Sinasina

So here is the drama i've been waiting for the most for a long time now. So far the story did not progress anywhere, we pretty much only had world-building (and some banter) in the first two episodes that I've seen. I feel that there is no hook for me, other than the writer's name. I remember, when I watched the first episode of Goblin & I was already hooked by the birthday cake scene. Very pretty people are not enough by themselves to entertain me..
I'm pretty neutral about Minho, but I don't feel that he was ever a good actor & I really hope that this drama has more substance than his face, his acting so far has not been very convincing. I like Go Eun quite a bit, but I'm not yet sure about her character in this one.

Anyhow I'm hoping that things will go up from here, a 9/10 final review is still on the table. It's not going to be another Abyss, right!?

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edit: After seeing episode 3-4 I'm really hopeful. The story is finally on track & I'm kind of hooked, I'm genuinely looking forward to episode 5. MinHo's acting seems to have improved, perhaps he got more into the character as the filming has progressed. The world building stage seems to be over and I loved the teaser & how episode 4 ended.

edit2: I enjoyed episodes 5-6. I guess the only thing that's really lacking is humor, there is not a whole lot of it, but nonetheless I'm still excited about next week.
Here is me being nitpicy >>>
The writer is not the best at writing realistic warfare scenarios as we have seen in DoTS, we had some of that in ep6, probably it was an effort to jab at Japan due to their ongoing trade dispute. It's not great when real world politics have an effect on the entertainment industry like this, but I've seen much worse in Chinese works, hopefully there will be no more of this in future episodes. The second Jung Tae Eul detective Kang Shin Jae childhood origin story was completely unnecessary, feels almost like a byproduct of live filming/live writing. The drama had to be preproduced due to all the visual effects, but it's possible that the script was only written week by week as the filming went along, I hope that I'm wrong, because weekly writing almost never leads to a coherent script and that is pretty important for a high concept series to work.
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Final edit: "next week" came a little late, I had the time to binge the last 10 episodes over the course of a week. I'm disappointed overall. The romance got serious really abruptly, but Minho's acting was probably the worst it has ever been. Kim GoEun makes all these really lively animated faces & cries a lot, but Minho has no emotional range what so ever, their most epic scenes are completely butchered by Minho. I think it's safe to say that his bad acting killed the drama for me. The story goes real slow in between e6 & e12 and that would have been fine, if we had some cool romance, but Minho sort of ruined that, what else remains from the drama doesn't amount to very much.
I guess Kim Eunsook kind of borked the script, but objectively the script wouldn't even be that bad. With a better director & without Minho we could have reached the level of W, well too bad..
I heard folks discussing that the OST was really good, very similar to Goblin. Well, I'm not saying it's bad or anything, in fact is perhaps slightly above average, but to me this comparison doesn't make any sense. I feel that the 15th best track on the Goblin OST double cd is more valuable than all the soundtrack that TKEM has. It's pointless comparing them.

I just finished watching the last episode, which was probably the best episode of the drama and because of that I decided to give a final score of 6/10, but it's probably too high..

I almost forgot, good God the ad placements were terrifyingly bad. At times it felt like the entire drama was just an advertisement. There were some product placement scenes that straight up made no sense. I mean FL drinking something & then praising it is something that could actually happen, but Nari's supercars..

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Earthquake Relief, the Motherland stands with us!

I had nothing else to watch & needed something for my workout sessions. That's the reason why I picked this up against my better judgement. As an experienced cdrama watcher I expected very little from a drama about firefighters & firefighter plus a journalist's romance. Unfortunately `A Date with the Future` is worse than I thought. Saying that everything's wrong with it is a bit hyperbolic, but there is so much wrong I won't be able to get to everything with my rather dispirited review writing here...

The comment section talked a lot about FL being a stalker, I think my fellow MDLers do have a point, though I thought this was not too bad compared to Go Go Squid, or what's worse the second ML(the firefighter, not gege) in this very drama! Since he is the real stalker here & he has done so many absolutely horrible things to chase the clearly uninterested girl that he would have deserved a restraining order or more. However this is a Chinese drama and so the stalkerish behavior plus the insane amount of forcefulness won him the girl..

