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.

With You
(最好的我们 / Zui Hao De Wo Men)
MyDramaList rating: 7.5/10

Hello hello! I’m back with a new review! I wanted to take my time writing this because the series was relatively long and a lot happens and I have multiple things to note.
I think I once saw a trailer or teaser of this drama when I was still following the facebook page of Dramafever (and they post a lot of clips from old and new dramas so I got a lot from there) and thought it looked really cute.
In the end, I think it really resembled A Love So Beautiful which I watched before, and it also reminded me of Rush to the Dead Summer. These are all stories depicting the lives from a group of friends that meets in high school and follows them through to graduation and after.
I think in my rankings With You lists second after Rush to the Dead Summer. I liked it better than A Love So Beautiful and I will certainly explain why.

But first of all, a summary. With You is a 24-episode Chinese drama about a girl called Geng Geng (played by Tan Song Yun). Geng Geng isn’t particularly bright, but gets into the prestigious school Zhen Hua by chance (because it was the year SARS broke out and the rules became lenient all of a sudden). On her first day on her way to school she has an embarrassing encounter with a fellow student, and this fellow student later turns out to be her future desk mate, Yu Huai (played by Liu Hao Ran).
Fun fact: ‘geng geng yu huai’ as a proverb means ‘to take troubles at heart’. It seems fate has been in their favor since the beginning. Despite some initial irritation, the two click like no other and become close friends. It doesn’t take long for it to look like more than friendship.
The story is basically about Geng Geng struggling in school to keep up with her competent classmates in a strict educational system while also getting used to her father remarrying. It’s about how she makes friends and how people help each other out. And of course her relationship with Yu Huai.
The drama starts around the year 2000 in Shanghai and makes time jumps to show the passing of time. Through this we can also see the evolution of technology (the use of mobile phones, like Rush to the Dead Summer) and ways of communicating with each other. The biggest time jump happens in the last two episodes where we suddenly jump from 2005 to 2015.

Let me introduce the group of friends surrounding Geng Geng and Yu Huai because these side characters were a big contributing factor in why I liked the series.
On Geng Geng’s side, there are Jiang Nian Nian and Jian Dan. Jiang Nian Nian, nicknamed Beta (played by Dong Qing), is a seemingly confident and mischievous girl. She’s the kind of girl who always stands up for her friends in a cool way and strives to empower the people she cares about.
However, the truth about her is that she feels very lonely inside. Her parents both work in Beijing and the lack of parental guidance sometimes does bother her. She eventually develops a crush on their homeroom teacher Zhang Ping (Fang Wen Qiang), and when the feeling isn’t mutual she starts showing her more vulnerable sides. Beta is one of my favorite characters from the series because of her layers. She doesn’t want her friends to see her weak, because she is always the shoulder to cry on, but in the end I’m glad she does show those feelings.
Jian Dan (played by Chen Meng Xi) is a simple-minded girl who followed her childhood crush Han Xu (Li Jia Cheng) to Zhen Hua. The two have been together since they were kids and Jian Dan has made it her mission in life to always take care of him.
Initially I liked the relationship of these two because I really thought it was going somewhere. It seemed to me like Han Xu was actually warming up to Jian Dan as well, but in the end I was confused when the whole thing happened where he couldn’t accept her feelings of love. Anyway, I thought they would be cute. Their relationship is different from a typical ItaKiss couple because he isn’t a jerk to her. He just gradually gets used to her next to him and he only finds out he took her affection for granted after he loses her. Overall, the relationships that were portrayed were very real to me. The main reason I love Geng Geng and Yu Huai’s relationship is because they are so real to each other, they are joking around, occasionally the flirt is ON (dang), and they are completely at ease with each other. No awkwardness in ‘omg he looked this way’ or in the mutual approach; we know from the first moment that these two are interested in each other, even if it’s just as friends at first.
Another classmate that has a slightly bigger role than the other classmates is class supervisor Xu Yan Liang (played by Liu Qi Heng). He has a secret crush on Beta, but is (kinda harshly) rejected by her when she leaves for Beijing in the end. He is a loyal friend nevertheless.
Zhou Mo (played by Liang Hao), is a friend of Yu Huai’s who is the only one from another class than the rest. He is smarter so he is in a higher class (yes, that’s how the school ranks its students). He is depicted as the typical guy who is constantly trying to impress girls but keeps failing until he gets a chance to play Jian Dan’s knight in shining armor in the situation with Han Xu. He suddenly shows a softer and more caring side there.
And lastly, the indispensable second male lead, Lu Xing He (played by Wang Li Xin), whose attempts to gain Geng Geng’s love last well into their future.

Before I go on to my positive and critical criticisms on the story and characters, I wish to share my opinions on the cast and elaborate a bit more on what I mentioned above.
I think the acting in this drama was very good and realistic. The actors very nicely portray the fickle high school student characters, both in happy and in struggling moments. The characters all have different sides to them, no one is one-dimensional and that is great.
My first compliment goes out to Liu Hao Ran who plays Yu Huai. He was really nice to look at, I don’t mean just looks but he just has this really kind face with a lot of expression. Everytime he looked at Geng Geng this little smile would start spreading on his face (or even just in his eyes) it made me really happy. He and Tan Song Yun portrayed their mutual feelings really well. If there’s one thing I love it’s a build-up in a relationship where it takes the couple a long time before they reach the touchy kissy part, but it’s so obvious even without skinship how much they like each other. With Yu Huai and Geng Geng it was mostly just teasing touches, pats on the head and stuff but the chemistry spat off the screen with just that.
When eventually they had a kiss in the future when they hadn’t seen each other in a long time, it was explosive (and initiated by Geng Geng which I thought was very good). So props to the two main actors! I enjoyed watching them together, they were adorable and I shipped it. I was looking forward to whenever they would have scenes together and that’s a good sign.
Furthermore, I liked how we get more insight into their friends’ lives as well. I loved Beta because, as I said, she has so many layers. She hides her loneliness in being the protective tough friend but she actually needs someone to cry on in return. I think in the future she does end up with Xu Yan Liang and that’s good because he’s always been the only one who looked out for her and cared about her for who she was inside.
I also iked that it wasn’t about ‘pretty people’. I mean, both Xu Yan Liang and Zhou Mo weren’t exactly ikemen or flower boys. But they still put their feelings out there and both got the girl in the end. There were all sorts of kids in school and that was a well-made representation. Sometimes the focus in Asian dramas only seems to be about how pretty or handsome people are and I personally find that very shallow. So this was also a good thing in my opinion.
I liked that Jian Dan eventually realizes that it’s no use to keep pursuing Han Xu while getting nothing in return. It shows that she isn’t just a mindless naive girl – she comes to a realization and is strong enough to let a guy go that she’s loved for at least 10 years. That shows a lot of courage. She stands up for herself by letting him know that she won’t walk behind him anymore and focusses on her own path in life, even if that means literally separating classes from him in school. She changes back to liberal arts to do so and leaves him crying with regret. And rightly so. He shouldn’t have taken her for granted.
Overall, I think every character has something to contribute to the story, even if it’s the senior in school Geng Geng would get advice from or the snobby girl in class. Everyone eventually shows different sides to their personality and that made it really realistic and enjoyable to watch.

Most of the actors were new to me. I only knew Zhou Mo’s actor from My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend where he played the main lead’s best friend. I don’t usually see actors I know in Chinese dramas so this was nice. I also feel like I knew Lu Xing He’s actors from something (dramawiki says he was in Meteor Garden but I don’t remember who he played there lol).

In terms of satisfying elements: I really liked the opening sequences. By this I mean the sequence that shows the title of the series: a bird’s eye view shot of the six friends (Geng Geng, Yu Huai, Beta, Jian Dan, Zhou Mo and Xu Yan Liang) running away after being caught sneaking into school at night to watch a famous Chinese athletes’ running on a school television. This is the opening scene of the series before we flashback and officially meet all the characters. This approach is similar to Rush to the Dead Summer, because that one also starts with the graduation scene before rewinding all the way back to the beginning.
The first scene already shows Geng Geng and Yu Huai’s closeness and promise to always be desk buddies. I loved seeing the sequence where they one by one snuck out of the classroom after guards came to chase them away and I liked that they made that the title sequence, because it’s a scene that is a constant reminder of their youthful school days.
I also really liked each episode title sequence. Every episode is introduced by a short sequence that would later in some way or another appear in that particular episode. I just loved how these short clips are all very simple but beautifully illustrated.
While writing this review I found out the literal translation of the series’ Chinese title is ‘The Best of Us’. I think this would’ve been a great English title for the series as well. It seems to include multiple meanings, it could stand for the period when the main characters were at their best, their youth. It could also refer to the social hierarchy at school and achievement pressure which the characters are exposed to (being the best in school and life). Anyways, now I kind of wished it was the official title, it would make much more sense. I think ‘With You’ is a bit vague because it’s about so much more than just Geng Geng and Yu Huai being together (at least that’s what I assume this title indicates).

I will now jot down my thoughts on some important themese that pass by in this series. First of all: family.
The first thing we learn about Geng Geng is that her parents are divorced and her father is starting his remarried life. Geng Geng gets a stepmother and a little stepbrother and getting used to this new life influences her a lot. Geng Geng keeps in touch with her mother, who is busy working and a lot stricter about her education than her father, but she’s still always there for Geng Geng when she needs counsel or comfort. Geng Geng misses her mother a lot and it takes her a while to warm up to her new step-family.
It may not seem like a big plot in the story, but I think it actually is. Having divorced parents contributes to Geng Geng’s reputation of ‘being a minority’ as is mentioned a couple of times later on in the series. Some guy she goes on a blind date with even calls her parents ‘dishonorable’ for getting divorced. Geng Geng is always the underdog who’s not smart enough and family situations in these matters always come up in discussion.
The theme of family is important for more characters than just Geng Geng. For Beta, it’s a sensitive subject because her parents are both away in a faraway place she can only reach by plane. For parent night at school she actually pays a butcher in the market to pose as her fake dad. She never admits how lonely she feels except during her one-on-one talks with the homeroom teacher who sees completely through her and forgives her because he sees what a good kid she is (which causes her crush on him).
But it almost seems as if Beta feels like she needs to be a parental protective figure to her friends because she lacks parental guidance herself and doesn’t want anyone else to miss that. Even in the arc when a new student joins their class and befriends Jian Dan while also getting closer to Han Xu, Beta feels like she needs to protect Jian Dan from getting hurt even though that’s what turns her into the nosy friend from Jian Dan’s perspective.
I think this is a very important point in the seemingly unbreakable friendship between the inseparable Beta and Jian Dan (they’ve been friends since middle school). Jian Dan feels like Beta is obstructing her from forming new friendships. But I can imagine that Beta is just scared of change and doesn’t want anyone else she cares about to leave her behind.

Another heavy theme that appears later on is social pressure.
While the series starts out very cheerful and optimistic and the focus of the characters is merely to enjoy their time at school, when senior year approaches something else comes with it: ambitions. And in many cases this is the parents’ ambitions for their children.
I was a bit shocked when this part came along.
The snobby girl in class, Zhu Yao (Liu Wen Qu) attempts suicide while crumbling under the pressure. Yu Huai also starts falling apart. He starts out as one of the best students in class, but when both his mother and his teachers start pushing him to go study physics at a good university, he suddenly loses his focus and starts failing. And slowly but surely we see him lose it. Still emotionally bound to his promise with Geng Geng and the desire to also show her that he won’t fail her, he starts slipping up and in the end he doesn’t even have the courage to face her anymore so he disappears.
Showing this part of Chinese society in this way in something that seemed to be a simple story about friendship made it even more realistic to me. I knew there was high achievement pressure in Asia, but to see it depicted like this got me really uncomfortable.
In Korea, there’s a whole series devoted to showing school life and related pressure issues, also including the influence of parents on the school board (The School Series [1-4] and [2013/15/17]).
Yu Huai’s mother is like that too, and while her love for her son is undebatable, she takes it too far. She starts coming to Yu Huai’s school uninvited and spies on him to see if he’s doing his best in class (and I’m talking actually peeking through his classroom window). It’s crazy! And then when it looks as if he’s too busy playing around with Geng Geng, she calls Geng Geng out for distracting him even though she’s only been busy helping him study.
It always breaks me to see this theme in dramas because I truly think from my heart that people should choose their own futures and follow their own dreams. Especially when they’re young, people can literally waste away when forced to pursue a study or career they don’t find personal joy in.
Isn’t being young all about finding your own way in life? Why should that be forced upon you? It’s about finding your own strengths.
This makes me quite angry sometimes, although I know it’s just because I’m personally not used to such strictness.
I found it heartbreaking to see that when Geng Geng and Yu Huai both couldn’t fulfill their prospects of being accepted into a university in Beijing, while Geng Geng’s first instinct was to reach out to Yu Huai, it was Yu Huai’s instinct to run away because he couldn’t face the consequences of his failure while he really needed Geng Geng at that moment.
I watched a documentary once about ‘losing face’ in China and how humiliating things like this can be for them so I’m taking this very seriously.) When they meet again after 10 years or so and Geng Geng is a professional photographer, Yu Huai still thinks he doesn’t deserve her and then it’s Geng Geng’s turn to step up and show him that she won’t leave him alone. In the end, the two truly are meant to ‘take troubles at heart’ and face them together.

I mentioned before that every character in this series had a contribution to make to the story. One of these cases is the story of Geng Geng’s senior.
During the main story, Geng Geng has occasional encounters with a girl who is some years above her in school. This girl is Luo Zhi (Chao Ran). She seems to be the typical beautiful popular girl, but she’s actually struggling with unrequited feelings herself. She’s in love with the school’s golden boy Sheng Huai Nan (Nie Zi Hao), but she can’t express her feelings for him. Geng Geng one time discovers a secret message from her written on the school’s rooftop saying ‘Luo Zhi likes Sheng Huai Nan but nobody knows it’.
In the future, Geng Geng meets Luo Zhi again, now about to get married with (three guesses) Sheng Huai Nan. Luo Zhi specifically asked for Geng Geng to take their wedding pictures at their old school. Luo Zhi tells her that they started dating after both starting their studies in Beijing and now they couldn’t be happier.
The greatest moment was when Sheng Huai Nan revealed that he’d written on a wall somewhere ‘Sheng Huai Nan loves Luo Zhi and now everybody knows it’ (or something along those lines), as a parody on Luo Zhi’s old message. As it turns out, Geng Geng told him about the message in secret. Seeing this love that had seemed impossible still coming to bloom, it inspires Geng Geng to admit to her remaining feelings for Yu Huai after all and reject Lu Xing He for good.

