent drama, but I just couldn’t wait, I was in the mood and I just moved it up.
It was on my list foremost because of IU and because I was curious after learning it was about more dark stuff than just a fun hotel.
I have a friend who told me about it (she doesn’t watch anything involving ghosts whatsoever, but she saw some clips and told me it was supposedly very good). Honestly, I was not disappointed and I was hooked from episode 1 on.

First of all, let me try to give a summary of the story.
The story of Hotel Del Luna starts off in the Goryeo period, when a orphan rebel warrior called Jang Man Weol (played by IU/Lee Ji Eun), stumbles across the so-called Guest House of the Dead and involuntarily becomes the new owner after being tricked by a deity. The Guest House of the Dead is a place where wandering ghosts and spirits spend their last moments on earth before moving on to the afterlife.
Man Weol is forced to live through centuries as the owner, welcoming new guests, some of which who come to stay and work for her at the guest house > inn > hotel until present day.
Her three most loyal employees are Mr. Kim (played by Shin Jung Geun), Mrs. Choi (played by Bae Hae Sun), and Ji Hyun Joong (played by Block B’s P.O./Pyo Ji Hoon). Mr. Kim Shi Ik is a scholar from the Joseon period and is currently working as the bartender in the hotel’s sky lounge bar, Mrs. Choi Seo Hee is in charge of the guests and youngster Ji Hyun Joong is the front office clerk.
In the 90s, a man who was in an accident but is not yet completely dead stumbles upon the hotel, now called ‘Hotel Del Luna’, and attempts to steal something. Man Weol busts him and threatens to let him die for real, but the man begs her to let him live for his young son. They strike a deal: the man will live but when his son is in his 20s, Man Weol will come to claim him for her hotel. Skipping to 2019, Goo Chan Seong (played by Yeo Jin Goo), now in his 20s, has been staying away from Korea after hearing all his father’s stories about the strange hotel, but when he returns to Korea to work for a high-class hotel, fate has it that his path crosses Man Weol’s.
Man Weol bestows upon him the gift of being able to see ghosts and while in the beginning he is freaked out and does whatever he can to stay away, in the end he has no choice but to become the new general manager of the hotel. It has been a tradition for a while that the hotel has had an alive human as general manager.
Slowly but surely Chan Seong gets used to the particular guests of the hotel and Man Weol’s materialistic tendencies, and he becomes closer to the staff.
In the meantime, we learn more about Man Weol’s past and why she can’t move on, just like her employees.

I would like to re-emphasize how much I enjoyed this drama. The concept was good and original, it gave a completely new angle when it came to ghost dramas, the acting was good, the characters well really well-constructed…. I can keep going.
The thing is, I’ve watched multiple K-Dramas with ghost themes and they all kind of came down to the same thing: there’s always an innocent ghost that doesn’t remember how he/she died and there’s always an evil spirit that’s responsible and has taken possession over someone’s body.
What I liked about Hotel Del Luna was that it gave a new perspective on ghosts and it really emphasized their humanity. Even the ones that on first glance you’d think ‘eeewww creepyyy’ turned out to be mostly victims when their back stories were revealed. It looked at various situations and concepts of death, people who held grudges because of their deaths, people who were in accidents, etcetera. I really liked that it took a familiar genre and still delivered something new to it. And put standard ghost tropes into perspective.
For example, the guest from room 13, who was introduced as the really very scary dangerous guest who wasn’t allowed to leave her room because the smell of alive humans would drive her nuts – when Chan Seong was made to go in to light the incense and you could see her peaking through the ajar closet with that creepy IT-like grin, I was seriously scared. But on the other hand, I really wanted to know more about her. And they actually explained her entire story.
To be clear, this drama has 16 episodes but every episode is about 1,5 hours(!) long and a LOT happens in every episode. But I really appreciated this because in this way, they could create so much backstory for everyone and really take their time to play out all the plotlines. In the end, nothing felt rushed or unnatural, and even a couple of guests got an extended story.
The creepy ghost girl who went crazy and killed herself and became a vengeful spirit turned out to be a victim of some serious cyber bullying. Pictures of her being taken advantage of by a guy from college were spread over the Internet and the comments all made her lose confidence in humanity. She wasn’t allowed to leave her room because she’d go out and take advantage on the people who did that to her – and this happened when Chan Seong accidentally freed her. But at the same time, while what she did wasn’t right, you couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. These scumbags drove her to suicide and they were just living their cocky lives without reflecting on their actions. They barely even remembered her, that’s how small the matter was to them.
In the end, she was vaporized by the deity because she became a vengeful spirit and harmed humans, but at least she got her peace after the injustice that had happened to her by those bastards was revealed to the world.

And then there’s Kim Yoo Na (played by Kang Mi Na). Kim Yoo Na is actually the spirit of high school student Jang Soo Jung possessing the body of her former bully Kim Yoo Na. Yoo Na threw Soo Jung off a bridge and Soo Jung got back at her by possessing her body, leaving Yoo Na’s spirit to be unknowingly burned by her parents. Now Soo Jung is living in Yoo Na’s body and since she’s practically a ghost, she can also enter the hotel and becomes an intern – she and Hyun Joong also start going out. Despite her sometimes impulsive and selfish behavior, she helps out a couple of times when it comes to tracking down spirits.

The story really was about finding peace, for both the living and the dead. It captured the humanity of every ghost, even after death.
I was really touched by the scene where the father who got into an accident with his little son made a dream call to the truck driver that killed them that he didn’t want him to feel guilty and that he shouldn’t lost his life because of this – that it was their fault for suddenly jumping onto the road.
All these different situations really spoke to me, although the general theme of the series is so fictive, it showed some real humanity and that I really liked. Not all people are killed or wronged by bad people. Of course, there were some scumbags, such as that serial killer dude.
I think he was the only real bad guy in the series because he showed no remorse at all. Seol Ji Won (played by Lee David), was a former college mate of Chan Seong when he was studying in the US and he started some really serious cyber bullying about Sanchez – I will get to Sanchez later – Chan Seong’s friend. After getting back to Korea, he kills seven people and buries them in a forest. Yoo Na discovers this as she keeps seeing a ghost sitting in the back of Seol Ji Won’s car, calling for help. With her help, all the victims end up at the hotel, waiting for getting back at their killer, especially when other people get framed for the murders he committed. In the end, he chooses to commit suicide rather than face justice and he becomes a vengeful spirit with a lot of resentment towards Chan Seong and all the connected people.