The workspace related things were pretty bad for both leads, the firefighter department had an incredible amount of posturing & various direct propaganda related speeches in every single episode. The TV station did not have too much screen time, but of course they went completely off the rails there too.

Then there is the usual surgeon is good at every medical disciple, the firefighter is good at fighting not only fires, but criminals with knifes as well & the reporter is also extraordinarily multitalented being a better dog trainer then the professionals at the rescue team and she gets promoted to team leader at the TV station just by doing nothing but reporting on her boyfriends firefighting activities etc etc..

There are several really boring, silly and to me uninteresting action scenes of course, home made bombs, getting locked into the cold room, earthquakes plural.. (plentiful time spent in the hospital of course)

There was this scene when the ML & FL were hugging each other to sleep while having a burning candle in a glass jar close to them on the floor. I found it ironic how bad of a messaging that is in a show about firefighting.
Let's talk a bit about the dogs too. I generally don't like dogs as a cat person, but I have some doubts about animal handling & safety in this show.
Also at one point the team was called to "quickly" help with earthquake relief, but before going they held an effin parade in front of their buses. Like what the heck, people are dying, but you all are just parading there spinning left and right saluting to this or that, reciting speeches about unity..

Admittedly the main couple had some good moments, but I don't think the actors had particularly good chemistry & overall I wouldn't call this very good. There is an absolutely super annoying teary eyed `ge` second love interest for the FL & he only gives up in ep30. At least all his scenes are very fastforward buttonable, since he is not at all integral to the story. There is also a noble idiocy breakup, at least it happens early enough on & it's not very long, but jeez it was so awful.

Frankly I'm a bit surprised this passed censorship. Firefighting -and to a lesser extent even the military- is portrayed as an absolutely shit job that nobody should sign up for. Then again what do I know, perhaps in China they have the problem that there are too many people aspiring to become firefighters or even soldiers.

It goes without saying that I feel I have wasted my time, should have rewatched something instead for the nth time.

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It's a bit disappointing from kdrama writer giant Park Hye Ryun, still this is no Start-Up.

Screenwriter Park Hye Ryun is responsible for 3 dramas on my all time top 10 list. Because of that even though Start-Up was a huge disappointment I've let the comment section's hype get to me.
What's good news I suppose that this is far far better than Start-Up. (Which I may have dropped half way or so in, I'm not even sure anymore)
Anyhow the plots and themes in Castaway Diva are very much Park Hye Ryun-like, despite the fact that she is not the only writer, probably the other writer Eun Yeol contributed more to dialog, I don't know. Anyway anyone who has watched the big three dramas I mentioned before (While You Were Sleeping, Pinocchio, I Hear Your Voice) will find many subplots & the general direction of the story in this drama oddly familiar. Near the finale there is a pretty iconic scene that is 1:1 While You Were Sleeping as well. Not that I mind this too much, Park Hye Ryun always heavily built and iterated from her previous works in all her dramas and I absolutely adored them..
So you might ask, why did I rate the writing at 5.5? Well, out of all the preproduced (non live filmed) dramas this was perhaps the most inconsistent (that I can recall anyway). To me it seems like the writers shaped the plot assuming that the general audience won't remember the minutiae of what they've seen 2-4-6 weeks ago. Unluckily for me I binge watched this over the course of 4 days during long daily workout sessions, as such in almost every episode I had several moments where I was rolling my eyes at all the gaslighting that has been presented to me. Also even if I ignore the plot itself and look at the various world building elements, the drama is -even by kdrama romcom standards- just incredibly poorly researched. Pretty much every little detail about the Island was wrong. I understand this is fiction, but it would not have been very hard to ask someone well versed in wilderness survival to give the writers some tips & to use common sense. (I could list countless things here, but just to say a few: potatoes, FL's well groomed-ness, swimming in baggy sweatpants/shirts, the shoes)
The biggest writing related pain point though is that this is like a romcom with most of the romance ripped out of it, but the rest of the things are left as they would be in a really silly drama about a cat shapeshifter or something else like that.
Anyway I did not really feel the leads bonding at any point in time, as opposed to the second lead doing some of that. Basically the love triangle here is very similar to what we've seen in While You Were Sleeping, but with the amazing main romance missing, if that even makes sense xD (meaning the second ML is not a nuisance, it's just this is so weird overall)
If you are curious what a good romance-less romance drama is like, take a look at the cdrama Reset.

