My Demon

Funny, exciting, cute

This show is probably my favorite K-drama yet.

Positives:
- Song Kang's acting is amazing (and he's just very gorgeous)
- interesting and well-written female lead
- well-thought out story line and fantasy elements
- funny side characters
- interesting villain
- thriller/gore-like elements
- very strong and good start & middle
- the soundtrack (the instrumentals!!!) is so good
- the insight into history and religion were interesting

Negatives:
- the last two episodes are much worse than the rest of the series and can't really compare - the plot and the character development feels out of place and uncharacteristic. This would have been better without the last two episodes (whose conflict could've been solved within minutes)
- some characters are a bit ridiculous/unserious and there are a few cringy moments
- the villains were a bit predictable but that wasn't the point, so it's fine

Overall really a great series. I especially loved Guwon, he was funny, pretty, epic, entertaining, and just great in general. The only real downside is that the show drops a bit in quality after/around ep. 13, but that is the case in many K-dramas.

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A glut of villains , violence & comedy imbalance. Cringeworthy irritating comedy.

Started out interesting but then got bogged down by the sheer number of people the Female lead was in conflict with. It's one thing to have you wondering who the evil behind the evil is, and it's quite another to have more than three "grade A" villain's! Super creepy/violent scenes trade off "comic" relief, which is more irritating than relieving [IE: gang members who turn into super fans of the demon-just cringy]. The romance between the lead's assistants got way to much screen time and again, and was also cringy. Episodes were either super violent or stupid sidekick filler. I was really puzzled why this drama didn't just pull me in & keep me in because it checked off all the right boxes of what I am interested in. Still, when they revealed the whole back story of the main couple-I was nonplussed as it was not compelling.
the last 3 episodes dragged, and the end, though happy. was anticlimactic-like the writers & actors were all just tired & ready to be done. Yes tidy endings for all characters, but kinda TMI & bland at that.


In the end it was a few things that made this a huge disappointment:
***Spoilers***
It just didn't work for me that in her past life the female lead worked in a tea house-which translated to prostitute (?)! was planning on committing suicide & then faked being Catholic in order to hope to change societies norms concerning rank. I just didn't see the nobility in that, nor the grand love, and certainly not any grand sacrifice. Which is what they were trying to sell us.
Also, a major blunder on the writer's part was having the female lead's parents die because of a deal with Demon (& ha ! he didn't even remember ? but then said he did but didn't mention it because it would complicate things ? All of the was unconvincing, but even more unconvincing was female lead's forgiveness of that due to her seeing that he "saved" her in her past life (uh, NO he didn't, he just accidently interrupted your suicide attempts) Another plot point in which we have to suspend disbelief is that the female lead's surrogate mother was trying to take down the female lead's parents & had a significant part in their deaths. OH the time skips. must every drama have them ? And having Demon just appear, with him being like :hey yeah I'm back why are you surprised ? not excited, not showing any emotion, so weird & unromantic. Then thier lives just go on with him STILL being a demon-you know the thing that appalled her when she actually saw him in action after he supposedly became a nice guy!? yeah, so he's immortal, goes around looking for bad people to punish and wow-that's actually pretty awful if you want a future with him (you hate his job & you're not immortal). I felt like they just kept him bipolar-I love cake- I take lives-I love my woman-I send souls to hell. If they were trying to get us to see him as some Batman/Robinhood righteous dude, they failed. This is no Tale of the Nine tailed, nor is it Healer.

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Lot of potential, but comes crashing to a halt in the final episodes

TL;DR - Worth a watch, but don't get overly invested.

If there is one way to sum up My Demon, it would be "wasted potential". It had a phenomenal cast, a plot that initially seems gripping, and a promising OST. But it then proceeds to spend 16 episodes doing nothing with each of those elements.

Starting with the OST, it immediately grips you episode one with TRUE - YOARI. But aside from True and Whenever Wherever, many of the songs quickly wear out their welcome due to repetition. It feels like the producers found a song for each emotion they wanted to evoke, and then just played that song to invoke a feeling, with no real diversity or writing to back it up. Perfect example - using the main song TRUE when Jung Gu Won returns to save Do Do Hee. Theoretically, a great scene, if we hadn't heard the song over and over, in addition to the scene just not really landing right due to improper build up.

Which brings us to the next issue - the writing team squandered a phenomenal hook with the plot by trying to shoehorn in every single kdrama trope you can imagine. Secret God hiding behind the scenes as a beggar? Check. Protagonist losing their OP powers to force tension? Check. Extremely forced break-up in the final act? Check. Weird trauma connecting the ML to FL to force said break up, without any proper explanation or payoff? Check. If they had just kept the plot focused on the murder of Chairwoman Joo and properly hidden the true killer better, it would have been a vastly more interesting show. Unfortunately, it quickly becomes apparent that Jung Gu Won will simply snap his fingers to get Do Do Hee out of any situation, but then oddly not actually see it through immediately, because then we'd have no show. This becomes increasingly apparent when they keep randomly mentioning Jung Gu Won's need to fill contracts as a demon, but only when they need to manufacture a time crunch to remind the audience they should actually be caring about the demon vs god plotline instead of the murder mystery part.

