ItsAMe

From what I understood, each time the game gets restarted, the students's memories gets erased or locked or whatever. Since the parents mentioned that FL had managed to unlock her memories, the memories obviously do not get removed completely. The game restarts with the same students.

"This time" seems to have been different compared to the previous rounds. Nobody knows exactly why that happened.

We don't know how fast the game time elapses compared to the "real world" time. Since the students still look normal (nice clothes, nice hair, well fed), they cannot have been in that room for longer than a couple of hours.

Are you sure about the "it happened a hundred times"? Unless I inadvertendly skipped the part, the parents said that there had been like 12 rounds with the same class. What we saw in the game was fiction.

I didn't mean to say that you should not criticise the writer but I'm usually against telling people to stop what they are doping, especially if I don't pay for the production. I paid for the result (by watching it on Viki), so I criticise the result only.

Obviously, people thought this drama was worth their money, so they gave people money to make this drama as it is. Somebody thought that the writer was good for this job. The script wasn't a surprise attack on the production team. There were people who read it and gave their ok. We don't know who those people were, and how much they edited the script themselves.

I think you overestimate a writer's power. The writer is basically a replaceable nobody. One of many. As a nobody myself, a nobody who is making a living by writing mediocre stories, I can tell you that we are very happy and lucky to get commissions that pay well. Most of the time, we cannot afford to say no because if the people who pay us find us too exhausting or feel that we go against their "great ideas", they'll simply replace us. We need a constant stream of output to remain relevant because people will quickly forget us. And once people forget us, our career usually ends because the most difficult part is to become relevant. Once you are somewhat relevant, you just have to keep working to stay relevant.

Long story short: The result does not necessarily reflect a writer's actual skills. If the writer is a nobody, it is very likely that quite a few people had a say in the product, and too many cooks often spoil the broth.

The writer seems to be so irrelevant that he wasn't even mentioned in the description here. ;)

Thank you. :)

I find most art boring, uninteresting, stupid, and so on. If everybody demanded that artists should stop producing art, there would not be any art at all.

Coincidentally, I'm working in the entertaining industry (not film industry, though), and I know looooots of writers who write like little children, who have never heard of logic, and who are generally not the brightest bulbs in the box. However, you would be surprised if you knew how many fans some of them have. And you would be even more surprised if you knew that many people are in fact looking for light entertainment. Those "bad writers" satisfy a demand.

Yes, there are better writers, better actors, and better everything. The question is: Are you able to win them over for your project? The answer is usually "no" because those "better people" are often involved in "better projects" with a significantly higher budget. The majority of dramas are rather low budget.

I think we can call this drama badly written without telling the writer to stop writing. If we don't appreciate somebody's work, we can simply ignore it because nobody forces us to watch dramas, and there are thousands of alternatives anyway.

By the way, I still think this drama is mediocre, not entirely bad. If you want to see a worse drama, try "Sponsor".

Oh, I see. I focussed too much on the video instead of Se-eun's tragedy. I almost forgot about her, which actually proves your point. Yes, you are absolutely right. The writers should have made it clearer how Se-eun suffered, so we have at least a clue why the parents felt they needed to kidnap everybody instead of the culprits only. :/

I've never seen any explicite sex scenes in K-dramas, only in K-movies. Also, it would have been inappropriate to show something more explicite because the characters (not necessarily the actors) are very likely supposed to be minors. Maybe the deepfake wasn't actual porn but just a slutty tiktok dance. In my opinion, it doesn't matter what it was exactly. Since the pupils sent the video around, it could not have been some "boring stuff" because nobody would have cared. We can safely assume that it was something with a lot of naked skin.

The "interesting" aspect in "Taxi Driver" was that the boyfriend betrayed FL's sister's confidence in one of the worst ways possible.

I agree with you, though. The ending felt rushed because the backstory wasn't written/explained well. To be honest, I don't care much about the suicide part because the explanation was sufficient for me. I know people who tried to kill themselves for the most stupid reasons, so I don't question much in this respect. I'm more interested how on earth the parents felt it was a good idea to punish everybody. Their brief explanation makes no sense to me. Since their explanation was presented as "complete", it didn't even invite us to come up with our own theories.

As a programmer myself, I can ensure you that we are not robots. Being able to grasp abstract logic and to develop an algorithm, does not mean that we are rational in every aspect of our lives. Most of us want to feel validated by our peers. Or did you mean to say that only dumb people kill themselves?

Fat and ugly people are not oppressed either if somebody tells them the truth. However, being constantly reminded of obvious and undesireable facts is still hurtful, especially for teenagers who don't agree that they are fine as long as mommy and daddy love their chubby angel.

Almost nobody would say they didn't care about deepfake porns created by other people without their permission because they knew those were fakes. You never know when those videos will pop up. If they popped up in the worst moment, who would believe you that they are fake? When will people stop wondering how you look naked whenever they see you? And who else will approach you, maybe even follow you home thinking that you were "available"?

For vulnerable teenagers, these questions can be fairly torturing. And who knows what else happened to Se-eun.

I found the suicide plausible. However, it made no sense to me that the parents also punish their daughter's best friend by using their daughter's game.

