Sinasina

I cannot recommend this drama!

What a weird drama, oh my god I don't even know where to start..

Alright about the premise, the whole way the relationship/marriage started is completely insane. I kept watching, because Perfect and Casual had a similarly insane first 2-3 episodes & after that it turned out to be one of the better cdramas I've seen.
In all honesty around e7-8 I started thinking this show will be like that too, before the secondary love interest shows up most of the episodes were a work of art. There were several episodes in a row where there was no plot, but only very chill, cozy and a bit moody romance & I felt I could keep watching content like this for a hundred more episodes.

I think our leads look great together, in an attractively misfitting way. They had slowly developing, but good chemistry & if I focused exclusively on their romance, then that was quite good up until the finale. They had their ups and downs, but there were no serious problems or misunderstandings that took too long to resolve.

This is a visually stunning show, it's really high up there in terms photography & the sets, sceneries are just amazingly beautiful..

To me this drama feels a bit like they hired the best possible actors, the best possible cinematographer, procured some great background music inserts and gotten an amazing director too. Unfortunately as it often happens the writer did not work out. I already talked about the premise, but I'm almost at a loss of words about the things that go down in the second half of the drama. There is big twist too & that is indescribably absurd & once that is resolved ridiculous business problems crop up & suddenly the money required to solve problems shoots to the stratosphere, they start throwing around numbers that make no sense..
There is some propaganda related messaging as well in the final episodes, though I'm not sure how much of it is intentional.
Unlikely coincidences sure happen a lot in dramas, but good gawd in this one the unlikely chance meeting trope sure is overused & that's an understatement.

One thing that is not writer's fault is the puppies on the show. What the characters describe as "stray dogs and cats from a nearby village" are specimen of incredible pedigree. To me that was extremely immersion breaking, similarly to when in other dramas they adopt and raise randomly found imported hedgehogs that look like $2000. Though in this show it's worse, because the meaning & messaging associated with strays is very significant & then showing dogs that are worth more money than my car is just absurd.

Just to reiterate, the plot twist shocked me more than anything else I can remember in cdramaland, the egregiousness of it, not because it was so impactful.. I'm even suspecting that a large chunk of the drama failed censorship, so they quickly filmed that birthday scene & moved on from all family conflicts with a single stroke.. (the 23 episode length does support this theory) I'd be happy to read your opinions about that under this review :P

5.5 may seem like an unnecessarily low rating, but I don't have it in me to go any higher!

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It's not great.

The Good:
⌲ The cute second couple
⌲ The lack of love triangles
⌲ There are very few annoying things. (unfortunately the same is also true for excitement)
⌲ The beautiful people, everywhere
⌲ It's not very long & as such the pace is rather good until e12.

The Average:
⌲ The mediocre acting
⌲ The mediocre chemistry
⌲ The super shallow romance
⌲ The villains were meh.

The Bad:
⌲ The time travel plot is far below average, it's just really on the boring side & there is even less logic than usual in this genre.
⌲ The lack of comedy is a big problem, since there is no other hook for the romance to remain interesting.
⌲ Even for a low intensity cdrama this one is just lifeless
⌲ The ending follows a basic time travel drama cliche & I don't like this type of happy ending at all.
⌲ There is very little thrilling for a supposed thriller.

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This show was great. This is probably at the limit of what a cdrama romcom can be today. The leads had great chemistry & they looked adorable together and it's great that focus has been so much on them, there is not much side tracking during the 32 episodes. The production quality is extremely high, the audiovisuals are up there with the best Asian dramas that I've seen. I may have enjoyed watching the GoGo Squids, but this is my first cdrama, where the gaming aspect truly works and they made a great job at making that exciting. The aerospace parts were also relatively interesting and kind of novel too I guess. Ultimately the story is not all that revolutionary or anything, but it's just so wholesome and the drama kind of made me relive the feeling of watching Asian dramas for the first time. My need for fluff & sugar has been also completely satisfied. It's so refreshing that the main couple is not opposed by anyone, there are only supporting voices and yet the drama is still funny & interesting enough. The complete lack of a love triangle is always a giant plus as well.