I will talk a bit about Sanchez before I review more about Man Weol’s past and the reincarnated people from her past.
Sanchez (played by Jo Hyun Chul) is Chan Seong’s college friend who owns his own pizza place and is pretty rich. Chan Seong is staying at his house since it’s so big.
Let me just say this: SANCHEZ IS BAE. Honestly, he’s such a good friend, even after he learns all about the ghost stuff. It was heart-wrenching when his girlfriend/fiancée-to-be suddenly turned up as a ghost next to his table. She got into an accident because she was so eager to get to him and he was going to propose and MY HEART COULD NOT. That moment when he was sitting at the table waiting for her and suddenly got the phone call and she was standing next to him and he couldn’t see her and I was like NO DON’T TELL ME SHE DIED NO. Ugh, my heart. I felt to sorry for him, I wanted to hug him so much.
Anyways, Sanchez was the best friend ever. Period.

I have so much to discuss about this drama that I need to think of how to construct this review! As I’m typing more and more things come to mind and I don’t want to get into too much detail about the contents of the drama.
But one of the most important things I have to review is the spirit world, Man Weol’s past and about the parts the deities and the Grim Reaper played in it all.
The funniest thing about the hotel was that all matters concerning the dead were taken care of ‘business-as-usual’ style. Man Weol having a chat with the deceased about whether they had any regrets or resentments left, if they had any remaining fortune in the living world, the manner of how they would leave for the afterlife (by bus or limo for the more elite guests) etc., it’s all very amusing. And the fact that to ‘the afterlife’, they would just step into a fancy car, drive through a tunnel and ultimately had to cross a large Manhatten-like bridge to the other side was very well interpreted.
I really liked the deities and the Grim Reaper characters.
The deities are all portrayed by the same actress, Seo Yi Sook, and they’ve made it so that they’re all ‘sisters’. Their combined name is ‘Ma Go’. There’s the Ma Go who gives flowers to the deceased and helps them on their way (also the one who made Man Weol the owner of the hotel), the one who has the sight of both past and future, the one who makes the special medicine and potions, the strict police-like one who chases down and punishes vengeful spirits, and the deities of wealth and poverty. All of them have different personalities and appearances (loved the one dressed as Queen Elizabeth). The Grim Reaper, played by Kang Hong Suk, is a very stoic but also funny character (in a dry way). He makes sure all the designated spirits depart the human world safely and it’s his job to catch evil spirits that don’t belong in the human world. He occasionally showed up at the hotel as well to chat with the employees. Unlike the usual concept of a grim reaper, he wasn’t scary at all, just very stoic and I loved that he had this gas tank thing on his back, lol.
In the garden of the hotel, there is the Moon Tree. Man Weol was bound to this tree when Ma Go made her the new owner. She was forced into this job because of a terrible crime she committed. She killed a lot of people out of hate and vengeance – although truth be told, she went through a lot of shit herself.
I initially thought that Man Weol’s story would remain very secret and mysterious, no one knew the complete truth about her. But since Chan Seong suddenly started seeing her past in his dreams (because of a flower from the Moon Tree that Ma Go placed with him when he was asleep one time), her past is revealed to us viewers gradually throughout the entire series.
Man Weol was originally from Goguryeo and lost her parents at a young age and was found by a lady who raised her together with her own son. The lady passed away soon after but Man Weol and Yeon Woo (played by Lee Tae Sun) grew up as close as siblings, slaves rebelling against the state in hope for a new and free world.
Initially the enemy as he is a guard to the princess and has to stop the Goguryeo rebels, Ko Chung Myung (played by Lee Do Hyun) joins the duo and the three of them spend some time together. Man Weol and Chung Myung grow closer, but then Chung Myung suddenly betrays them and they are captured by the guards. Yeon Woo is hanged and Man Weol is imprisoned, but the swears that she’ll be the one to kill Chung Myung one day. The princess Song Hwa (played by Park Yoo Na), is arrogant and wants to keep Chung Myung by her side.
Man Weol is ultimately manages to assassinate both the princess and Chung Myung, but even in her present life she is filled with resentment for them and is therefore unable to move on.
And then, to her astonishment, Princess Song Hwa’s reincarnation appears before her in the form of Lee Mi Ra, Chan Seong’s ex-girlfriend and former college mate from the US. As she gets involved with Chan Seong and Sanchez again and makes it clear she wants to get back with Chan Seong, Man Weol is unable to hide her resentment and attempts to place a terrible curse on Mi Ra. Chan Seong manages to save his friend just in time, enveloping the curse himself.
Honestly, that part just felt so bad. In this scene, Man Weol was so undeniably the bad guy. I mean, we knew her resentment towards Song Hwa was legit, but Mi Ra wasn’t her, she didn’t have any memories of her past life, so I didn’t think it was fair and I was a bit shocked by the weight of the curse Man Weol attempted to put on her. I found it really mean of her.
Yeon Woo is reincarnated into police officer Park Young Soo, who is also in the team investigating the serial murders caused by Seol Ji Won. He and Mi Ra meet and fall for each other. As happy as she is seeing that Yeon Woo is reincarnated as a good person living a good life, Man Weol has some trouble accepting he is now seeing Princess. Song Hwa’s reincarnation. But of course, she can’t tell either of them about their past lives, she alone has to live and remember everything by herself.
What became of Chung Myung is one of the saddest things of all. It is revealed that Chung Myung sincerely loved Man Weol, and he tried everything he could to protect her while knowing she would come to kill him one day. Man Weol has waited for centuries, waited for him to appear in front of her so she could face her final resentment; except she never sees him. He’s always been there, but she never saw him because he was reincarnated into a firefly. There’s constantly a firefly hovering around the Moon Tree, and it’s also this firefly that leads Chan Seong to the hotel the very first time. This firefly turns out to be Chung Myung. I don’t know man but I found it so sad T^T He was always there and she was always waiting, not knowing he was by her side throughout the centuries. He couldn’t show himself to her without her own inquiry.
There’s even a period where Man Weol suspects that Chan Seong is the reincarnation of Chung Myung, and she fears she has to kill him, but in the end Ma Go tells her the truth and she is able to accompany Chung Myung to the afterlife bridge where she declines his offer to come with him.

