Polo749

Yes I also skipped all NDS scenes unless they had HJP in them. I don't hate NDS, I just don't watch it for him. At all.

It's because the humour was at HJP's expense. That would only work if we didn't sympathise enormously with him. Again I found myself wondering what the writers were thinking.

There's a character in Vanity Fair who is in love with a character called Amelia but he just quietly helps her in the background (even letting someone else take the credit for something he does that means a lot to her) because she's in love with someone else. HJP reminds me of him. Spoiler for VF- he ends up with Amelia in the end as he should because things should work out for characters like him. Somehow I don't think it's going to go that way for HJP.

The fact that HJP was about to sacrifice his own feelings for Grandma, SDM and NDS (maybe not so much NDS) only makes me ship him with her more.

I saw in another comment that KSH has said his character has a twist. I hope that doesn't mean he's going to become the antagonist or anything like that.

I agree that KSH is amazing in this role. He's just perfect for it and I can't imagine anyone else playing HJP. Nevertheless, I think it's the plot as much as the actor. The plot needs to be more tuned to NDS and less tuned to HJP. Sometimes it feels like HJP is more of the main character than SDM, let alone NDS. Couldn't NDS actually have been her pen-pal and when they meet later he pretends to be successful because he wants to impress her, just like she assumes when she meets him at Sandbox? Obviously it would require a lot of changes in details but that's what I mean. Otherwise, you're just switching the first and second leads around but leaving them with the same importance. Like demoting someone and promoting someone else without changing their pay.

Agreed, one of the things that kept me watching in the beginning was the relationship between the two sisters. I thought it was going to be important.

Well I'm in my late 20's and I prefer HJP so I seem to fit with your theory. I have noticed the trend changing in other Kdramas too and I haven't liked it. Then again, they're still figuring out how to make it work. It seems like at the moment they've just switched the first and second male lead. As a result the second male lead seems more important. I don't think it's just because of our expectations but because plots have revolved around a male lead who is strong and successful and if the male lead is going to change the plots need to change too or else it just feels wrong. They need to figure out plots that make the new male lead (who is the old SML) more important to the story than the new second male lead (who is the old ML). Does that make sense?

Are you saying get lost? I was trying to be friendly but that's fine if you don't want me to be.

Lol I'm so envious. I'm team HJP and I feel so salty about it. :)

Edit: I just realised this comment seems sarcastic but it's not meant to be.

Oh I don't want spoilers either. I'll be avoiding comments until I've seen both episodes.

I think it's still going on but I'm not sure if the writers can change the endgame. It may be contractual that NJH's character gets the girl otherwise he's sort of being demoted to second lead. I don't know for sure though.

I'm going to force myself to wait until Sunday and watch them both. I did consider waiting until all the episodes are out but then I decided that was too ambitious.

I share the same sentiment as others. Fine, NDS can have SDM but if he starts getting more scenes with Grandma than HJP... just no.

I wonder how the writers feel about HJP? Not about the response to him but just their own thoughts. I got the impression in School 2015 that even the writers didn't want it to end the way it did as it was kind of vague. It felt like they reluctantly ended it the way they had to. Maybe that was just me imagining things.

I've re-read my comment and I still feel like I haven’t quite hit the point I was trying to make so I’ll just add this. It’s all about suspending disbelief. Their actions and motives aren’t realistic so we might as well just accept what the writer tells us. My point was that it’s easier to do that for “our guy” than it is for not our guy. It’s especially easy for HJP fans because even though his motive doesn’t fully explain his actions, there’s no other possible motive for him to do it. NDS on the other hand could be trying to exploit her. However, that’s not what the writer is telling us. NDS is doing it for the same reason as HJP- to protect SDM. It doesn’t have to make sense, nor does it have to be executed perfectly, it’s all about the concepts and which one we find more appealing. Although ideally it would make better sense.

Lol, long comments are my thing. I'm bad at keeping things short.

I find it interesting that a lot of the arguments are focused on who deserves SDM more. We're very invested in "our guy" and keep comparing him to the other guy, usually at the other guy’s expense. I don't personally feel the need to do that because I'm looking at it from a storytelling perspective. For me, it's not so much about who is the better man but which is the better love story. However, there’s a problem that I’ve been skirting around and I want to explain it in more detail.

When we’re trying to justify why our ship is the better love story we have to put the characters and the plot under a microscope. The problem for me is when I do that I can’t help but notice how stupid the plot is. Take the letters for instance. They’re the premise for the entire story but they are like a picture in a colouring book that has only been partially coloured in and poorly at that. We’re told that HJP and Grandma wrote the letters together but then we see scenes where he is clearly writing them on his own. We’re told that the boy in the letters was fabricated but then we’re shown that HJP added his real birthday and birthday wish. It’s debatable whether or not his wish was genuine but I lean towards genuine. It doesn’t actually matter one way or the other for reasons I will get into but I think it has been really inconsistently portrayed. The writer needs to choose because so far there’s a continuity issue.

