Who cares

This drama is being praised for being intense, painful, emotional, mysterious, layered, tragic, and everything else. And yes, it has all those elements. It spans childhood, college, their thirties, even later when she is diagnosed with Cancer. It tries to show friendship, love, hatred, jealousy, loneliness, and fate.

But honestly, I feel like it was deliberately made difficult.

The story follows Eun Jung and Sang Yeon from school days to adulthood. We are told they are close, almost inseparable. We are told theirs is a deep and complicated friendship. But I never really saw the love. I saw tension. I saw insecurity. I saw jealousy. I saw avoidance. But I did not feel warmth.

Sang Yeon keeps saying she lived her whole life alone. She says she had no one. But Eun Jung was always there. From childhood to her thirties, Eun Jung stayed. She trusted her. She chose her again and again. I never felt that Eun Jung kept Sang Yeon around out of pity or sympathy. It felt genuine. So when Sang Yeon says she was always alone, I genuinely could not understand it. If your friend is right there for you the entire time, how are you completely alone?

What I felt that, what she blame & suffer everyone around her for the misery in her life when she herself never tried to make her life better.

Maybe loneliness is emotional. Maybe she felt unseen. But the show never explains it properly. It just keeps repeating that she was alone without showing us why.

Now coming to the love triangle.

From the beginning, Sang Yeon knew that the person she was chatting with online was Eun Jung’s boyfriend, Kim Sang Hak. When Eun Jung indirectly asked her if she liked someone, Sang Yeon lied. Later when she was asked clearly if she liked Kim Sang Hak, she still denied it. That was my first red flag.

Feelings are not wrong. You cannot control them. But you can control your actions.

As a friend, if my friend even has a little interest in someone, that person is automatically off limits. I cannot even imagine looking at them romantically. So watching Sang Yeon stay close to Kim Sang Hak, hide the truth, and slowly get emotionally involved felt wrong. It felt like she did come in between.

And I will not blame only her. Kim Sang Hak was equally wrong.

He hid things. He did not communicate properly. Even if Eun Jung needed space or had her own emotional walls, he could have handled things better. Instead, he kept things vague. His “my heart swayed” moment was so fucking ick to me. It was confusing and frustrating. You cannot be in a relationship and say you are unsure whether it is Eun Jung or Sang Yeon. That is emotional confusion that hurts everyone.

Even later in their thirties, he keeps pursuing. And I am honestly glad Eun Jung did not go back to him. That was one of the best decisions in the show.

But I kinda wish Run Jung would've dated the guys at her workplace who liked her.

What frustrates me is how everything is romanticized. The lying. The hiding. The emotional interference. The constant presence in someone else’s relationship. It is framed as tragic and painful. But a lot of it could have been avoided if Sang Yeon had just been honest from the beginning and stepped back.

And then comes the emotional climax. If a lead character is going to die, I am supposed to feel something. Sympathy. Empathy. Heartbreak. But I felt empty. I did not feel devastated. Because throughout the story, it felt like Sang Yeon created so much of the emotional chaos and never fully owned it.

She keeps saying she was alone because her mother was distant and her brother died. I understand trauma shapes people. But that does not erase the fact that Eun Jung was there. She stayed. She never abandoned her. So I genuinely could not grasp why Sang Yeon kept insisting she had no one.

Pain alone does not make a character tragic. I need to understand them. And here, I just felt disconnected.
Now coming to the acting.

Kim Go Eun who played Eun Jung was honestly top notch. I understood her emotions so clearly. She carried the emotional weight of the story beautifully.

Park Ji Hyun as Sang Yeon did an incredible job acting. She is so convincing that you genuinely start to hate the character. That shows how good she is. But I really hope she stops getting typecast into these roles where she plays the other woman who disrupts relationships. She deserves more variety.

The actor who played Kim Sang Hak was decent. I was not very attached to his character. The male lead was fine, nothing overpowering.

One of the things I was genuinely invested in was his brother’s story. Not just a few scattered moments thrown in for impact, but his entire freaking story. I wanted depth. I wanted context. I wanted to understand him beyond the surface-level crumbs we were given. They could’ve given us so much more, and I honestly think they should have. I was way too curious about him for it to end the way it did. What was he thinking all this time? What was his emotional journey? What shaped his choices?

In the end, this drama wanted to be about fate and the ache of what could have been. For me, it became a story about miscommunication, blurred boundaries, and emotional choices that could have been different.

There were poetic moments. There was sadness. But instead of feeling heartbroken, I mostly felt frustrated.

A friendship should not feel like one person saying she was alone while the other was standing right there the whole time.