I haven’t talked about Lu Xing He much yet. Geng Geng and Lu Xing He meet when Geng Geng is sneaking through the storage room at school to find her camera that was confiscated and Lu Xing He is taking a nap there. Lu Xing He is immediately interested in Geng Geng and starts pursuing her and from the first moment this creates a rivalry between him and Yu Huai.
Although it was very cute how he was so obviously in love with Geng Geng, one problem I had with him was that he didn’t know when to stop.
I’m sure he was well aware that Geng Geng didn’t like him back like that and only had eyes for Yu Huai, but he kept trying. Now there’s nothing wrong with trying but at a certain point he should’ve accepted that it was no use.
I was confused because at least two times it seemed like he got closure to accept Geng Geng and Yu Huai’s relationship and back off. The first time was when he decided to quit Zhen Hua and move to Beijing to follow his dream of entering art school. The second time was the scene with the train barriers where he stayed back and yelled that he liked her while the train came rushing by. In those two moments, I thought ‘okay, he got it.’
But then he returned anyway and still continued his attempts. In the end it just became a bit annoying to me.
On the other hand, Geng Geng also annoyed me a bit in terms of never giving him a clear answer. She knew how he felt about her -he said it at least 10 times- and she still wouldn’t clearly state ‘sorry, I don’t like you back like that’. There was never a clear stop sign from her, she would just continue going with him whenever he dragged her away (a trope I hate in Asian dramas) or when he would invite her places. She should’ve been aware that going with him meant giving him hope. And it did, because that’s why Lu Xing He kept trying.
Even in the end, after the encounter with Luo Zhi and Sheng Huai Nan, she sends him a rejection THROUGH TEXT. And not even a rejection of his feelings, but a rejection of his PROPOSAL. THROUGH TEXT. “Sorry I can’t accept your ring.” Like, seriously, how cowardly is that?!
They were good friends and he deserved a sincere face-to-face explanation.
But this only resulted in him coming at her the next time kind of aggressively with ‘what did you mean by that text?!’, which was kind of scary. And this puts her on the spot, but even then the only thing she says is ‘I’m sorry’ without any further explanation. I mean, a single ‘Sorry but I like Yu Huai’ would’ve done the job. At least he would’ve gotten closure. But it dragged on too long between them until it just became awkward and annoying when he made advances and Geng Geng was just standing there like… haha what are you doing, while both of them knew their hearts weren’t in the same place.

Despite the great story developments in the main part of the series, I felt a bit disappointed with the last two episodes. This was mainly because it felt too much like the other similar series I’ve mentioned before. They always tend to end the same way and I’d hoped for this one to be different.
The construction of all the stories remain practically the same: the bonding during youth which builds up to an actual relationship, their plans to stay together in the future, then something goes wrong, someone disappears, and then they meet again years later and find that they still love each other. Also, in the period of separation the second male lead has started taking his woo-ing to the next level and the female lead is almost admitting to move on with him, even if that means actually lying to her own heart. I just felt like the ending didn’t give much new insight or possibilities. I had hoped for something different because Geng Geng and Yu Huai’s relationship distinguishes itself from other typical dramas. In the end they still end up together of course, but there is no real talk about their feelings or a mutual apology. Somewhere I just wished they would’ve honestly talked the whole thing through.

Another example where I wished they would’ve communicated better is the part during their senior year when both Geng Geng and Yu Huai are determined to study in Beijing together. Geng Geng goes to Beijing to audition for a film school there and Yu Huai goes to a training camp where he needs to take a test in order to nominate for early admission at this prestiguous university he’s striving for (or that his mom is striving for, at least). They are apart for about 10 days which is already hard for them, but they promise to call every day. However, Yu Huai finds out that cellphones are prohibited and need to be handed in because it’s a distraction according to the insanely strict teacher there. He is there with Zhou Mo, and Zhou Mo literally calls Jian Dan to tell her that his phone will be confiscated and that he won’t be able to call her so she at least knows what’s going on.
But for some reason Yu Huai doesn’t do this. He keeps calling Geng Geng in secret until a teacher catches him and he’s forced to hand in his phone while still in mid-conversation with Geng Geng on the other line. And even in that moment when Geng Geng is literally on the line asking ‘what’s going on?’ he doesn’t tell her. He just hands the phone over to the teacher without even finishing his conversation, without even saying, ‘sorry I have to hand in my phone so I won’t be able to call you’. I just couldn’t understand why.
If he’d just done that Geng Geng would’ve known and not worried. Instead he left her hanging, wondering and worrying why she suddenly couldn’t reach him anymore. In that scene I was so confused and frustrated why he couldn’t just tell her that simple thing just like Zhou Mo did. What was so difficult about that? It’s not like Geng Geng would’ve been angry at him if she’d known he wasn’t allowed a cell phone.
I can’t stand it when people don’t communicate in dramas, but this was such a trivial thing – I couldn’t imagine he felt like he couldn’t tell her something as simple like that. Luckily, he eventually finds an old public phone and manages to reach Geng Geng to explain the situation and tell her that he misses her. But it all goes downhill from there, because that training camp is the start of Yu Huai’s deterioriation.

I mentioned before there was one kiss, and this is in the 2015 time period where Geng Geng decides to fully pursue her feelings for Yu Huai after all. There’s a moment where they play video games and for a second it’s old times and she just grabs him and there is a passionate kiss. However, since Yu Huai is still in denial here he pushes her away (for some reason I still don’t understand) and doesn’t even dare admitting he’s been in love with her since forever. So it didn’t really feel satisfying as a kiss where they both finally admitted their eternal love for one another.
The series ends with Yu Huai walking in on Geng Geng while she visits his mother in the hospital and (I think) overhears his mother talk to Geng Geng about her regrets in being so strict to both her son and being harsh to Geng Geng. After being pushed away by him Geng Geng starts texting him all sorts of quotes and sentences that Yu Huai said to her and vice versa that were important to their relationship. In response to that, Yu Huai comes to her in their special place where there’s a piece of wood Geng Geng carved their names in and that’s the end of it.
Though ending up together was the least they could do, I kind of wished there was a final hug or kiss to seal their feelings for good.

Overall, I enjoyed watching this series. I liked it better than A Love So Beautiful because the characters were less stereotypical and the bonds portrayed were realistic and sincere. The bond between Geng Geng and Yu Huai was beautiful and pure and still there was this passionate affection. The simple but strong love between two kids who knew nothing of love created a very innocent but strong chemistry. The friendships depicted were very real and every character contributed something to the story. There were no characters that served just as comic relief or anything like that. It showed a lot of different lives and relationships, not just between friends but also between families. It’s about embracing youth and dreams but also experiencing heartbreaks and changes in life. Because that’s what life is about: a constantly changing thing. Even if you’d like time to stand still and be in a certain moment forever, you’ll find that that’s not how it works.
The writing was good, the characters were well constructed, the cinematography was beautifully illustrating. Apart from some tiny details, it was a very fun but still realistic series to watch.

I will now go back to some Korean dramas, but I still have some Chinese dramas left to watch. Even though Chinese dramas are kind of the underdog in what I usually watch, hidden gems like With You are what keeps me interested in keeping them in the running.

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.

Switched
(宇宙（そら）を駆けるよだか / Sora wo Kakeru Yodaka)
MyDramaList rating: 2.0/10

I found this series on Netflix and I decided to watch this while I’m also still watching With You (next on my list). Plus it’s been a while since I watched a Japanese drama and I believe this was on my list for later anyway (edit: fake news, I mistook it for a Chinese drama named Flipped). After watching this series, at first I didn’t intend on writing a review because I felt too much frustration about it. I didn’t feel like there was anything nice I could say. However, after reading some other more positive comments and reviews, I felt like this was the whole purpose of me starting to write reviews and express my thoughts and there are still some general positive comments I can make. I will try to remain nice, but there are definitely some frustrating aspects that I can’t express in any other way.

Anyways, let me summarize the plot of this only 6 episode-long series.
First of all, in the story of this drama there’s a fantastical phenomenon called the ‘Akatsuki’ (Red Moon), and it’s a regular occasion when the moon turns red for some reason.
Ayumi Kohinata (played by Kaya Kiyohara) is a sweet high school student who seems to have a really nice life. She has two great guy friends, she has a nice family, fun friends, school is going well… and then her childhood friend Koshiro Mizumoto (played by Tomohiro Kamiyama) even confesses his love for her! Can it get any better?
Nope. It can get worse, though. On the day of her first date with Koshiro, she suddenly gets a call from an anonymous caller. When she picks up, a girl from her class, Zenko Umine (played by Miu Tomita), declares to her that she’s going to commit suicide. As a matter of fact she’s on top of a building right behind Ayumi and she asks Ayumi to keep watching her as she jumps.
In complete shock, Ayumi watches her classmate jump and faints afterwards. When she wakes up, she is in the hospital and when she asks the nurse how Zenko is doing, the nurse looks at her weirdly and says ‘What are you talking about? You are Zenko.’
As it turns out, Ayumi and Zenko have switched bodies. In her desperate attempts to get her life back together after this bizarre event, Ayumi finds out that Zenko has always been jealous of her and actually planned to switch bodies with her, especially now that Ayumi got together with Koshiro who Zenko also has a major crush on – which is only possible when you commit suicide during a Red Moon and the other person watches the whole thing.
So Zenko now seemingly has what she wants – but Ayumi, though shook to the bone, is determined to get her life and body back. The only person who sees right through her is her good friend Shunpei Kaga (played by Daiki Shigeoka), who also has feelings for her. Together they try to find a way to reverse the switch, because Koshiro somehow reveals a dark side to him as well by staying with Zenko even though he knows she’s not really Ayumi.
Ayumi and Kaga encounter a woman named Ukon who provides more information on the body swapping – being a victim of it as well – but tells them there’s no way to reverse it without one of the two persons actually dying.
In the meantime, whilst trapped in Zenko’s body, Ayumi experiences the bullying that Zenko has had to endure and her bad relationship with her mother and starts empathizing with her as she never realized her classmate’s life was so hard. But, with forced determination, she starts opening up more in school and gains the sympathy of her former friends and in that way shows that even though she might look differently, Ayumi still has the power to make people like her. Zenko, on the other hand, is not amused by Ayumi’s progress and shifts back into her own psychotic dark behavior.
Eventually, Koshiro reconnects with Ayumi and Kaga by revealing that he only stayed with Zenko because he wanted to find out a way to bring Ayumi back. Before conjuring up a plan to do so, Koshiro and Kaga also accidentally get swapped and make the situation even more complicated.
In the end, the three friends manage to persuade Zenko to attempt a ‘shuffle’ plan in which they take turns swapping bodies until they’re back in their own and it ends with them succeeding and becoming friends and happily ever after.

First of all, let me write a little about the characters.
Ayumi is the typical lovely, sweet, popular high school girl. Normally the popular girls in Japanese dramas would be characterized as actual mean girls, but Ayumi is the epitome of sweet. Even after everything Zenko does to her, she still wants to help her and emphatizes with her. She gets stuck in a situation where she literally sees someone else live her life (I’m suddenly somehow reminded of the song ‘Crystal Ball’ by Keane and its music video) and she still manages to not give up even though she might have to spend the rest of her life as Zenko. Although at some points she is so naive I felt that they were still trying to stereotype her as the too sweet and naive girl. She was also crying a lot, although I would understand the initial shock, she kept being shook by all the things that happened even when at a certain point she kind of should’ve gotten used to things. Just my opinion.
Zenko shows her true colors until the end. Even when she thinks she’s finally got it all, she learns that physically becoming Ayumi also entails that she’ll always be reminded of the real Ayumi that she hated so much. She has decided to switch bodies with Ayumi based on a completely selfish thought to be popular and have her ideal boyfriend. It’s all based on exterior factors and in the end it doesn’t matter – Ayumi still comes through and she only becomes more miserable than she was before.
Koshiro is one of the most ambiguous characters in this drama because as a viewer I kept swaying between HE’S EVIL and OH NO HE’S GOOD AFTER ALL and OKAY NOPE HE’S DEFINITELY EVIL and OH NOT EVIL AFTER ALL. It started to get really confusing, and only in the last (or second to last) episode we see his point of view. It wouldn’t have made any sense if he was evil, because he’s been childhood friends with Ayumi and they were so close for so long so it would’ve really been weird if everything had been a lie and he ‘only wanted to be with Ayumi because of her pretty face’ as he once proclaims.
I can only say one thing about Kaga, really. KAGA IS BAE. He’s the typical second male lead, the friend who is friendzoned even after being the only person to see Ayumi for who she really is and standing by her the entire time. We don’t get to see a truly sympathetic side of Koshiro, so if it were me I would go all the way for Kaga. But hey, that’s not how dramas work unfortunately. Anyways, Kaga was the hero for me in this series, and I think for most people.

I want to critically look at the motives in the series, mostly Zenko’s. Because in situations where people act rashly because they’re being bullied and feel ousted from society, there usually is a reason to find somewhere that may rationalize their behavior. And sometimes there’s people who just can’t be helped. I’ve been in a situation myself where I only tried to help someone and they just wouldn’t listen or accept any help and just continue living in the dark.
Zenko’s character is described as someone who has always lived in the dark. Ever since her father abandoned her, her relationship with her mother worsened and the bullying at school worsened. When they showed scenes of her being bullied, I certainly thought ‘this is harsh’. But then again, I think it’s most important how you move on from those experiences. On one hand I feel like learning and growing and getting stronger from there is the most important and staying stuck in that victim role and letting that define you is the worst that can happen. But that’s my one-sided opinion after being one of the first case scenarios. It’s definitely not easy and I can imagine people being effected by bullying for life, I just find it a pity. Because no one deserves to be bullied and to be effected by such nonsensical childish treatment is such a waste. I believe everyone can make something of their life, as long as they find the strength within them, regardless of what other people have said to them in the past. It’s not about them, it’s about you. You shouldn’t let yourself be effected by what some kid said to you in high school. That kid probably didn’t even realize fully what effect his/her words had at the time and would probably now even apologize for it if he/she could. Everyone does stupid things as kids with no full awareness of what this could do to another person. But the most important thing is to get stronger. Let those people behind in the past. They don’t define you. You define you.
Sorry, whole positivity rant, but that’s what I would want to say to Zenko. She is the number one example of someone who lets the bullying get to her, falls into the victim role and doesn’t know how to get out of it. Doesn’t even want to get out of it, in a way. She thinks becoming someone else will solve all her problems. Well, guess what: you are the only one who can save your own damn problems. Changing your face doesn’t change who you are. In the end your true colors will shine through. In the end she started yelling at people about how they were still talking about the real Ayumi and I was like …girl you should’ve taken so much things into consideration before you decided to switch bodies; OF COURSE they’re going to talk about Ayumi. You’re not her, you don’t have any of her memories or personal traits. If you’re going to be bitter about continually being reminded of her you shouldn’t have become her, lol.
In the end confrontation, Koshiro says to Zenko that both he and Ayumi offered their help to her before and she didn’t take it. He points out that she’s someone who won’t even accept help from others but simply wants happiness to come her way. Life doesn’t work that way. Accepting help also is a way to open up to people, but Zenko is so distrustful of people that she won’t even allow herself to see the good in some people and starts to become hateful towards them too.