Since we don't know what happens "outside", we don't know if the kidnapping part is a plot hole. The parents must be extremely rich to be able to have and run such a superior hardware. They are certainly able to kidnap and hide a bunch of sedated teenagers. We also don't know how fast the simulation/game is. 12 iterations does not automatically mean that the teenagers have been there for several weeks.

The suicide makes sense, in my opinion. Do you really think that a girl wouldn't feel ashamed in an open-minded Western country if a (fake) porn video of her existed? Teenagers have killed themselves for less.

Regarding the ending, I completely agree with you. The parent's explanation makes no sense, especially not, since they also torture their daughter's best friend and other innocent people. And they even use their daughter's work to torture their daughter's best friend.

Didn't the parents wonder in the last episode why the girl became their daughter?

And that makes the whole revenge even more ridiculous. The parents claimed they were doing that for their daughter but if you are right, her parents are as bad as the bullies because they use their daughter's work to torture innocent people, especially her daughter's best friend.

I had the same questions, except for 3).

Since the the game was hyper realistic and ran smoothly, the parents obviously use superior hardware. Se-eun could be some AI character. The parents know their daughter and could have fed the AI model with the relevant data.

You are revealing a lot of details. Would you mind editing your post and enabling the "spoiler"?

Next time I see a mediocre picture, I'll humbly tell the artist to never draw anything again. Sounds ridiculous? If so, why would anyone demand that somebody who wrote a mediocre drama should never write any drama again?

Despite the interesting topic, this drama was rather underwhelming. Unlike the mafia and the bullies, the civilians were fairly boring. Important roles such as the doctor and the police were not fleshed out. Those characters became important for like 30 seconds: "ABC died. Btw, did we mention he was the doctor and revived EFG? And XYZ was the police, and she's dead now, too."

Also, FL was analysing the situation the whole time, especially the corpses. I expected her to narrow down at least one of the mafia guys this way but she only found one culprit with the most obvious evidence: a shoe print. Funnily, the mafia didn't try to kill her first despite her being the most likely one to identify one of them.

The mafia were surprisingly cold blooded. While I am willing to believe that there is one psycho killer among them, I find it rather baffling that the other mafia members didn't mind killing directly or indirectly either.

The "ghost story" and the ending were quite interesting but the drama instantly became ridiculous when the parents even blamed their daughter's best friend. That whole revenge makes little sense.

Lots of followers of the famous religion of peace are known not to respect any different opinions on their idol(s). We'll very likely see their lovely behaviour in a couple of days again. Since they are followers of an established religion, we don't call them mentally ill, though. In other contexts, we do call people showing the same behaviour mentally ill. Examples would be people who worship a specific actor, browse the internet, and insult people who don't agree that their idol is not perfect. Fortunately, we are still anonymous on the internet and won't meet in real life.

I don't care about Cha Eun-woo's popularity. If you like him, that's good for you. Nobody told you not to like him.

As I wrote in another comment, I assume that you are either a child or somebody whose native tongue is not English. If you are an adult native speaker, I would recommend to read my initial comment again, especially the part about the pretending.

Here is a little help for you:
"Some people just want to pretend that this wasn't true."
=> "Some people" != all fans
=> "this" == Cha Eun-woo is mainly casted because of his good looks.

If you feel you were among those "some people", there is a proverb: "The lady doth protest too much, methinks". If you don't count yourself among those "some people", let's agree that our discussion was a misunderstanding.

Since I'm a nice person, I assume that your native tongue is not English, or that you are a minor who's not that educated yet as other people. If you are a native speaker and a grown-up, you would have noticed that I didn't write that all fans pretend that Cha Eun-woo had talents. He does have talents. However, I've seen plenty of self-proclaimed fans, especially toxic fans, who pretend that Cha Eun-woo got casted in dramas like this because he was the most talented actor out there, not because he's got the perfect look for roles like these. Everybody who's not a child is able to see that his acting skills are rather limited. People who acknowledge his limited acting skills are not necessarily hating him, and we are not necessarily jealous. We would not waste our precious time watching dramas with him in a role if we hated him. If all you see is either hate or love for Cha Eun-woo, you are hopefully a child because, for adults, this behaviour would be ridiculous.

@amanu35, Nobody wants to steal Cha Eun-woo's role. Cha Eun-woo is successful without you insulting people on the internet. And he certainly does not care about you who makes him look bad. Or maybe he does because people like you make him look bad and feel bad, which not only affects his mental health but also his career. Do you want to make him known for his talents or for having a toxic fandom? If it's the latter, please continue.

@amanu35, Believe me or not, there are people out there who don't care about so-called idols and who watch dramas to get entertained, not to drool over some person. I'm not one of you creepy stalkers who claim to be fans, who harass their idols until the idols become suicidal, and who insult other people on the internet who dare to express an opinion which is not shared by the so-called fans. I will stop acting bitter and jealous if you stop to be a creepy stalker who believes that some idol cares about random people's opinion. Let's make this world a better place. :)

Why do you feel that he's bad in romcoms? From what I see, romcoms are mainly about good looking people looking good. Cha Eun-woo does a pretty good job at looking good. Say what you want about his admittedly limited acting skills but he did a great job in the kissing scenes.