In all honesty, the story had so much to offer and showed so many stories that the romance between Man Weol and Chan Seong didn’t even interest me that much. I was totally rooting for Hyun Joong and Yoo Na because Hyun Joong was my baby and they were just adorable together. But honestly the romance between the two main leads wasn’t even the most defining thing for me to like the series. I actually found their relationship quite dry and stiff. It lacked passion. It was mostly just staring at each other smiling, one good kiss and casual hugs. I didn’t really feel it that much.
But it didn’t take away the joy for me, either. I mean, there had to be romance, otherwise it wouldn’t have been a K-Drama. But this time it felt a bit like romance for the sake of romance. I actually liked the relationship between Man Weol and Chan Seong as they started out, at odds with each other but slowly growing on each other.

I wish to make some remarks on the casting. I mentioned before that I thought the acting was very good, there were also some nice cameo appearances, and everything just fit into each other very well.
First of all, IU. The last drama I saw with her was My Mister, and I was already impressed with how much her acting had improved there.
IU was amazing in this drama. From the first moment on, I LOVED her. As the rebel warrior, and then as this mysterious, fabulously-dressed, eccentrical missy, she rocked. Her acting was so good her, I am so proud of her for growing so much. She got to show so many sides of her acting, both cute and immature as mature and grown-up, dangerous and mysterious.
I’m really impressed and I will continue following her dramas because this is the good stuff.
The thing with Yeo Jin Goo is, I see him in the same cluster as Kim So Hyun and Kim Yoo Jung. I’ve seen them as a cluster ever since The Moon That Embraces The Sun, where they were still babies and played the kid versions of the grown-ups. And now slowly but surely they’re becoming the grown-ups in the series and they have their own kid versions. Yeo Jin Goo is a bean, but of all his dramas I’ve seen, I can see a typical way of acting which sometimes seems to be a bit stiff. He always carries the same expression, either staring wide-eyed or with his toothpaste-commercial smile. And in this drama, he fell a little flat for me personality-wise. I wasn’t really convinced by Goo Chan Seong as a person and that’s probably one of the reasons why the relationship between him and Man Weol didn’t really stand out to me as truly passionate. I feel like he has more to learn when it comes to really showing more emotional expressions and how to act out to be passionately in love with someone. I mean, his counterpart was IU, I was surprised he wasn’t heart-eyed like 100% of the time. But it just stayed at kind smiles and pats on the back. It had to be realistic that he had to be so special that a woman who had lived for centuries carrying the weight of the dead and her resentment with her all this time, would fall for him. And that I didn’t really understand because of this. So that could’ve been a bit more convincing, but it didn’t bother me so much that I’d mark as an actual complaint. They were still sweet together.

My favorite character was Ji Hyun Joong. I didn’t know this guy (only when I looked him up did I find out he’s in Block B), but I just loved him. He was this adorably puppy bean with his scrunchy face and blessed smile, but he also constantly had something melancholical about him. The duality of his character, the youth he never lost even though he’s been dead for 70 years already… and when they revealed his past and how he died and what was binding him to the human world, I just wanted to hug him and never let go.
I really liked him, both the actor and the character. He was a really good choice for this role.
The relationship between him and Yoo Na was one of the things I really liked, because it was actually so wrong (as in, he was a ghost waiting for his little sister to die to pass on and she was a ghost in a human body, she still had her entire life ahead of her) and you know it just wouldn’t be able to stand. And the moment when Hyun Joong had to leave and say goodbye was one of the moments were I literally had tears in my eyes.

Let me quickly go over the three employees and their stories and how they got over their resentments.
Kim Shi Ik, the bartender, used to be a scholar in the Joseon period. He was a genius and passed the civil exam (or what’s it called?) in first place. However, he became interested in the lives of the ‘normal’ people and started writing down their stories. For this he was shunned by his fellow scholars; how could he, a man of his status, lower himself to the perverse and vulgar tales of the poor? (It didn’t make any sense to me, either, but hey I guess that’s Joseon logic). He was humiliated so much that even his wife left him and he lost all the reputation he had build that he took his own life.
His resentment is solved when a guest ghost in the hotel turns out to be a writer researching Kim Shi Ik’s life and is about to publish a posthumous book about the ‘perversities’ of this so-called scholar. Man Weol and Chan Seong work hard to make sure the book isn’t published and Mr. Kim’s name is cleared.
Mrs. Choi Seo Hee was also from the Joseon period. She used to be the daughter-in-law of a wealthy family, but as soon as she gave birth to a daughter she was cast out of the household (they only wanted sons to pass on the bloodline). Her husband just pushed her away to try it with another woman who could give him a son and Seo Hee lost both her child and her mind. She is bound to the human world in order to see the bloodline of her husband’s family ended. When the last son comes into the hotel as a guest she finally thinks she’s done because he never got married, but it turns out he did get a woman pregnant. However, in the end she is not able to harm the woman or hurt the baby. Also, because of her old-fashioned mindset, she never thought about the child as a being of its own and not necessarily the continuation of a certain bloodline. After she finds peace with this, she is able to leave.
Ji Hyun Joong was still a student when he was murdered by his former friend by accident. It was during the First Korean War (I think?) and his parents were killed in the bombings. He and his little sister fled, his little sister having lost her sight in the bombings. His former friend now turned runaway soldier accidentally shoots Hyun Joong. Hyun Joong’s last dying wish to him is that he takes his sister with him and help her survive. In doing this, he ‘cursed’ his friend into a life of taking care of his little sister. His little sister forever thought her brother was still with her – the friend had to pretend to be Hyun Joong. Hyun Joong is waiting for his little sister to grow old and pass away so they can leave together.
When Yoo Na finds out the truth, she is initially very selfish in that she doesn’t want him to go, but the way she handled it in the end was very impressive. But their farewell was absolutely heartbreaking, they were both bawling their eyes out.

This is a bit random in-between, but recently I feel like I don’t put as much of my own interpretation in my reviews as in earlier ones. I noticed that the major parts of my reviews include story summary and contents of the series, and I want to add more of myself into them. This is what I’m going to be working on more from now on as well.