The only thing that saves the show from being totally bland and average is the chemistry between the cast. Both the ML/FL and the SML/SFL make adorable couples with tons of great moments. it feels like they were written by an entire separate team of writers compared to the rest of the plot. Watching Jung Gu Won awkwardly try to play homemaker with Do Do Hee was some of the best moments of the show. It's just a shame that it comes grinding to a halt when they decide to shoehorn in the weird connection of Jung Gu Won actually having signed a deal with Do Do Hee's father and being there on the day of his death. It's clear they were trying to force a confrontation by trying to make Jung Gu Won responsible for Do Do Hee's parents' death, but it isn't written well enough to make sense. He never actually does anything to her parents, but then basically dumps her and runs away out of shame, only to come back and then they never really address it as a couple? It is entirely overshadowed by the fact that she dies to save him, and then he resurrects her and dies himself for breaking one of God's rules. It felt incredibly hamfisted, like the writing team needed to hit a set number of cliches per episode so they forced it in there to be more like Goblin King or Tale of the Nine Tailed. After all, what good is a fantasy kdrama without the MC "dying" in the penultimate episode?

So overall, it is a perfectly serviceable show, just not very unique. Each thing it does is simply done better, in another show. Want ill-fated romance and tragedy? Goblin King. MC with cool superpowers that chooses to give it up to be with FL? Tale of the Nine-Tailed. Tragic past-lives connection? Destined with You. Burning chemistry between the leads with a romance that will both make you laugh and sob at the same time? Crash Landing on You. My Demon is basically an amalgamation of a bunch of different shows, and it does each thing just slightly worse than the show it's copying.

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Waste of KYJ and SK's chemistry and acting skills

It had potential and some moments/dialogues/ideas that stood out but the execution was downright blasphemous because I simply cannot believe someone would actually pay for a story/plot that is so paper thin it may not even exist.
Side characters except probably for Ju cheon seok were downright caricatures which is sad because those characters had potential. The chemistry and the tension between the leads carried it until a certain point but after that...yeah.
I cannot even call it tropey because that would mean they have done a good job about the tropes because they had the right leads who could have done justice to a solid, tight storyline with tropes done right. They tried to do many different themes and ended up a mess. A shame honestly.

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Doesn't deliver on the deal

The best of the series is that Song Kang plays the part of an ethereal being (Gu Won) who can convince people in desperation to sign demon's bargain very well and handles both the emotional and humorous parts of the story compellingly and delightfully, whereas his co-lead Kim You Jung does not play a convincing 28 to 32 year old age range CEO (Do Hee) at any point in the story, with no gravitas, charisma, or authoritative aura. She is pretty miscast, the role would have been better served by an actor that's actually around that age or can play up that age. The writing for Do Hee and the show as a whole is not that much better, with her being morally repelled on things based on the needs of the writer in that moment rather than as anything that she particularly stands for consistently or confronts to change her mind. Part of the reason for this is probably because the show itself doesn't want to examine too closely how Gu Won enables a lot of evil doing in the span of a decade in exchange for taking the soul as well as damning desperate kind people to hell. It seems that he may have a choice, but that's a dangling plot thread never fully addressed. There's so many and I'll touch on some in a bit. Both the actress and writing does better for Wolshim, which would have made sense if she could have brought in a bit more of that character's strength of will into her modern day incarnation being as they are the same soul, but it doesn't happen.

There is also a lack of chemistry between Gu Won and Do Hee, which could be overcome if the characters had connection, but the writing doesn't develop that nor does it define the rules of it's supernatural world and it's stakes very well. People go to hell, but what that entails isn't explained. What was Gu Won's experience of hell? How did fisherman guy get out to reincarnate to make the same deal again and how did he become Gu Won's butler? Is the sentence in hell temporary or does it depend on the crime? Do people of all faiths go to the same hell? Or does it only apply to people in the Catholic faith? The reasoning between how the transfer of Gu Won's power to and from Do Hee occurred is also ill defined and then also did nothing with the premise of him dealing with life without his powers. It's merely an inconvenience as he still has access to it through Do Hee and he's also very financially secure with his art foundation where he also lives and also really just so the character would hold hands, but nothing more that affects Gu Won on a deeper level.

