Dear X

KYJ Acting and Ending

Very very good series and acting of you jung is amazing😍😍She is surely a big thing in korean industry.In one thing I am not satisfied it should be available in more languages like english and hindi then only this much type of good series can be seen by whole world.10 stars from me for you jung's expressions and best acting in the world.She is now making me fond of her.
After seeing the whole series the last episode marks an impression on me,wasn't expecting that Jun Seo will do this with her and little bit dissatisfied with the end she should end up with someone junseo or jaeoh but a message is portrayed in the whole series from the start that ahjin type people will always remain alone like in the end.But very appreciable work of KYJ,if I will rewatch this series that will be due to KYJ.Its my pleasure to watch this series of KYJ with this type of Acting Its not a pice of cake for anybody to do Baek Ah Jin.I am little bit sad for her that she remain alone in the end even people don't get it that she feels sad for grandmother and Jaeoh both ,not sure about Junseo.But she has emotions😭.

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Much ado about nothing

The protagonist is a single minded, unapologetic female propelled by an ambition so fierce that she doesnt just climb the ladder; with strategic brilliance, she claws her way up it, splintering rungs and sending rivals and foes tumbling as she ascends. She leaves behind a trail of broken alliances, emotional wreckage of those she betrays, and death — with a chilling lack of hesitation. Every cold-blooded maneuver feels like an echo of a past where she had no control, an unprotected childhood where everything was a matter of survival. At first we sympathize, we empathize, and then, we recoil in horror. I don’t think she is a complex character. She is tragic, she is magnetic, she is also a monster.

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An Overrated Disappointing Mess

Dear X starts off really good, but after episode 3 the story goes downhill. FL is treated like she’s perfect, even though she uses people and acts badly. Everyone helps her for no clear reason, which makes the story feel unrealistic.

The other characters, like Jun-Seo and Jae-O, don’t feel like real people anymore. They just exist to support her, and their stories are not developed well. The drama looks nice, but the writing becomes weak and messy. FL just uses everyone.

Overall, Dear X is overrated. It had a good beginning, but the plot becomes flat and disappointing.

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Love this thriller drama

Flowers to Kim You Jung for this role!
I couldnt wait to binge watch this. Oh how Baek A Jin used everyone around her and they call just fell for her charm.
Did anyone else realize that Kim Jae O didnt see how he was trapped by A Jin image being an "angel"? Like the things he was hearing, he didnt believe them and all he wanted to do was to "PROTECT HER" to the end and nothing else mattered.
To me, she used Yun Jun Seo emotionally. Like she knew how to always run to him because of the LOVE he has for her, he would do anything despite knowing her ways. Ummm, too bad, she didn't love him back even to the end because he was so tired of her sh*t and it showed.
The moment she got married, I was like okay she found her match, someone who is also crazy but A Jin couldnt be controlled.
Fast forward, with her at the end, I wish her story ended with Yun Jun Seo but the writers had other plans.
Overall, it was a great thriller drama and I enjoyed each episode. Flowers to each character! They played their role well.

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If 'Black Swan' and 'Carrie' had a child

Dear X is dark and utterly addictive!
It's an emotional rollercoaster that keeps you guessing—who to trust, what’s real, and what isn’t.

Weaving together drama, suspense, and psychological tension, Dear X offers a unique take on the entertainment industry. It’s chilling and beautifully crafted, a tangled web of emotions where everyone is hurting, everyone wants something, and nobody walks away unscathed. Haunting, dramatic, and surprisingly empathetic, it shows how ambition, love, and pain can twist together until you can’t tell them apart anymore.

Ah-jin is not an easy character to like, which threw me off at times, but I found myself captivated by her story nonetheless. She manipulates the loyalty and devotion of those around her, using them to climb higher and prove just how far she’ll go to survive and succeed.

While not directly related, or even intentional, I couldn’t help but notice some striking similarities between Ah-jin and Carrie White from the Carrie films. Both grow up lonely, mistreated, and misunderstood—carrying wounds that no one truly sees until it’s too late. When they finally break, it’s not because they’re evil, but because they were never given love, safety, or the chance to simply be human. In the end, both stand as tragic figures shaped more by the cruelty around them than by who they ever hoped to be.

Much like Nina from Black Swan, Ah-jin also spirals into madness as she claws her way toward the top. The parallels between the two are impossible to ignore. Both are women moulded by trauma and crushed by impossible expectations within the entertainment world. They want so badly to be perfect, to be chosen, to be enough, and that pressure slowly unravels them. Their lives become performances, their identities blur, and eventually the personas they’re forced to uphold end up consuming them. It’s a painful, raw look at how the entertainment world can twist people until only the mask remains.

If you’re in the mood for an eerie drama that leaves a lasting impression, Dear X is exactly that.

