Yian Ji

It’s because she thinks that he’s her husbands son. His real mother was the husbands first love, and the wife thinks that he took him in because of this fact. After he leaves and becomes famous, she also hates him because she thinks that he’s holding her real son, Tae Min, back from becoming a famous writer too.

It’s made clear that she’s slightly mentally ill in the drama at some point. At least that’s how it appeared to me.

But yeah, she basically thinks he’s her husbands illegitimate son, and hates him for his talent.

Omg the central plot of this is so fucking annoying >< whoever wrote this should have ditched the ‘no dating’ plot and just had Shi Lei and Yu Zhen go through a hate to love plot, focussing on their relationship changing. This part is in it already and considering the short run time it’s done well enough. There’s a slow change from Shi Lei hating him to realising he just doesn’t understand his reasons and to eventually liking him. Just why did they have to include the friends who were gunna get engaged? Why is it up to Shi Lei to fix this problem for them? They’re grown ass adults! If your workplace has strict rules about dating, fucking quit! That’s what adults do, they don’t force their friend to find a way of getting their boss to get rid of the rule >< just wtf. And it’s completely unnecessary. Everything could literally stay the same and still work perfectly if those two weren’t in the show at all.

If I see one person reply to this with ‘it’s fiction’ or ‘it’s a drama’ etc, anything telling me that works of fiction don’t have to work based on reality, I’ll tell you right now don’t do that. Unless you want an essay about how characterisation and plot development work and how plot contrivances can completely ruin a show that otherwise could have been quite good. It’s important for stories to make sense within their own verse and their characters have to act in a way that at least appears realistic within that verse. If your characters just appear to be reciting lines that need to be said to move the main plot along, your failing.

Mhh yeah I see what you mean.

Is it subbed?

This show is confusing as fuck.
If the historians can’t show or tell anyone about the daily records they write, how exactly does anyone else ever know about the history?
Hae Ryung finds the hidden daily record about the false dethronement but she can’t tell anyone, so how exactly do they plan to reveal this truth to anyone but the historians?
How do they plan to correct what the rest of the country believes? How do they expect future generations to know anything if no one but like 10 people can read and know what the records say??

I feel like they needed this to be part of the plot to make certain situations work, but it makes little sense. They’re always talking about the historians recording embarrassing stuff but why care when no ones going to fucking read it except the next 10 people that work as historians??

This was a big disappointment considering the whole drama is based on history and the right to record it accurately.

It’s also annoying that the whole plot takes place in the last 3 episodes while the rest of the show is just Dowon and Hae Ryung fucking around and being cute.

Only good point, Cha Eun is pretty good in this role. He really gets that shy and innocent character across perfectly. Plus Dowon is the only interesting character in this whole drama.


Oh yeh, I also didn’t really get why the queen mother would want Dowon to become king. Yeah ok he’s the rightful heir, but he hasn’t been brought up to be king at all, you don’t just suddenly become able to lead a country it takes a long time to learn how anything works let alone how to rule a whole country. Also Dowon obviously doesn’t want to be king and I’m pretty sure Prince’s in waiting were allowed to abdicate their birthright at any fucking time they pleased. Also it’s obvious she’s doing it for herself to replace her lost son, not because she cares for him.

Yeah this is very obviously a Japanese fetish movie guys >< if you’d read even just a small synopsis you’d realise it was very obviously written by someone who just wants to fuck forehead brain holes.

And this also, obviously, isn’t the kind of content that lots of people are into, it’s like all the hate sei no gekiyaku got from people who’d watched the whole movie >< like it’s not hard to figure out that Sei no, was going to be literal torture porn, all you had to do was google it once, same with this movie, not hard to figure out what it’s really about. If you still don’t know I’ll tell you, It’s about extreme medical body modification and as it’s name suggests it’s a pretty fucking extreme kind of fetish.

P.S; I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Japanese movie that didn’t have an uncomfortable rape scene.

Last one; I’ve only seen Narita Ryo in The Cornered Mouse dreams of cheese and the image of him on his knees giving head must be seriously burned into my memory. I couldn’t even remember that it was the same actor as I was Watching Homunculus and in that last scene when he drops to his knees in front of Nakashi, I just thought to myself, why am I expecting him to suddenly start trying to give him head?