I really liked this drama. As I said, it was a particularly shiny gem within a familiar genre. The whole story was wrapped up very nicely, all character got literal closure on their stories and everyone was able to move on.
And I think that’s a very important theme to note: ‘moving on’.
Maybe even the most important one. It’s not just about ghosts that have lingering sentiments and therefore aren’t able to move on peacefully. It’s about people finding ways to face their unsolved business and find peace.
Some people hold grudges and resentments, others are only fogiving and apologetic, others hold regrets, others are just waiting for others to come join them.
In some cases, actual action is required to solve the things, in some cases the person just has to accept and move on emotionally. It’s interesting to try and depict the dead as people that still watch over their loved ones and are desperate to show them a sign of that they are sorry or okay.
This is also why I really liked the scene where only certain spirits were allowed to make a ‘dream call’ to someone still alive. From the hotel, this was a literal phone call, but it would mean they would appear in someone’s dream. The scene I mentioned before where the father appeared in the dream of the truck driver that killed him and his son, in which he told him that he hoped it wouldn’t traumatize him forever and that he wouldn’t lose it and that they were to blame for jumping in front of the truck – the truck driver crying words of gratitude and apology – as I said, in some cases accidents are accidents and they effect the person behind the wheel just as much.
It just put a lot into perspective. In the usual ghost dramas it’s always very black and white who are the good ghosts and the evil spirits, but there were just so many different sides to each and every character that it was impossible to 100% blame or hate someone (except maybe the serial killer, he was just cray – but he too faced his judgment when he met his 7 victims as a ghost).
It wasn’t just a fun drama to watch, it was really good. The depth of the story and the unexpected credibility of all the characters really impressed me. Also the story’s thread between the past and the present was really well-found. I liked how you slowly but surely gained more information on people and that every episode gave so much storyline.
I looked up the director of this drama, Oh Choong Hwan, and found out that he has directed several really good dramas, among which You Who Came From The Stars, While You Were Sleeping and The Girl Who Sees Smells (another drama I really liked). I will keep an eye on this guy for future projects.

I’m glad I moved this series up in my list, it was a true pleasure to watch.
The only thing I didn’t really understand was the ending, though, did they suddenly all come back reincarnated or something? And how was Man Weol still the same, did she somehow come back or what? I didn’t really get it, lol, but anyway.

Also, the Kim Joon Hyun thing. I have no idea who the guy is, but for some reason I really liked that they used him as this recurring element.
And can we please just mention that cameo at the very end? I almost fell off my chair, lol! I totally did not expect Kim Soo Hyun to turn up as a final send-off. I was like, who is this, I first thought maybe it was a reincarnated Chung Myung or something and then suddenly it was him and I was like HELL YES and my mom came to ask what was wrong and I couldn’t explain because only a K-Drama fan could understand this. Loved that.

Also, I wish to write a few words on Sulli. I read some comments about her and IU being close friends and I saw a comment somewhere saying ‘Sulli will now be a guest in your Hotel Del Luna’. And I thought, while this is undoubtedly meant as a nice remark, it’s still a little painful.
But then, in episode 10, Sulli actually had a guest role in the series and I didn’t know this so then the comment suddenly made more sense and it was so bitter to see her so pretty and smiling while knowing that a few months later she would be gone.
I’ve only seen Sulli before in To The Beautiful You, so I didn’t really know much about her, but she definitely didn’t deserve this cruelty in her short life. Twenty-five years old, for Christ’s sake. All them haters better be receiving some bad karma.

I have officially watched 10 dramas in the past 4 months, from June to October. I will keep up the pace and provide more insightful reviews! I will also try to vary more between more than just Korean dramas ^^
I’ll keep you posted! Thank you for reading!

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.

Accidentally in Love
(惹上冷殿下/Re Shang Leng Dian Xia/Provoking the Evildoing Cold Highness)
MyDramaList rating: 7.5/10

Hello! I know it hasn’t been long but I just binged this drama in a couple of days because it was really cute and short and I couldn’t stop!
A friend of mine recommended it to me and since I don’t watch a lot of Chinese dramas I figured I’d give it a try. From the first impression of the title poster to the opening theme sequence to the actual story and characters, I will say from the start I really enjoyed it. Sometimes you just need something short and cute and simple and enjoyable 🙂
I say short because even though there are 30 episodes, the episodes are only 20 minutes long which is very unusual for a Chinese drama! But it really fitted the format of the series and it did make it easier to binge because after each episode I just wasn’t finished with it yet.

Summary: the story is about a girl called Chen Qing Qing (played by Sun Yi Ning), who grew up in a wealthy household. Since her parents’ early deaths she has been raised by her grandfather and excels in a lot of fields, from mathematics and sociology to music and drawing. She especially enjoys drawing comics. The story starts on the evening before her arranged wedding, and going through a picture book of her parents, she suddenly has a vision or dream about her parents. They appear before her and tell her how proud they are of her. Then, they tell her that they wish for her to be happy and follow the life she personally desires.
When Qing Qing wakes up the next morning she takes her life into her own hands – she escapes her own wedding and flees to the town and university where her parents met and studied together, hoping to both find out more about her parents there (she doesn’t actually know a lot about them) and to follow her own path. She disguises herself so her grandfather’s guards who followed her wouldn’t be able to find her and after some initial complications, she is able to get herself enrolled in the university, be it under her disguise.
On the other hand, we have teenage popstar idol Si Tu Feng (played by Guo Jun Chen). Despite being very loved and adored by his fans because of his looks and talent, he is very cold and not very amicable. He finds himself often wanting to escape his idol life and just be free.
Feng and Qing Qing meet when they’re both on the run from their respective guards and pretend they’re a kissing couple in an alley. This leads to their first actual but accidental kiss.
Initially, they don’t get along very well and there are some misunderstandings between them. However, when Qing Qing enrolls in her university, she finds out not only does Feng attend the same college, they’re also in the same class AND she’s assigned the seat right next to him.
The series follows the relationship between Feng and Qing Qing as they go through several hardships together and eventually fall in love with each other. Several other side characters include Feng’s best friend Gu Nan Xi (played by Ma Li), his childhood friend Lan Xin Ya (played by Cheng Mu Xuan) who’s also in love with him, his former friend now-turned-enemy Lin Yi Yang (played by Zhao Yi Qin) and Qing Qing’s roommate and best friend Zhang Fang Fang (played by Zhou Mo).
Of course, Qing Qing has a lot of secrets since she’s under constant disguise. Will she be able to keep these secrets even after things between her and Feng become serious and several people are determined to do anything in their power to sabotage their relationship?

Let me just elaborate on Qing Qing’s secrets. The thing is, she assumes three different identities in the story. The first one is her real self: long hair, elegant dresses, the rich girl she was raised to be. In order to gain attention, she has no choice but to go back to her actual look a couple of times to get what she wants (as her disguise also makes her stand out less). One time she joins a competition to star in one of Feng’s MV’s to win money to help out Fang Fang, and she has to resort to her normal look to gain the attention at the audition that she needs. Even though this is how she actually looks, she takes the name Qing Shen in her pretense to fool Feng and the others.
Her second disguise is the one she assumes when she runs away from home and the one she has on most of the series: a short curly wig, glasses and painted freckles on her face. She wears a lot of bright, colorful clothes and acts extrovertly and determined towards basically everything. For this disguise, she uses her real name Chen Qing Qing, and in the end she realizes that this initially fake personality has opened up a new side of herself and the free spirit she always longed to be. Her third identity is that of anonymous cartoon artist Hebiancao. She creates cartoons about Feng and makes them into online comics that get very popular with Feng’s fans.
So basically, Feng gets to know her as the quirky bespectacled curly-haired Chen Qing Qing who claims to come from a poor background.