Onto the second big problem I had with the drama, which is Park Eun Bin, or more specifically her portrayal of castaway Seo Mok Ha. I have seen this actress before shine in Age of Youth. (I don't think she is lacking in skill, in fact she is probably awesome.) Also while in Attorney Woo I very strongly disliked how she acted as an autistic lawyer. There she did the usual Hallyu version of "person struggling with disability" act and probably did it as well as it is possible, but I always found that incredibly offensive in any drama, but I digress. The point I'm trying to make is that someone had the genius idea to not only cast her for this role, but also make this castaway character's portrayal essentially the same, or maybe because this was her next drama after Woo she did not completely recover from that role which she has taken way more seriously as an actor. I suppose instead of all this ranting I could have just said that she is overacting in this one, but it just feels wrong & weird.

The casting in general is not all that great. I love watching good sismances in dramas, but I did not feel that sister chemistry all that much, though all the back and forth in the plot did not help. Nor did FL have good chemistry with ML, but there was barely any time to build on that, so I could be wrong. Though I must admit the evil dads were quite fit for their roles, despite not having seen these supporting actors in evil roles thus far.

Remember how the final 3-4 episodes of Pinocchio were after due to it being a huge success they extended the run from 16 to 20 episodes? Walkaway Diva has ~8 episodes like that, out of 12 which is obviously not great. Earlier I ranted about the writers expecting the audience to forget stuff, now that I think about it, perhaps that could have totally worked on me too, because I don't think I'll remember much of anything of what happened between ep2 and 10 in a couple of weeks.

I apologize for all the rantish walls of text so far, I too am getting tired of writing this review, so I'll quickly list -in no particular order- what I actually liked about the drama:

⌲ Episode 1 is a great short film, with very talented child actors [10/10]
⌲ Everyone is really attractive, with very pleasant, almost hypnotic voices.
⌲ The entertainment industry related procedural parts are usually far far worse. (they avoided many common themes that tend to ruin things in other dramas about idols)
⌲ The parents -adoptive dad+mom- were adorable.
⌲ The OST and all the singing is really really and I mean REALLY good. (though it's annoying that everything is basically lip syncing, because all songs are perfect studio recordings, where there was no effort made to make them live-ish during editing)
⌲ There are no significant misunderstandings.
⌲ It's a high quality production with great photography & across the board great audiovisuals.
⌲ Evil Dad #2 was a relatively high class kdrama villain & did not overstay his welcome. (similar to other Park Hye Ryun villains)
⌲ There were some very satisfying -power-fantasy like- scenes.
⌲ The dialog has some rather great moments, here and there.

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Increasingly awful nearing the final episode

The Good
⌲ The FL actress is incredible. (11/10 pretty, 11/10 chic, 11/10 acting ability)
⌲ The cast overall is quite good. (though the ML seems outclassed to me)
⌲ In the early episodes, despite the makjang premise It's been a pretty chill drama with a lot of fun bickering between the leads.
⌲ No -meaningful- love triangles

The Neutral
⌲ The chemistry between the leads is not bad, not amazing.
⌲ Lee Do Han (the actor did a good job, but it's a weird character & the whole premise of coming home from America makes no sense, if I were gay I would have never done that.)
⌲ The romantic progress between the leads is not very natural, it's like the writer decided to follow the episode 8 formula & then just kind of made it happen with a sledgehammer.
⌲ While the writer obviously did not do a good job, some of the dialog -especially early on- is quite amazing.

