Minalapinou

I went in without much expectations, and liked it a lot at first. Unlike Jung So Min's middling Love Next Door, it wasn't trying to be clever or deep, it was using pretty much all the Kdrama romance tricks we know and love (drunk meetcute, rich heir whose family got killed in a crash, childhood crush, fake relationship that turns real, a truckload of coïncidences, etc. etc.), and as a result since they had the cutest cast ever, it worked. It was basically the So Min and Woo Shik show. I found myself looking forward to the next episodes, but at some point the writing started to bother me beyond reasonable measure. First, the (many) villains were just a bunch of lazy carricatures, led by a two-faced psychopath, because apparently we can't have a Kdrama RomCom without one these days. Second, when I watch a fake marriage drama, I expect it to milk it a bit more by having our MC forced to pretend in public, but here, with the usurpation of her husband's identity, they wrote themselves into a corner by having their character forced to hide instead, which meant that the result was a very weird mix between the fake wedding trope and the secret affair one. I hoped the secondary couple would give me something else to look forward to, but I lost it at the abysmal boob-CPR scene (maybe I'm alone in this but I just hated how that scene was shot and written) and rage-quit soon after when the asshole ex resurfaced. I guess I'll just rewatch Because This is My First Life for the third time. It's a shame because at first it made me think of ye olde light romances like Full House (adorable down on her luck heroïne who is scammed and homeless, fake marriage with a grumpy rich man to keep the house) and I was so in.