What I like in Chinese dramas is that they always make every scene look so damn adorable. All the colors of the backdrop, the layout of the rooms and settings, the clothes – everything seems like a comic book. I don’t know if the building shown as a campus is an actual campus but man, that looks like one magical place to study. The characters were also designed as types, which again added that element of animation to the series.
The cold idol, the quirky geeky girl, the quiet gentle best friend, the bitchy mean girl, the bad boy with a secret soft side, etc. It reminded me a bit of My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend in terms of how the layout and the settings looked and how the characters were written as type characters.

Gu Nan Xi was the typical nice best guy friend who was always there to root for his friends. Even though he is the first one to discover Qing Shen and Qing Qing are the same person and even develops a crush on her as well, he still roots for her to be with Feng. The running gag was that he was sometimes treated like a fool by Feng and he would curse out his best friend saying that ‘he owed him a girlfriend in his next life’. He was a genuinely sympathetic character from the start, just like Fang Fang.
I actually really liked Fang Fang even though I feel like the writers didn’t fully go the distance with her character. She was very introverted and quiet, wanted to stay out of trouble, and even when she would have to take risks trying to help Qing Qing, she never turned against her. Even when Qing Qing eventually tells her the truth and shows her her real appearance, she doesn’t get mad even a little bit. Besides that, she has her own little budding romance going on with rumored bad boy Lin Yi Yang, who for some reason keeps treating her nicely. Lin Yi Yang used to be best friends with Feng and Nan Xi, but after something terrible happened to their mutual friend in the past, he has always blamed Feng for it.
Here’s the deal: Feng, Nan Xi and Yi Yang used to be a group of friends together with a girl named Lan Xin Yu (Xin Ya’s older sister). One time, Feng and Xin Yu were in a terrible accident in which their car fell into the water and Feng was rescued and Xin Yu wasn’t. After that, several misunderstandings were created: One, Lin Yi Yang always blamed Feng for the accident and Feng turned into a cold person because he felt this blame too. Two, Feng promised that he would ‘take care’ of Xin Ya after her sister’s death and Xin Ya has since then interpreted this as that Feng is in love with her and will marry her and always ‘take care’ of her. And here something went terribly wrong.
Xin Ya is the queen bee in college, together with two followers she initially serves as the typical ‘mean girl trio’ that always seems to get Qing Qing into trouble. I found her both insufferable as hilarious; there were seriously humorous moments in her scenes and acting, just in the absurd exaggeration of her behavior. However, as Feng gets closer to Qing Qing, she gets more determined to drive them apart and even calls in help from Queen Witch (as I called her) Yang Lanting (I can’t find the name of the actress anywhere o_o). She is also an old friend of the guys and supports Xin Ya in her quest to get rid of Qing Qing. In the end, Lanting has a really bad influence on both Xin Ya as Feng.

Although the entire series was pretty much colorful cuteness wrapped up in episodes, in the last 5 episodes there was a moment where suddenly something very dark happened and I found it kind of disturbing. I was really enjoying how happy and easy the story was, no major or unnecessary drama, when there was a conflict people would just say sorry and make up etcetera. But suddenly, Xin Ya started acting up. After Feng openly announced his relationship with Qing Qing in front of all his friends, Xin Ya gets so depressed she actually takes a bunch of sleeping pills and nearly kills herself. Shocked by the event, Qing Qing is also suddenly called by her grandfather who is really sick and she needs to go back home to him for a while – which was the WORST timing ever. She left Feng alone and vulnerable at the worst moment ever. With Qing Qing gone, both Xin Ya and Lanting had all the room they needed to emotionally blackmail poor Feng into staying with Xin Ya. Heck, even Xin Ya’s mother joined the game. It was sickening what happened, you could just see Feng crumble under the guilt. Ever since the accident with Xin Yu, he has been particularly vulnerable when it comes to guilt and they used this against him. They didn’t even care about what he wanted, he just had to sacrifice everything for Xin Ya because otherwise ‘she would hurt herself again and you don’t want that, do you?’ I honestly lost a little faith in humanity in that 1,5 episode.
I just hope people know they can’t actually do this, they have no right, no nothing to do this to another person. Xin Ya obviously suffered from some sort of attention disorder so I was first just frustrated by her immaturity, but then it seemed like she honestly didn’t even realize what she was doing to Feng and that she too was being manipulated by Lanting. Lanting apparently told her that if she hurt herself again, Feng would stay by her side forever. I mean, the award for the most rotten person goes to…
I’m just glad Mu Nian told her off at the failed wedding, he just said everything I was thinking. Yes, the emotional blackmailing went to the extent of forcing Feng into marrying Xin Ya. It was not okay.

I haven’t even mentioned Hua Mu Nian yet! Hua Mu Nian (played by Yan Hao Yuan) is also a student at their university, he’s part of the Student Association or whatever it is that Qing Qing joins to gain more information about her father. He has pink hair and in the beginning it really seemed like he was the only gay character in the show, but then suddenly he falls for Xin Ya and I was sad because it would’ve been nice to see an openly gay character in a Chinese drama and I was starting to believe it was finally happening… sigh, I guess not.
Anyways, he was great and I loved him and he said all the right things.