The Bad
⌲ The makjang-ish setting
⌲ E11 is one of the worst kdrama episodes I have ever watched.
⌲The finale is just a kindergarten tier fanfic fantasy. (normally I wouldn't mind so much, but following E11 it's straight up jarring)
⌲ The writing is really random in the second half, to the point that it's intelligence insulting.(I heard the comic is far better & more consistent)
⌲ The grandpa character (though I never really liked this senior actor in anything, but that could be on me)
⌲ The cartoon villain half siblings
⌲ The awful and I mean AWFUL seperation/breakup plots
⌲ The random time skip

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meh

The first 5-6 episodes were overwhelmingly strong, sure there was not much innovation there, or things I have not seen before, but the mostly excellent casting & the fantasy elements offered solid entertainment. However the second half of the drama just fell flat. The focus shifted from the fantasy romance to other far less pleasant things and some of those make very little sense too. Also why would there be a need to give the father personality adjustments in a pre-produced drama. To me it seems like the screenwriter was really not prepared for this, but even if this were live filming, the pacing would still feel far below average. I have read the webcomic after finishing the drama & in my opinion that one is far better. Yes the ending is still very bad, because I always hate it when "superhero" characters get a normie ending , but at least throughout the comic the author focused on the right things and there were some nice epic moments after all the buildup, which cannot be said about the drama.

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Kim Eun Sook is a huge name in the kdrama industry. We could argue how well deserved that is or not. While I do think Goblin is still the best kdrama ever produced, I'm not sure if the script & more specifically the plot is why. With that said Gentleman's Dignity to me is by far the worst of her works I've seen so far. There are so many problems with the script that it's difficult to list them all & frankly this drama isn't really worth watching in 2023. (which I just did for the first time) You could argue that it's just dated & I'm looking at this with the wrong mindset, but then why do I find Secret Garden being so much better in every way imaginable despite being 2 years older?

Even if I ignore the miscellaneous problems with the plot, the base setting itself is already bleeding from multiple wounds. Out of the 4 male leads two of them are just the baddies, one of them -started out as- a womanizer & another just threw away her lover like a trash bag, because he has fallen in love with someone else. To me If I cannot empathize with the most important characters, then it will be difficult to enjoy any drama. (the other 3 try to help cover up the cheating as well, but then suddenly he is not really a cheater, because the writer decided to completely rewrite his personality to fit the plot direction)
There is also a lot of backward crap about Korean society that I always hated in kdramas.

I could even say this is basically the gutted version of a typical -bad- family drama. By gutted I mean most of the fluff is removed & there are no plotlines involving the elderly. However the whole shebang with a long lost first love & a mysterious high school kid returning home to Korea plot seems very typical.
Also what is Kim Woo Bin doing in this drama? Did they just cast him as eye candy & created a very random inconsequential role for him?

There are some reasonably funny moments, but overall the comedy is not very convincing.

(Much like Secret Garden this drama too has some really cool iconic outfits..)

So yes, I cannot recommend watching this, there are far better retro titles out there. Even the ancient My Girl from 2005 is a far more enjoyable drama than this.

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I think this show is a little overrated, reading other reviews & the comment section I had the impression that this is the most amazing romantic comedy ever. Well it is definitely not, not even close, but 2022 had been quite bleak for Korean romcoms & this one admittedly stands out a little, because it does not really have anything majorly wrong with it & the enemies to lovers trope is something most people -including myself- enjoy. For a corporate kdrama the office slice of life is quite unoffensive, but it's not very interesting either, the hook in the show is just the comedy & romance, nothing else, but the acting is not exactly top tier and the comedy is hit & miss for me. I'm not a huge fan of slapstick & this drama has quite a bit of that & also there are a lot of really juvenile gags. As for the romance it's good, but I'm not a huge fan of the ML in this role & the chemistry is not all that believable. Also the ending felt a bit rushed, did this flop on Korea, so it got shortened to 12 episodes???

I decided to give this 8/10 only, because there were very few good romcoms over the past year & at least I enjoyed this one a lot, though I'm quite certain a rewatch is not in my future.

