You and Everything Else

When love and jealousy collide

You and Everything Else captured the messy beauty of love from warmth to hurt and betrayal. It also shows how relationships are not as perfect or effortless. It dives into the push and pull of emotions, showing how love can transform into resentment and how jealousy and insecurities has the power to break even the strongest bonds.

The acting was raw, the chemistry was intense and the story might seem exaggerated but yet it could happen in real life. I found myself thinking… If it was me, I don’t think I could ever forgive a friend for that kind of betrayal. Yet, Ryu Eun Jung’s decision to stay by her side showed a kind of bravery I admired and struggled to understand.

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A drama that challenges your morals

This drama has destroyed me! There are so many dark themes that will leave you devastated.
This drama is a story about the love-hate relationship between two best friends who practically grew up together. It’s also about being human, making mistakes, forgiving, and the importance of self-love or self-hatred.

What really impressed me about this drama was how we as an audience felt the exact same things as one of the main leads Ryu Eun-jung. We see the story of the two girls becoming friends and growing up together in 4 parts of the drama:

1. Their childhood in elementary / junior high school. She loves her friend Cheon Sang-yeon first, then at school she wants to hurt her, then they become friends, E.J. also loves S.Y.’s family members (mom and brother). S.Y. becomes like a second family to her. S.Y. however develops jealousy and hatred towards E.J. during these years because she gets all the attention from her family members that she rarely gets but craves. They fight over sth again but rekindle when S.Y. runs away from home and hides in E.J.’s house. She starts feeling warm motherly love from E.J.’s mom. The scene in which she eats her noodles and cries into her bowl broke my heart. These childhood scenes were so important to further try to understand S.Y.’s behaviour.
Then, her brother dies and the only person who is really there for her is E.J. The latter starts feeling pity for S.Y. which adds to their already complicated relationship of seeing each other as rivals (in E.J. eyes S.Y. has everything she wants aka money, wealth and a big house, and in S.Y.’s eyes E.J. has everything she wants aka a loving mother amd people in general loving her).

2. part is a fast forward to uni life, E.J. is at uni, happily studying and dating a guy with the same name as her first love aka S.Y.’s brother who died. Soon S.Y. also joins the uni, as we later find out not because of E.J. but because of her secret crush on E.J.’s boyfriend that she has had for many years when they met in a chatroom. Seeing how again E.J. has the person that S.Y. is so desperately craving for, leads to her eventually trying to manipulate Kim Sanghak (the boyfriend) into helping her while keeping it secret from E.J. As viewers, we see whats happening and although we feel sad and pity for S.Y. because she does want to find out about her brother by using S.H. we also do notice that she is using her brother as an excuse to get closer to S.H. and create a drift between E.J. and S.H. sth that a best friend should not be doing.
In the end, it comes to a huge showdown of E.J. breaking up with S.H. because of S.Y. and a huge fight between the girls when S.Y. refuses to accept the apartment money from E.J. because of her pride. A pride that eventually might be the reason for her loneliness and for pushing people away. In that scene I felt really mad at S.Y. because her mother was dying too and she could have used the help from E.J. since she was also like someone from the family. But probably S.Y. did it on purpose because she really did NOT want E.J. to be part of her family under any means. She didn’t even tell E.J. that her mom was gonna die which made me even madder.

Then the 3rd part of the show is them as adults, now working in the film industry. The scenes here really made me the angriest about S.Y. She has become totally spiteful and emotionless after her mother’s death. She shows up at E.J.’s office as a co-producer and we also see Kim Sanghak joining. He still has feelings for E.J. and S.Y. still has feelings for S.H. or she is more like obsessed with him in an unhealthy way. We see her confessing her love to him but he of course denies her. She breaks down and ends up getting drunk at some point, when she pleads E.J. to not date S.H. because she loves him but can’t have him so she doesn’t want her to have him either. That scene just blew my mind!!!! And E.J. did tell him that she can’t date him again, just for S.Y. because I do feel that she was actually thinking about rekindling that love. But her pity for S.Y. was so inherently deep, a feeling she had to live with all her life since her childhood. But then, what does S.Y. do??? She steals E.J.’s project and her director and founds her own company because she wants to see E.J. destroyed just like she is 🤯🤯🤯 She can’t live with the fact that she is fine… I was so shocked and hated her as much as E.J. did.

The last part of the show is the current situation of S.Y. coming back into E.J.’s life. She has terminal cancer and wants to end her own life in switzerland and asks E.J. to help her and accompany her to the facility in Switzerland.

