The Courage to Find Happiness
IOTBNO is a character study, heavy on pathos. The premise is that the leads are broken people helping each other heal, and so the leads' mental health is central to the story. As the writer clearly wants to focus on the three leads' psyches, the weakest point in the show has the most physical action.
The characters are multi-layered and nuanced, and the actors are effective at presenting their emotions and their inner conflicts. The whole cast is top notch, but the ML (Kim Soo-hyun) and FL (Seo Yea-ji) have incendiary chemistry and the ML's autistic brother (Oh Jung-se) is a fleshed-out human.
The FL writes macabre children's fairy tales, which are used to frame the overall narrative, giving the series a distinctive gothic aesthetic (BTW the FL's books are available for real at Amazon). The show has enough callbacks and symbolism to keep your interest in the details.
Your opinion of the series is likely to be driven by your attitude towards the FL. The FL is arrogant and selfish, and she gets away with outrageous behavior because she is rich and pretty. The series straddles the fences with details on the FL's mental health; the sleaziest character states in the sleaziest way possible that the FL has an antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) while more reliable characters use only vague language to describe her personality. The FL does exhibit some obvious ASPD behaviors (and SYJ, perhaps unreliably, described her character in promo bits as having ASPD) but the FL also shows some empathy early on, and that capacity for empathy grows over time. We are left with a character who literally may or may not be a sociopath, and in the real world that has some consequences that go beyond the depth of this series.
Whatever the case, we are not supposed to be comfortable with the FL. That said, I consider her to be an inspiration in some ways because in spite of her (initial?) toxic behavior, the FL finds the courage to find happiness and furthermore she helps the ML (whose own mental health is a wreck) and his brother develop that same courage. Whether or not they live happily ever after, they have each found a path forward, which seemed impossible at the beginning.
The characters are multi-layered and nuanced, and the actors are effective at presenting their emotions and their inner conflicts. The whole cast is top notch, but the ML (Kim Soo-hyun) and FL (Seo Yea-ji) have incendiary chemistry and the ML's autistic brother (Oh Jung-se) is a fleshed-out human.
The FL writes macabre children's fairy tales, which are used to frame the overall narrative, giving the series a distinctive gothic aesthetic (BTW the FL's books are available for real at Amazon). The show has enough callbacks and symbolism to keep your interest in the details.
Your opinion of the series is likely to be driven by your attitude towards the FL. The FL is arrogant and selfish, and she gets away with outrageous behavior because she is rich and pretty. The series straddles the fences with details on the FL's mental health; the sleaziest character states in the sleaziest way possible that the FL has an antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) while more reliable characters use only vague language to describe her personality. The FL does exhibit some obvious ASPD behaviors (and SYJ, perhaps unreliably, described her character in promo bits as having ASPD) but the FL also shows some empathy early on, and that capacity for empathy grows over time. We are left with a character who literally may or may not be a sociopath, and in the real world that has some consequences that go beyond the depth of this series.
Whatever the case, we are not supposed to be comfortable with the FL. That said, I consider her to be an inspiration in some ways because in spite of her (initial?) toxic behavior, the FL finds the courage to find happiness and furthermore she helps the ML (whose own mental health is a wreck) and his brother develop that same courage. Whether or not they live happily ever after, they have each found a path forward, which seemed impossible at the beginning.
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