Minalapinou

Great performance by Kim Tae Ri, Nam Joo Hyuk was my dream boyfriend, lovely directing, but I'll never forgive the show for being such a huge bait and switch. Maybe I'm wrong but I have a theory, and suspect that two ideas were at war for the script : someone wanted this to be a sublte queer romance paying hommage to yuri stories of the 70's with rival lesbians fencing, and someone else wanted this to be a straight romance spanning decades and crises paying hommage to The Way We Were and the Before Sunset/Sunrise/Midnight trilogy. I think both ideas were good, but obviously doing them at the same time is a huge challenge and 2521 is no Rose of Versailles, so as a result the story ends up somewhere in the middle, cutting both stories short. The ending is also a big middle finger to those of us who were invested in Baek Yi Jin's story arc as he ends up after so many hardships and heartbreaks being reduced to a side-note and memories. You can also make a case of the show trying to be : a "Reply" like romance that kept us guessing about the future (that went nowhere), a social commentary on the 90's crisis and the evolution of sports and journalism, a friendship is magic tale, a family drama...and in the end it all crashed with a tepid conclusion, leaving me wondering what was the point. I still adore the Na Hee Do/Beak Yi Jin high school friendship and romance but I can't ignore how the drama *completely* wasted the potential of their adult relationship (I didn't even need them to end up together, I just needed their adult story to make sense !).