Stepping back for a second from the lessons to be learned, I would like to comment on the acting style. Japanese dramas always have a certain format of acting, the style of humor and the never-ending ‘eh?’ whenever something’s asked. Another thing that is almost always depicted the same way: crazy people.
I mean, come on. Not every crazy person walks like a goblin while psychotically (and very loudly!) biting his/her nails. It was perfectly clear that Zenko bore grudges and that she was a dark person, but this was just exaggerating. They made her look like someone from The Grudge or The Ring or something, with the crazy eyes and all. Serioulsy, the nail-biting in particular was really obnoxious and nasty. At a certain point I started throwing my pencil at my screen whenever fake Ayumi started her crazy eyes nail-biting sequences. I believe it’s not even possible to bite your nails like that, are we sure her fingers are still attached to her hands? Sorry, but really, this was really annoying for me.
More typical Japanese drama tropes include dramatically running away after seeing or hearing something shocking (or I suppose in Ayumi’s case, whatever reason – she broke out in a dash a lot of times).
One scene in particular was really frustrating because I kind of hoped that she would make the right decision but at the same time knew she wasn’t because it was a Japanese drama. It was really predictable but not in a good way. It’s the scene where Kaga asks Ayumi to stay in the classroom and at the same time Koshiro asks her to come to the arts room (while every single person in the drama knew that Koshiro was up to something with Zenko and Kaga was the only person ever alive in that world that could be trusted). It was so obvious that she had to stay in the classroom for Kaga, but she STILL went for Koshiro. It was an illogical and profoundly DUMB choice. I mean, it was scripted, but I kind of hoped Ayumi wouldn’t be that stupid. In that way they made her into the typical naive sweet girl who wouldn’t see the bad in her childhood friend even though at that point he was acting really suspicious. It was just that at that very moment, she stood closer to Kaga than to Koshiro so it also just seemed really weird for her to still choose Koshiro in that particular moment in the story.

Lastly (I’m not going to make this too long), I would like to comment on the frequent and most of all casual talk about suicide. I mean, when they decided to go along with the ‘shuffle’ plan they were basically talking about themselves committing suicide multiple times. And they didn’t even blink at the prospect. ‘Okay, so first us two will jump off a building and then you two, and then afterwards it’ll be you two and us two. Let’s go jump off a building and get our bodies back!’. They made it sound almost comical, and it was really weird for me. The whole series contains so much darkness, heck, people jumping off buildings and even this video of a lady where she crashed into the building as she fell and literally splat on the ground (with very nasty splat sound effects, also not very nice)?
To talk about such things so casually gave me real mixed vibes about it. Especially when it’s all happily ever after in the ending and everyone is happy and everything is forgiven and forgotten and I was just like… No? All this stuff that happened and you’re just going to act like nothing happened? This girl tried to basically kill y’all and you’re just going to be her friend?
I didn’t even understand how they managed to persuade her in the end, let alone how she suddenly still became ‘nice’.
In one way I would’ve liked it if it turned out that all she needed in the end was just a hug and an apology from her mother. Her mother came around and admitted on how she’d treated her. Heck, I had more sympathy for the mother than for Zenko in the end.

I would’ve liked a bit more story for Ukon and the talking bird. Now they only had an informing role and we don’t really know anything about them apart from a short flashback of how they changed bodies themselves. At first I thought the bird and Ukon had changed bodies, that would’ve been fun.

Overall, I think the most important lesson to be learned from this drama is that nothing will change who you are. Even when you try to look different and change your life, even taking over someone else’s life, you can never become anyone else than who you are. Your true personality will shine through no matter what you look like.
And I’m seriously done with fat-shaming. I don’t know what it is with Asian dramas, but characters that are described as ‘ugly’ somehow always are casted as chubby/fat people. Ugly isn’t measured by someone’s body weight, it’s measured by someone’s behavior and personality. And this drama proved that, even when looking cute from the outside, the ugliness of Zenko’s personality still came through. I actually think Miu Tomita is really cute, especially when she smiled. When she had to play Ayumi in Zenko’s body, I just wanted to hug her and pinch her cheeks. Being fat/chubby doesn’t equal being ugly. Take a note, Asian dramas.
There were a lot of unrealistic factors in the series, apart from the Red Moon and the swapping bodies. You’d think that people like your parents and your closest friends who really know you would immediately know that there was something different about you. Everyone just behaved really unnatural and unrealistically in the given situation. If you were so desperate to keep up the act of becoming someone else, would you openly express crazy behavior and act very much UNLIKE that person?

In the end, Kaga is what saved this drama for me. When he was trying to laugh through his tears at the end when he still brought Ayumi and Koshiro together despite his own feelings and everything he’d done, that was the one moment I had feels. Somebody give this guy a medal and a a really big hug for me. Oh, and I don’t know if I’m the only one, but doesn’t Daiki Shigeoka look like Yamapi? Like, A LOT?

When checking the info on the AsianWiki site, I found nothing but positive comments on this drama. I’m a bit confused because I was mostly frustrated and cringed a lot while watching. But maybe other people saw through the bizarre-ness of the story and focussed on the feelings that were portrayed. And I have to admit, the actors did act convincingly despite the strange and occasionally disturbing script.
This drama was a bit too weird for me. I mostly kind of scoffed or laughed through the bizarreness of the story. It definitely wasn’t one of the better shows I’ve seen and I don’t think I will recommend it to anyone.

I’m going to watch some cheerful shows now!

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.

Radio Romance
(라디오 로맨스 / Radio Romaenseu)
MyDramaList rating: 6.5/10

Hello again! Time for another review. I just finished watching Radio Romance, but I took my time watching it. I didn’t go through it as fast as with the last drama I watched, and I will explain why.
First of all, this drama was on my list because of the two main actors. I’m a fan of Kim So Hyun, and I liked Yoon Doo Joon in Splash Splash Love, so that immediately sparked my interest.
I will start with a summary of the series, then I will elaborate on the characters and cast and then point out my criticisms on the series.

The story of Radio Romance is about a young radio script writer assistant named Song Geu Rim (played by Kim So Hyun). Her dream is to be a real script writer for the radio, but there’s a problem: she’s not a very good writer. Her scripts never make it to the broadcast and that’s why she’s been stuck as an assistant. She has it all when it comes to motivation and drive, and she has a real passion and love for the radio.
This passion started when her mother became blind after getting eye surgery and she had to describe everything she saw to her mother in great detail. The two of them would listen to the radio and her mother loved it so much because it made her able to see all these stories and sceneries that were described. It became Geu Rim’s dream to be able to get her own written script spoken on the radio, especially one sentence that her mother really loves: ‘It’s time for the sky to turn from blue to red’ (or something along those lines, to indicate the setting sun).
However, when the DJ for the radio show Geu Rim is a part of decides to quit all of a sudden and they can’t find anyone new, their show is about to get cancelled. At that moment, the eccentric radio producer Lee Gang (played by Yoon Park) returns from his trip to India and recruits Geu Rim for his new team. He says he will make her his main writer, on the condition that she gets top star Ji Soo Ho (played by Yoon Doo Joon) as their guest. Geu Rim is hesitant at first because she doesn’t really like Soo Ho – she’s not impressed by the whole top star image and just finds him a bit fake. However, the urgency is real and she doesn’t have another choice so she persistently starts persuading Soo Ho in order to get him on their show.
Soo Ho, who grew up in a seemingly perfect family (his parents both celebrities as well, the ultimate fabulous family and all that), is actually not happy at all. Everything in his life is decided by his mother (who isn’t even his real mother), who is also the CEO of his agency, and his father is away all the time having secret affairs with young actresses. His whole life he has lived from a script, he has never done anything for himself – he isn’t allowed to. When he gets offered the radio show, he initially has no interest at all. It doesn’t pay much, his mother is against it, it won’t have any real value to his career, so why would he? However, after seeing how far Geu Rim is willing to go to persuade him, he finally agrees to do it.
Geu Rim is determined to show him the beauty and importance of radio, and eventually of course he starts genuinely liking it too – and her, as well.

As it turns out, Soo Ho knows Geu Rim from when he was younger. There was a time when they were both in the hospital – Soo Ho for his depression and Geu Rim to support her mother. They met there. and Soo Ho fell in love with her. So actually he’s been in love with her all this time. The first time they meet as adults, he recognizes her immediately but acts like a jerk because that’s who he has become. However, when they start working together, he quickly accepts that he can’t deny his feelings and also confronts her with those feelings.
Geu Rim slowly but surely learns more about Soo Ho’s truth; his fake perfect life, the sadness and loneliness he’s been carrying with him for so long, and she starts sympathizing with him – and this sympathy turns into love as well.

I will start by stating what I liked about the series before elaborating on my critical points.
Recently I really enjoy watching dramas that put a spotlight on a business or society matter that otherwise doesn’t get much attention. Unpopular opinions or underdogs in certain industries suddenly get represented more and more and I really like seeing that. That’s why I really liked how this drama depicted the radio industry. Radio is considered to be kind of an underdog in contemporary media forms, with all the new social media platforms and apps and everything. I’ve never actually thought about what goes on behind radio shows, that those are scripted too and include a lot of technical expertise.
Although I have to say the radio show depicted in this drama – I don’t know if all Korean radio shows are like this – but they are really different from radio shows in my country. Most of the radio where I’m from is just the same music over and over and some hip radio DJ’s blabbing and making stupid jokes. They only call people when they’ve won something (like tickets for a concert they’re giving away or something). I haven’t heard a radio show where there’s an actual sincerely scripted monologue followed by a fitting song. Maybe once or twice, but those are not the mainstream popular radio channels. So it was definitely interesting for me to see this image of how radio was supposed to reach people.
Song Geu Rim has a really idealistic image of radio, something with the radio channels being stars in the sky and the importance of showing the listeners those stars (?). I’ve never thought of radio like that, but I suppose it’s a bit underrated. It’s also mentioned in the series when Soo Ho initially refuses to go on the show; ‘I’m already doing all these movies and dramas, I’m famous from TV, why should I bother with radio’. Ironically, in the end this very medium is what brings the two main characters together for good.
In any case, thank you writers for giving this insight into the world of radio.

I have to admit one thing very honestly: the story and the situations depicted in this drama were very old-school to me. I feel like these days K-Dramas manage to really step up their game and not dwell on the hopelessly romantic tropes. They’ve really come a long way – this is why when I watch an older drama I can see the difference so clearly. The tropes with making a big deal of holding someone’s hand or pulling someone aside because a motorcycle rushes by at high speed – they’re nice gestures, but they don’t need to be dramatized in my opinion. In this drama this was exactly what was being done and I realized I found it kind of tiring. I honestly thought ‘come on guys, I thought we were past this’ at several times. Each kiss, each hand being held, each pull closer was in slow motion (+ repeated 4 times from different angles) and guided by cheesy romantic BGM. I had hoped for a little more maturity in the relationship. The chemistry wasn’t the best either in my opinion. They were cute together, but their romance lacked passion.
Of course, Soo Ho’s awkwardness justifies it from his side because it’s scary as hell for him to open himself up like that for the first time ever.
But for Geu Rim… honestly it seemed to me as if Kim So Hyun wasn’t used to having her own kissing scenes yet because her kisses were more like pecks and when a REAL kiss occurred it was initiated by Soo Ho/ Yoon Doo Joon and you could see her just kind of going along with it, making it a bit awkward while it should have been a genuine ‘I love you so much’ kiss.

I do have to give it to Yoon Doo Joon though, because while I thought Soo Ho’s eyes looked dead most of the time, his face would completely light up when he’d look at Geu Rim (especially when she made him smile). I think it’s great when actors can act with their face like that.
Soo Ho’s character is complicated. He has closed off his real feelings for so long that he’s become this other person who doesn’t have the freedom to live his own desired life anymore. Because of a traumatic happening in his past he can’t sleep well at night anymore, and he just follows the schedule that people make for him.
When he meets Geu Rim after so long, he finally starts seeing the light at the end of the tunnel again and slowly but surely (and very awkwardly) tries to open up more, even though he finds it hard to sometimes contain his greediness in the process. At some points he became a bit too Kim Tan (*the guy from The Heirs, I will use his name to indicate a certain kind of toxic masculine behavior from male characters in K-Dramas from now on) for me, but there were also moments where his loneliness and inner sadness got the better of him and these moments justified his actions because you could see that he did it purely because he didn’t know any other way to convey his feelings to Geu Rim. So I won’t be too hard on him.

As I mentioned before, I really like Kim So Hyun. I’ve seen so many dramas of her it feels like I grew up with her and I saw her turn from a child actress into the young woman she is now. It’s really nice to see someone evolve like that and to see her acting progress as well. As a child actress she got a lot of dark and gloomy roles – she started out as the young version of either the first or second female lead – and the first happy role I saw of her was in Let’s Fight Ghost. I felt like that was the first time I saw her as a genuinely cheerful character. That was her transition from child role to high school student role. I remember seeing her in I Hear Your Voice, which is a phenomenal series in my opinion. She was really good there as the female lead’s young version. And then there was Who Are You 2015 where she played the double role of twins – again a display of her versatile acting.
Overall, I think I have to say that her roles in Ruler: Master of the Mask and Radio Romance are my least favorite ones. I’m not saying I hated it; it’s just that I know how well she can act and her character just fell flat to me, even though she started out really cool. I felt like she could have shown more spunk and independent behavior as Geu Rim. On the other hand, I did like the moments where she resisted Soo Ho’s demands. When he would keep calling her and she’d think ‘damn, why does he keep calling’ and she would just not pick up her phone. Also, when they were together but she needed to focus on script writing and she would just tell him she needed some space. Soo Ho is a real attention seeker, so I get that from her character’s perspective it might not be easy to push him away for even a moment. But still, she could’ve been a little more empowering as a female character.