This last part of the drama was the hardest to watch. Again, as viewers we do feel pity for S.Y. but we also remember what she did to E.J. so we can understand why she acts so dismissive towards her. This drama challenged my way of thinking in many ways: Is pity enough to love someone? No, it isn’t. The love between the two girls goes deeper than pity. It’s them seeing themselves reflected in each other. It is also envy, and striving to love oneself that they see in each other.
Can you really love someone again and again despite them hurting you? Yes, you can. Forgiving doesn’t mean forgetting. It means remembering especially well what they did to you and why they did it. Especially childhood friends have a huge significance on us, almost as if they are our family. They shape us in our formative years so loving them is almost unconditional.
The way that E.J. forgave S.Y. is almost like empathizing with a villain who had a very tough life and is now trying to become a better human being, but eventually will have to die. So this is your last chance to say goodbye.

Now for the other characters, apart from Eun-Jung, Sangyeon and Sanghak, E.J.’s mother was one of the most important characters. She was the epitome of unconditional love. She saw right into S.Y.’s heart and how much she was in pain and how much she strived for love and affection. She didn’t see SY for her actions but for her pain and struggles. EJ later says “My mom thinks that not everything bad is all bad.” I think this quote says it all.

And then ofc we have SY’s mother and her importance in EJ’s life and how she showed EJ what she herself couldn’t see in her: That she is talented as well. She also helped her replace her pain over her deceased father br creating something beautiful. It seemed that SY’s mother was showing more affection to EJ than to her own daughter which added to the viewers feeling sadness and pity for SY (because EJ’s mother treated SY nicely but she also treats her daughter well). I think the relationship between SY and her mother was one of the most complicated ones. It made me really sad: How she didnt show to her daughter at first, and then how SY pushed her suffering mother away after her brother’s death and even blamed her mother for his death, how then her mother got sick and also died and SY felt regret over wasting her time with her mother on blame, pain and resentment… Her mother has always loved SY but she just wanted her to become a kind human and that’s why she was so strict with her as a child.

One of the messages of this drama might be: We are not perfect, we are human. Humans have faults and humans make mistakes even if they’re aware of those mistakes, even if they keep doing the same mistakes again and again without any effort of improving, even if they hurt others with it; we are all just humans who will have to live through a cycle of suffering endlessly…

I am sure I could write more about this drama and its characters as it was so challenging to read all the emotional struggles they were all going through. Definitely worth a watch but I could never rewatch this!

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Imbalanced resolution

One of the drama’s strengths is its ability to give depth to its characters. However, the finale leaves several arcs incomplete. Cheon Sanghak’s struggles were never fully addressed, and the reasoning behind Sang Cheon’s fault in it felt unclear. Kim Sanghak’s story was almost entirely sidelined despite his significance earlier on, as if he was abruptly erased from the narrative. This creates a sense of imbalance in the storytelling.

The focus on Cheon’s illness overshadowed other character journeys. While Cheon’s ending felt emotionally complete, others, especially Ryu, Cheon Sanghak, and Kim Sanghak , were left without resolution. This makes the finale feel rushed and incomplete, as though important arcs were sacrificed for emotional weight rather than balanced closure.

Ultimately, the drama succeeds in emotional impact but falls short in delivering satisfying conclusions for all its main characters.

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When Narrative Disorder Masquerades as Depth

The idea is great, but not new.
We’ve already seen it to exhaustion.

Whenever a drama wants to explore “deep female friendship,”
they almost always throw in terminal illness
as the narrative glue.

The only truly remarkable part here
are the performances of Kim Bo Min and Park Seo Kyung
as the younger versions of the leads.
They deliver the real emotion, much more than the adults.

The real problem is the narrative structure.
That tendency in K-dramas to tell the story all over the place:
they start in one year,
jump back 40 years,
then 10 years forward…
and on top of that, insert another story inside a story.

If it had been told in a linear way —
childhood, youth, adulthood, and finally the blow of cancer —
the impact could have been brutal.
But they chose to fragment it.

There’s no accumulation of tension,
because they show you the consequences
before you even understand the causes.

The difference between narrative complexity and narrative disorder is clear:
this drama seems to believe that fragmenting the timeline is art,
when in reality it’s sacrificing emotion.

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Underrated Gem With Powerful Emotions and Storytelling

I’m genuinely surprised I missed this K-drama. It didn’t seem to get much attention or strong word-of-mouth, so it probably flew under my radar. But what an incredible experience it has turned out to be. The storyline is intense, the acting is powerful, and the cast delivers with such authenticity. The show starts off with a seemingly simple plot, but the direction is excellent and the storytelling flows so smoothly that it quickly becomes captivating. It carries a perfect blend of warmth, sadness, jealousy, and emotion that feels incredibly real and relatable. I would definitely recommend this to others. I’m excited to continue watching and see how the story unfolds

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I beg to differ

This drama is being praised for being intense, painful, emotional, mysterious, layered, tragic, and everything else. And yes, it has all those elements. It spans childhood, college, their thirties, even later when she is diagnosed with Cancer. It tries to show friendship, love, hatred, jealousy, loneliness, and fate.