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¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This is probably the most mediocre kdrama romcom you'll ever see, except three things.
1) There is no love Triangle
2) It has come out in 2022.
3) It's trying to educate the audience a lot.
The first one is rather obvious, the lack of love triangles is always a huge plus for me. This drama is many things, but boring it is not, so I can only applaud the writers for this choice.
The second one needs more explanation. In my opinion 2022 had been a really bad year for kdrama romcoms, there were only like 3 really good ones and quite a few rather bad attempts. At the very least Law Cafe is an enjoyable easy watch, once.
As for the third one, I sense a lot of blatant -progressive- educational intent & this largely reminds me of TVING dramas. Progress is of course good and Korea could for sure use some, but social engineering works better, if it's not so much in your face..

To elaborate more on mediocrity, the romance is average, the comedy is average & we have a crazy cartoon villain alongside an incredible amount of silliness.

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Good, but incredibly slow.

It's been like three years since I've watched Eternal Love 1. It was my first, or second cdrama too. Having seen Dream now I'm thinking that perhaps I've been looking at the original drama with rose tinted glasses. The reason being that Dream is incredibly SLOW and thinking back perhaps EL1 is just as bad in this regard.
The original novel is titled "Three Lives Three Worlds, The Pillow Book". I have not read it, but I'm guessing that all the reincarnated, or semi reincarnated lives witnessed in this drama originate from the novel and oh boy the author did not fail to exhaust this plot device. This is the single worst thing about the drama. Spending 10 episodes in the mortal realm & 10 in another realm living different, or semi different lives is not my definition of a fun story. Had this been a normal 24 episode drama I would have been okay with that, but it's 56 episodes. That's not even all, the show has many makjang-ish moments, it's way beyond what I would consider a frustration free viewing experience.


On a more positive note, there are a lot of amazing things in this drama as well.
In my opinion this is how a cultivation novel should be brought to screen. Sure the CG is pretty low fidelity, however all the daoist powers, formations, creatures and realms were portrayed pretty closely to how I imagined they would be after reading about them for many years. Even an ascension pool is featured!

Of course ultimately this is a romance drama & the OTP had great chemistry and - whenever the characters were aware of each other's identities- their romance was really entertaining to watch, with lots of comedy included.

The supporting cast is absolutely amazing.

The love triangles may be weak, but the secondary love interests caused a decent amount of angst and many misunderstandings. So the overall score is not that great, triangle-wise.

The audiovisuals were excellent, bad CG notwithstanding.

Overall I would say that I greatly enjoyed about half the drama, most of the other half was on the boring side of frustrating, however considering how memorable this drama is for me I think rating it at 8/10 is more than fair.

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Spoilers ahead, careful..

This is a great slice of life school drama, heavily inspired by the Reply series. Though if Reply 1988 is Empire Strikes Back, then Lovely Us is Lego Star Wars, if that makes sense. This drama doesn't take itself nearly as seriously as the Reply-s and there is quite a bit of of overemphasized juvenile humor too. Overall the drama is quite easygoing and wholesome & it has much fewer annoyances than 1994, but the immersion is not quite up to that level.

I have taken off two points due to the following reasons. Firstly I feel that a 16 episode long mini series shouldn't be this episodic. Whenever the characters had any significant progress in their relationships, the next episode sort of washed it away immediately, as if nothing has happened. As a direct consequence the last episode of this drama feels a little like episode 8 of a typical kdrama, sort of excluding the last 10 minutes. I mean sure, I can get onboard with the main couple only getting together in the last episode, but I cannot help but be wanting more. As for my biggest gripe, it's the second couple's story. At the midway point their impromptu appearance on that TV show was perhaps the best moment in the series, that really gave me the feels etc & then boom come the next episode and as if that never happened and in the finale the writers decided not only to not bring them together, but it's even heavily hinted that she flew straight into that Oyang's arms. I'm extremely displeased about that, to say the least.

The cinematographer overused background obliteration, so the rather well made sets had very little opportunity to shine. Though admittedly this did not bother me too much.