It's great that the FL is an artiste, but none of the usual annoying tropes are used. In this drama even the paparazzi are kind of cute. Supportive netizens appear the be becoming a trend in modern cramas, that's always something I'm happy to see. Personally I love it, when in a drama a normal person is dating a celebrity and we get scenes describing situations where people meet their friend's significant celebrity other for the first time. Trope-ish or not, that just never gets old for me and in You Are My Glory we had a lot of that..

I already mentioned how I found the production quality to be excellent. The OST deserves further elaboration. Individually the songs are not that great, I've heard way better in a cdrama (hello there Perfect and Casual), but the mixing is really outstanding, music is used perfectly to help set various moods, I never felt it being detrimental.

Sexuality in cdramas & especially in kdramas is often portrayed very strangely. Like 35 year old FLs are almost never ready to have premarital sex. I understand that many people like it how sex is not a major plot point in these shows, unlike in Hollywood productions, but in my opinion the opposite can be even more annoying. Not in this drama though, this is how I think all drama couples should approach this matter. (implying sex in a realistic time frame, without bringing it into major focus)

Obviously nothing is perfect. The single biggest problem I found with this drama is the main driving force of conflict, what little conflict we've had, namely ML's low wages as an aerospace engineer. This is extremely unrealistic, in China a state employed aerospace engineer will never have problems affording medicare for his parents. So the entire plot about ML wanting to switch carriers due to low compensation feels wrong. Frankly it surprised me that the censors let this go, though perhaps having hundreds of Chinese flags everywhere made them happy enough to ignore this not so minor detail.

I'm sure a rewatch will happen eventually, 10/10!

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This show is an odd animal. It's like Veep meets Brooklyn99 with a little (very little) kdrama romance added in. The problem is if I look at this show comparing it to those american works it falls short. Sure it's supposed to be a political/crime comedy, but it's not really that funny most of the time. If I look at it expecting intricate plots & interesting procedural proceedings it just doesn't deliver, that said korean political thriller? shows almost always suck. The story is really bad, with so many plotholes that you could drain the ocean with them. When a comedy show doesn't take itself very seriously & it's really funny I can ignore the bad plot, but that's not the case here and it does try take itself quite seriously at times, in an inconsistent manner. They've spent the entire first episode setting up the main leads & then their joint life kind of fades into the background, bad rewrites perhaps?
It's not all bad though, like there is a little "Catch Me If You Can" vibe at times and both female leads were quite good. I couldn't help but notice that Lee Yoo-young's eyes are very unique looking! I kind of liked the ending too, normally I prefer long happy endings, but in this genre this 10 seconds long ending was okay, it reminded me of the endings of classic heist movies, such as Entrapment for example.

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This drama is just awesome. There are so many great things about it:
-Many memorable scenes
-The retro feeling
-The 90s kpop
-The amazing cast
-Everyone had great chemistry with almost everyone.
-Amazing parents (this is a first for me after 30+ kdramas)
-Gay storyline in a kdrama that feels almost natural
-Good cinematography, especially outstanding for a slightly aged show
-Amazing ending

The biggest negatives for me were the mandatory love triangle and the older brother, despite the older brother's amazing flashback romance I just couldn't accept his predatory behavior as a teacher. Normally I don't care about age gaps at all, but this just irked me. Also they dragged on this semi dating bullshit for way too long.

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It's good, but overrated!

I started this show about a week ago, but long after the show has ended, so I have seen & read many glowing reviews & saw how folks proclaimed this drama being the best one they have ever seen.
I not for one moment have felt that way, but it took me quite a bit of introspection to -I think- figure out why.
I mean at the very least we’ve seen amazingly well acted emotional scenes, that are up there with the best of the best in Kdramaland. There is a lot of good music, romances & one amazing bromance thing, so at the very least I can understand why someone would rate this at 10/10 amazing..

