Pleochroism

Oh boy, this might end up being more of a long rant than a review. I’ve had a lot of thoughts over the run of the series, and most of them aren’t very favorable.

Some background: I started watching this drama without reading the source material first. I read the manhwa between epsiode 6 and epsiode 7 airing because I was really curious about what everyone was saying about changes made to the plot and characters. I really enjoyed the first 3 episodes, but hated episode 4, and for me that was where the problems started that tanked the whole series for me.

So I’ll start with the few things I did like.

I liked the overall production value of the series. It was clear that it had a decent budget, the sets - like the characters bedrooms - were well done, the cinematography was generally nice, and the animated title sequence was lovely. I wasn’t crazy about the way the drama was edited, but other than that, the production value was quite high.

I liked the casting of Heesu. I think that Ahn Ji Ho portrayed the character very well. I had some minor issues with acting from other characters, but overall the acting was better than average.

I liked Heesu’s noonas. They were funny and they all had a fun family dynamic.

I liked Ji Yu and Seung Won’s friendship. And I liked that Seung Won’s moms were kept in the adaptation, even if I also felt that their family story was underutilized.

As previously mentioned, I liked the first few episodes and had high hopes for the series as a whole up until it became clear that it wouldn’t be what I expected.

Now for the many things I didn’t like.

First of all, I felt like this drama was way too long for what they did with the extra time. A KBL drama with 10 45-minute episodes is a rarity, which was an exciting prospect at first. But the writers did not use that time well.

There were far too many extraneous subplots that had little substance to them.

I counted 7 side storylines:

Chan young and his tennis playing
Ji Yu secretly releasing music as “Summer”
Chan Young and Ji Yu’s relationship
Heesu’s sisters and their various relationship drama
Ho Sik and his knitter crush
“Carrot” and the counseling message board
The text blackmailer

Here’s the problem: almost all of these storylines were underdeveloped and unsatisfying as written on the show. Overall, the writing for the subplots on this series was inconsistent and poorly integrated into the main plot.

Either they were given outsized importance and then ended abruptly (the blackmailer and “carrot”). Or they were entirely composed of disjointed scenes seemingly randomly placed throughout the run of the series (Heesu’s sisters’ relationships, Ho Sik and his crush). Or they were completely written as plot devices to impel action from other characters but never given any intrinsic emotional resonance (“Summer”). Or they were simply written in a way that was cliche and simplistic, giving viewers no real reason to care (Ji Yu/Chan Young and the tennis plot).

There was just way too much going on and no reason that it had to be that way. If they had just expanded on a couple of these storylines instead of trying to do all of them, the pacing could have been much better and the project as a whole would have felt more successful. But instead they just kept throwing things at us without giving us any reason to care, which in turn made all of these scenes feel like draggy bits of filler instead of important pieces of the story.

So in the end, we get all of these unsatisfying threads of storylines pulling us in 7 different directions away from what should have been the main plot of the drama - Heesu and Seung Won’s developing attraction and relationship.

Which, for me, caused issues with that main relationship plot too. Because it dragged on and on with very little progress to the point that I was no longer feeling the chemistry between Heesu and Seung Won in the last few episodes. That chemistry only started to re-emerge at the very end of the series. Overall it didn’t feel like a “slow burn” to me. More like a sad fizzle.

In a “slow burn” I expect the romantic tension to build as the characters get to know each other. In episode 5, we got a good taste of what a good slow burn *could have* felt like. Heesu and Seung Won genuinely became closer and learned more about each other in ways that were unrelated to Heesu trying to hook Seung Won and Ji Yu up. They should have been consistently be having scenes like that where they share more about themselves and their lives. Ideally, they should be talking about their passions, goals and worries with each other. They should be shown taking care of each other in small ways and should be experiencing moments of intensity that show that they’re passionate about each other - whether those are heart fluttering moments or moments of pure frustration or anger.

I’m not saying that there was none of that in this drama, but it wasn’t at all consistent. Instead we got a collection of stilted scenes between them that were frequently cut off to switch gears to one of the many random, unsatisfying subplots.

I think the worst of these subplots were Chan Young and Ji Yu’s relationship, Chan Young’s tennis story, as Ji Yu’s “Summer” story.

The problem with the Chan Young/Ji Yu pairing is that it’s completely superficial. We don’t dive into what they like about each other and they aren’t shown having any meaningful conversations.

Chan Young is shown to be passionate about tennis despite his dad not wanting him to pursue it. But the problem is that we never actually hear him talk about it except in short scenes with coaches. It feels poorly integrated into the drama because despite the fact that Ji Yu is the only other important character who knows and supports what he’s doing, he doesn’t even have deep conversations with her about what drives his passion, what his goals are, or about the difficulties with his family. That kind of depth would bring so much more intrigue to the story and would also support the romantic development between him and Ji Yu.

Similarly, Ji Yu never talks at all about what’s driving her to make music. How did she get started singing and songwriting? How does she feel about it? When and why did she start her YouTube channel? What are her goals? We barely ever touch any of this. She goes to the audition in episode 8, but we aren’t really told anything about it. What is it for? Why does she want to do it? What is she hoping to accomplish? She doesn’t discuss these things with anyone, and again, Chan Young is seemingly the primary person in her life who knows and supports her, but they never talk about these things at all except through short texts.

That’s why these storylines feel so bland, superficial, and poorly integrated. Because we’re being told that these are the things these characters are passionate about, but the way it’s shown simply isn’t convincing.

And yet Chan Young’s dull tennis playing is treated as one of the main storylines of the show that appears in almost every episode. Ji Yu’s “Summer” storyline is also given inflated importance despite it feeling like a pure plot device that only exists to compel action from other characters.

Even worse is the way Chan Young’s character was written in general. He’s just *so selfish.* He admits that he knows nothing about his best friend of several years, but then blames Heesu for that? He publicly shames his friends for silly reasons (Heesu not telling him who he likes, Seung Won “liking” Ji Yu) but doesn’t even seem to care enough to ask questions about their lives. And then his reaction to Heesu’s confession is to run away, then blame Heesu for the fact that he ran away? And Heesu is forced into apologizing while Chan Young never apologized?? Infuriating.

They completely ruined his characterization from the manhwa. But frankly, you don’t even need to read the manhwa to see that he’s a bad friend in this series.

It was how his character behaved (and how the writers seemed to give him an inflated sense of importance despite never giving us a good reason to care about him) that brought his drama down from a mediocre 5.5 to an abysmal 3.5 for me.

I was also just generally unhappy with how many creative decisions seemed to be made with the goal of appeasing straight viewers. From the addition of the straight couple that didn’t exist in the manhwa, to the way Heesu and Chan Young’s friendship was changed, to the way that Heesu’s coming out was treated in general. It just didn’t connect for me, and I feel like that’s because I, as a queer person, was not the intended audience.

So yeah…I’ll leave it there. I kept watching this drama to the end because I still had hopes of it improving, but those hopes gradually shrunk from episodes 7 through 10. At this point I’m just glad it’s over and now I’m going to rewatch a decent KBL to cleanse my brain of this.