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This is basically like 4 regular kdramas in one, 2 really sweet guilty pleasure romcoms, 1 really juvenile show that's somewhat annoying to watch & one that is really boring. Considering that this is a 50 hour family drama targeting families -including children and the elderly- it's the best outcome one can really hope for. All things considered Once Again is possibly the best family kdrama ever produced. The content that was meant for different audiences is bearable. The makjang stays just below my nerve threshold. I'm sure you all know how the typical kdrama recipe is like, where everything goes to shit around episode 14-15 and then we get a happy ending in the last episode. Despite the 50 episodes the ratio of conflict is very similar to a regular kdrama, but while binge watching this the "bad" episodes can be a bit taxing since there are 3 times as many of them due to the overall length of the show.

Overall I'm happy that I watched Once Again, but I ended up skipping many of the annoyances.

edit: My Father is Strange is a very comparable family drama.

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I enjoyed watching the first 1/3 A LOT, enjoyed the second 1/3 moderately & I found the last 1/3 (before the one hour long ending) boring & predictable. The truly amazing acting performances are semi ruined by the script. There isn't any writer's creativity here. It's like they took the procedural story from "I Can Hear Your Voice" & they added the plot twist from Healer, but unlike in Healer they tried their best to ruin all the good that they've built, milking the stupid twist to the max. Others have mentioned that they could only finish watching the show, because of the interesting villain figure, well I did not find him interesting at all, by the time I reached the later episodes I only continued watching to see the inevitable happy ending. The procedural parts weren't interesting, I did not feel very engaged with any of the miscellaneous cases. The mental problems of the villain just made me yawn.

Despite all the negatives I'm still giving it a 7.5, because the acting performances were really spot on, the romance despite the retarded separation was quite awesome. The humor deserves some praise as well, I did spit out my tea that one time.. I liked the ending double episode too, liked it a lot in fact. It's nice that there was no triangle, I really hate triangles.
I Can Hear Your Voice & Healer are MUCH MUCH MUCH better than this one, but nonetheless this is still entertaining enough & I felt that it was mostly worth my time.

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Great drama that aired at the perfect time, matching the season and my mood!

Romance-wise this is not far off from the best I have seen in cdramaland. The acting by the leads is fantastic, it's rather hard to believe the FL is played by the same actress I've recently seen in `A Date with the Future `.
I've read the novel & I think it's alright & oftentimes very beautiful, but as someone who has read countless Chinese romance novels, I think there are better ones out there. This show is really benefiting from its audiovisuals & the various involved arts besides writing, overall I'd say the drama is significantly elevated over the novel.

So why is it not 10 stars? Well there are a few plot related hiccups. Due to changes the director/script-re-writer made, the drama ended up having 3 rather weak episodes, 24 to 26 was it? It was really unnecessary to turn something sufficiently dramatic into a 6 month force separation due to noble reasons. Sure maybe this is arguably realistic enough, considering our FL's mental state, but there was really no reason to make this such a long affair on our screens. Also the second couple -which does not exist in the novel- is straight up boring & second ML's family things, grandpa's dog burial etc are 5/10 at best. Assuming these things did not exist in the comic either, the director's own touch misfired a little bit here, though it's not that much time-wise..
Mistakes aside, our rewriter has done some good work too here and there, for example the ending 3 episodes are very satisfying & well done as opposed to the what we get from the side stories in the novel.

Overall this is a beautiful and very atmospheric healing drama with a lot of positive messaging, I can only recommend!
I'm especially happy with how the FL has dealt with her mother, I'm shocked that this passed censorship to be honest, I fully expected the drama version to add a mini redemption arc or some kind of concession for the mom, but I'm super happy that the toxic parent got what was coming to them, amazing! (and this almost never happens in Asian dramas)

(triangle haters can safely watch, the flies get dealt with rather quickly)