Let me explain, why to me this is far worse than 10/10 & why I felt something is really wrong with this drama throughout most of the episodes. Disclaimer, I’m a rather nitpicky person. I can find logical flaws in almost anything, but that has not prevented me to give 10/10 ratings to flawed shows before.
Let’s start with a TLDR to not waste anyone’s time with my long rambling: Many and perhaps most of the minor details in this drama are either wrong or off. This pile of immersion breaking lack of attention to detail is just too tall for me.

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So here I go:

I could go on and on about -tiny or large- time travel related plotholes, but I have begrudgingly accepted them, because time travel shows always have a ton of these. (Though the level of disregard for consistency is on another level in this drama.)

Music is an important part of this drama, but the sound is completely unrealistic in most scenes. Not only does everything sound like an overly perfect studio recording, but also every guitar in the show sounds like $20000. These kids are not millionaires, yo! Sure the guitar point is very nitpicky, but I have never at any point felt like I’m listening to music made by a very talented up and coming band, or anything remotely live-like. (as in live music sounding like a live performance)

Sol Ina is just too old for this role. Yes, she acted amazingly well here & I’m happy for her success. I’m sure no one could’ve done better in her place, but I would love to see a big budget kdrama where the teens are played by at most 22 year olds. Just to reiterate again, yes she is stunningly beautiful and everything, but she's not a teen & can never pass as one. If this only happened in a couple of flashbacks it would’ve been fine, but she is a teen the entire time.
This point applies to Ryeoun as well. He is not a believable Korean teenager at any point in time. He is 25, what could he have possibly done, right?

The portrayal of disabilities in Korean media always have been very annoying to me. Here it’s probably the best I’ve seen so far from them, but there were still quite a few weird moments. Being deaf is very difficult to portray well to begin with, I don’t know. Largely because you want to keep the audience entertained, but if you as an actor do over the top emotional faces in every single scene, then the end result cannot possibly be something believable. Though of course the actors followed well what was asked of them. I can somewhat understand why they choose to do it like this. Imagine if the story was almost the same in every way, but Cheong Ah had not been deaf just an introvert, if Eun Gyeol's parents were able to hear, but lived a very hard, tumultuous life. To me it seems like most of the plot would have worked just the same. I strongly suspect that the writer added decided to go with the CODA thing, because there were a couple really big hit shows that featured disabilities. Deafness is not completely an important, integral part of the show.

Romance is only so so, I did not really feel the chemistry, nor are the romantic plots very engaging. Then again this is probably the most realistic part of the drama, because teenagers falling in love is the easiest thing in the world, no elaborate plots are needed.

The main villain is very sterotypical and boring, her actions were very silly & her end is anticlimactic. The family situation at that house makes no sense. They could have made Cheong Ah's backstroy much more interesting without opting for this whole "her father ignores her suffering" plot.

The late nineties Korea in the show is -you guessed it- highly unrealistic.

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My fellow MDL user, I’m sure you’ve noticed by now how most of my criticisms are about realism. It would be a logical conclusion that this is a me problem, since kdrama as a genre tends to be very lacking in realism & anyone who wants realism should not watch kdramas.
I agree with this of course, but if a show’s end goal is not just to entertain with comedy & sugar, but maybe to educate about disabilities, to present gut wrenching moments and to make the audience empathize with the characters, then realism becomes rather important, or at the very least a fantasy setting should respect its own established rules & just in general the writer should not insult our intelligence.
Just look at the various Reply dramas, every single one of them has a similar blend of teen romance, bromance and to a lesser extent family tragedies to Twinkling Watermelon, but they are far more reasonable in every way, the emotional scenes in those are really really great, while the comedy and romance still get to shine.

The overall presentation is a bit childish. So perhaps we should just judge this as a teen programme. That’s fair, I’ve given it some thought & perhaps watching this at the age of 14 my mind could have been completely blown, I don’t know. Most of us on MDL are adults though & with that in mind I decided to settle for a rating of 7.5, because despite everything I've said, here and there there were moments of real brilliance in the show.