But honestly, I feel like it was deliberately made difficult.

The story follows Eun Jung and Sang Yeon from school days to adulthood. We are told they are close, almost inseparable. We are told theirs is a deep and complicated friendship. But I never really saw the love. I saw tension. I saw insecurity. I saw jealousy. I saw avoidance. But I did not feel warmth.

Sang Yeon keeps saying she lived her whole life alone. She says she had no one. But Eun Jung was always there. From childhood to her thirties, Eun Jung stayed. She trusted her. She chose her again and again. I never felt that Eun Jung kept Sang Yeon around out of pity or sympathy. It felt genuine. So when Sang Yeon says she was always alone, I genuinely could not understand it. If your friend is right there for you the entire time, how are you completely alone?

What I felt that, what she blame & suffer everyone around her for the misery in her life when she herself never tried to make her life better.

Maybe loneliness is emotional. Maybe she felt unseen. But the show never explains it properly. It just keeps repeating that she was alone without showing us why.

Now coming to the love triangle.

From the beginning, Sang Yeon knew that the person she was chatting with online was Eun Jung’s boyfriend, Kim Sang Hak. When Eun Jung indirectly asked her if she liked someone, Sang Yeon lied. Later when she was asked clearly if she liked Kim Sang Hak, she still denied it. That was my first red flag.

Feelings are not wrong. You cannot control them. But you can control your actions.

As a friend, if my friend even has a little interest in someone, that person is automatically off limits. I cannot even imagine looking at them romantically. So watching Sang Yeon stay close to Kim Sang Hak, hide the truth, and slowly get emotionally involved felt wrong. It felt like she did come in between.

And I will not blame only her. Kim Sang Hak was equally wrong.

He hid things. He did not communicate properly. Even if Eun Jung needed space or had her own emotional walls, he could have handled things better. Instead, he kept things vague. His “my heart swayed” moment was so fucking ick to me. It was confusing and frustrating. You cannot be in a relationship and say you are unsure whether it is Eun Jung or Sang Yeon. That is emotional confusion that hurts everyone.

Even later in their thirties, he keeps pursuing. And I am honestly glad Eun Jung did not go back to him. That was one of the best decisions in the show.

But I kinda wish Run Jung would've dated the guys at her workplace who liked her.

What frustrates me is how everything is romanticized. The lying. The hiding. The emotional interference. The constant presence in someone else’s relationship. It is framed as tragic and painful. But a lot of it could have been avoided if Sang Yeon had just been honest from the beginning and stepped back.

And then comes the emotional climax. If a lead character is going to die, I am supposed to feel something. Sympathy. Empathy. Heartbreak. But I felt empty. I did not feel devastated. Because throughout the story, it felt like Sang Yeon created so much of the emotional chaos and never fully owned it.

She keeps saying she was alone because her mother was distant and her brother died. I understand trauma shapes people. But that does not erase the fact that Eun Jung was there. She stayed. She never abandoned her. So I genuinely could not grasp why Sang Yeon kept insisting she had no one.

Pain alone does not make a character tragic. I need to understand them. And here, I just felt disconnected.
Now coming to the acting.

Kim Go Eun who played Eun Jung was honestly top notch. I understood her emotions so clearly. She carried the emotional weight of the story beautifully.

Park Ji Hyun as Sang Yeon did an incredible job acting. She is so convincing that you genuinely start to hate the character. That shows how good she is. But I really hope she stops getting typecast into these roles where she plays the other woman who disrupts relationships. She deserves more variety.

The actor who played Kim Sang Hak was decent. I was not very attached to his character. The male lead was fine, nothing overpowering.

One of the things I was genuinely invested in was his brother’s story. Not just a few scattered moments thrown in for impact, but his entire freaking story. I wanted depth. I wanted context. I wanted to understand him beyond the surface-level crumbs we were given. They could’ve given us so much more, and I honestly think they should have. I was way too curious about him for it to end the way it did. What was he thinking all this time? What was his emotional journey? What shaped his choices?

In the end, this drama wanted to be about fate and the ache of what could have been. For me, it became a story about miscommunication, blurred boundaries, and emotional choices that could have been different.

There were poetic moments. There was sadness. But instead of feeling heartbroken, I mostly felt frustrated.