Omfg it’s called a synopsis for a reason not a shot by shot of the whole plot

Yeah look this could have been a pretty good movie, if it was like another hour longer. But trying to squeeze in that much story while also having the main characters go from place to place for little reason didn’t really work…
The whole thing with Ae Ran was unnecessary and the shamans explanation should have been even more detailed. It gets confusing because the audience doesn’t really know if Ae Ran was meant to ‘bewitch’ the shaman or Cheong Seok, maybe it’s the translation? Because in the subs it says someone was needed who could bewitch the virgin shaman, but in the movie it seems more like she did it to the monk and the shaman was just fucking nuts…

Anyway, it started out good then didn’t end so well. I don’t like plot contrivances and the ending is a big one, Seon Hwa is suddenly able to suck the eye into his body, the caskets already open but apparently it takes like 10 minutes for the black eye to load…

Ugh the ending of this drama really fucks everything that happened in the whole drama. It’s when writers become to excited by their work being really popular and start to realise that the ending must be the best part, so they try to jam it full of intensity to the last minute and your left with a something that doesn’t make much sense at all…

Yeh the ending is bad. They don’t give any kind of good reason as to why Jae Han has been on the run for 15 years, because they couldn’t think of one that would make sense but they wanted to shock the viewer by revealing he’s still been missing/dead, but no wait he’s just been on the run for no fucking reason, and wait! Even better the radio still works and he’s been talking to someone else from the future, and blah blah blah… like fucking chill. A good ending doesn’t depend on how much random shit you can squeeze into it, it depends on the closure you give your audience and this drama gives nothing but last minute reveals that are unnecessary and ruined a good thing.

Yeah I mean this show is ok. Tbh I prefer the movie this was based on. The movie doesn’t rely on a lot of plot contrivance to make sense, while this drama does. Also the communication between Jae Han and Hae Young doesn’t actually do much good, they mostly seem to cause trouble. And the actual criminal cases in the drama are a bit over the top, none of them except the Inju one were that interesting tbh.

There’s also the badly written ‘Hae Young has to be framed for some kind of crime to make this plot work so let’s just write something that makes no sense coz no one will care’ basing a murder accusation on a meeting no one else knew about and one fight that took place months ago is pretty weak. I mean something much better could have been written using this set up.

It’s also really hard to differentiate between flash backs and scenes happening in the past, but happening concurrently with the future. Like they make no effort to style these differently at all it’s left up to the viewer to decide which is never really a good idea.

I am getting a little bit tired of every k drama murder mystery being a conspiracy rooted in some kind of local development of infrastructure type. Like a crime can just be a crime it doesn’t have to be connected to high government officials or big companies. But this is like a constant trope. Like it ruined Beyond Evil and it’s kinda fucking the end of this drama too. Korean audiences apparently love watching people with money and connections being fucked by their own greed. It just really sucked that the one case I was interested in had to be the one with the big conspiracy…

Anyway, the drama is fine. It didn’t bore me and it managed to keep my attention like 90% of the time. Is it great murder mystery? Well, not for me but that doesn’t diminish it.

(Also I know that this drama isn’t directly based on the Movie Frequency but I doubt the makers of this never saw that movie and thought to themselves this would make a good drama… )

Ok I just started watching this so this isn’t actually about the drama being good or bad, I don’t know that yet I’m only on ep 1. But, there’s a scene in the beginning where Je Hoons character sees the kidnapped girls mom standing with the sign and years pass, and it’s indicated by calendars cropped into the scene with fade outs. The last one we see is 2004, so that’s 4 years later apparently and Je Hoon has gone from a 12 year old kid to a 32 year old man… XD I’m sorry I just find this so funny. It’s as bad as US teen tv shows with 35 year olds playing teenagers. Asian people look their age just as much as anyone else. I know it sux having to hire another actor to play a character as a teenager and sometimes the script kinda doesn’t allow for it. But when dramas or any show does this, it tends to take the viewer out of it for a second.