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It's very momerable, but at the same time there are many significant negative points.

In my review I'll mostly focus on the negatives, since I'm late to the party & the drama's abundant positive reviewers covered everything else. Though let me just say the main couple's chemistry & their acting performances are unprecedented in a cdrama, I don't think I have ever seen another cdrama that had such lively leads, with so much raw emotion etc..
(It's not a criticism really, but I chuckled a little when I saw Lao Gao driving a Maybach, this is the real authentic Cwebnovel experience right here!)

Okay so the negatives in no particular order:
⌲ The drama is very long & there are some repetitive plots, it feels like I rewatched an extraordinarily good drama 4 times in a row, this shouldn't have been 36 episodes. (though I'm sure many people that watched it as the eps were released barely noticed this)
⌲ Zhu Yun should have explained many things to her mom, but that never happened. (+horrible mom with little plot relevance & screen time)
⌲ Lao Gao's character development makes no sense to me. (and the transition to crazed cartoon villain is especially jarring)
⌲ Why would Li Xun trust Gao with L&P? (Their friendship? is very poorly explained in the drama)
⌲ Why, just why would Li Xun a so called genius use brawn over brain to deal with Fang Zhi Jing?
⌲ I found Fang Zhi Jing's plot against LX's sister over the top silly.
⌲ Zhu Yun kept a so called childhood friend on the hook for years. (you are a bad girl ZY, though at least this is bearable for a triangle)
⌲ The misunderstanding about a certain marriage happening has never gotten resolved, despite there being a lot of tension about this for a while.
⌲ The English in the drama is just embarrassing . ("Lucky & Power", "Thank!")
⌲ Ren Di is such an underutilized character. (Her band was really cool for those 3 minutes)
⌲ Ren Di's briefly shown romance is rather horrible.
⌲ Zhu Yun pretending not to care for so long, even in her internal monologues makes no sense.
⌲ The storytelling and even the main romantic plot is quite jittery at times, there are also frequent twists of logic, though the latter could be attributed to the questionable subbing quality, I just don't know.
⌲ This drama features the ugliest breakup I've ever witnessed. Noble reasons or not, no self respecting woman would ever forgive this much. (and yes LX is rather toxic in the early episodes too)
⌲ There is an enormous shift in the drama's tonality where we go from a very serious twenteen startup attempt to a ridiculously silly situation at the Flying Network? whatever company.
⌲ Xu Li Na (Her plot is all over the place & then she suddenly cares about Gao in the final episodes following their super silly divorce)
⌲ The programming related segments are ridiculous at times.
⌲ I can accept LX being a wunderkind knowitall, but based on what I've seen of ZY's progress as a newbie, she is the (un)real genius here..

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This drama indeed has some amazing characters, but the story feels aimless and unfinished. I loved the two noona romances, although Tami's in the last 1/3rd of the drama was quite annoying. The interactions of the 3 main women were also quite entertaining, it's quality bromance. Having binged this in 3 days I feel that writers did some pretty obvious character personality adjustments in between episodes, which seemed to have made the flow of the story inconsistent. Also there is quite a bit of repetition, some scenes and issues are brought up & discussed in a way that reminded me of time travel dramas. This show is first and foremost a procedural drama, but the happenings in the Search Engine industry were not all that interesting, especially in the second half.

Had they've given me a proper happy ending, or at least an open ended ending that shows some hope I would have rated this a point higher. To reiterate on the ending, none of the 3 women have a real hope to keep their current partner. Tami reconciles with Morgan in the last episode, but realistically nothing is resolved and they are doomed to fall apart again. Song Gagyeong's happy ending is a successful divorce with a husband she clearly had a strong bond with..
As for Scarlett, what are the odds that after one month of being together her relationship can survive another 18 or so months of being apart. I guess the Melodrama tag on Wiki is completely justified. :)

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It has an absolutely awful, disrespectful ending!

