This review may contain spoilers
The Hardest Person to Forgive is Yourself
This is my first morning daily drama I committed myself to when it started airing back in April. Were all 120 episodes, 60 hours, worth it? Kind of.I enjoyed the main characters, their chemistry, and their conflict with each other. It's not easy to sit through their struggles, hardships, and bad things just happening to them, but they overcome them with the support of their friends, family, and loved ones. Eventually they learn to embrace what has happened and make the most out of it. Amor Fati. "Love of one's fate." This phrase would apply to every character in the show.
The subplots also talk about a few things that aren't portrayed very often in K-dramas, particularly child depression, homosexuality, and family abuse. They aren't easy topics to discuss, but are handled with care in the show.
My only particular issue with the show is how quickly things wrapped up near the end. Although we are given at least a week's worth of episodes for the epilogue to show how the characters are doing later, there was no build up to them. The four main characters receive a nice conclusion, but the side character stories all wrap up in the final episode, leaving me unsatisfied as they felt rushed. The side characters were just as important as the main ones as they helped carry the show to have enough content for 120 episodes.
Oh well. Amor Fati.
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Bad...
This is the worst long-running drama I've seen from SBS usually they are serviceable, no wonder they canceled the time slot. It's really unfortunate that Choi Jung Yoon came back from 7 years hiatus for this awful project. This is one of the most brainsmooth stories in kdrama I've seen, absolutely mind numbing. This is the writer's first drama and it's showing big time. Amateur writing, cheap production, bad stylists and horrendous cast performance. There are kids shows better written than this, it's hard to believe a human wrote this. A production value from 20 years ago, awful lighting and sound design. These stylists need to be fired, look at the characters' faces, a thick mask of whatever make up they have is about to fall off. Finally the cast, which consists of 85% of unknowns who can't act and are always awkward. For the same reason, the few side stories we had were uninteresting and lacked and characterization. I think what contributed to the death of this drama the most is the lack of familiar faces, the size of the cast and the side stories.Misleading poster, the redhead was only there for the first 25 episodes then turned to brunette/dark.
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This review may contain spoilers
"Amor Fati" is a drama about an ordinary housewife named Yeon Hee, whose life is completely transformed when she finds out that her husband is cheating on her and wants a divorce so she can marry his mistress. In a funny twist of fate, Yeon Hee ends up meeting Jae Kyeong several times, without having any idea that he is married to Yu Na, the woman her husband is seeing.Yeon Hee is framed, forced to leave home, and discovers that she has cancer. This is a turning point for her, to finally take action and learn to take care of herself, she accepts the divorce and ends up becoming Jae Kyeong's neighbor. Speaking of Jae Kyeong, he is a really good person. Not just anyone would raise a child knowing that it is not theirs, and he did so by never telling Ha Neul the truth. The two develop a friendship, supporting each other through difficult times, and end up falling in love in the process. The big problem with this is that there is no chemistry whatsoever between Yeon Hee and Jae Kyung as a couple, there is not even a kiss scene... they functioned more as friends.
Now the situation is completely different with Yoon Chul and Min Jung, they steal the show from the main couple, they are so cute together, I wish the drama had shown more of them, especially since Yoon Chul was very careful to think about Woo Joo's feelings too when he decided to start a relationship with Min Jung.
One of the great positive points of the drama is Seo Woo, she is an incredible character. While everyone was against Yeon Hee, Seo Woo remained a faithful daughter and every opportunity she had, she tried to defend her mother and this girl suffered a lot in this drama too. In addition to finding out that her father is a traitorous bastard, she also finds out that she is pregnant with her fiance's baby, who later reveals that he is gay.
I also really liked that the drama focuses a lot on Ha Neul and Woo Joo and their relationship with their mothers. There is even a concern in showing them growing up, going through puberty and understanding some things that were very young before. They learn to value their mothers more, since Yeon Hee and Min Jung are not Ha Neul and Woo Joo's biological mothers, but they accepted them in their hearts and that has never changed, at any time. Being a mother does not mean giving birth, but rather caring.
Yu Na as a villain ends up not being that impressive, because if we analyze it properly, we end up feeling sorry for her. She really wasn't to blame for falling in love with a married man, the problem was everything she did to get Jun Ho and keep his company, all the crimes she committed and all the people she hurt in the process, including her own son Ha Neul, but I liked that in the end they gave the character a redemption. When we found out she was pregnant, I thought she would have a happy ending with Jun Ho, despite all the wrong things she had done, but Yu Na understood that she had to pay for her crimes, so she asked Ha Neul and Yeon Hee for forgiveness and then left with her son, to start a new life away from all that. It was the best possible ending for the character.
In conclusion, the drama is good, the only problem is the boring romance, but if you ignore that and pay more attention to the rest, it's worth checking out.
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