Also, this is just a personal thing I have about dramas that use real life laws etc, but twist them to suit their needs. A Statute of limitations on a kidnap and murder case is much higher than 15 years. In South Korea the statute is 10 years for commercial disputes, so I would safely assume that Murder is much higher. And for murder, pretty much anywhere there is no statute, that why you see old cops obsessed with old murders in movies so much. Also a statute of limitation may be extended indefinitely if new evidence is found, especially if the evidence is as damming as what happened in that first episode. But then we wouldn’t have a cool race against the clock plot, but I mean having her go free coz the test results matched like 2 minutes after is just a bit too fucking ridiculous even for me, anyway this doesn’t really matter I just find it annoying XD

This drama has the BEST, like top, Number 1, self haircut scene ever. In the existence of tv and movies. I’ve always hated seeing someone in a movie cutting their own hair with a giant pair of scissors, yet somehow ending up with a perfect haircut. When Heo Im cuts his hair in this drama, I laughed so fucking hard. It was perfect. His hair looked exactly like what a self haircut, done by someone who’s never cut hair, should look like.

XD it’s pretty easy to tell how good looking he is, in start up and in MRIAG they don’t even really try to make him look less attractive. You should watch Seventeen if your really into him, it’s a short web drama and it’s not great tbh, but he looks beautiful in it. I mean he looks beautiful anytime to me tbh XD.

There is no plausible way to defend her characterisation to me honestly, I haven’t seen any comments in her defence but I would be interested in reading some actually, just because it’s always good to really see the other point of view as well. But even if I did, like I said there is nothing in my eyes that explains any of her actions. Even past that, her character is completely flat, even when she goes through that break up, she appears to hardly care. Or to be more accurate, it seems to be that she’s really just feeling sorry for herself. It didn’t look like she had any feelings for the guy who dumped her because 10 minutes later she’s already falling in love with another guy. That alone speaks volumes about how thoughtlessly her character was written. If she really is the type of girl to feel so deeply for someone else, there’s little chance she would be already interested in another guy on the same night she was dumped. All of this just points to the fact that whoever wrote her character did not think about her at all past ‘she has to be the support character that likes So Hyun’, this is her only personality trait and it’s her only function.

I’m really hoping that the English translations of the manhwa will continue, even after the drama has stopped airing and the hype around it has died down, because from the little I’ve read of it and the rest I’ve read about it, the plot, characterisation, development and general issues dealt with in it, are so much better than the drama.

I do like the drama though, I just wish it had focused so much more on Joon and So Hyuns friendship instead of giving most of the focus to the romances between the characters. The friendship between those two is the most interesting part of this drama, as is Joons character as well. While So Hyuns issues are interesting, the ‘I’m poor and all my problems are because of this’ is a little bit over done, while Joon has real world issues that aren’t glossed over, though again, I wish they had also focused more on his obvious depression and domestic abuse part.


(Sorry for writing so much ><, I just like discussing dramas with people like you, not because you agreed with me XD just because you articulate your thoughts and criticism so well, it makes it easy to understand and also makes me see things about the drama and characters that I hadn’t considered before ^^)

Mi joo is the worst character I think I’ve ever had the displeasure of seeing in a drama. Seriously I think the jealous ex girlfriend and possessive rich mother trope are better than her. Who thought it would be a good idea to have her fall in love with So Hyun after seeing him once for 2 minutes? And then confessing to him after meeting him 3 times and saying all of 4 sentences to him? She has absolutely no idea what this guy is like, what his personality and habits are. Even the love at first sight dramas I’ve seen make more sense, at least in them the person who falls in love actually gets to know the person they fell for after that first sighting. Mi Joo never, at any point actually gets to know So Hyun past ‘he’s good looking’ .
Her reaction to being rejected is the most over the top reaction to anything ever. I’ve seen people being less sad about their mother dying. She seriously goes as far as transferring to another University! It’s just intensely stupid. Does anyone know if she’s anything like this in manhwa? I’m curious, I have a feeling she’s not and her character was re written for the drama but the person doing the writing must be an idiot.

Yeah I found the fact that Netflix did not translate the start up and general business terms that were given Korean descriptions on screen really frustrating. I assume it was done because it would be too much text, but I’m used to pausing shows so I can read translations on top and bottom of the screen if there is more to be translated than just dialogue.

I have been also getting increasingly frustrated with the Korean drama industries refusal to portray aspects of their culture the way they really are, or, only doing it up to a point where it doesn’t actually make them look bad. I know that most dramas work on the basis that if you ‘want it the most’ you’ll eventually get it, which I do enjoy up to a point. But I really think this aspect is what’s holding them back from making really great dramas. The only one I’ve seen so far that didn’t follow this trend was The Nokdu Flower and it was almost purposely overlooked for any awards etc.