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Baek Ah-jin attacks the powerful and cruelly destroys them. First with her gaze, then with the means at her disposal. It's difficult to support her, even more difficult to hold it against her. Clearly, she never just defends herself ; it goes further than that.

It is very interesting to see that in the first episode, the school lesson focuses on Xun Zi, a Chinese philosopher from the 3rd century BCE who believed that humans were fundamentally evil, selfish and destructive, and that strict education was necessary to force people onto the right path: that of Confucian obedience. Since humans are inherently evil, they dislike work but enjoy gain and pleasure. A brave fellow, or not. In any case, he predates Thomas Hobbes by 19 centuries. And we are more inclined to teach the Englishman's work than that of the Chinese philosopher. We can probably do without both of them and still believe in humanity.

Some of Ah-jin's vile schemes are pretty far-fetched. And painful for her as well as for us viewers. Each stage unfolds over two episodes, and you have to accept that you won't know all the elements needed for the trap to close, sometimes on a target, sometimes on the heroine, you never really know, which can be frustrating. (Episode 10 was terribly long)

Ultimately, I'm not sure what point they're trying to make here. Are they telling us that a strong sense of justice can backfire? That helping others can be dangerous? That women manipulate men for their own gain? I have no idea. Most of the time, people disturb Ah-jin as she goes about her quiet life. I don't understand how these men fall under the spell of someone so cold and indifferent, who, moreover, gives them no hope. But the slow (too slow) descent into hell of everyone around Baek Ah-jin/Kim Yoo-jung fascinated me. It's exciting to follow someone who appears infallible (or so we believe, for a while), with diabolical actions, taking on school bullies, exploitative parents, all-powerful employers, and a manipulative husband. Every aspect of a poor woman's life is scrutinised... You can never guess what the plot has in store. That's what makes the series so interesting: the surprise and the fact that you find yourself on the side of the victim who has become the tormentor.

Kim Yoo-jung knows how to skilfully play with the image she projects. Her caressing gaze, filled with opals, suddenly empties and comes back to life in the blink of an eye. She can be attentive one moment and cold the next, crushing people in her path. She takes no pleasure in attacking others ; it's just her nature, like a cornered animal fighting for survival.
This is an amoral K-drama, or at least one that tries to make us believe it is. There must be a moral to be found in all this, but I haven't figured out what it is yet. Baek Ah-jin reflects the violence of a world that hates her. The final scene of the penultimate episode illustrates this masterfully, drawing a parallel between a film shoot and a real execution. This brings us to the final phase, the top of the podium and, consequently, the fall. The media cycle continues.

What a surprising and fitting ending. Cruel survival. A sad victory that tastes like defeat.

"In a hell like this, hope is a luxury we cannot afford."
"Apologies are for when you've done something wrong."

PS: Yoon Joon-seo, truly the most terrifying of them all. To be honest, I don't understand how he managed to live so long, find a girlfriend, publish a visibly moving book, and feel nothing but emptiness. It's difficult to feel empathy for him and his mother, nonetheless. He got on my nerves the whole time.

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Not Your Typical Kdrama

Kdramas have made a name for themselves by using tried and true tropes and cliches to do an amazing job telling fairly formulaic stories. And they're fun, and I like a lot of them. But this is not that kind of show.

I would come close to putting this show into the same category as the film Parasite - not quite on that level of pure art in filmmaking, but carrying similar complexity in the writing and in taking a deep dive into human psychology. Though I would asterisk this by saying that most of the characters in Parasite are actually not as mentally damaged as the characters in Dear X. (Parasite zooms out a bit and looks at damage on a social level, whereas Dear X, though it touches on that, is more deeply focused on the characters' mental and emotional interior lives.)

I'm also not interested in talking about whether or not the female lead is being correctly identified by the term "sociopath" or ASPD (though I don't think she is) - the important thing is she's utterly damaged, selfish, brilliant - a real villain protagonist.

Mainly, I want to say, as a 20-year professional in the writing and publishing industry - the writing in this show is fantastic. The characters are deeply thought-out and realized, and the actors, of course, do a brilliant job portraying them. (I hope they win awards, seriously. They deserve them.)

I was particularly impressed by the overall story structure. The show breaks the story into 3 mini-arcs, neatly divided up into 4 episodes each: high school (and right after graduation), early acting career, and full stardom. The supporting cast shifts each time, and the immediate problem facing Baek Ah Jin (Kim You Jung) also shifts, keeping things fresh rather than lingering too long in one stage of her life.

For my personal take, the final arc was slightly weaker, just because my favorite parts of the show were when Baek Ah Jin was displaying her brilliance and taking action against her current "X" - I have a competency kink, I think. I love watching characters be awesome at what they are doing, and I loved watching this mentally damaged female lead take agency and make things happen the way she wanted. That gets a little lost in the last 4 episodes, and she feels like she has much less agency, which was a bit disappointing to me. Without spoiling, I would have liked Ah Jin's ending to go a little differently.