I have to elaborate that I really liked Geu Rim’s character in the beginning of the show. I liked how she dressed, the frizzy hair, she was this hip young cheeky kid with a passion that she couldn’t realize. When given the chance to be an actual writer, she could cry with joy. That’s all she cared about at that point. Throughout the development of the series, when her relationship with Soo Ho progresses, for some reason her look became more plain and she lost a bit of the spunk she had in the beginning. She suddenly became really mellow in my opinion, her energy level went down.
This was also kind of caused by the increase in dominance in Soo Ho’s behavior. He starts acting like the jealous boyfriend even when they’re not officially together yet. Everything had to go according to how he wanted it, he would just barge in and grab Geu Rim by the hand and take her with him as if she was a will-less damsel. He would forbid her to see other men, even hang out with Lee Gang even though they had a real close friendship. Of course as it turns out that Lee Gang is also interested in Geu Rim he was right to be aware for rivalry there, but it was obvious Geu Rim wasn’t romantically interested in Lee Gang.
As soon as Geu Rim started acting mellow and just started following Soo Ho, I couldn’t help but remember Kim So Hyun’s character in Ruler: Master of the Mask where she literally had no own will at all. I found it a pity that her character became so soft, because I really liked her spunk and I know she can act so much better than that.

I have seen Yoon Park in several other dramas but this was the first time I’ve seen him in such an eccentric role, so I really liked that. Although he didn’t even come close to being a love rival, he was the mature guy who accepted his defeat with a smile and backed off to let the two be happy. But I really liked his trolling nature. Although I liked his eccentricity, they could’ve made him a little less stereotypical. The constant ‘Namaste, Namaste’ was enough after a while.
I feel like Lee Gang and Jin Tae Ri were cast purely to create a second male and female lead, but their characters didn’t feel like second lead characters to me, more like slightly important side characters. Lee Gang, in any case.

Please forgive me as I will now elaborate on my most critical point of this entire series: Jin Tae Ri.
Jin Tae Ri (played by Yoo Ra) is an unpopular actress who used to star in a drama with Soo Ho when they were young and she’s desperate to make a comeback. That is literally her story. The only thing she does in the entire drama in butt into people’s business to focus the attention on herself, bitch at people to make herself feel better, and repeat the same record over and over again: ‘I was in a drama with Soo Ho as a child. I was in a drama with Soo Ho as a child.’ She would barge into places, make desperate accusations and irrelevantly blackmail people. When she wasn’t bitching at people, she was crying because ‘deep down she’s actually really vulnerable and she just wants people to notice her’. Well, that’s exactly how she was portrayed – as someone who just wanted to be noticed but in trying to achieve that only created pointless air with her words.
I don’t like to be this critical, but Jin Tae Ri is possibly one of the most pointless characters in a drama series I’ve seen so far. I honestly didn’t understand the point or purpose of her character.
She didn’t contribute anything to the story, not even as a rival or anything. If she was supposed to be in love with Soo Ho, that didn’t come through. She only threatened him with the fact that she would reveal information about his family in order to get on a show with him to better her reputation.
It really felt like she was just there in order to have a bitchy second female lead character. In the end she gets together with Soo Ho’s manager because he’s the only one who can stand her. No one in the drama cares about what she has to say, everyone just lets her rant and when she leaves the room everyone just goes on with their lives. Even when her background story was explained it didn’t do anything for me.
This was one of the main things in this series that really bothered me, I hope people can respect my opinion. I don’t want to blame anything on the actress because she still performed everything devotedly, but this was just a very badly written character. She could’ve not been there and it wouldn’t have made any difference. In the end she literally didn’t achieve anything except a boyfriend, good for her.
I had this hope that when she first started her ‘I’ve known Soo Ho from when we were kids’ story, she would turn out to be an actual childhood friend who knew what happened and who’d maybe been there in the period where Soo Ho’s friend Woo Ji Woo died and the impact it’d had on Soo Ho. If that was the case, it may have given her some purpose as a character; as someone who knew a side of Soo Ho that no one knew and who’d help him open up or something. But nope, none of that.

About this friend Woo Ji Woo, he was the stepping stone to link Soo Ho and Geu Rim to each other. When Soo Ho was in the hospital, he became friends with Woo Ji Woo (played by Choi Min Young). Ji Woo is an energetic boy who loves music but who is terminally ill and knows he won’t live longer than age 20. He has a crush on Geu Rim, who frequents the hospital because of her mother, and he strives to win a singing contest and confess his feelings to her while he still can. Soo Ho is inspired by his will to live the last of his years freely and without regrets, but he ends up falling for Geu Rim as well.
In the end Soo Ho feels so bad about betraying Ji Woo that he distances himself from him. When Ji Woo runs after him one time he is hit by a truck and dies. The guilt of his death has followed Soo Ho to this day, it’s why he still can’t sleep and open up fully to Geu Rim. Whenever he’s with Geu Rim, a part of him always remembers Ji Woo.
In the end it turns out that Ji Woo was fully aware that Soo Ho liked Geu Rim as well and he even gave them his blessing disguised in letters addressed to Geu Rim but actually written for Soo Ho.

Why the two main characters in K-Dramas always have to be somehow linked to each other in their respective pasts is another trope that I’m getting a bit fed up with. It’s not a regular thing in real life where all ideal couples actually already knew each other as children and just magically happen to meet again under really complicated circumstances, I think the stories where two people just meet without having any connection to each other are the most realistic nowadays.
I liked the Ji Woo story, but there were things that felt weird to me. It kind of seemed to me like the two boys were following Geu Rim as kids, they were always watching her from a distance, even riding the same bus, always just watching her and smiling at her (which I sometimes thought was a bit creepy in a way). Also, Geu Rim’s lack of emotional reaction when Soo Ho told her the whole Ji Woo story was really weird. You’d have to feel something if your boyfriend tells you he had a friend who liked you and he pretended to be him because he liked her too and how they watched her so many times together? Geu Rim was just like ‘daww you must have felt so sad seeing me because I reminded you of your friend *hug*’ That’s certainly not how I would’ve reacted.

There was one character that I did like, although he didn’t get any credit for his actions in the end: Jason (played by Kwak Dong Yeon). He is introduced as a friend of Soo Ho and also as a psychologist who is instructed by Soo Ho’s mother to keep an eye on him. In the meantime, he likes to assess Soo Ho’s emotional transgression and when Geu Rim enters his life, he is fascinated to see how Soo Ho changes. In the beginning it was just funny to see how cheerful he’d get when Soo Ho would show an emotion. At a certain point I started doubting if he was to be trusted, because he has this poker face expression sometimes that had a glint of darkness in his eye – but in the end it turns out that he didn’t have any hard feelings against Soo Ho. Yes, he might have gotten a little too ambitious in his curiosity as to how Soo Ho would respond to certain situations, but all he tried to do was help him open up and face his fears in his own way. And as a result he just gets a ‘no you researched me for fun, you made me a case study and reported to my mom, get out of my house’ from Soo Ho. Anyways, I liked his character.
I like characters that aren’t one-dimensional and that keep you guessing as to what they’re really up to and what their motives are.

I liked the character of Soo Ho’s manager as well, although he didn’t get a lot of back story. He was a nice supporting character. I do feel like they made him like Tae Ri just so she had someone to turn to in the end that could love her, but otherwise I didn’t feel them as a couple.
However, their kissing scene was better than all of Soo Ho and Geu Rim’s kissing scenes combined. Honestly when that happened I couldn’t help but think, ‘now THIS is what I call a kiss’. On the other hand, the proposal felt kind of out of the blue. Mostly because I just missed the whole build-up in their relationship. But anyway, I already ranted enough about Jin Tae Ri, so I’ll just say I liked the manager guy.

There were these two radio producers who became ‘rivals’ to Lee Gang’s team, one of them being Geu Rim’s former boss. This woman, Ra Ra Hee (played by Kim Hye Eun) is the one who kept Geu Rim as an assistant for so long, and when Geu Rim gets the chance to be the main writer for Lee Gang, she becomes salty and tries to convince Geu Rim that she’s not good enough. However, even though she teams up with Soo Ho’s mother and tries to thwart Lee Gang’s team, in the end she does seem to care for Geu Rim as her junior. Apart from that her role wasn’t really deepened any further, except for her relationship with her partner producer.

I realize I haven’t said anything about Soo Ho’s mother in detail yet. Nam Joo Ha (played by Oh Hyun Kyung), is this sophisticated career woman who has spend her whole married life pushing her son in the right direction (her right direction). Almost the entire series she seems to be the cold-hearted stepmother who doesn’t care about her son’s free will and emotions and can’t care less that he has feelings for some girl; keeping up appearances is the most important thing.
But when their family’s facade is exposed by one of her husband’s ex-affair actresses, she is on the brink of falling apart. She is secretly suffering from her husband’s behavior and covers this by drinking wine and being extra strict for Soo Ho. I liked that in the end Soo Ho and his mother managed to come to terms when he covered for her in a press conference and she also opened her mind more.

As a last comment before my conclusion, this drama showed me again how insane the fan culture in Korea can be. Top stars and idols are treated as gods by their fans, but as soon as they fall in love in real life, the fans can immediately turn against them. I just don’t understand how some people can have so little respect for other people’s privacy. It’s none of your business! I think one of the most terrible things about being an idol is that you don’t get to live a normal life. You are limited in so many things, things that seem so mundane to normal people: seeing the people you like, going places you want to go, even falling in love and dating. It’s crazy and I will never get used to it.

I’m sorry if this review became a little more critical than uplifting. But I find it important to write down my thoughts on the series, whether they are good or less good. I find it important to be critical and I’m trying to be more critical in life as a whole because I usually don’t have a strong opinion about a lot of things. This is one of the things where I feel free to share my thoughts and I hope this can be respected.
In any case, I’m glad I saw this drama but it wasn’t one of the best I’ve seen. There were a lot of tropes I’d like to see less of in the modern (post-2017) K-Drama. The balance between the important and less important characters was a bit shaky, with some characters we got a lot of information while I could’ve done with less, and with some characters I would’ve liked some more depth in order to sympathize with them more.
I am still going to watch new dramas with Kim So Hyun because she can do so much better than this and I still admire her as the young and talented actress that she is.
It’s definitely a cute love story, but I would’ve liked it to be a little more than that. Using the radio medium as a way to connect people was really nice, but with the development of the romance this too seemed to fade into the background a bit.

Anyways, I will keep writing my reviews and I will keep you posted! Thanks 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.

Jugglers
(저글러스 / Jeogeulleoseu)
MyDramaList rating: 7.5/10

Hello! Yes, it’s been maybe a week since my previous review but I went through this really fast. It was on my list for a while and I was looking forward to watching it. I have to say it brought back the fun of watching K-Dramas for me. After all the Netflix watching it was hard to find my way back to K-Dramas, but now that I kind of finished my Netflix binges, I am ready to tumble back into my previous addiction.
This was a nice throwback to a simple and cute love story drama.

In short, the 16-episode drama Jugglers is about Jwa Yoon Yi (played by Baek Jin Hee), who works as a personal assistant for a manager at a big advertising company. Yoon Yi has kept this job for 5 years although her boss is a jerk and makes her cover up his many affairs and keep his wife from finding out. Besides her diligent work as a secretary, Yoon Yi also manages a blog for other personal assistants with terrible bosses to vent their frustrations. When due to a misunderstanding her boss’s wife drags Yoon Yi out for having an affair with her husband, her boss does nothing to clear things up and Yoon Yi is fired. As it turns out, her boss is the one who uploaded a post on the forum framing her as the one who seduced him.
He leaves her behind and gets promoted to the chairman’s office.
In the meantime, Nam Chi Won (played by Choi Daniel) becomes a managing director at the same company. Due to a fire incident-trauma from his past he is closed off from others and doesn’t seem interested in making new friends. He is also once divorced and not looking for new relationships, even though his ex-father in law (also the Vice President of YB) (played by Kim Chang Wan) and the young director of YB, Hwangbo Yool (played by Lee Won Geun) try very hard to make him more social.
When Yoon Yi is jobless and there’s an open position at Chi Won’s assistant desk (although he specifically doesn’t want an assistant), an opportunity comes where, of course, Yoon Yi gets the job. The two met before in a not so friendly situation where he almost hit her with his car and she kicked him in the shins. So they don’t start off very well. But, as we all know from episode 1, this will change.

Apart from their growing bond, there are other storylines surrounding the so-called ‘Jugglers’ as Yoon Yi describes them in the first epsisode. The term ‘Jugglers’ is used to describe the personal assistants like herself who need to multi-task and fight for whatever their bosses require of them. The boss is incomplete without his assistant, and it is their duty to support him in his climb to the top, because after all, if the boss goes up, so will they.
In most cases, anyway.
I was curious as to why the drama was called Jugglers but it’s a nicely found term. Do I agree with their mindset of following their bosses whatever it takes even though their bosses are all awful and don’t give them any credit in return? Not so much.
I personally just got out of a job as an assistant for a boss who was insufferable, so seeing the bosses in this drama kind of gave me flashbacks. Luckily with me there was no kind of direct harassment involved, but the part where the assistants don’t get any validation but just nasty comments was very familiar. But enough about me.

The other Jugglers in the story are two of Yoon Yi’s friends, Ma Bo Na (played by Cha Joo Young) and Wang Jung Ae (played by Kang Hye Jung). Ma Bo Na, like Yoon Yi, has been the personal assistand for an executive director for years, but all he cares about is his own reputation. Bo Na literally works her ass off for him, but with one single mishap her boss would already yell at her for being a failure. When her boss gets closer to becoming promoted, her ambition takes over so much she’s even willing to go against her friends.
Wang Jung Ae is a young mother -honestly the first couple of eps I thought she was Yoon Yi’s older sister because she always called her and Yoon Yi called her ‘eonni’, but it turns out she’s the older sister of one of Yoon Yi’s high school friends? Or something? Anyways, Wang Jung Ae is a naive and airheaded 30-something housewife whose husband abandoned her and her teenage son for another family. Loan sharks are after them and she wants to be able to make a living for herself so she starts to look for work.
Yoon Yi then introduces her to Director Hwangbo Yool, because he is in need of an assistant as well. However, Yool is such a kid at heart that he’s already fired 88 assistants because they couldn’t handle his whimsical behavior. Although his conditions for an assistant are single and around age 20, Jung Ae uses the identity of her younger sister Mi Ae and starts working for him. As it turns out, her motherly warmth is exactly what Yool needs to mature. But she still has to keep her real identity a secret.

