Mahyar

Throughout almost the entire series, I was mesmerized by how tangible its emotions felt. Everything was so painfully recognizable. The performances—especially Kim Go-eun’s—were unbelievably natural, to the point that I could understand both Eun-jung and Sang-yeon completely, even when I disagreed with them. The story was engaging and often surprisingly gentle, but more importantly, it felt *real*.

And then came the final episode.

It did not seem to be trying very hard to make me cry. There was no desperate attempt to force an emotional reaction, yet my tears came uncontrollably. I rarely cry while watching dramas, and I have seen similar tragic stories many times without feeling much at all. Sometimes I can even feel when a story is trying to make me pity its characters. I never felt that here. The story itself was tragic, of course, but I do not think the illness, the assisted death, or the tragedy of the circumstances was what made me cry. I was crying because, through Kim Go-eun, I felt like I was looking directly into Eun-jung’s heart.

That is what makes her performance so extraordinary. People often praise great acting by pointing to one unforgettable crying scene or one particularly powerful moment. Kim Go-eun does something much harder here. She is phenomenal in *almost every tiny moment*: a brief reaction, an embarrassed smirk, a change in her eyes, the way her throat tightens when she is trying not to cry, the smallest hesitation. I never simply *saw* Eun-jung’s emotions—I felt them. Whenever the camera returned to her face, I could almost immediately sense what was happening underneath it. Her performance was not one spectacular scene. It was fifteen episodes of microscopic, consistent, completely believable human behavior.

And Park Ji-hyun was incredible too. Sang-yeon is such a difficult character to portray because she is neither simply lovable nor simply terrible. She can be selfish, jealous, hurtful and infuriating, while at the same time being deeply attached, vulnerable and painfully human. Both actresses made it possible to understand two people who could hurt each other terribly and still remain profoundly connected.

What I love most about the series, however, is that it never turns their relationship into an idealized friendship full of unconditional loyalty, nor into a hollow relationship defined by betrayal. It is something much more difficult to write: a *real* long-term relationship. We see the very first feelings that formed between them, and then we see how those feelings change over decades. Admiration becomes jealousy. Love coexists with resentment. Attachment can produce hatred, and sometimes you can even end up hating the very thing you love—or hating the fact that you hate it.

Almost nothing happens simply because it would make the story more dramatic. Things happen because they feel like things that could actually happen between real people. That is why the relationships are so unpredictable—not because the drama constantly tries to surprise us, but because real life itself is not written around clichés.

This is also why, after finishing the finale, I initially felt disappointed. I had been waiting for some enormous final message that would tie the entire series together, and I did not get one. Some characters' futures remain unresolved. But a few hours later, I realized that this was probably exactly right. The series was never trying to construct a perfectly closed narrative. It was portraying one relationship—and only showing the parts of other people's lives that mattered to that relationship. In real life, most people do not receive a neat conclusion to every person they once knew. Some stories simply stop being part of ours.

The same thing applies to its themes. I usually prefer stories built around one central idea, but I am glad *You and Everything Else* did not force itself into having one grand message. It touches on many different things—transgender identity, assisted death, childhood experiences, the relationship between parents and children, loneliness, envy, love, resentment, forgiveness, memory and art. They do not all exist to prove the same thesis. They simply exist, the way different lessons and experiences coexist in an actual life.

The treatment of assisted death especially stayed with me. The drama does not seem interested in telling the viewer what to think. Instead, it gives space to the different emotional, moral and personal dimensions surrounding such a decision. Considering how sensitive and legally complicated the subject remains in South Korea, I thought the series handled it with remarkable restraint and care.

I also kept wondering whether the writer had drawn heavily from her own life, because some of the writing felt almost *too* specific to be purely imagined. Eun-jung being a screenwriter makes this even more interesting. There are moments where she talks about storytelling and about whether certain scenes should be removed because doing so would make the audience lose the emotional context behind a character's final reaction. Watching those scenes, I sometimes felt as though the drama was quietly commenting on its own construction—and perhaps even on the ending we were watching. I cannot say the series is autobiographical, because I found no evidence for that, but it is remarkable how deeply lived-in the writing feels.

Sang-yeon's name is another detail I kept thinking about. She explains early on that the “yeon” in her name means *swallow*, and she wants to live like one: free, wandering and unattached. But by the end, the metaphor becomes much more complicated. Sang-yeon really is like a swallow, just not quite in the way she initially thinks. She can leave places, people and parts of her life behind with extraordinary ease, but she cannot truly detach from certain people. She keeps moving, yet she always seems to have somewhere—or someone—to return to.

The scene near the ocean makes this especially clear. She realizes that she has always been the kind of person who leaves things behind and expects them to remain exactly where she left them until she comes back. That, to me, is the tragedy of her idea of freedom. Leaving does not necessarily mean letting go. In a strange way, her departures depend on the belief that what she loves will still be there when she returns. She is a wanderer, but not necessarily a person without a home. Perhaps she is someone who can leave almost anywhere precisely because, somewhere deep inside, she always believes there will be something waiting for her.

And then there is Eun-jung.

I genuinely think Ryu Eun-jung may be the most emotionally mature and fully realized character I have ever seen in a drama. Her maturity does not come from being flawless or endlessly kind. It comes from the fact that she learns to live with the complicated things inside herself without allowing them to destroy the people around her. The conversation about the empty space left by an absent parent also stayed with me. I like to think Eun-jung really listened to Yoon Hyun-sook all those years ago—that instead of allowing the absence of her father to define her, she gradually filled that empty space with other good things and became the person she eventually became.

That is perhaps what makes this drama feel so complete to me now.

At first, I thought the ending had left something missing. Now I think nothing was missing. The series did not need a final revelation, a grand statement, or a perfectly tied-up future for every character. It had already given me what it wanted to give me: a relationship shown across decades, with all its love, envy, cruelty, tenderness, distance, dependence, mistakes and forgiveness.

And perhaps this is what makes their relationship feel so true to me. Long-term friendships in real life can become incredibly difficult to define. The longer two people have known each other—and especially when that relationship began at a very young age—the deeper the attachment can become. You accumulate years of memories, shared experiences, expectations, disappointments and versions of yourselves that only the other person remembers. Love and dependence grow deeper, but so can jealousy, anger and resentment. These feelings do not necessarily replace one another; they can exist simultaneously and become intertwined.

That is also why the people we are most attached to can hurt us more deeply than almost anyone else. When someone has become such a fundamental part of your life, protecting the relationship can mean exposing yourself to more pain. The wounds they cause can reach places that the actions of almost anyone else simply cannot. And walking away from such a relationship—or even trying to leave it behind emotionally—can be far more difficult than leaving almost any other relationship, because you are not only losing a person. You are confronting years of your own life that are inseparable from them.

That is what *You and Everything Else* understands so remarkably well. It does not romanticize lifelong friendship, but it does not reduce it to betrayal and resentment either. It shows that a relationship can contain love and hatred, dependence and distance, admiration and jealousy, tenderness and cruelty—all at the same time. The longer and deeper the relationship becomes, the more complicated those contradictions can become.

It feels less like watching a conventional story and more like being allowed to witness a real life closely enough to see all the tiny emotions underneath it.

I honestly don't know how you even write something this emotionally precise.

**A masterpiece.**