Endings are important to me, when the writer completely gives up common sense in the final episode flipping the proverbial table, then I tend to just lose it & from then on I won't be able to write an objectively fair review.
Twenty-Five Twenty-One's ending made me change my rating from 9+ to 3.5. Trying to look at this objectively I think Who Rules the World's ending is even worse, perhaps the worse ending I have ever reached. The only reason I'm not THAT harsh in my scoring today is because at least the romance has not been ruined, but everything else is, what happens in the final episode is so egregious that I can not easily put it into words.

I'm so angry that I'm really not in the mood to talk about the good things. Just to sum it up real quick, the romance is really really good in this one, which is about 40% of the drama. Chemistry, bickering, cuteness, fluff etc it's all there, it's as good as it gets from a semi-historical show. The palace politics genre is something I generally hate watching, but in this drama up to maybe episode 25-ish it was really really well done. (there is only one evil queen, so the usual cold palace concubine garbage is mostly not there) At that point I still thought a 10/10 final score would be possible. In the later half though the plot deteriorated quite a bit, however after watching episode 38 I thought this would still be at least a 8/10, but then the ending came..

The Wuxia part of the drama is good and bad at the same time. There are many Relatively well done fight scenes & we go through various Wuxia classics, it even has a saint's trial. However the whole thing in the later episodes about armies clashing & whatever else is pointless to me.
In an acceptable Wuxia-world (no pun intended) strong cultivators decide the outcome of all battles & a weak king without the permanent support of a strong cultivator can never amount to anything ever, no matter how big his army is. Since if he offends a cultivator, they can literally just enter the palace & kill him effortlessly. I think the argument that this is not the case in this specific fantasy world is a bad one, since something similar happened not once, but twice in this show.
Also there were two plots related to cultivation that I thought were incredibly bad. The first one is about the theft of that certain technique, that's something absolutely insane, so much so that no self respecting wuxia writer would ever write that, because it's like fan fiction. The other one is the potion that supposedly disperses all inner force, though my dislike of that is more of a personal preference, it's not completely unreasonable.
Oh I almost forgot FL's sect is supposed to be one of the top righteous sects in Jianghu, however they are repeatedly the useless pig teammate throughout the entire show (useless+weak+stupid the whole lot).

If by some random chance someone who has not watched this drama yet chanced upon this review, my suggestion to you fellow MDLer is to maybe watch up to episode 38 & then just pretend the show only has 38 episodes & call it a day. The romance gets proper closure by that point-ish.

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Tiptoing around forbidden puppy loves, jiā yóu!

I enjoyed watching this drama, but I cannot help but feel that it's perhaps overrated a tad. All the glowing reviews are not wrong of course, the bromances, the slice of high school life were up there. The entire cast was great, the leads had great chemistry & looked wonderful together and there is more than enough fluff and sugar in the drama for my liking.

So why is this not one of my favorite cdramas? Well, the high school episodes (1>14) were certainly decent, but I feel that the high school years were perhaps dragged out too much. In China puppy loves are frowned upon & I'm sure censorship also comes into play and so the end result is that the leads were crushing on each other real hard from very early on, but due to the aforementioned limitations they kept tiptoeing around the issue. Doing that for 2-3 episodes before graduation would've been okay, but it was more like 10 episodes here. There was perhaps a repetition problem too, with some recycled plots. The bigger problems surface in episodes 15-20. I always hated the rejection/separation due to noble reasons trope, but that's minor compared to how annoying the leads had acted in that period. "I will keep chasing you, I will never give up"proclaimed FL, fastforward 1-2 episodes & FL's resolve immediately faltered due to an extremely minor misunderstanding. Considering how much shit FL went through to finally stand in front of ML this could not have been going any more against her character, that's just sloppy writing. I must also mention that one of the biggest reasons behind said noble rejection makes zero sense, since it was revealed later on that ML's family still kept their pretty luxurious apartment from before.