Anyways, Lanting was an actual witch and I was happy to see her go. In the beginning I just thought she was on Xin Ya’s side and therefore was only interested in her point of view, but in the end she actually showed a truly ugly part of herself by manipulating both Xin Ya to physically hurt herself and Feng to stay with Xin Ya. I was so angry when Xin Ya’s mother had the nerve to say ‘I’ve never blamed you for Xin Yu’s death… but I can’t lose Xin Ya as well’. So, basically saying it was his fault and she wouldn’t let him get away with it again.
I just felt so sorry for Feng, he had no one to save him from that situation and even Qing Qing didn’t help. That was one of the two moments I was annoyed by Qing Qing. She knew the situation was hard on Feng and he cared for Xin Ya as a friend. Even though I agreed with her when she was like ‘omg you’re going to fall for her manipulative actions?’, she did show no consideration or empathy whatsoever for the situation Feng was being pushed into and she only became selfish.
The second time I got annoyed was when Feng got this super exclusive chance to train in the States. Even though it was an amazing opportunity, he was hesitating because of Qing Qing. At the same time, Qing Qing gets the opportunity to study in Japan to become a comic artist, but she flat out refuses because of Feng. When Feng finally gathers the courage to tell her, she doesn’t even let him finish and just gets angry that he also didn’t flat out refused because of her. I mean, I’m sorry, are you actually surprised he was hesitant to tell you after you got your amazing career choice? Of course she would be lonely, but she had no right to stand in the way of his dream. She had no right to just assume he would give up on his dream for her.
The first thing she actually said was ‘What about me?’ and that pissed me off so much! Luckily, like several times before, it turns out that she has the habit of lashing out before actually thinking about it, so she needed some time and did call him to say she went too far and he should go.
However, of course, in the end – on the way to the airport – Feng realizes he really can’t do without Qing Qing and he decides to stay.

One of my favorite parts of the series was when Feng had to film a video underwater for his new album. Ever since the accident with Xin Yu, Feng has been terrified by getting into water and the idea of drowning.
Qing Qing takes it upon herself to help him overcome this fear and I loved this so much. The things she did for him were so adorable, especially the one where she brought him to the beach and told him to sing while looking at the water because singing would make him less afraid. And of course the one where she made him stand in the square and the water fountains would come out of the ground and she started to dance around him to show that the water wasn’t scary. This part was so heartwarming, I couldn’t even.
My other favorite moment was when Qing Qing hijacked Feng and Xin Ya’s wedding. I was just waiting for her to make a move, even though she was far away she knew very well Feng was not doing okay and it was already obvious she was going to do something as she called in the help from Feng’s fans. How she entered the hall all like ‘I object!’ and then released all those handshake vouchers (they were fan vouchers to shake hands with Feng for 5 seconds) in the air being like ‘I have enough vouchers to hold your hand for the rest of your life, you can’t deny me!’, I loved it. It was so quirky and so Qing Qing.

The build-up in their relationship was really nice and natural. They took their time, and even though their actual confession is not until in the latter half of the series, their growing affection for each other is already apparent from way earlier. They went through so much together and in the end they were just the most adorable couple.
I was surprised even the whole thing when Feng found out about Qing Qing hiding her true identity took such a short time! I was convinced this would be the main ‘drama’ moment of the series, but he got over it so fast! So nice!

One last thing: I just couldn’t understand how people didn’t see Qing Qing as pretty. I actually found her prettier as her quirky disguise than when she was not in disguise. I guess for all the animation elements, the fact that she wore glasses just meant she was categorized as ‘not pretty’? But to create this great contrast that suddenly when she came to class as her true self, everyone was suddenly flocking to her because ‘she was suddenly super pretty’ and then when she went back to her disguise they stopped even though they by now knew she was the same person? It was kind of weird, but again, I guess it was partly to emphasize the cartoonesque nature of the story.
It didn’t make sense to me, Sun Yi Ning is pretty no matter what disguise. I really liked seeing the different sides of her acting.
And Guo Jun Chen’s floppy ears are adorable. I had to say it.
Oh, and! The opening theme is really cute. I loved that they used it as the song Feng wrote for Qing Qing, the song fits them so perfectly!

I would’ve liked to see a little more development in the relationship between Fang Fang and Yi Yang. Even though it was established that they started dating, I would’ve liked to see at least one kiss. I mean heck, even Mu Nian and Xin Ya kissed! Although by accident.
I did really like the last part where Yi Yang came into a cafe where Fang Fang was having coffee with a friend and he would just take that friend’s coffee like ‘Are you sitting here (aka Get out, I wanna sit here)?’ and Fang Fang was like ‘I’m so sorry, he just always acts like this’, like he was a badly behaving puppy. They made a really cute couple and I would’ve liked to see some more moments between them in-between all the Feng and Qing Qing stuff.

Honestly it felt like watching Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok Joo all over again. That drama healed my heart and it was just cute and fluffy and romantic and lovely and even the ‘dramatic’ parts where just passing ships that went away without too much ado. I really enjoyed watching Accidentally in Love. I would definitely recommend it for a breather of lovely romance.
I wish to find more Chinese dramas like this, these are the ones I can take even though there was still dubbing over the original voices and the usual. But it actually didn’t bother me in this case! There is still hope! The acting was also good, sometimes there were some exaggerated things but that just fitted really well with the kind of story that it was. It needed the animation element, it needed that occasional bizarre humoristic element to make it. It wasn’t the kind of drama that needed actual heavy themes or ‘drama drama’. It was great and enjoyable the way it was.

I’ll be back soon! I now make a schedule how many dramas I watch in a certain amount of months and I still have room for series I can finish in October so I’ll just have to determine which one is next! Stay tuned!

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.

Sungkyunkwan Scandal
( 성균관 스캔들 / Seongkyunkwan Seukendeul)
MyDramaList rating: 7.5/10

Hello~ Back with another review and this time I watched a classic that has been on my list for a long long time. I’ve wanted to watch this but never found the time or wasn’t in the right mood, but I chose that it was time.
What also helped was that recently I saw the Korean movie ‘Burning’ and rediscovered my love for Yoo Ah In, so that was an extra motivation.
I really liked going back in time and watch an oldschool type 20-episode drama. I have to admit though, that it took me a while to get into and some details from the first episode have already started to fade in my memory. Despite this, I will try to summarize and critique the series as vividly as possible.