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I don't like the Saeguk genre. I started watching this due to the extreme hype & Shin Hye Sun. At first I was pleasantly surprised, the first 9 episodes were perhaps the best saeguk experience I've ever had. Despite the nonsense story I just felt an incredible amount of joy watching this. It was like 95% high quality humor & 5% political bullshit/scheming. Unfortunately the ratio completely flips around after episode 9. The humor is not enough the carry the story anymore. In fact if I ignore the comedy & look at this as a political romance the writing is on the weaker side of mediocre. The second half of the story has a lot of makjang with a really sloppy love story & a weird love triangle situation. I found the second lead to be the really really annoying, cartoon villain type, but the other villains had really unclear & unreasonable motivations as well. In general having characters that have teary eyes in every single one of their scenes is just a terrible chliche and this drama has 3 of them, yep.. (prince, drug addict assassin guy & second ML) The second FL's story is also kind of like something one would see in a lakorn, what a wasted bromance opportunity. (or more?!) Also about the guy with the scar on his face, it's just intelligence insulting that someone would have such a distinct scar on their face, but use a mask that doesn't cover that area. Even in the mask shop scene there were suitable masks on the wall.
Every moment with the OTP on screen was entertaining to watch, but the writers just couldn't commit to handling the whole genderbender, semi BL situation and this concluded in what I consider one of the worst endings I've seen in a kdrama. (typically I don't even start a kdrama, if the ending is bad) I'm sure that the fear of conservative housewives bombarding them with letters is part of it, perhaps even KCSC could have been considered, but good God there were so many ways to turn the situation tame in a more wholesome, happy manner. (there are some great ideas in the comment section)
While I was watching the drama I was thinking that perhaps the main writer wrote all the political stuff & the main storyline, while a group of writing interns were responsible for the comedy. Imagine my surprise, when I saw later that this drama has been written by a duo. I guess that could explain everything.


Despite the bad story I decided to give the drama a 8/10 rating. Partly because it's been an extremely memorable experience, partly because the comedy is just so on point and also because EVERY actor was trying so hard. Korean actors are almost always professional enough, but in this show nearly the entire cast has shown near tangible enthusiasm, even more so than in Crash Landing. As I said the saeguk makjang writing was bad, but thanks to the extraordinary acting performances - at least compared to other saeguk makjangs - it felt quite polished to me.
If Shin Hye Sun doesn't win a Daesang for this, then the award show season of 2021 would hold no meaning. (She is way more deserving than Jun Ji Hyun ever were) This is not the first time for her to carry a show on her back almost singlehandedly (not even the second time), but she was just too brilliant.

The production quality is very high, the sets, the OST, the cinematography were all up to standard. That "Bong Hwan-A" song is just perfection..

Shoutout to court maid Hong Yeon, I'd be more than willing to watch her in a leading role.

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After having watched the first 2 episodes I feel that this drama has a lot of potential. The show has a great vibe, there was a lot of wholesomeness in these two hours. I came in expecting something along the lines of WWWSK and Her Private Life, but this is a way more realistic story, with more down to earth characters. In my opinion Park Min Young's best performance was in Healer and in this drama she plays a similar, but somewhat darker character.
About that melodrama tag, yes it makes sense, but it's pretty chill for melo, kind of like how it was in Encounter.
To sum it up it's an easy 10/10 based on 2 episodes, I have high hopes for this one.

And here are my (spoilery) thoughts after seeing the rest of the show:

The things that I wrote about the first two episodes hold up pretty well up to about episode 12-13. From there things do go downhill some. The story shifts focus to the main mystery & in all seriousness I was not all that interested about that whole situation & they could have gotten the explanations over with in 20 minutes, if they really wanted to. From this show I wanted wholesomeness and warmth, but we got some real Melo in episodes 14-15 and I did not feel the emotional impact all that much, nor did things get resolved in a satisfactory ending in the final episode. Make no mistake episode 16 was pretty nice, but it led to the kind of mildly hopeful unending that I don't particularly like. It's possible that the subtitles contributed too, the last sentence that EunSop said slowly over the course of the last 3 minutes felt strange..(VIU) Also I'm curious about how the original novel ended, I have a suspicion that it was not like this.
The low rewatch score is the result of the ending, I don't like rewatching shows that don't offer a reasonable closure.

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