As for minor annoyances, there were quite a few of those as well. It's like the writer couldn't decide if the main character should be poor or upper middle class. Following ML having to work to pay his father's medical bills we reach a point where ML & FL kept throwing around hundreds of thousands of yuan, but later on once again we reached the poor phase, where Si Yue could not afford a proper wedding ring. Using arbitrary writing like this just to activate that not so great double proposal trope does not sit very well with me.
It's also mildly annoying that almost every single obstacle the OTP had to overcame in their adulthood was something really annoying & cliche. (plagiarism, copyright X2 etc)

The love triangle is frustrating too. Luckily there is not a whole lot of it, though it gets PRETTY DAMN ANNOYING at one point. The main issue is that the second ML is once again the usual kind senior/childhood friend character. It's equally annoying every time how the FL pretends for 20 episodes that she is completely dense about the whole "being courted" situation & once she is confronted with his confession(s) she keeps ignoring the situation for quite a while more. Unnecessary plots, unnecessary character and he has gotten a mini redemption ark even.

People in the comments kept comparing this to You Are my Glory, well that's a pretty weird apples and oranges comparison, but if I ignore the obvious differences in genre, I can only say that Glory is a hundred times better. Even as high school dramas I cannot help but feel that A Love So Beautiful(the cdrama, not the newer kdrama) and Lovely Us resonated with me a lot more..


All things considered I feel the 7.5 rating is more than generous.

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The first 5-6 episodes were incredible. I have fond memories of the anime "Ano Hi Mita Hana no Namae o Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai", but this show has a more mature story and a better sequencing of events, up to the half way point at least. The actress playing Jisoo did an amazing job, I really felt drawn to her & later on even as a voice actor she was phenomenal. Feels weird that she is supposed to be a supporting actress, however Lee Hana is credited as the second lead. It's not like Lee Hana did a bad job, it's just that the writers were not kind to her character. After episodes 7-8 the writing has become aimless. I mean I get it, the ratings were bad & international audiences don't matter, so they tried a bunch of haphazard ideas to improve ratings, but I don't think that ever works, but it kind of ruins it for the rest of us. (same thing happened to When The Weather is Fine) They focused on Kang Inwook's character way too much to up the conflict, but I don't think anyone cared about him at any point in time. Ultimately the ending is reasonable (not great) and they did deliver on the sad boy meets sad girl & then they heal premise. The title of the drama is "A Piece of Your Mind", to me this means that if the writers have had the chance to develop their original concept we could have gotten a lot more focus on the AI devices. I'm thinking that the old lady that tuned the piano would have had a lot more screen time as well..
We had stunning audio-visuals and good acting performances, but then again there are quite a few side characters that had meaningless storylines. Other than Jisoo & the OTP I did really not care about anyone else, which is a shame, because the cast was great. As for the main leads, they had average chemistry, but their acting performances were great.
One big plus is that even though the "final confrontation" was dragged out, things didn't devolve into full on makjang..

Overall the 8/10 rating seems reasonable for a show this memorable despite the numerous shortcomings.

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So I was really hyped about this drama. I couldn't wait for it to start airing. What a letdown..
It started out a bit interesting, but as the plot progressed the entire story turned into a mess. (not that virtual-real interactions were realistic from ep1 onward) Almost nothing makes sense in any way. It reminds me a bit of the disappointment I felt, when I watched The Matrix Revolutions, it has similar, but more pronounced problems. To summarize the script is just bad. People criticize Park Shin Hye for bad acting, but honestly I think she was fine here, it's not her fault that the writer made her character a 2d persona with very little substance, sure I admit that she isn't the best when it comes to crying in kdramaland, but come on .. Technically this is a tragedy/melodrama, but it's difficult to take it seriously, so the melodramatic moments lack impact for that reason. As I said the story is a jumbled mess and I cannot take it seriously despite me being rather tolerant for nonsense, I loved SaO season1 for example.