A friendship should not feel like one person saying she was alone while the other was standing right there the whole time.

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i can't see myself re-watching this

Before I start my rant, I want to say the acting was phenomenal. Everyone was acting like their bills depended on it. It is another drama that worked only because of the leads. If anyone else had been cast in these roles, I probably would’ve dropped it. Kim Go Eun gives one of her best performances here, while Park Ji Hyun, though getting slightly typecast, still pulls it off well. The real issue is the writing. It feels like the script was originally meant for cable, but no network wanted to pick it up, so it ended up on Netflix . This series simply isn't meant for bing-watching. The theme throughout the series is pretty gloomy and dragged out, so viewer can hardly relax. The most frustrating part for me was Cheon Sang Yeon: simply a terrible friend, yet writers somehow expected viewers to sympathize with her, despite her guilt-tripping behavior. Until her last breath, she had no character development, so I ended up feeling guilty for not feeling anything when she was dying.

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I had a hard time rating this show and I have mixed feelings.

I really liked the first half of the show where we see Eun Jung and Sang yeon deal with the aftermath of Moonee's death. I think it was a great representation of grief. You feel the emptiness and the denial through the screen. I felt the hollowness and even though I knew she passed away I still couldn't accept it. Eun Jung being reminded of Moonee when she met Kim Sang Hak. Her completely loosing it when Kim Sang Hak wasn't answering his phone when they went on the trip, thinking something really bad happened. Sang Yeon finding out more about the brother she thought she knew. Her watching the Chinese Odyssey, looking at his old film photos. Looking back at how quiet and kind she was after realizing what she was struggling with the whole time. Finding out that she was trans and that she had a life and a world that Sang Yeon never got to enter. The ever growing distance she felt with her mother, herself and the world around her. I think that was one of the strongest parts of the show. As someone who lost a sibling when I was younger it just felt reminiscent in a way.

I didn't quite like the messy love triangle, though I understand why they wanted to include it. It showed Sang yeon's ever growing bitterness but really it just felt out of place and a bit too much.

I'm not gonna talk much about Eun Jung and Sang yeon's relationship because thinking about it makes my head hurt sorry, I feel like other's have articulated their relationship much better than I can even try,

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The Frangible Line of Friendship

This drama left me rattled. Sang-yeon’s character in particular she had me swinging between pity and pure rage. She grew up feeling her mom loved her brother more, and instead of finding healing, she weaponized her grief. Whether it was guilt over her brother, jealousy of Eun-jung, or craving validation...her pain turned into manipulation.
Eun-jung, on the other hand, had already lost her dad and found comfort in Sang-yeon’s mom (her teacher at the time). That bond shaped her resilience, while Sang-yeon twisted it into a reason for envy. From then on, everything between them was a push-pull of love and rivalry.
The betrayals stacked up from stealing Eun-jung’s love, her work, even her peace of mind. Watching Sang-yeon sabotage her supposed best friend, only to later ask her to walk her to death’s door, was both gut-wrenching and infuriating. I couldn’t decide if she was selfish, pitiful or both.
But what this drama did brilliantly was show how "friendship isn’t always soft and comforting rather it can be violent, corrosive, yet impossible to sever." Even when they hated each other, Eun-jung and Sang-yeon were defined by one another. And that’s what makes the ending so devastating: reconciliation came, but only at the edge of time.
The cinematography and acting were subtle, almost restrained, making the emotional explosions hit even harder. By the finale, I was drained, angry and heartbroken all at once.

Was it beautiful? Yes. Was it frustrating? Absolutely. And maybe that’s the point: real friendships aren’t tidy. They can scar you, define you and still leave you longing for more.

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you will simultaneously hate and love this

this story genuinely confused me, angered me, and stressed me tf out BUT i had a good time. the main characters ryu eunjung and cheon sangyeon are super well fleshed out and complex, the storyline will have you pulling at your hair and reliving your worst friendship breakup but you won’t be able to stop watching, it’s like a slow motion car crash. i think if younger me watched this i wouldn’t have enjoyed it as much as adult me because i would see it in a very black and white way. when in reality it’s very hard to put these characters in a box. you will for sure have complicated feelings about every character, but you’ll love it :D

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Humanistic portrayal of the complexity of relationships

It’s customary for me to begin my reviews with “Where do I start?” but this series is quite long and is character driven so it seems more fitting now than ever to ask, how the hell do I unpack this?

First off, You and everything else, is a series where we explore all the fluctuations in the friendship between Ryu Eun Jung and Cheon Sang Yeon as they go through 4 different stages of life: Their childhood, college days, post grad/adulthood days and finally, the present day.