I want to say something about the casting, because that’s something I really liked. Recently I’ve been enjoying watching dramas about contemporary work life for some reason because they give real insight in the ambitions and reputations and pretentiousness and harassment and other things we’re not supposed to talk about but are a seemingly indispensable part of working at a company, I guess.
I knew Baek Jin Hee only from Missing Nine where she played a character that couldn’t have been more different from Jwa Yoon Yi. It was really nice to see such a different side of her. I didn’t even recognize her as the same person at first. Because she’s tiny and with a very petite posture, you would think she’d pose well as a little shy girl, but the confidence and bubbliness that Yoon Yi exuberated made her character really fresh and modern. There were moments when I found her a bit selfish or tsundere, but it didn’t make her unlikeable. It differentiated her from the typical K-Drama heroine who just does whatever the male leads tell her to do.
Okay, and this is my first and foremost reason why this drama was on my list in the first place: I love Choi Daniel to bits. It’s been ages since he last appeared in something and he just recently came back from the military (THANK YOU) and I just love him. Ever since I saw Baby-faced Beauty I can’t help but smile whenever he appears on screen. So yeah, that was a big pro for me. And he also showed a different character than before. Cold and distant, but as soon as he opens his heart he becomes the adorkable giant teddy bear that he is. I’m sorry, I’ll try to contain myself.
There were a lot of actors that I didn’t know, but that made it even more refreshing to watch. When I know actors and you know their acting styles I automatically start looking for patterns.
My favorite side characters were definitely the Video Editing and Advertising teams because even though they were background characters, their timing and humor just made the series for me.

I would like to give some comments on a few things that I found a bit lacking or debatable. First of all, Nam Chi Won’s troubling past which seemed like such an important asset to his story. When Chi Won was really young, he and his family got into an accident which only he survived. For some reason people were bitches and everyone talked bad about him, how only he survived, that he was better off dead like his family, and no one wanted to have him. These memories still haunt his dreams and play a part in his secluded behavior. Nevertheless, a very kind uncle took him in. When Chi Won was a teenager, a fire broke out in their rooftop apartment and his uncle helped him escape but got stuck himself and was unable to get out in time. The one person he had left that had felt like family to him was now gone as well. As a result Chi Won has developed a great fear of fire in whatever form, even lit candles on a birthday cake.
Discovering this truth about him, getting to know his past is what drives Yoon Yi closer to him in the first half of the series.
It almost looks like Chi Won has a form of PTSD at certain moments. However, once the two of them get together, this whole story -the story about Chi Won’s past and fear of fire and his sad family history- is completely wiped from the next half of the series.
Honestly, when in the last episode they make a remark about how not scaring away from fire anymore, I’d almost already forgotten his fear of fire. It was as if everything that once bothered him was literally washed away and forgotten when he fell in love with Yoon Yi. And maybe that was the point, but I found it a bit weird that that was it for his character development. It just ended there, never to be even mentioned or shown again. And also how Chi Won’s whole character seemed to change suddenly from cold and distant to super smily and lovey-dovey. He’s suddenly smiling all the time and being giddy, which didn’t seem like the Chi Won from the first couple of episodes at all. But hey, maybe that’s what being in love does to you? I don’t know, but the change was kind of sudden.
Talking about finished storylines, this also includes the whole coincidence story of Yoon Yi now living in the same house where the fire broke out and Chi Won moving back in. I mean, I thought his reasons for moving back in (because this was before he was fully interested in Yoon Yi) would play a more important part in terms of his character development, that he would face his past or something. But it wasn’t mentioned again after the storyline of them falling for each other was completed.
On that note, I think this is an important division we can see in this series: it’s clearly divided into two parts. The first part is simply the love story between Yoon Yi and Chi Won. Once this first chapter is concluded, the second part moves onto the cooperation and action needed to ‘defeat’ the two nasty bosses. And there was no more character development in that part except maybe for Bo Na, because her father is introduced, but it didn’t really contribute to her character as ‘development’. It just felt like a tiny insight without much necessity. A parental character using sign language is always a bittersweet asset, but nothing was revealed about Bo Na’s upbringing that made it feel necessary for her father to be deaf. If it was such a defining element of the way she was brought up, she should’ve gotten more than that in my opinion. Because now I didn’t have enough proof of her goodness and positive resilience to empathize with her fully. Even after they made up I was just confused about their (Bo Na and Yoon Yi’s) friendship. Thinking like a normal person, it seemed weird for Bo Na to choose her jerk boss’s side over her friendship so easily. It wasn’t just ambition and fighting for her way, she actively helped in sabotaging Chi Won and Yoon Yi’s reputations. She just suddenly became this rivaling frenemy, kind of bitchy even, which really puzzled me because forever being the willless shadow behind a manically laughing douchebag or cherishing your best friendships shouldn’t pose that big of a dilemma. But maybe I’m underestimating the pressure executed on these assistants. The mere fact that so many women (because as this drama depicts it’s all female assistants for male bosses) would give up years of their lives to run meaningless errands and making meaningless efforts for someone who doesn’t even look back at them while telling them what to do is just very dissatisfying.

Another recurring thing that honestly baffled me, maybe it sounds silly but DOES NO ONE OWN A PENCIL SHARPENER? All these people in the office using actual knives to sharpen their pencils… I don’t know about you guys but there’s a perfectly simple and way less dangerous method to sharpen a pencil. It’s called a pencil sharpener. There’s an actual tool for it, people. And you won’t have to risk losing a finger when using it.

Let me go back to the relationship between Hwangbo Yool and Wang Jung Ae (although she’s posing as Wang Mi Ae). I think this is one of the more interesting relationships in the series. At a certain point I started finding their bond more fun to watch than Chi Won and Yoon Yi’s. Because the build-up in Chi Won and Yoon Yi’s relationship stops as soon as they get together. After that, they’re the perfect couple. No fights, no arguments, just happy lovey-dovey stuff, snuggling up to each other, pecking kisses in secret etcetera. Their relationship didn’t change after it was established.
However, the relationship between Yool and Jung Ae was constantly changing. At a certain moment I was actually wondering whether or not it would still become a romance, but in the end the mother-son parallels were too obvious. It didn’t need to happen for their bond to be beautiful.
Hwangbo Yool lost his mother at a young age and has since been bossed around by all the old men in his family (and the board of directors of YB). Rebelling against this, he comes to work on his motorcycle, he only comes to work to eat and he drives his assistant crazy by asking her to run the most ridiculous errands. He acts really carefree, but he’s secretly plagued by trust issues because he feels like he doesn’t truly have anyone he can completely trust and like his assistants, everyone leaves him in the end. I think Yool is one of the more layered characters in the series. Of course, at one point the truth about Jung Ae comes out – she’s not who she says she is – and he momentarily loses all trust in her. He yells at her and says a bunch of mean things and we see Jung Ae just crumble away with guilt, but she doesn’t get a chance to defend herself. In her defense, Yool doesn’t know what happened with her husband so if he’d known that he might have not fallen out to her like that. In the end he does reflect and decide not to hate her and insists she now comes to work as Jung Ae, not Mi Ae.
Wang Jung Ae seems to be the breath of fresh air necessary because she does everything she’s asked (although that might also be because she’s not that smart and she assumes everything’s just part of the job). However, she’s the first assistant who’s not driven mad by Yool’s behavior and she grows on him when she starts showing more effort and guts. At times she manages to soothe Yool when no one else can, for example when it’s his mother’s death anniversary and when she cooks him meals. Yool is taken aback by his warmth and I think it does somewhere remind him of his mother, the way she takes care of him. That’s why eventually he opens up his heart to her and lets her into his private house and stuff. As I said before, Jung Ae’s warmth might’ve been exactly what he needed to mature.
If Yool’s the most layered character, Jung Ae is definitely the character with the most character development of all. We see her turn from a clumzy, naive woman who knows nothing of the world except household chores into a confident Juggler. And all she did was be true to herself. It’s because she is naive and airheaded that she turns out the way she does. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. It may take you to good places if you’re surrounded by the right people.

There is one more person in Yoon Yi’s group of friends, Park Kyung Rye (played by Jung Hye In), who is not a Juggler – or used to be but quit because she couldn’t handle the boss (there’s a mention of it somewhere). I thought her look was very cool, very androgynous. She works at a local coffee bar that all main characters seem to frequent. Kyung Rye is the friend that’s just always there, mediating. She’s not on anyone’s side, she just wants everyone to get along. She’s always there at the girl gatherings, when either Yoon Yi or Bo Na is feeling down, she comes to the rescue when Jung Ae’s identity is about to get exposed, she helps sabotaging the nasty bosses etcetera. She always everywhere, the cool and funny friend. But she didn’t get her own story, which I think was a pity. We don’t learn anything about her except for outside stuff. I would’ve liked to get more story from her character.
Same goes for Oh Chang Soo. Oh Chang Soo (played by Min Jin Woong) is Yoon Yi’s ex-boyfriend who starts working in her team and keeps making effort to win her back, although she despises him. His introduction was hella random. We did not see him before, he was not mentioned in Yoon Yi’s memory or flashback yet he was introduced as if we were supposed to know who he was. Even when he is introduced, we don’t get any evidence of how Yoon Yi knows him and only through dialogue find out later that they used to date. But they made him such a present love rival that it would’ve made more sense to me if they’d given him a proper introduction. As in, show us the history between him and Yoon Yi before re-introducing him, like with her former boss. It would’ve made more sense to me if they’d shown the guy from episode 1 who used to be Yoon Yi’s boyfriend, then at least it would’ve been like ‘ohh that guy again’. But in this case the guy was introduced as an unknown former boyfriend that was never mentioned before, and his efforts were so fruitless that in the end he just became a bit of a comical character. Which is a shame because Min Jin Woong is a good actor. (I only know him from Drinking Solo where he was also the comical character but with a sad layer behind the jokes.)

And now, let me move on to the villains of the hour, the two nasty bosses who get their asses handed to them in the end. Bong Jang Woo (played by Choi Dae Chul) and Cho Sang Moo (played by In Gyo Jin). Bong Jang Woo is Yoon Yi’s previous boss who dumps her after a self-inflicted scandal and moves up to the chairman’s office. When he returns as a managing director, Yoon Yi is well into her relationship with Chi Won. For some reason Bong insists on having Yoon Yi back as his assistant. When he does, he just starts treating her like he did before as if nothing had changed, still asking her to secretly buy lingerie for the women he was seeing and stuff. It was painful to see how Yoon Yi was thrown around by the company in the last couple of episodes. Luckily, she now had Bong’s wife on her side and they make a plan to reveal his behavior to the press by calling all his previous assistants who went through the same thing.
I knew the actress who played Bong’s wife but I just can’t seem to remember from where. I believe I saw her in the role of a housekeeping lady but I can’t remember which drama it was. Anyways, her name is Jung Young Joo and she slays. Yoon Yi nicknamed her ‘Misery’ and whenever she called there was this doom-sound ringtone which was hilarious.

This drama had multiple sequences in slowmotion that kept recurring. One of them was when Misery walked into the room, it would be in slowmotion with some hiphop song in the background. Another case would be people making their way out of the office and epically putting on their coats as they walked. One of my favorite sequences was when the entire Video Editing team did it in a wave and for a second it seemed like the Advertising team would follow, but then it was just one person who wanted to look cool, lol.

Cho Sang Moo wasn’t so much a harrasser as someone who played dirty. From Bo Na’s perspective, he used to play fair and she used to respect him for the way he worked his way up by himself, but at a certain moment he started pulling strings and blackmailing people.
In the end, when he’s out to oust Chi Won and Yoon Yi for good, Bo Na’s conscience finally catches up with her and she decides it’s been enough. She then sacrifices her whole career to help Yoon Yi expose him and he’s sent to jail.
The only thing that confused me in the end was why they suddenly wanted to make him look like a good person after all. The whole series long he’s the wicked boss who only cares about his own promotion to director, he doesn’t look back at Bo Na even for everything that she does for him, and then at the end Bo Na visits him in jail and suddenly he’s like ‘you were always so great I should’ve respected you more, you’re better than me’ blabla. They still tried to show a more human side of him in the end but for me that wasn’t really necessary because all we’d seen from his as a character was greed and self-centeredness so why would we suddenly need to see him as a good guy? If he was he should’ve acted like that in the first place. I don’t know, it came a bit out of nowhere for me.

Anyways, overall I enjoyed watching this drama, it was like a stroll down memory lane – the style was kind of typical romance K-Drama but the setting was modern and contemporary. It’s interesting how it showed women’s strength through a position where it’d seem they have no strength at all. I hope it serves as an inspiration for personal assistants struggling with his life in reality.
I will move on now to another drama I’ve been eagerly waiting for.
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.

Kill Me, Heal Me
(킬미, 힐미 / Kil Mi, Hil Mi)
MyDramaList rating: 7.0/10

Hello everyone, I’m back with a new review! I took my time watching this and also reviewing this, because there’s a lot to see and say about this drama.
First of all, it was on my list as a ‘golden oldie’ (even dramas from 2015 fall under this category now) and also a must-see classic, like for example Another Oh Hae Young. I knew from beforehand that it was about D.I.D. because when I was watching Jekyll, Hyde, Me (also about D.I.D.), this drama was recommended in the comments a lot as well.
I knew that namely Ji Sung was very famous for his role in Kill Me Heal Me and the only thing I’ve watched of him is Wife I Know (find my review here), so I was curious as to his performance here, which was of course 4 years earlier.

Okay, let’s start with a summary. The 20-episode drama Kill Me Heal Me is about Cha Do Hyun (played by Ji Sung), a chaebol heir to his family’s company who suffers from D.I.D. (Dissociative Identity Disorder). After experiencing a traumatic fire in his childhood he has developed no less than 7 different personalities he can barely control. The only people aware of his disorder are the psychiatrist who treated him in America and his secretary. Until he meets Oh Ri Jin (played by Hwang Jung Eum), a rookie psychiatrist who is under the guidance of Do Hyun’s psychiatrist. Right after they meet Ri Jin is confronted with one of Do Hyun’s personalities and, taken by her curiosity, she starts getting involved and seeks information by her superior who has treated him. Oh Ri Jin also has a twin brother, Oh Ri On (played by Park Seo Joon), who is a mystery novelist using the name ‘Omega’ and who is secretly researching Cha Do Hyun’s family history.
Oh Ri Jin eventually becomes Cha Do Hyun’s personal caretaker and their bond gradually deepens, but there is a whole history between them that neither of them remember as both their memories of their childhood are very fragmented. Do Hyun is missing the memory of one year of his childhood, when he was 7 years old. Ri Jin doesn’t have any memories of her childhood preceding age 7.

I want to say one thing before I go on. I really don’t know why, but I have a problem with Hwang Jung Eum as an actress. Of course I watched She Was Pretty not too long ago (see my review here) and her hysterical acting seemed fitting for her character there, but in this drama it became a bit too much for me. For me it seemed like she was screaming and acting out randomly and being loud for no reason a lot. I don’t know, I think I just can’t handle her acting very well.
I will try to remain as objective as possible in this review, but I just wanted to comment on that fact.
I will also say one thing about the acting in general: I felt it was very over the top. I lack knowledge about D.I.D. and what it does to a person, but I felt like they exaggerated a lot in this drama. For example, whenever Cha Do Hyun had an attack and would change personalities, he would first get an intense fit, gasping and grabbing his head and collapsing on the floor – and when he changed personalities they made it look like his eyes changed colour for a moment. When he changes into Shin Se Gi, a tattoo appears on his neck. I’m not sure if this is completely accurate to true D.I.D. symptoms (I can’t imagine tattoos appearing and disappearing and eye colours changing to be realistic), but they mostly seemed a bit dramatized to me.
In Jekyll, Hyde, Me, I felt like the changes were a lot less intense. Then again, I’m not sure how the real deal works. I wonder if it truly is that painful in real life or if the personality change happens more calmly or if it changes per person. Anyways, there was a lot of screaming and seemingly painful inner transformations.