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The first 12-15 episodes were fantastic. There was so much humor, that I had a hard time watching the episodes in a single go, because my brain just couldn't take all the positive stimulation, it was just perfection in the romantic comedy genre. (even the gossipy coworkers were fun)Unfortunately what followed up until episode 25? (the episode, when FL got hospitalized) had barely any humor, quite a bit of boredom & many only slightly melodramatic, but still extremely frustrating scenes. The second female lead's character was one of the worst I've seen in a drama. The story felt repetitive & it also crawled to a near complete halt until that really stupid moment when SS found the bookmark and 2 minutes later she saw the second FL's "move". I mean come on, even for a romantic Cdrama this was rather terrible. After the reconciliation in e26? I expected to return to the fun times of the early episodes, but unfortunately I was disappointed once again, because I had to witness one of the most unreal plot twists in a drama with that 10kk RMB debt thing, the resolution of that was kind of acceptable I guess & the last 2-3 episodes were also okay, but nowhere near as satisfying of an ending as it could have been.

I will definitely rewatch the first half of the drama though, those early episodes were very memorable.

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Lusi's outstanding performance is somewhat elevating an otherwise weak drama.

Lusi is really shining in this, she is portraying the uneasy happiness & everything else perfectly, this is what I call 10/10 acting. (though she looks malnourished as usual if not more so) Most other things -at least outside of the high production values- are very mediocre or worse. In the first half of the drama I did not really like any of the the main characters, they were all bad apples in their own way. Objectively there is nothing wrong with that, people watch mafia movies as well, however they really dragged out the spiraling lies part, 15 episodes?! -nearly getting caught in episodical fashion- is crazy to me. I found it difficult to get through this, authentically acted or not to me it's hard to watch a relationship drama where there is so little chemistry & where both parties bring questionable motives into a marriage. Especially considering how uninteresting & predictable most of the first half is.

Then there comes the second half where most main characters get a full personality rewrite, the tigers give their stripes to the lions & now it felt like watching a completely different show. On its own the second half has quite a few decent romcom moments, but there are so many annoyances. The corporate plots are trash, the child's things are meh & the second couple's difficulties are just awful. All the while there is a tremendous amount of propaganda speak happening involving "ethnic" content. I'm usually okay with governmental agendas in cdramas, but this has been too much even for me.

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No Watch, Not too much Loss (2024)

Whenever I see a bad ending I tend to bitch and moan about it, so let's get that out of the way. I feel that that the writer has not even tried to prepare to write a 12 episode long miniseries. She just went through the motions almost exactly the same way as if it were a 16 epi long drama & then in e12 just quickly tried to wrap it all up, but -3 minute long happy ending aside- the finale is the worst episode of the show. It's just really messy & quite a bit stupid.


The Good
⌲ Most characters on the show are rather entertaining on their own.
⌲ The Kim Young Dae + Shin Min Ah pairing worked better than I thought possible! (not amazing, but good)
⌲ Frenemies to lovers done very well in the first 9? episodes. (lots of fun bickering)
⌲ The show is very entertaining until the messy stuff in the final episodes. (until secret identities are found out)
⌲ The cat
⌲ The sismance
⌲ The comedy early on


The Average:
⌲ FL's seconary love interest (cartoon tier plot with a divorce offer, but he had so little impact that this does not qualify to trigger my hate for love triangles)
⌲ This is probably Min Ah's worst acting performance I have seen thus far & I'm a fan btw.. (still good, but disappointing compared to her usual self)
⌲ The murderer
⌲ The sex toys


The Bad:
⌲ I'm fairly open minded about consenting adults doing whatever, but this polyamorous plot was increasingly bad all the way to the end. (what bothered me has very little to do with the free hippy love part, more with marriage etc etc)
⌲ For a kdrama romcom there is barely any fluff in the show, sorry but this is not enough sugar for me!
⌲ The stupid 6 month separation in the final episode
⌲ The ridiculous career choices in the final episode (Jeez!)
⌲ The chaebol dad (though the time pressure on the writer made some very predictable plot developments disappear, so this could have been worse)
⌲ Tobacco
⌲ Why just WHY did FL's mom have to die just one second before the finale?

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