This review may contain spoilers
Disliked the romance, sort of liked the time travel
This isn't a drama which I would normally start but my sister wanted to watch it. She dropped it two episodes in btw, but because I suffer from never drop disease, I put it on 2x speed as I was determined to finish after it was rotting in my On Hold list for over a year.I'm not saying that it was a bad drama but it just wasn't for me. The whole teacher-student relationship was weird especially since the FL was just 16-17 year-old while having such a big crush on the teacher, who was 10 years her elder. She was very clingy towards him, even gifting him a shirt on his birthday and when the two of them got trapped together in school overnight, she pretended to not have her phone just so she could stay with him. Welp, at least the teacher wanted to set her up with his younger self. That was basically the plot of the first five episodes, after that it got a bit better since the ML got back to present and his younger self traveled with him too.
Then it got more interesting, I liked how the ML at the end had so many different memories of the past because it was like he lived all of them, but each was different a bit when it came to the terms where he and the FL met. However, I would prefer for the time-travel to be explained a little bit more.
Overall a 7/10 rating, not really memorable and there were some things bugging me.
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Acting / Cast: The actors did well, this isn't an acting masterpiece but it was good. Lee Jung-Shin was the person that stood out the most for me, I really liked his acting and how he portrayed adult Shin-Woo with is the mix between a very adult person who still had something of a child inside. Seo Ji-Hoon also did a great job even though the writers sometimes made his character look like a little kid even though he was almost eighteen. Lee Yeol-Eum was also good, but I found her character a bit lame and annoying at times, but I think that was more about the writing than about the acting. The rest of the cast was also very good and did great supporting the main cast!
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Part of that was the overly-elaborate time travel recursion. I have absolutely no problem with shows that don't bother trying to come up with an explanation for time travel, because there isn't one. As the Doctor said, it's all just "wibbly wobbly, timey-wimey stuff", so Dramas can cook up whatever explanation they like, or none at all, which is how this Drama handled it. But I think the writers got a bit carried away the idea of Inception-style layers upon layers, like a Matryoshka doll version of the Matrix. The intricacies took some of the gloss off the OTP and made it easier to focus on and cheer for the single-timeline stories. The boy who became a celebrity so that his crush could call him Oppa was my favourite of those.
Overall, by no means an awful Drama, and it did have the virtue of being short, total runtime well short of 9 hours. I've definitely sat through much worse.
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This review may contain spoilers
She never loved shin woo (student) and still doesn't love him
Melting Heart isn’t just a romance drama — it’s a slow tragedy disguised as one. Beneath its time-travel premise lies a heartbreaking irony: Kang Shin Woo destroys his own chance at love in his desperate attempt to protect it.Ji Soo never truly loved the student Shin Woo. Her heart awakened toward the teacher Shin Woo — the man who helped her jump over the school wall, the man whose warmth she remembered for ten long years. When she later meets the younger Shin Woo, she only sees in him the shadow of her teacher, not the same person. To her, they are two separate men — one a cherished memory, the other a painful reminder.
That’s what makes Melting Heart so tragic. Even if Ji Soo ends up with the student Shin Woo, it will never be out of genuine love for him — only because he looks like the teacher she once adored. And that truth will haunt Shin Woo forever.
He fails to save his mother but manages to save Ji Soo, yet in doing so, he loses everything else. His actions rewrite the past so cruelly that he erases his own place in Ji Soo’s heart. The woman who once liked the student now only loves the teacher who never truly existed in her reality. Ji Soo, meanwhile, carries love and guilt in equal measure — love for the teacher Kang Shin Woo and guilt toward the student Kang Shin Woo. In the end, neither can find happiness together.
In the original timeline, Ji Soo fell in love with her classmate, the student Kang Shin Woo. There was no teacher version to interfere — no time traveler to alter fate. But when future Kang Shin Woo traveled back in time intending to make Ji Soo fall for his younger self, he unknowingly destroyed that very love. Instead of falling for the student, Ji Soo fell for the teacher — a man ten years older, from the future — thus changing the core of her feelings forever. In this rewritten timeline, Ji Soo’s love was never for her classmate but for the mature, mysterious man who came from the future.
Kang Shin Woo ultimately becomes the architect of his own misery. His original self was never loved; he only remained as a lingering guilt in Ji Soo’s heart connected to his mother’s death. And tragically, the future Shin Woo never realized that Ji Soo once liked him in the original past — she only distanced herself out of guilt, not indifference.
When he finally got the chance to time travel, his obsession blinded him. Instead of preparing to save his mother’s life — the one person who truly loved him unconditionally — he focused solely on winning over Ji Soo. His failure to act in time cost him his mother and his soul.
In the end, Melting Heart becomes more than a love story — it’s a brutal reminder of how selfish desire can corrupt love and destroy family. Kang Shin Woo’s downfall is not just tragic but moral: he chose lust over love, obsession over compassion, and in doing so, lost both his mother and Ji Soo.
A painful masterpiece about time, regret, and the death of filial love
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