By contrast, Jun Seo (Kim Young Dae) and Jae O (Kim Do Hoon) both come to the point where their characters are fully realized, expressing what has been building inside them over the years. For them, their endings are exactly right - sad, but true to who they are.

If you don't like watching shows in which you can't approve of or relate to the characters, this show will probably not be for you. If you, like me, just want a solid story regardless of subject matter, give it a shot. For me, this is going straight into my "best of Kdrama" collection - and that's a short list.

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People Are Strange

First off, the hate for this show is insane. Folks complain every drama is the same. Then when something different comes along, they hate it.

With that being said. A sociopath is hard to portray on screen. Kim You Jung was PHENOMENAL as Baek Ah Jin. She blew me out of the water and man, was she EVIL. Sometimes i felt bad for her. Other times i wanted to slap her. That is how you know the actess is doing amazing

Is she mad as a hatter? God, yes. Does ahe deserve any sympathy? A little bit, but not a lot. She manipulates all the men around her and does it to perfection. Fans always love the psychopath MEN, yet seem to have an issue when it is a female.

Me, personally, I throughly enjoyed this show and will re-watch it again with my aunt. Kim You Jung was utterly robbed when she wasn't nominated for best female lead performance. Sush a shame.

And for the haters, stop begging for something new, unique, just to turn around and whine about it. You obviously don't want "different"...

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Consider the allegory

Before I clued into the strong allegorical symbolism in the last few episodes, my enjoyment declined throughout. The FL’s performance was worth the watch. When I realized, oh my god they just had the writer drive them off a cliff at the end LOL…it became much more insteresting to me. I now want to rewatch it to find the other symbolism. I’ll update my review later once a I’ve had a chance to do that. The other characters all represent an archetype of the K-Drama industry: actress, actor, writer, Sasaeng
obsessed fan, stalker, controlling financer/producer, media, etc.

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One mess of a show!

Genuinely is one of the most chaotic shows I have ever seen in a long time. The plot does leave a lot of personal interpretation to see how you would view the whole point of view of the characters but even then, it really does only make you end with quite eerie and gut-wrenching feelings.

Jun Seo and Jae Oh are both characters that are depicted to be taking very different perspectives on how they view Baek Ah Jin. Neither of them really shows any logical reasoning on how they went about dealing with the many complex situations and the latter's death was pretty uncalled for in my opinion, considering that a realisation for him would make the most sense to really complete his journey. The decision on taking down Baek Ah Jin from Jun Seo just was unwanted cause of how long it took for him to realize the case, and the attempted suicide just was anticlimactic.

Not gonna lie, the acting of the cast was phenomenal. It really showed the depth and conviction of every character and was truly a hooking performance. Definitely just a one-time watch though.

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Dear Baek Ah-Jin; Villain to the privileged. Survivor to herself.

I fail to see Ah-jin as evil. Manipulative? Absolutely. She’s also intelligent in using people, things, and whatever resources she could grasp in order to survive and climb to the top. Her actions are calculated, not senseless. Her only wicked act was framing an innocent man. However, the fact that she had to resort to that is another discussion to be had. Bullied, abused, stalked, harassed, etc. Where was the hammer of justice then? Her lack of emotions was a double-edge sword; a shield that protected her when she needed to be strong, but wounded others when empathy was required most but lacking. This is why the end of her 1+ year period with her boyfriend and Grandma was such a tragic loss. I don’t hate the ending. If anything, I found it unsettling in the best way. I even felt afraid seeing the CCTV footage of her in that bloody white dress lol. Her relationships with the two main leads were toxic in their own way- but hey, it works for them… to an extent.

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SAVED BY HWANG IN YEOP!!!

I honestly went crazy watching this drama because of Hwang In-yeop. He is insanely handsome, and once again, he doesn’t disappoint when it comes to acting. Every scene he’s in just hits harder.

If I’m being real, the male second lead’s acting felt stronger than the main lead’s (lol). He brought more depth, more emotion, and somehow made every interaction feel more meaningful. And yes — I shipped him with the female lead so badly 😭 It felt more natural, more painful, and way more emotionally convincing.

Plot-wise, I actually really liked the story. It’s heavy, emotional, and uncomfortable in the way a good drama is supposed to be. I felt incredibly sorry for In-gang. Some scenes were honestly hard to watch because of how tragic and overwhelming her situation was. There were moments where I almost couldn’t continue because it hurt too much.

Overall, Dear X might not be perfect, but for me, it was carried hard by Hwang In-yeop’s performance and the emotional weight of the story. Painful, frustrating, but also addicting.

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