The inconsistency is partly what makes the letters so controversial. HJP fans feel like NDS is stealing the love she has for HJP. NDS fans argue that she doesn’t love HJP because the letters were fake and co-written by Grandma. HJP fans come back with, he partly put himself into them and even if he didn’t, that still leaves the fact that NDS is benefiting from a lie. NDS fans respond, the lie isn’t his fault so why does it matter if he’s benefiting? Others have pointed out that they’re all in the wrong. Grandma and HJP misled SDM for a whole year. Grandma continued to even after that and then HJP got back on that train with her. NDS was the last to join but he is benefiting from it the most. Whoever is most to blame they are all lying to her.

The reason why I think many can overlook the problematic nature of the letters is because the whole thing is silly. Look at Grandma and HJP’s motives for doing it in the first place. What even are they? It makes sense that Grandma would want her to have a friend and ask HJP to be her pen-pal but that’s not what happened. She asked him to fake being a person her age and initially she wanted him to be a girl but HJP says he has to be a boy because the handwriting will give it away (???). It’s actually a very bizarre thing to do and it’s only made more bizarre when they pick a real person out of the newspaper. If HJP used a pseudonym but otherwise wrote as himself that would make sense. Instead, he and Grandma make up a fictional/real person to be her pen-pal because for some reason he has to be her age and it doesn’t matter if he’s fake/sort of real.

Later, HJP and NDS go to the immense trouble of maintaining this lie to protect her even though it’s obvious she’d be far better off knowing the truth. NDS would definitely be better off if she knew because then it wouldn’t blow up in his face later. It’s unclear how it would affect HJP because we don’t know how real the letters were. I know this is Kdrama logic but that’s precisely my point. Both sides dismiss the seriousness of their guy's part in the lie because their motives are nonsensical. Whether you’re team HJP or team NDS, why get hung up on details that don’t make any sense anyway? I honestly think both teams are guilty of that but guilty is the wrong word. We don’t have a choice to be honest. So where does that leave us?

On the one hand, you’ve got the concept of a man hiding his feelings but going all out for the woman he loves (granted, initially for other reasons). On the other hand you've got the concept of a man showing his feelings but struggling to meet the standard that he believes the woman deserves. Both are romantic notions so you can see why people would ship either way. However, I think the reason some of us favour HJP is because he's naturally more important to the story. It’s not just that he has a backstory while NDS doesn’t. Crucially, he has a relevant backstory. Giving NDS a backstory wouldn’t make him more relevant. The concepts behind both characters are romantic but it’s just as important how the characters fit into the story. If the story wasn’t so hung up on the letters it might not matter but from the start it was set up to revolve around them. It doesn’t matter how genuine the letters were, HJP’s backstory was the entire premise for the plot so how was NDS meant to compete in terms of relevance? HJP is the more important character and therefore it feels wrong that he’s not the lead. I made this point before that if the writer wanted NDS to be the lead then the letters plot should have been wrapped up ages ago.

That pretty much sums up why I think it’s pointless arguing about who is better for her based on the letters. None of their motives actually make sense and so it’s not surprising that we don’t blame the guy whose team we’re on. It does make sense that we’d hold it against the guy whose team we’re not on because...well, you figure it out. Of course there are other ways to argue about who is better for her but I think we should leave the letters out of it. I think they ultimately come down in HJP’s favour, not because he comes off better but because he helped write them, thereby making him more important to that storyline.

Is anyone enjoying the love triangle? Or do we all agree it's total manure?

I'm okay with this. I don't want him to have a happy ending. I'd like him to have a bitter sweet ending, that's the most fitting for him. Of course we don't know what's going to happen between now and then so if they can build up to a happy ending for him that would be great but I don't want one to just come out of the blue.

I shouldn't be so hard on this writer because I have liked her other stuff that I've seen but unless it's all intentional it really has been badly thought out. Seriously though, it would be such a genius move to set up a character who perfectly fits the bill for the male lead but then convince everyone that he's the second lead. You can see why they would need to higher a lead actor to pull that off. I just find it unlikely that they would advertise it the way they have though. If nothing else, they would be worried that advertising it in a misleading way would backfire. I think if they were planning a twist they would advertise it more ambiguously. It says a lot about the plot though that our expectation of who the male lead is hinges so much on how it has been advertised and the status of the actor who plays him.