My favourite part of the series is their middle school to high school era. It captures the essence of who both characters are by showcasing their family dynamics, the worries that occupy their minds, the pressures they face, the things they love… The show did one of the best character development set ups I have ever seen.

Also, the acting, especially from young Ryu Eun Jung, had me absolutely floored. It’s some of the best acting I’ve seen this year, point blank! I mean, the nuance she brought to the character, the micro expressions, the mannerisms that brought life to Ryu Eun Jung… These are things that create a serious bond between the audience and the character.

This is what makes us care about Eun Jung. About her hopes, about her getting the boy, about her doing well in school. The way people are depicted through her point of view is also immensely endearing. Ms. Yoon, for example, because of Eun Jung, it’s kind of impossible not to love her. And then Cheon Sang Hak comes along and it’s impossible not to love him either.

This is where I find the writing phenomenal because during the very short span that we get to be with Sang Hak, we are as enamored by him as Ryu Eun Jung is. And when we learn of his death, we experience the sadness, we experience the shock, we understand how and why everything else in the story revolves so much around this sole event.

When the girls grow older, however, I find that the acting quality (though still incredibly polished) diminishes. I love Kim Go Eun but I do find that she almost always just acts as herself. I did have to take a point off for that.

Park Ji Hyun on the other hand surprised me. I wasn’t expecting much from her, but she carried the show on her back! The nuance I was talking about initially, and the emotion, oh boy the emotion. The times when she’s third wheeling Eun Jung and Sang Hak, the sort of pull you know she has towards Sang Hak, and then the retreating when she realises that he is not hers to have. Ugh. I love it!

The writing for me starts getting wonky when we’re introduced to the arc where Sang Yeon is looking for answers concerning her brother’s death. I don’t think that was done as tastefully as other aspects of the series BUT since this is a character driven story, I understand that we needed something to unravel Sang Yeon.

I also think that (Kim) Sang Hak’s sort of shift towards the end of their college days has me side-eyeing the writer because it’s not particularly believable to me. Not because Sang Hak is a saint, but because he is someone who has a clear set of principles. Someone with principles like him wouldn’t just say “My heart was swayed.” He is someone who is level-headed, thinks things through and cares a lot. So for him to have acted as he did has me feeling like there is some inconsistency somewhere in the writing.

One thing that I really like about this whole thing is the humanistic take on Eun Jung and Sang Yeon’s relationship and how it evolves. The toxicity of their relationship feels familiar. Like you might see in your family, with your own friends, or in stories you've heard from others. It’s red flags that don’t seem so red at first.

Not until you become more mature and realize you allowed people to walk all over you. It’s the depiction of life as it flows, where everything is not obvious all the time. It’s thinking you had made the right decision only to realize that you had been wrong. It’s thinking that you have grown stronger and wiser, only to realize the opposite to be true. This is what is real, and this is what You and Everything Else depicts so beautifully.

The last segment of the story is the part that disappointed me most because it became draggy. We were going through the same ups and downs as we had gone through previously and Sang Hak as a character became utterly useless. At that point there was really no reason to continue with the story. Everything that needed to be established, had been; Sang Yeon has issues, likes to blame everyone but herself for things that are entirely her doing, and Eun Jung has a soft spot for Sang Yeon and will keep enabling her behavior until the end of time.

Okay, I know that this is me oversimplifying their dynamic but this is the essence of it.

Didn’t really care for Sang Yeon dying and didn’t really care for Eun Jung making the final decision to accompany her to Switzerland because again that entire dynamic has being explored already.

Overall, this show was enjoyable for factors such as the acting, the initial storyline, and the characters. I think that the overall length of the show ruined the pacing of the story when we entered 2013, making it draggy, redundant, and sort of pointless to be honest.

Yeah ok, Sang Yeon dies… so what?

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crying my eyes out

the headline for this review was true for the first half of the series. i loved the story of when they were in elementery school. the friendship, followed by the jealousy, was greatly protrayed. the child actresses were really good! and then when they were in univeristy, the grief they had for Sanghak was very very emotional. 1.) when Eunjung ran away after hearing Kim Sanghak’s name, 2.) during the group trip when Kim Sanghak didn’t answer his phone and she thought he was dead, 3.) when Cheon Sangyeon saw the last photos taken by her brother for the first time, i cried a river. the emotions were very well delivered.

i enjoyed Kim Goeun’s acting when she was falling in love with Kim Sanghak, it was cute.

as for the second half, i lost interest because it was more slow-paced and what Sangyeon did to Eunjung was evil, and using the terminal illness card to ask for forgiveness was a no for me.

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