At this point, every kdrama has a serial killer plot and so does this one. I thought the ambiguity between the actual mastermind being son Do Kyung or the father Seok Min at first to be a good way to keep the sense of mystery, but they reveal who it was way too soon and Seok Min is just the stock over the top villain afterwards. It was weird how at the end of the drama they show a scene remembered by the mom Se Ra about Do Kyung and her like they were a relationship the show cared about all along, but they weren't. There were extremely extraneous sub plots that did nothing to service the story as well like the sister Soo An being extremely jealous and obsessed with Do Hee and the entire mafia that is obsessed with Gu Won. The weren't even useful in finding the other killer's identity as the police did that just fine. Ga Young's obsession with Gu Won was also really annoying more than anything. There is also nothing to build on her current relationship with Gu Won aside from being his actual stalker that even the show called out. They aren't even shown as friends but at the end it's supposed to be touching that he says goodbye to her. She tried to get his wife to take poison pills. If all these subplots weren't used to develop or parallel the main characters as people then everything is so mind numbingly surface level and wasted screentime and storytelling potential.

The ending is so frustratingly lazy. There is zero reason for Do Hee to block the shots for Gu Won. The show didn't even try to make it work by making them magic bullets that can kill a demon or something. It's just something to force Gu Won to make a decision that causes his combustion. The way he's brought back is also extremely anti-climactic. So it was because he won a deal with God, but why didn't that just immediately kick in? Why three years? Why did god have the wait three years? Everything is so arbitrary and meaningless. I initially had a slightly higher rating for this drama, but the more I think about it, the worse it really is. To end on a positive, there is one storyline that the drama actually did good on and it is Chun Sook, Do Hee's adoptive mother. The actress played the conflicting love and guilt toward Do Hee so well and the mystery of what she did had a full circle connection back to Gu Won. Her memory of seeing Gu Won collect on Do Hee's dad's deal was a great reveal. The timing of withholding and revealing this information was good too. She felt like a full person despite the shorter amount of screen time compared to the other characters. Again potential for the drama to be better is always there, but they always kept going in the opposite direction.

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light & entertaining but lacklustre finish

Song Kang, the "Netflix King" for having so many shows exclusively on this network, shows his comic talents in this story of a demon, Jeoung GuWon, who takes advantage of despair & suffering to make deals with humans willing to trade their souls for relief. A master in the human world who is used to having absolute power, he meets by chance Do Do Hee, a workaholic CEO who proves to be his nemesis. DDH is played by Kim Yoo Jung (a veteran at age 24) who gives her character a refreshing hard nosed edge, with enough depth to reveal a lost & vulnerable soul within without turning her into a caricature.

This show is infused with funny moments in spite of its very dark undertones. And although all the usual romance tropes are in play, somehow they're not annoying when you have SK to look at, & whose dramatic acting is actually decent. The storyline follows a largely predictable path but with smaller twists that aren't so obvious & keep things interesting. There's also the past lifetimes theme which is very popular in fantasy genres, showing how demons are born from pain & resentment, & tying the lead characters together over centuries. And, of course, no demon is complete without a demon hunter, but the character who I thought would be that, didn't become that. Questions of who or what constitutes evilness, whether the devil is in humanity or exists separately, are ever present. And, God is a woman, also of course, & one whom this demon serves.

In spite of the questions, Demon is not a deeply philosophical journey, but is entertaining and very binge-able until the rather lacklustre final episodes where innocents are redeemed & bad guys get their due.

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Promising start, boring second half

✅Impressive start, the premise was promising, like a demon in contract marriage + losses his powers. I was intrigued how they'll develop the story, and had me hooked till Ep8.

✅ Song Kang being a hot oppa and showing his abs and couple having beautiful visuals.

❌ My boy is a demon, who has lived on this planet for hundreds of years, but he still has no clue about anything and acts like a pathetic lover boy ;/

❌The plot is lackluster with no interesting developments or engaging storyline in the second half of the show. It's extremely predictable.

❌Too much talk, not enough action. For a fantasy drama, I wanted more magic, but it was disappointing that they didn’t use it to its full potential. Unsatisfactory feeling.

❌ There was way too much focus on side stories. They weren't bad, but they were clearly just filler to stretch the show to 16 episodes. It could've easily been wrapped up in 12.

❌I wish the old lady was more involved in the story, her character was interesting and I thought she'll play out a huge part in the story but she didn't 😀 hmmmmm

And don't even get me started on the FL, girly your husband is a demon, what do you expect him to be???? A angel??? 🤣🤣

Overall, I felt this was a mix version of SWDBS and The globin lmaooo with lazyy writing, it had so much potential but route was too cliche and ended up becoming too predictable for my taste🤧

5.2/10

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Kim You Jung, estou obcecada por você

Estou encantada com a atriz Kim You Jung, uma grata surpresa conhecer ela através desse trabalho!!! Tenho que admitir que o que realmente prendeu minha atenção inicialmente a esse dorama foi a química dos protagonistas! Minha única ressalva sobre a história é que enrolaram demais no desenrolar do plot e deixaram de investir no desenvolvimento de personagens secundários!

No quesito atuação, tenho que bater palmas para a Kim You Jung, o ator que fez o Do Gyeong e o Seok min. Para mim, as cenas mais emblemáticas conta com a participação deles

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