As I mentioned before, and I also mentioned this in my review of She Was Pretty – which is from the same year as this one – this drama really gave me the oldschool Korean romantic drama vibes. I feel like the dramas these days have developed in quality a lot, so when watching an older one now, everything seems extra corny and dramatic. Again, I can’t really pinpoint how and what, but it just felt like it was another oldschool 20-episode K-drama.
The very first thing the drama shows is a short summary of what happened in Do Hyun’s family. When he was 7 years old, there was a terrible fire and Do Hyun was saved by his father. Consequently, his father has fallen into a coma and hasn’t woken up yet (21 years in now). After that we see Do Hyun’s grandfather, the head of Seungjin Group, and his daughter-in-law (Do Hyun’s family register mother) passing away in a car accident.
What connects all these things only becomes clear when nearing the end of the series. And then we realize that the series isn’t solely about Cha Do Hyun and his ‘illness’ – it’s just as much about Oh Ri Jin and her origin (yes, I did that).

Cha Do Hyun is a rather docile male character. He seems to be quite introvert, and he prefers not to be around other people when he gets an attack. When he is himself, he is kind and meek. He seems to fear his personalities, especially because he can’t control them when they come out. There are gaps in his memory, so he doesn’t even remember all the details about how his personalities came into existence.
I found him to be quite fragile. It seemed like after every serious conversation he had there would be some sort of trigger causing him to have a fit and be taken over by another personality.

Oh Ri Jin is a rookie psychiatrist. In the first few episodes of the drama, we see her walk around a hospital, mostly concerned with one patient who keeps escaping (gotta love Kim Seul Gi for her glorious cameos). However, after she decides to become Do Hyun’s personal caretaker, she leaves the hospital. So we actually don’t see her in action as an actual doctor. Except for when she’s ‘taking care’ of Do Hyun, but this caretaking consists more of running after him when he changes and gets away and being by his side rather than prescribing him pills or anything like that.
Another thing I found peculiar was that, although as psychiatrist I’d imagine you’d stay calm in situations when a person is showing strange symptoms and character changes, Oh Ri Jin seemed very hysterical to me. Whenever Do Hyun would shows changes in his behavior, her first reaction included yelling a lot and shaking him by the shoulders, asking ‘what’s wrong??’ about 50 times before calming down an realizing he wasn’t Cha Do Hyun anymore. Furthermore, whenever she assumed she was being attacked or she witnessed for example Yo Na ambushing, she would first pull some weird facial expressions and -again- yell a lot.
Again, I’m not sure what the conditions of being a psychiatrist are in real life, but her personality seemed a little too hysterical and intense for me to completely take her seriously as a psych in the making. I also had some trouble accepting her personal behavior, because I thought she acted quite childishly sometimes. Anyway, this might have to do with me having trouble with the actress as I mentioned before.

It took me a while to place all the members of Do Hyun’s family – because Korean dramas love family complications, especially when it comes to rich families with all their dirty secrets. To explain, I will write it down as simple as possible:
First there is Cha Gun Ho, the grandfather and head of Seungjin Group. He is married to Seo Tae Im, the grandmother. The two of them had two sons, Cha Joon Pyo (Do Hyun’s father) and Cha Young Pyo (Do Hyun’s uncle).
Cha Young Pyo is the father of Cha Ki Joon, Do Hyun’s cousin and sort of rival for inheriting Seungjin Group.
Cha Joon Pyo was married to Min Seo Yeon (the daughter-in-law). Min Seo Yeon quickly became grandfather’s favorite and she climbed up in the company more than her husband. Their marriage was not a good one.
Cha Joon Pyo had Do Hyun with Shin Hwa Ran (Do Hyun’s birth mother), who wasn’t welcomed into the family even after he fell into a coma.
Min Seo Yeon had an extra-marital child with her first love. The secret of this child was hushed throughout the family, and Min Seo Yeon lied to grandmother that the little girl was Joon Pyo’s child. But Joon Pyo never acknowledged her, on the contrary: he threw her in the basement and started abusing her. He tried to warn his son to stay away from her and make no mistakes – eventually even when Do Hyun would make a mistake in his piano lesson or maths problem, his father would hurt the girl as a punishment to Do Hyun as well.
In other words, Do Hyun and the secret child/little girl (who turns out to be Ri Jin) knew each other as children. The girl was abused for being an illegitimate child and Do Hyun took on her memories of being abused as his own. Through this experience his first personality Shin Se Gi was born. In fact, this personality is the one who instigated the fire. This solves one mystery, the disentanglement of Cha Do Hyun’s memories of being locked up in a basement and shrinking back for his father’s raised hand; his memory of being scared of basements itself turns out to be a manufactured one that actually belongs to the little girl. As it happens, Ri Jin has been scared of basements since she was a child.

In the end, it turns out that uncle Cha Young Pyo is the one responsible for the ‘car accident’ in which grandpa and Min Seo Yeon died.
In short, Cha Joon Pyo and Min Seo Yeon were married but they broke up and both had an illegitimate child with someone else. Min Seo Yeon is Ri Jin’s birth mother. Ri Jin’s adoptive mother was Min Seo Yeon’s good friend who saved Ri Jin from the basement during the fire and raised her alongside Ri On as her own child.
You still following? Haha.
Oh, and most importantly, it turns out that Cha Do Hyun was actually Ri Jin’s name. Cha Do Hyun’s real name is Cha Joon Young, but after the fire he started claiming it as his own name to keep the little girl’s existence alive in the family register, feeling guilty that he couldn’t save her.

I think the build-up in explanation of what happened in Do Hyun’s family was very well done. First you would get bits and parts of it, and there’s even a time where you’re steered the wrong way before everything falls into place. In the beginning I didn’t even think the whole Cha family history would be that relevant or that I would have to remember it in detail, but it turned out to be the center of the plot of the drama itself.
Also, I think it was very clever that we’re first led to believe that Min Seo Yeon’s secret child is Ri On, because every time a dialogue about it occurred the shot would very subtly change to Ri On. He also dropped hints about one of them being adopted. At least I first thought it was Ri On. If they indeed did that on purpose, it worked. It’s only until Do Hyun remembers the reason why he’s afraid of basements, we see that it’s a little girl with him, not a boy. Also his personality Nana turned out to be the name of her teddy bear, not herself.

I think it’s time to describe all Do Hyun’s personalities and how they came to be. I’ll list them in order of appearance.
First of all, there’s Shin Se Gi. Shin Se Gi is the first personality that appeared in Do Hyun. He’s the one who started the fire. Shin Se Gi is recognized by his wild look, including a tattoo in his neck and earrings. He is the most agressive of the personalities. Shin Se Gi was created when Do Hyun couldn’t handle the pain of not being able to protect child Ri Jin anymore from his father’s abuse. When he changes the first time, he sees a toy laying on the ground with something written on it, something with ‘new generation’ (‘shin segi’ in Korean), and that’s how he got his name. Shin Se Gi carries all the memories Do Hyun lost, the memories about his past with Ri Jin and he also recognizes her immediately when they first meet as adults. Shin Se Gi is in love with Ri Jin from the get-go, so when he appears he is always trying to make advances on her.
Secondly, Perry Park. Perry Park is an older guy who lives carefree and likes fishing and booze. He distinguishes himself by wearing Hawaii shirts and has a satoori dialect. His name comes from a promise young Cha Do Hyun (still Cha Joon Young then) made with his dad when he was still a nice father. Because at that time Joon Pyo was hiding from his family, everyone called him ‘Mr. Park’. He also liked fishing a lot. Do Hyun promised his dad that he would buy him a boat some day and after asking him what he’d like it to be called, his father says ‘Perry Park’ (actually meant as the Korean pronunciation for ‘Ferry Park’).
Thirdly, Ahn Yo Seob. In high school, Do Hyun tried to commit suicide once. From that event, Ahn Yo Seob -the suicidal personality- was born. Ahn Yo Seob is a 17-year old boy who values art and classical music.
Almost simultaneously, as a counter against Yo Seob, Do Hyun’s will to live created Yo Seob’s twin sister Ahn Yo Na. Ahn Yo Na is a typical teenage girl who loves make-up and accesories and fangirling about handsome boys. She is one of the most troublesome personalities as she likes to run away. Eventually, Ri On becomes the focus of her infatuation, much to his dislike.
And then there’s Nana, who only appears in the last episode of the series. Nana is basically little Oh Ri Jin when she was hiding in the basement. She has a huge teddy bear whose name is Nana, but in the end she reveals to Ri Jin that her name is Cha Do Hyun.
The last personality that comes out is Mr. X. Mr. X only appears in the last episode, after Perry Park has already disappeared. He turns out to be a manifestation of Nana’s father – Ri Jin’s biological dad whom she never knew. He shows himself in a magician’s costume, claiming that this is probably what a little girl would imagine her father to look like, and expressing his relief for not looking like Superman. In the end his only action is to accompany Nana to disappear from Do Hyun’s mind, because she couldn’t leave by herself.

All in all, Ji Sung does a very good job in portraying the 7 different personalities. Of course their changes in costumes and hairstyles help, but each personality has a completely different vibe. Personally I liked Perry Park and Yo Na because they were so different from Do Hyun’s own character that they jumped out the most. Also the change in nuance in his way of talking and the way he carried himself as every one of them: my compliments.
One thing I found a little unnatural though was the build-up in the relationship between Do Hyun and Ri Jin. I first felt like Ri Jin was warming up to Shin Se Gi because he was always making advances at her and even kissed her before. When he would change back, Do Hyun would always hastily get away from her again. In any case, the first time they kissed as Do Hyun and Ri Jin felt a bit soon to me. Of course we know that they’re going to end up together, but as I saw it they were still in the middle of working the whole ‘you can trust me, I’m on your side’ phase. Ri Jin was only telling him to try and not be too hard on the other personalities and then suddenly he kissed her and I was like ‘oh wow, that escalated quickly’. And then suddenly they were mutually in love. I don’t know, it was a bit quick in my opinion.

I honestly thought Oh Ri On would have more to do with the whole plot of the story. He’s Ri Jin’s protective older brother who secretly harbors more than brotherly feelings for her. However, it never once occurs to him to try and make those feelings a reality. He’s come to terms with the fact that he’ll always be her brother and he has decided he will always try to protect her. Initially this includes keeping her away from her past. From childhood on, whenever she would have nightmares about her past, he would ‘interpret’ her dreams as funny stories. He keeps his research of Do Hyun’s family a secret from her as well.
Her adoptive parents tried to help her overcome her fear of basements by sending her on errands and fetching stuff from the cellar and Ri On would always go with her, allthewhile claiming that he was scared of basements too to keep her company.
However, when he notices he can’t keep her from Cha Do Hyun and her involvement grows bigger, he starts accepting that as well. In the end Oh Ri On reluctantly helps them get together and ultimately even records their story in a new novel whilst still being chased by memories of Ahn Yo Na (haha).
I read a lot of comments saying they disliked his character because he tried to keep the truth from Ri Jin, but I just couldn’t seem to dislike him. Then again, Park Seo Joon would need to try really hard to do anything I don’t like (I can’t deny I’m a bit actor-biased, I’m sorry). But it was so obvious that he did everything out of love and care for her, and she also forgave him because she knew that. And kudos to their awesome parents who raised her like their own child. Their parents deserve an award, honestly. The fact that Ri Jin found out by herself that she was adopted and never held a grudge at all shows how close their family is.

Now that we’re on the topic of family, I think this is a fairly important theme in this drama. Apart from the Cha family drama, there’s some interesting things to note about this theme that I wish to share.
I found it interesting to see how two children who used to play in the same basement ended up in two entirely different environments.
Cha Do Hyun grew up without family who had his back – he is only on the family register because of his father, but he is still also an illegitimate child, his birth mother is still ousted from the family and his grandmother, uncle and cousin all treat him coldly. When they obtain information about his condition, they’re all more concerned with the future of the company than with Do Hyun. Carrying the burden of his disorder all by himself, Do Hyun doesn’t have any friends – rather, he’s scared to make friends because he fears he will only hurt them when he changes personalities. His secretary Ahn Gook (played by Choi Won Young) is the only person close to him, but even he doesn’t fully know how to take care of him when he changes.
The only person who might be able to help is Dr. Seok Ho Pil (nicknamed Dr. Scofield) (played by Go Chang Seok). He knows about all the personalities but doesn’t know how to treat him well.
On the other side we have Oh Ri Jin who, despite her background, grew up in the most warm family environment ever. Two loving parents who raised her without hesitation as their own child and a loving big brother whom she gets along with great. They have a golden retriever (gotta mention the dog) ; basically, the ideal happy family. Because of her upbringing Ri Jin grew into a very happy and energetic woman. Even when she remembers her past, it’s painful at first, but her attitude towards her adoptive family doesn’t change at all. Overall she remains quite calm even after remembering everything. She keeps expressing her love and gratitude for her family.
So in the end it turns out that the person surrounded by his real family is much less happier than the person surrounded by her adoptive family. It changes the perspective of family; in the end it’s the people you choose it to be. Cha Do Hyun has a lot of blood-related family but he doesn’t feel like they are his family at all since all they’re after is his heritage to Seungjin Group. On the other hand, Ri Jin doesn’t have any blood-related family but feels so at home with her foster family that she doesn’t even get angry at them for not telling her the truth about her background.
Sometimes you choose your own family.

Of course, you would think, according to the Cha family register Do Hyun and Ri Jin would be family. However, Ri Jin was never registered and Do Hyun took her name and they are not blood-related so no problem there.
But in a sense they found a family in each other, even when they were kids. They played together, made each other promises, held hands, even played house together (ohoho) before they even fully understood who the other was and what their relation was to each other.
Both of them came from messed up family situations and ended up right where they belonged – together.
At first, Ri Jin encourages Do Hyun that all his different personalities are a part of him and that all those different parts make that one great person called Cha Do Hyun. But in the end, all the personalities still disappear. Cha Do Hyun gets better and doesn’t need them anymore because now he is finally able to carry his own pain and loses his desperation. These disappearances have a big emotional impact on Ri Jin because she did get along with all of them. So maybe to her that also felt like losing a kind of family.