This drama is kinda weird…

At some point while watching it I realised I was already on ep 13, while I thought I was on like ep 8. And this isn’t due to me not paying attention it’s because not much actually happens in it. At ep 13 in my mind the plot had barely started yet it was almost finished.

There’s only one thing that the plot demands be found out. Which is who Seonl shot. That’s it. Just one thing. Yet throughout the drama it’s framed as a big betrayal, a conspiracy almost, as to what happened between the three of them. But what actually happened to them is obvious very early on. As are all the other things this drama presents as a ‘mystery’. Like Yu being a ghost, is obvious right away. The fact that Seonl didn’t shoot Hwi yeong is obvious right away. The fact that his brother is basically a sociopath and the antagonist is obvious. The fact that the girl who blackmails him is the sister of the stalker from ep 1 is obvious right away, also that she’s trying to kill Seol not Se Ju. Literally everything in this show is so obvious, that I’m not actually sure, wether the writer did this on purpose or wether they thought, they were writing a good mystery but actually weren’t. Like I really don’t know.

The weirdest thing though, is that the show isn’t boring, it’s not bad, it’s just underwhelming when you finally realise that there’s only 1 mystery that’s written well enough to not be obvious from the moment it’s introduced. It’s seriously disappointing. I was really sad when I realised I only had 3 episodes to go and also realised that there wasn’t any big reveal or secret coming up, that I wasn’t going to get an actual time line of events from their past lives, all I was ever going to get are the 6 different flash backs shown over and over again ><

So yeah, this isn’t a show I will recommend purely based on the fact that there’s not much substance to the plot. And personally I would rate this a 5/10, because like I said, it’s not bad and I wasn’t annoyed at plot holes or inconsistencies within the story (there wasn’t much of a story to have any plot holes in) but there’s also nothing really good about it. The characters are ok, none of them really stand out and none of them have much personality except Se Ju, who’s whole personality switches from untrusting asshole to sweet and hopeful just because now he likes a girl (ok I take it back, this part really annoyed me, when character personalities completely change just because one aspect of their life changes, that’s when I know that whoever wrote this still doesn’t exactly understand how characterisation works within a story) the acting is fine since the script doesn’t really give anyone much to work with, the cinematography and production is fine too, just everything about it is fine and nothing about it is really memorable actually interesting or surprising, and that’s not good considering it’s a mystery…

I get your point here, but, a drama/Tv show should never have to be watched more than once for a viewer to understand what’s happening in it. If something is overly confusing the first time around more than 90% of the audience will never bother watching it again.

I’m not saying that this makes the drama bad, it just makes it a failure. Production companies and ppl that work in the industry know this, they know that an audience needs to understand your show or the show will fail (being good or bad doesn’t really matter) what matters for a drama is ratings and if your audience loses the plot they’ll stop watching and your ratings will drop and your drama fail…

I’ve watched a lot of dramas/movies/shows more than once (obviously XD) and sure I notice new things on a second watch, but those things aren’t paramount to the plot and even without noticing them any person could understand the movie. If your making a drama while thinking ‘it’s ok people will watch this twice and the second time they will understand it’ you’ve already failed at making a drama.

Omg the FL in this is what? A legendary fan fiction writer? Talk about wish fulfilment XD

Oh wow! How daring and original writing fanfics about another writer! Omg that is unbelievable! Just my mind is blown!

But really, wtf is this? They run after the dog for an hour with him screaming at her it’s not his dog so many times, and ten minutes later she’s super confused at the Vet because ‘it’s not his dog?’

I mean what the fuck am I meant to think about this? Is everyone a complete idiot in this world? The FL is definitely a fucking psycho though! She served him at her fucking job at a subway! And she’s expecting him to remember her? This is seriously fucking stupid…

I have a bad feeling I’m going to hate this drama…

I’m honestly glad to see that I’m not the only one that understands that dramas, movies, tv shows etc can have an impact on the real world. They can and most definitely do influence the way people think.

But, tbh I think this goes a step further than that. I don’t think that these things were misrepresented due to writers or directors or production companies not having the right knowledge and failing at, trying to portray something good or progressive. I think this is done on purpose. I think the makers of true beauty definitely wanted to imply and suggest the things you listed and they used the excuse of wanting to tear down beauty standards while in reality they were doing the opposite. This is a common theme in media, using societal norms and standards in a way that influences actual thought of the people watching and influences them toward agreeing with and applying these ‘rules& standards’ to themselves and others.