Let me start with a summary.
Sungkyunkwan Scandal takes place in the late Joseon period, and focusses on Sungkyunkwan, which were the university quarters of the capital in which only scholars were allowed. And only men could become scholars.
Besides special occasions, women were prohibited from entering the grounds.
The main character of the story is Kim Yoon Hee (played by Park Min Young), who – after the untimely death of her father 10 years earlier – now has to somehow fend for her family consisting of her, her mother and her sickly younger brother. To earn more money, she disguises herself as a man and helps out transcribing books at a local bookstore. Her talent for literature and writing is very unusual for a girl (since girls weren’t supposed to even learn how to read and write), so she has no choice but to hide her true identity. One time, the bookstore owner gives her a very risky job – provide a cheat sheet to an aspiring scholar who is taking the entrance ceremony to Sungkyunkwan. However, during her mission, she accidentally approached the wrong scholar, Lee Sun Joon (played by Park Yoo Chun/Micky). Although confronted by him afterwards, she gets away with it.
But urgency for a fair future arises when her family becomes so needy for money that her mother is even willing to marry Yoon Hee off as a concubine to the Minister of War. However, another opportunity arises for Yoon Hee to escape in the middle of the night (her mother and brother help, I don’t remember the details anymore >_<) to enter the Sungkyunkwan entrace test. While it wasn’t her first intention to actually enter the university, the king himself is so impressed by her literary wit in the exam that he insists she enroll.
And so it happens that Yoon Hee, under the name of her brother Kim Yoon Shik, enters Sungkyunkwan to become a scholar. There, she becomes friends with Lee Sun Joon, who becomes her classmate, their other roommate Moon Jae Shin (Yoo Ah In) and fancy-dressed playboy Gu Yong Ha (Song Joong Ki). They face many trials in their friendships and scholarly ambitions, mostly caused by the student body president and his group of followers. The student body president Ha In Soo (played by Jun Tae Soo), is also the son of the Minister of War, and he is determined to sabotage Kim Yoon Shik and Lee Sun Joon’s progression within the university, but they keep winning.
Slowly but surely, Lee Sun Joon and Kim Yoon Shik start having more than just brotherly feelings for each other, but of course homosexuality is more than prohibited in Sungkyunkwan; it’s unheard of.
Lastly, there is the case of a secret uprising to go against the king amongst some of the ministers and this all links back to the reason why Yoon Hee’s father and Jae Shin’s brother were killed 10 years ago.

I would like to emphasize again how much I enjoyed watching an oldschool drama from 2010 with everything that was still wrong but enjoyable about K-Dramas back then. They’ve progressed so much in the drama industry, but it’s still nice to watch something like this – it made me a little sentimental.
The flashy acting, the extreme close-ups (eyes, lips etc.), the tacky soundtrack… Still loved it, though.

The main part of the story revolves around these four friends, and among that around the growing romantic relationship between Lee Sun Joon and Kim Yoon Shik.
Of course, a lot of things happen in the 20 episodes. Mostly activities within the Sungkyunkwan tradition which require the scholars to face off against each other in some kind of tournament, whether it’s a written test or an archery competition. In every case, the student body president conjures up a plan to make sure the quartet of friends doesn’t win, but consistently fails. In this way, it was almost like watching a typical show with a typical bad guy who always tries to defeat the good guys but always loses. Ha In Soo was basically Draco Malfoy in late Joseon times.
Ha In Soo also has a younger sister, Hyo Eun (played by Seo Hyo Rim), who falls in love with Lee Sun Joon and almost gets engaged to him. By the time she starts to pursue him, Sun Joon is already falling for Yoon Shik, and although he initially agrees to marry her to get rid of his feelings for Yoon Shik, he ultimately calls it off when he finds he can’t ignore how he feels.
And then there’s Cho Sun (played by Kim Min Seo), the most distinguished gisaeng (I still don’t like the word ‘prostitute’ as a translation) who falls for Yoon Shik, of course under the impression that it’s a guy.
It is later revealed that Cho Sun is also a hired assassin who works for the Minister of War to stir up trouble and make people think the mysterious rebel thief called the Red Messenger is a dangerous rebel.
As it turns out, the Red Messenger is actually Moon Jae Shin, and he doesn’t kill anyone – he’s only out to warn people and rebel against the people responsible for his older brother’s death.

In the last couple of episodes, the quartet of friends is summoned by the King to help him with a pressing issue: to recover the late King’s will that went missing when Yoon Hee’s father and Jae Shin’s brother were supposed to secretly deliver it to the palace but were struck down on the way there by hired guards. Yoon Hee then finds out what truly happened to her father and that it was all the Minister of War’s plan to work against both the King and the Left State Minister (Sun Joon’s father).
Following a lead of literary clues which Yoon Hee is smart enough to decode, she eventually finds the will. To be clear, the will is the key to the King’s dream to move the capital elsewhere and start a country where everyone is equal (many of the Ministers are against this). Just when this will is found, the truth about Yoon Hee’s identity is brought to the surface, the King finds out, and in order to protect her from being used as blackmail by the Minister of War, he decides to burn the will but declares that he will still keep dreaming about this dream of creating an equal Joseon.
I believe it was something like that. He burned the will, claimed that it wasn’t recovered to the Council and Yoon Hee was able to remain at Sungkyunkwan (the Minister of War was arrested for giving the order for murdering the two people 10 years ago etcetera).

I would now like to give some comments on the casting.
I knew all the main actors but it was really nice to see them in this drama.
Park Min Young is growing on me with every drama I see of her, although actually I’ve only seen Healer (lol). But I loved her in Busted! and she seems like a very cool person in real life. I think this was a very good role for her since she revealed different layers to her character, both as a woman and a man.
I’ve seen Micky Yoochun in a historical drama before (Rooftop Prince, which is great) and I really liked his drama The Girl Who Sees Smells, which (gasp) I just found out is the last drama he did in 2015. I know he went to the army at some point but I haven’t heard anything from him since then, is he back yet? What’s he been up to? He usually doesn’t leave a very big impression on me, but I think he was cast well in this role of uptight ambitious scholar who slowly starts to loosen up and become more human.
As I mentioned before, one of the reasons I wanted to watch this drama was because of Yoo Ah In – I won’t make it a secret I have a slight celebrity crush on him – and Jae Shin was possibly my favorite character in this drama. The unpredictable rumored rebel nicknamed ‘Geol Oh/Crazy Horse'(?) who also turns out to be this mysterious rebel thief wanting vengeance for his brother’s death. All tough and mysterious, but when he’s faced with a woman he gets the hiccups. I mean, who even thought of this? I love that person. Through the story – pretty much after he discovers Yoon Shik is a girl – he starts developing feelings for her too and tries everything he can to protect her, but sadly he is the second male lead in this love triangle.
I only know Song Joong Ki from Descendants of the Sun, but it was really funny to see him as such a dandy in this drama. In the beginning he seemed kind of creepy perverted and occasionally even a little annoying to me, but his character grows a lot and he got a lot of character backstory and development and in the end I just started to love him too. Because behind that ever so confident smile and flashy clothes, he was actually covering up the fact that he wasn’t an actual noble family scholar. And he still risks being exposed for it when it means getting his friends out of trouble. That’s what I call a loyal friend.
I’ve seen Seo Hyo Rim before in Me Too, Flower, where she was this typical lady, and it was fun to see her act so brightly as a little spoiled princess in this drama. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her when we all knew her love for Sun Joon was going nowhere. I liked her character, she never turned bad like her brother. I have to say I didn’t even completely dislike the Minister of War either. He was just consumed by his greed for getting higher up and everyone who could help him with that looked down on him. Apart from that, he really cared about this children and always took their side, mostly when it came to protecting his daughter’s honor.
I didn’t realize Kim Min Seo was in this drama until I looked closely; I’d seen her in a couple of series before but she was always cast as the bitchy/jealous second female lead (The Moon That Embraces The Sun, Baby-faced Beauty). It was nice to see her as a good character for once, the Joseon look suits her very well.