I’m realizing I’m forgetting one character that I think was supposed to be ‘the second female lead’ but the fact that I almost forgot about her I think is enough to show what little impression her character made on me.
In the beginning, Cha Do Hyun’s first love appears as the fiancee of his cousin. In this stadium it still seemed to me like his cousin and this girl were going to be really important in the story but in the end they barely appeared anymore. So, Han Chae Yeon (played by Kim Yoo Ri) is Do Hyun’s first love and she is engaged to his cousin Cha Ki Joon (played by Oh Min Seok). But clearly their relationship isn’t heartfelt, and some intentional swaying from Shin Se Gi drive Chae Yeon away from Ki Joon and break up the engagement. She wants to get back with Do Hyun, but by then he’s already fallen for Ri Jin.
He even admits to Ri Jin that he probably was never really in love with Chae Yeon but simply yearned for the idea that he, even with his disorder, was still able to love someone. But even Chae Yeon didn’t know about his past. She is now merely a pawn in Ki Joon’s side of the family’s plan to gain leadership of Seungjin Group.
All in all, except for some vainly executed talks with Do Hyun (even randomly butting in while he was having a blind date, that was a big ‘none of your business much?’ moment for me), her character didn’t really add anything to the story for me.
I feel like Ri On and Chae Yeon were weak attempts to creating a sort of potential second male and second female lead, but they never even entered the love square.
Same for the cousin, he was kind of the intended ‘rival’ for Do Hyun but in the end he got completely stuck behind his father and couldn’t do anything to really stop Do Hyun from inheriting the company after finally getting grandma’s permission. So as a back story that felt a bit irrelevant for me. Do Hyun’s family situation was already complicated as it was. The only thing that needed to become clear was that Ki Joon’s father planned the ‘car incident’ in order to inherit the company instead of Min Seo Yeon.

One last thing: the final confrontation with Do Hyun’s father. At the very end of the series, Cha Joon Pyo finally wakes up from his coma, only to be confronted by his now adult son asking him to confess who planned the car accident. After that, that same son (as Shin Se Gi) tries to strangle him.
Now I have to say that I actually felt a little bad for the father. Of course, he did terrible things and was anything but the perfect son-in-law (even though his mother would never acknowledge that). He did lock a little girl up in a basement and abused her. But when he woke up and met with adult Ri Jin, the first thing he did was get on his knees to apologize. It was so obvious that he felt incredibly guilty about his actions, but they completely made him into the bad guy, saying this like ‘don’t force your apologies on me’ and stuff and I was just like, ‘he is not forcing anything on you? let the man apologize? he’s been unconscious for about 20 years? isn’t this kind of harsh?’ Before the whole thing started he was shown as a really nice dad, he just snapped at some point but the fact that he showed regret was good, right? I don’t know, it felt like that the two of them needed to confront him with what he’d done for their own peace of mind before they took off and lived happily ever after, not caring about whether he’d show repentence or not. But I guess that was another step in order to ‘leave the past behind them’.

There was one comment that I saw that I thought was really nice and that kind of answered my thoughts about Ri Jin’s way of ‘treating’ Do Hyun.
The comment said that the person appreciated the fact that Do Hyun’s disorder wasn’t treated like an ‘illness’ as in that he was kept in a hospital or received prescriptions for pills (he did have pills but he was never able to take them as he always managed to knock them over while Se Gi was trying to get out lol). His ‘treatment’ consisted of actual caring. It suggested that the best way to ‘treat’ D.I.D. was to stand by the person and give them love and care and warmth to make them as comfortable as possible. In the end it was Ri Jin’s unfailing determination and love that made Do Hyun come to terms with all of his personalities and himself in the end. All he needed was someone to truly care for him and I think that’s really nice.

To sum it up, I’m glad I saw this drama, although it was a bit more fictional than I’d hoped. I’d expected a more realistic depiction of D.I.D. and I felt like some of the personalities such as Yo Na were there more for comic relief – but in contrast that made it more bearable to watch in-between all the angstiness. A lot of tears were spilt in making this drama, evidently.
After this I’m craving for some happy stories, so I’m going to continue with another one that’s been on my list for a while that I’ve been really looking forward to.
I hope my reviews remain interesting to read!

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.

A Love So Beautiful
(致我们单纯的小美好 / Zhi Wo Men Dan Chun De Xiao Mei Hao)
MyDramaList rating: 6.5/10

Yes, I’m still alive! First of all, I’d like to say that I’ve noticed how my reviews seem to get shorter each time. It’s not that I’m not motivated to review anymore, I still forward to it. I will try to keep my reviews as full as possible, not only describing the contents of the story, but also properly including my own opinions. Of course it depends on the mood I’m in while writing, but I don’t want some reviews to be more elaborate than others because I really want to leave a clear memory of all series I’ve watched.

It took me a long time to finish this drama, both because of personal circumstances (quitting my job, busy with rehearsals etc.) and because this drama was pretty slow-paced and I wasn’t always in the mood and sometimes really had to get into it again. So, my apologies for taking so long! Anyways, here we go.

I think I initially put this drama on my list because I probably saw a trailer of it in which it looked a cute love story and, you know, a typical high school romance drama.
In the end, I have to say it reminded me a lot of Love Til the End of Summer. Not in terms of plot and development, but because of the story and what it depicts.
The story of A Love So Beautiful follows a group of high school friends as they go through their lives, first in school and then after graduation until they enter society.
The main character of the series is Chen Xiao Xi (played by Shen Yue). Xiaoxi is a very smol and childly energetic girl, the typical klutz and bad at studying type, who is hopelessly in love with her neighbor since childhood, the cold but handsome Jiang Chen (played by Hu Yi Tian), who is the most popular guy in school because of his looks and high grades. Xiaoxi keeps chasing him and is very open about her affection towards him, but he keeps brushing her off, although it’s clear that he doesn’t completely dislike her. The love story between these two is the main storyline.
Apart from that, there’s Xiaoxi’s good friend Lin Jing Xiao – nicknamed Jingjing- (played by Wang Xin Wei) and nerdy Lu Yang (played by Sun Ning). Jingjing, a pretty but tough athletic girl, only has to save Lu Yang from bullies once to make him fall head over heels with her.
Later on a transfer student named Wu Bo Song (played by Gao Zhi Ting) enters their circle of friends and he falls in love with Xiaoxi, making him and Jiang Chen rivals. Wu Bo Song is a talented swimmer, his father coaches him in national competitions, but his growing feelings for Xiaoxi start effecting his performance in the water.
(When he was first introduced I thought Wu Bo Song was a Korean name, but he is definitely Chinese, my bad)

Apart from exploring Xiaoxi and Jiang Chen’s romantic development, there doesn’t seem to be a real plot to the story. A lot of things happen at school that brings the group closer together as friends, there are happy moments, embarrassing moments, sad moments, love rivals appear, friendships deepen, stress about grades, classmates in trouble etcetera. The parts in high school where they get in trouble together and bond as friends really reminded me of Love til the End of Summer. Also, when their homeroom teacher gives a speech at the end when they all graduate, it had a similar feeling to it. There wasn’t as much rivalry and sabotaging between people as in LttEoS, but the pace and other scenes depicting the lightness and carefreeness of youth was really similar.
It not having a core storyline or plot was however one of the reasons that it didn’t hold my constant attention. There wasn’t any real drama in it, the events happening in school weren’t as defining as in LttEoS (sorry for already comparing the two so much).
While watching this drama I realized that maybe I really do prefer dramas with a clear plot and direction that work towards a certain goal rather than slice of life series that just depict the ‘daily lives of…’. I’m not saying that it completely killed the drama for me, but it did play a part in how long it took me to finish it.

As I mentioned, the love story between Xiaoxi and Jiang Chen is the main storyline in the series. If I had to identify a plot then that would probably be Xiaoxi and Jiang Chen eventually ending up together.
I think their relationship was very similar to Itazura na Kiss. Xiaoxi is the happy-go-lucky klutzy girl yearning for the genius but icy aloof guy who initially treats her coldly. But there is a distinct difference in their initial relationship. They’ve been neighbors since childhood, always lived next to each other, so they’ve visited each other’s houses a lot in the past as kids. Jiang Chen lost his father when he was young and his mother took his younger brother with her when she moved to work in the city, leaving Jiang Chen mostly alone. In the final episode he reveals that Xiaoxi started to mean a lot to him in this period because she was the only one who kept him company and kept chasing after him so that he wouldn’t be alone. She would always wait for him to go to school together and even bring him breakfast in the morning. Xiaoxi’s parents were always very kind and welcoming to him as well. Jiang Chen’s abandonment issues caused by his father’s death and his mother’s neglection have resulted in him holding back his feelings for a very long time.
So his attitude in being cold and distant come from a completely different place than e.g. ItaKiss. Also, when it becomes apparent that Wu Bo Song likes Xiaoxi and starts making a move, Jiang Chen decides that it’s time to step in and sweep Xiaoxi away before it’s too late and he immediately starts acting differently.

I would like to write a little about all the individual characters now.
First of all, Xiaoxi. Of course, I know Shen Yue from Meteor Garden 2018 where she portrayed the main character Shancai. I remember that in the first episode of Meteor Garden 2018 they made a reference to A Love So Beautiful which I didn’t understand then because I hadn’t watched it yet. Anyways, I now got it.
I have to say that despite the writers’ attempts to portray Xiaoxi as cute and innocent as possible, at a certain point her childishness really started to get on my nerves. I get that it’s part of her character to be a klutz and a crybaby, but I still felt that she acted too much like a baby, even when she got older. At a certain point I really wanted her to grow up, as mean as that sounds, and to be more mature.
Maybe it’s because I really like to see independent female characters in Asian dramas these days (they’re going places in Korean dramas for sure) and I become more and more sceptical when the girl is portrayed as the spineless damsel who has to be protected by strong men fighting over her. In the case of A Love So Beautiful, this definitely bothered me a little.
I’ve gotten used to the fact that in Asian dramas the girls need to be protected by the guys, and girls who act cutesy and girly are more popular than women who can take care of themselves. Sometimes, it even goes as far as the guys wanting to ‘take care’ of their girlfriends almost as if they are their ‘pets’. They need to be spoiled and taken care of and patted and kept content. In a lot of cases, female characters in dramas are treated/referred to as objects that belong to them. This was something that bothered me particularly in Korean drama ‘The Heirs’ as well, because the girl was so apathic and the guys were just grabbing her by the arm and dragging her everywhere as if she was their possession. I really dislike that kind of behavior. (Another unrelated example: I was watching the Arrowverse and the phrase ‘You love her? Then put a ring on her.’, came by and it genuinely pissed me off.)
ANYWAYS (sorry I get carried away), Xiaoxi was one of these typical girls who relied completely on a guy to to make her happy. It seemed to me that she had a really idealistic image of her romance with Jiang Chen. When they graduated and eventually started dating and Jiang Chen got busy with becoming a doctor and couldn’t always make time for her because of assisting at surgeries, it didn’t go as she’d expected. I really got the feeling she wanted her relationship with Jiang Chen to be lovey-dovey forever, that he’d put her first in everything as she did with him. But the reason I felt she was so immature was that real life, real adult life, doesn’t work that way. She felt like he didn’t make enough time for her and then almost immediately got angry with him. He couldn’t come to her because he was in a surgery, and she immediately accuses him of not liking her enough. I also thought that, in their temporal breakup, her immaturity was one of the major things to blame.

About Jiang Chen, I didn’t know the actor (nor any of the other actors for that matter), but I think he acted well, especially when he started showing affection for Xiaoxi. It’s like in ItaKiss, when Irie starts opening up more and gradually shows more expression on his face, that’s what he did too and he did it very well I think.
I only have some critism regarding his character when it comes to the breakup thing. Which was completely based on misunderstandings from both sides.
The whole thing starts when one of his doctor superiors offers him an exclusive traineeship or education at a famous hospital in Beijing. He initially refuses right off the bat – for Xiaoxi. But she finds out about the rumors of him going before he can tell her and immediately starts blaming him for not telling her and without even giving him a chance to explain she’s like ‘Let’s break up’. (I really disliked Xiaoxi here because she was just throwing a childish tantrum and wasn’t even willing to listen to his side of the story.) He didn’t even get the chance to tell her that he already gave up this amazing opportunity for her. And like, the same day, his first surgical patient dies on the table and he is super upset and he comes to her for comfort and she’s just pissed at him and sends him away without even asking what’s wrong. I mean. It was so obvious from his face that he felt really crappy about something, but she didn’t even look at him and only went on about her own reason to be mad at him (which was the childish reason).
I don’t want to dwell on frustrating things too much, so let me get to my point about Jiang Chen. When he eventually starts winning her back, he starts acting a little cocky, saying things like ‘she always belonged to me’ and ‘we’ll get back together anyway’ and just grabbing her hand and kissing her without her permission.
There is one scene where he follows her with his car and pretty much commands her to apologize to him. I mean, I was on his side, but it’s not like he didn’t have anything to apologize for. In that scene he treats her like a little kid who did something bad and needs to apologize and after apologizes she gets another chance and a reward kiss.
It just felt wrong to me, also that Xiaoxi so meekly apologizes while up to that point she’s the one refusing to get back together.
He suddenly starts showing a really persistent side that doesn’t have any respect for Xiaoxi’s privacy or boundaries. He just kisses her when she lets her guard down for a moment, and he won’t respect that she needs time to decide for herself if she wants to get back with him. He even semi-forces a proposal onto her, for god’s sake.
Honestly, the development in the last part of the series was really fast and kind of unnatural to me.

Let me talk a little more about this sudden change of pace in the latter part of the series.
As soon as they graduate high school, the pace of the series suddenly changes and from one moment to the next, there’s time jump after time jump in which they *boom* are suddenly dating and *boom* are suddenly adults and *boom* are suddenly working. I honestly felt like I missed a lot in-between, when the next moment Jiang Chen out of the blue started calling Xiaoxi his girlfriend (to be clear, ALSO without properly talking to her/confessing how he feels about her first). And then they have this breakup and the next episode it is suddenly 3 years later and they meet again and the way they reconcile in the end… it all felt rushed to me.
It felt like they had only four more episodes left to the finale and they had to quickly think of a way to have them make up or something.
As mentioned before, LttEoS -in my opinion- made very good use of technological development (cellphones) to illustrate the times changing, but in the case of ALSB the time jumps were a bit too spontaneous and unannounced for me. It all just felt like it was going too fast at the end.
One moment Xiaoxi would still be mad at Jiang Chen, and the next moment she’d be smiling giddily again because he grabbed her hand. And then they were suddenly all kissy and lovey-dovey and she even went back to her childish self a bit. I don’t know, I had the same feeling with Love til the End of Summer when I didn’t really understand where they wanted to go with the ending. It was clear that they were going to end up together from the start, so why put in the whole ‘on a break’ and even give Wu Bo Song hope again of winning Xiaoxi’s heart after all — but then, not. Again. Sorry Wu Bo Song.