The build-up in the growing feelings between the main couple is very slow, just the K-Drama way I like it. It takes about halfway through the series before Sun Joon realizes he sees Yoon Shik as more than just a roommate, but it all starts when he sees ‘him’ dressed as a woman during one of their missions. After that he just can’t see Yoon Shik as a normal guy anymore.
I really liked it when they finally confronted each other, Sun Joon accidentally finds out that Yoon Shik is a girl and he is just relieved. No unnecessary drama ‘you lied to me all this time nuuu’, but just ‘oh hey you’re a girl, well this is convenient, now I don’t have to feel weird for liking a guy’. And their romantic gestures and secret meetups and kisses were really adorable. This is what I like about K-Dramas, the old-fashioned tacky but adorable romances.
Honestly, I felt a little bad for Moon Jae Shin, but he saw soon enough he didn’t stand a chance and even though he was obviously bothered by it a little, he gave his friends all the space they needed. I wanted to hug him so many times. Then again, I wouldn’t mind hugging Yoo Ah In many times either, lol (sorry not sorry).

This won’t be a very long review, even though it took me some time to finish because I took a break after the first three episodes. But I think the story and the characters were all pretty well established. In the end, there were no loose ends, they wrapped everything up nicely and I don’t really have any main criticisms. I had a lot of stereotypes in the characters, but that’s what made it so animating. Nothing was rushed, all the characters received development were needed, and no one was only ‘good’ or ‘bad’. In the end, even some of Ha In Soo’s followers turned on him because they just couldn’t ignore that what he was doing was wrong, everyone had a conscience.

I might think of more to write later, but overall I very much enjoyed watching this and I was very eager to see the development of Lee Sun Joon and Kim Yoon Shik and how everything would work out when all the different truths came out.
What I thought was funny was, when in an important time in their relationship, the news arose that Sun Joon’s father might have been responsible for Yoon Hee’s father’s death. And I found it so satisfyingly mature of the relationship they were in that they didn’t immediately turn against each other. I mean, there’s lots of series were one bit of news like that is enough to instantly break a couple apart or suddenly make one party say ‘I can’t be with you anymore’. But that didn’t happen, their first instinct was to figure out the truth together and I think that’s what made their relationship so mature and very realistically written. There was no unnecessary drama, when conflict would arise they would always just figure it out within one episode and always get back together because their friendship was strong enough to hold. Some modern-day drama characters could learn from this; even in Joseon times, when drama was REAL (look at the unfair treatment of women) and the rules were to be abided by or you would literally by killed or tortured, people just talked stuff out.

I liked how the series was established as a ‘slice of life’ impression of scholars in Sungkyunkwan in this period. Sometimes in historical dramas I feel like they don’t really take it seriously and the way they talk doesn’t differ that much from how they talk in modern-day dramas (at least, it sounds pretty much the same to me). In 100 Day Husband someone even makes a heart mark with his fingers one time, I was shook when that happened! And of course there is Hwarang, I won’t even talk about Hwarang, I couldn’t take it seriously for the life of me.
In this drama, they took the historical credibility very seriously, even the way of talking was distinctively old-fashioned. I like it the best when I can completely be immersed in how they walked and talked during that period.
There’s a reason I love historical dramas, they give me so much lessons in Korean history, it’s so interesting! Especially when it’s based on true empires and royalties.
I will continue to watch more historical dramas since they bring me so much joy and I might also one day re-watch The Moon That Embraces The Sun, my first ever and all-time favorite historical drama that got me hooked on historical dramas in general. When that time comes, you can expect the review on my blog! No guarantees though, it all depends on my mood and my ‘yet to watch’ list is still longer than ever. I almost can’t afford re-watching stuff, lol.

I have one more thing to say, and that’s how progressive I found this series, not only for a story taking place in Joseon times, but also for a drama from 2010. Although I usually dislike standard tropes in K-Dramas, this time I realized one thing I like about the ‘girl-dresses-up-as-guy’ trope – it’s actual proof that people fall in love with a person, and not necessarily a gender.
In dramas sporting this trope, the main guy always falls for the pretend-guy at some point, and then he feels weird at first but then somehow gets over it by thinking ‘screw it, I clearly like this guy and I shouldn’t suppress my feelings’ and then they find out that it’s actually been a girl all this time and he feels kind of relieved. But my point is, he falls for a person regardless of whether it’s a guy or a girl. And I actually think this is overlooked because most people focus on the truth of it still ‘fortunately’ being a heterosexual couple. I think this might be a very good message, it definitely proves that you can’t help who you fall for, guy or girl or variation thereupon.
I suddenly realized this when watching Sungkyunkwan Scandal, and it made me appreciate it even more.
I mean, Sun Joon doesn’t hesitate for a minute to confess he is a homosexual in front of the entire student body just to protect his falsely accused friends. I found the way he accepted his own believed homosexuality was very progressive for someone in that historical time period.
Also, the story of course holds a great message for women. Women were never supposed to acquire any kind of scholarly status, but Yoon Hee is so talented even the King can’t deny her place in Sungkyunkwan even after he finds out she’s a woman. And the way she talks about wanting a free life and just do what she wants without having to obey specific rules or limitations just because she was born as a woman (sometimes she too didn’t have any choice in).
Now that I think of it, their way of thinking really is very progressive for that time. I’m not sure how accurate that is in terms of how progressive and open-minded people were at that time, but I liked it anyway.

I think I understand now why this story is called a classic. For me, it really has to do with it being ahead of its time. The main characters in the story are also ahead of their time and it has a really nice message with hope for a future where men and women can be equals. I wonder if the actual people from that time with this dream could be happy if they see how far we’ve come in 300 years.
People don’t blink about homosexuality and some of the most major academic scholars in the world are women. It’s all possible now. It wasn’t always like that.
I’d like it if this drama can be seen as a wink to create a bridge between the past and how far we’ve come in the future.

Stay tuned for my next review! Bye-bye~