Wu Bo Song was the typical second male lead character. The awesome friend who always supported Xiaoxi and was always there for her when Jiang Chen wasn’t. The guy who was the nicest and whose acts never got noticed. And he keeps trying to the very end. When Jiang Chen goes to Beijing after all, he meets Xiaoxi at the airport where she’s crying and then *time jump to 3 years later* they’re suddenly “dating”. My first thought was, really? Jiang Chen is out of town, Bo Song is here to comfort you so then you just run off with Bo Song, taking advantage of his feelings while you know you don’t really love him? I just feel bad that Bo Song thought he finally got his chance and then Jiang Chen re-appears and Xiaoxi is like ‘okay yeah no this isn’t going to work after all’.
But in the end he keeps being the awesome supporting friend, relaying Jiang Chen’s true feelings through to Xiaoxi and giving up.
On a side note, I think the actor had a really friendly face (lol, I can’t explain why but he just looked really nice xD).

I’m going to write about Jingjing and Lu Yang now because they were my favorite characters and couple in the series and I’m super happy they got their happy ending.
First of all I was glad that the whole thing wasn’t just about Xiaoxi and Jiang Chen. Jingjing and Lu Yang played an important part, not only as supporting side characters, but they were people that were really needed in the story for balance.
Lu Yang is my favorite character by far because he is such a bean. At first glance he seems to be the typical nerdy friend who just wants to be popular with the girls, but when he falls for Jingjing he also goes through a rough patch (because Jingjing initally has the hots for the school doctor) and we see him genuinely get hurt. He also gets hurt physically because it turns out that he has a heart disease and at a certain point this almost gets the better of him and he has to be hospitalized. It is in this period that Jingjing starts to realize her own feelings for him.
I found it so heart-wrenching when she confronted him for suddenly acting distant and all he could say was that she deserved someone healthy and not someone with such a weak heart as his. His confession to her was the most badass one ever, because he came out of the hospital with his hair dyed in seven different colors and he got on stage for the end-of-year speech and announced how much he loved her in front of the entire school.
The little moments between these two were just generally heartwarming and cute and the actors portrayed really well how fond they were of each other. In the end, they even get married and that’s the moment in this drama where my heart was glowing the most. The way he looks at her when he first sees her in that wedding dress and mumbles that he must have saved the Milky Way in his past life – MY HEART.
All in all, I just really liked Lu Yang’s actor because he was genuinely funny (I usually have trouble with forced funniness in Chinese dramas) and showed so many expressions and sides to the character. I don’t like one-dimensional characters, characters that are just written as ‘the funny sidekick’ etcetera, so I’m really happy they didn’t just make him ‘the nerdy friend’.

I think the casting for this drama was good. I’m not entirely sure, but I even got the feeling that it wasn’t dubbed. Maybe it was, but it didn’t bother me as much as in Meteor Garden. It was weird to hear Shen Yue talk with a different voice all of a sudden, though, but this voice sounded much more natural, so I thought that this might be her own voice. (How weird is it that you don’t even know the actors’ real voices because of the damn dubbing system?)
The acting was good as well, in the same way as in Love til the End of Summer (again), it didn’t feel exaggerated or forced but well done. I also liked Xiaoxi’s parents, in how human they were portrayed.
There was one guy, a teacher I think, in their school who was yelling ALL THE TIME and this kind of annoyed me, but other than that I had no criticism about the cast. I think this was just how his character was written, the teacher who would yell at students about every stupid little rule.
I would’ve liked to see a little more depth in the homeroom teacher as well. I was reminded of Love til the End of Summer, where they showed really clearly that the homeroom teacher’s strict exterior was mostly a wall she put up while she actually really cared about her students. The homeroom teacher in A Love So Beautiful was just really strict all the time and then she suddenly would get emotional about her students while she never really showed any compassion to them in class, so that felt a little weird. But those are just details.

Overall, if you like slow-paced slife-of-life dramas that just depict the daily high school lives (like the Korean School 2013/2015/2017 series for example), you might like this. For me, one typical love story as plot didn’t do me much in this case (although I do like ItaKiss, I don’t know what it is). I really liked LttEoS because of the complexity and depth it added to the story and all the characters and the use of stunning cinematography, but unfortunately this series fell a little short for me in comparison.
The love triangle Xiaoxi-Jiang Chen-Wu Bo Song was just a bit too typical and one-dimensional for me.

There’s a couple more Chinese dramas further away on my list, and I will keep an eye out for more interesting ones. It was a nice breather in-between, and now I would like to return to dramas with a more determined plot. Keep an eye out for my next review! Thanks 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.

Erased
( 僕だけがいない街 / Boku Dake ga Inai Machi)
MyDramaList rating: 7.5/10

Hello! My apologies for the radio silence, I’ve been hooked on Netflix and I only recently found the motivation to get back to Asian dramas. It doesn’t help when you’ve gotten hooked on the Arrowverse and everything is on Netflix (my apologies). However, I am in the middle of a very slow-paced Chinese series so that didn’t always grab my attention as much, and instead I decided to quickly watch something in between which was next on my list anyway.
(By the way, just like with Good Morning Call there was no existing page of this drama on dramawiki so I created it myself again. You can find the link here: https://wiki.d-addicts.com/Erased.)

I wanted to watch the drama adaptation since I saw there was one, I really like Boku Dake ga Inai Machi. I watched the anime two years ago and then the 2016 movie not long after and I loved the complexity of the story. And of course, I’m always in for time travel. I also like to see how every adaptation deals with the ending, because as I remember it, all three versions end differently. The anime is too long ago for me, but I can at least make some comparisons between the movie and this drama.
I was eager to watch this version because of Furukawa Yuki as the main lead. I don’t find him particularly handsome or anything like that, but I was impressed with his acting in Itazura na Kiss and it made me want to see more of his acting. The rest of the cast was relatively unknown to me, but especially the children’s casting impressed me.

So, the story is as follows. Fujinuma Satoru (played by Furukawa Yuki) is a 29-year old aspiring manga artist who lives in Tokyo, but he can’t really seem to make his breakthrough. Other than that he’s really isolated, doesn’t have any friends. He works parttime at a pizza delivery service, but he’s awkward at socializing with his co-workers as well. The only person he’s close to is his mother, Fujinuma Sachiko (played by Kurotani Tomoka).
However, there is one thing that’s special about Satoru. He has an ability that allows him to go back in time to stop accidents from happening. He will only go back to a few minutes earlier and in that time he has to figure out what’s wrong and what’s going to happen. He calls this ability ‘Revival’.
When one time he is hurt in one of these accidents, his mother moves in with him for a short time, much to his own dismay. Sachiko then witnesses an attempted kidnapping, but isn’t honest to Satoru about it, brushing it off as a joke. Satoru, however, knows she only jokes when she’s serious, and keeps his guard up.
A few days later when he comes home, he finds his mother on the ground in a puddle of blood, stabbed with a knife in the back. As he runs out to chase a suspicious figure, he is cornered by the police and has another ‘Revival’.
However, this time he travels back eighteen years ago to when he was still in elementary school in Hokkaido. He suspects that the murder of his mother has something to do with a serial kidnapping and murder case that was active when he was young and which took two kids from his class as victims. Now 11-year old Satoru (played by Uchikawa Reo) has to figure out who the real culprit is and tries to stop his classmates from being taken, starting with loner Hinazuki Kayo (played by Kakihara Rinka).

Another important character in the series is Katagiri Airi (played by Yuuki Mio). She is Satoru’s co-worker at the pizza delivery store and ultimately the only person who really trusts him after everyone suspects him of killing his own mother.
In-between his adventures back in 1988, there are short moments where Satoru ‘Revivals’ back to the future, and finds traces of parts of history that he has been able to change. Airi helps him escape from the police and lets him stay at her place for a while. However, the culprit is watching them closely and assualts Airi when she’s alone at home.
Fun fact: I remember that in the movie, the culprit set Airi’s house on fire. I think in the anime it was something like this as well. In this drama adaptation he pushes her off her second-floor balcony. Although she lives and still trusts Satoru, she does report him to the police for his own safety.
Being escorted back by the police, Satoru ‘Revivals’ back to 1988 again and continues his mission.
In his original past, a man named Shiratori Jun (played by Yano Masato) was held responsible for the kidnappings, but he was a friend to Satoru and he was only trying to reach out a helping hand to children who seemed lonely, so Satoru is convinced he’s innocent.

The story describes Satoru’s journey and his attempts of fixing history in order to save not only his mother in the future, but also his friends in the past. Of course, it doesn’t all go well in one try, one time he manages to get Hinazuki through the day of her estimated murder but as it turns outit is only postponed one day. His determination is clearly visible to his friends, who get a little suspicious of him and why he’s suddenly so interested in Hinazuki. Naturally he can’t tell them the truth but they seem confident enough that his determination is legit and follow him in his plans.

The reason I am so intrigued by this story is because it has a darkness in it but also a very hopeful message. Satoru tries to save his classmates by befriending them, but he also becomes a better person because of his efforts. Before he couldn’t really be bothered by other people’s business, but now he puts everything on the line to save others, even though the limitations that being 11 years old may cause him.
Also, I have to mention that in both the movie and the drama series, the child actors were amazing. Especially young Satoru actor Uchikawa Reo, because he has to act like he has the mind of a 29-year old. I also thought Kakihara Rinka’s way of depicting the damaged and abused Hinazuki was really mature. When she first started talking, it was like hearing an adult speak and I had to check if she was really just a child or if she was actually older than I thought. I think Hinazuki is a very intense character to play, all the more for a child. She is a victim of domestic violence and often doesn’t come to school. Because of her home situation she isn’t quick to trust people, and that’s why she doesn’t have any friends, barely talks with her classmates and is an easy target for the culprit who targets kids who are alone most of the time. She isn’t quick to trust Satoru either when he suddenly approaches her, but the way in which they treat her and the things she then experiences (having Satoru’s mother cook her a warm meal, celebrating a birthday party together) means so much to her that it’s heart-tightening. I say heart-tightening because it’s both heart-warming and heart-wrenching at the same time. For a child so young to grow up without warmth from her family is never easy to watch, even in fiction.
In the end, with the help of his friends and his mother Satoru manages to save Kayo from her abusive mother. She is sent to child support and ends up living with her grandma.

The culprit, who in the end turns out to be their elementary school homeroom teacher Yashiro Gaku-sensei (played by Totsugi Shigeyuki), is your typical sociopath. Pretending to be a well-doing teacher and good civilian by day, at night he’s busy laying traps for lonely children.
One thing that I noticed again in comparison with the other versions: I remember in the anime there was this whole theory involving a hamster in a hamster wheel. I don’t really remember it very well, but I remember this hamster wheel was a returning element and that it had something to do with him being able to see threads above particular children’s heads that he felt like he needed to sever. For some reason, none of this appeared in either the movie or the drama adaptation. In every version Yashiro has another story to explain his actions. In this drama adaptation, it was a story about his brother who used to abuse him and later turned to sexually abusing young girls. I didn’t really get this story, especially because ultimately it didn’t make Yashiro a warrior for justice but he actually found that piece of his brother inside of him. Anyway, to me it didn’t really explain anything. But maybe it doesn’t need to, because he’s just a warped person and his actions don’t have a logic to them, they’re just wrong and inexplicable. He seems to get some sort of thrill out of approaching these children and killing them. It frightens me that there are people like this in the real world.
Another thing was that I have the feeling that Yashiro’s confrontation with 11-year old Satoru in the car also varied. Or at least, how Satoru learned something was off. I remember that he noticed that something was off when Yashiro promised him he’d call child support for Kayo and he discovers that he actually didn’t. Or something.
And in the movie (and the anime I think), Yashiro throws Satoru off a bridge. In this drama adaptation he drugs him and lets the car he’s in drive into a creek (in ice cold water because it’s winter season in Hokkaido).
Satoru is rescued a while later, and slips into a coma. He only wakes up fifteen years later.

One of the most beautiful moments of the series, in any version, is when Satoru wakes up from his coma and is greeted by an adult Kayo holding a baby in her arms. It turns out she married Hiromi (Satoru’s other friend who was also kidnapped and murdered in the original past). Seeing them as grown-ups and seeing that they were able to give life themselves genuinely touches Satoru. However, this course of events means that he has rewritten his own history – his past of working as a pizza delivery guy and meeting Airi is gone – now, he has been in a coma since he was 11 and has woken up in a 26-year old body. He has to revalidate and learn how to use his body strength from scratch. While revalidating, he coincidentally meets Airi again, and a sudden surge of memories of his original life knocks him unconscious for another year. However, when he wakes up the next time, he remembers everything and asks his friend Kenya, who is now a lawyer, for help to once and for all end Yashiro. Yashiro is now a councilmen living under the name of Nishizono Manabu.

The last part of the series takes place on a camping trip initiated by the revalidation center. This is also exclusive for this adaptation. The final confrontation between Satoru and Yashiro in the anime and movie were both somewhere on the street, I think. In this version they visibly dramatized the final confrontation with the two of them standing opposite each other on a rope bridge and all.
In the movie, Yashiro stabs Satoru before he is arrested and Satoru dies after accepting that at least he has fulfilled his mission and saved his mother and his friends. I was surprised by this ending because the anime had such a hopeful one. I’m glad this drama adaptation followed the manga and gave it a happy ending after all, where he re-encounters Airi by chance and states that the future is a blank slate again.

I liked this adaptation. It was short (12 episodes) and clear, it didn’t drag and it didn’t include any confusing additional storylines (sometimes with short series the writers try to include as much content into the storyline as possible, making it rushed). Furukawa Yuki did a good job, although I still would like to see a more energetic role of him some time. This series will probably be one of those few that I will watch any version and adaptation of because the story is that good.

I think that it’s important that even in the darkest times, it’s good to remember the warm moments and focus on the good. Sometimes it takes us a while to notice that something isn’t right with someone, someone might be hiding bruises, either on the inside or outside. In this whole process of initially saving his mother, Satoru found himself discovering a lot of new things about the people around him and himself, and they made him the new version of Satoru that he became after waking up from that coma. He suddenly had more hope and a stronger sense of justice to help and protect the people he cared about and genuinely felt grateful when he learned that they turned out well. Although we aren’t able to travel back in time, it’s good to sometimes look back and reflect upon how you were, in order to go on as you are. We tend to forget or suppress things and that’s okay. But I think it’s important to be the best version of ourselves that we can be and make sure we do everything we can to live up to the good in the world.

I will now continue with my slow-paced Chinese series and go on with my list 🙂 I hope my reviews will keep being interesting to you. Until next time!