This review may contain spoilers
I hate this with a burning passion and I need to rant about why.
The titular question refers to Lee Yeong Joon's (Park Seo Joon) confusion regarding his secretary giving notice after years. What is wrong with Secretary Kim Mi So (Park Min Young) that she can't see what an honor and privilege it is to be his 24-7 slave?
It isn't much of a question, actually. Kim Mi straight up tells LYJ that he's a narcissist and she's had no time to have her own life while working for him. So, since she is finally in a secure financial position, she's quitting. This is just the Sandra Bullock 2002 movie Two Weeks Notice, Korean style, right?
It ain't.
Don't be fooled by reviews calling this sweet and fluffy with 'a great plot'. This is a nonsensical, over dramatic, badly written garbage fire of abuse and misogyny. I was three episodes in when I started feeling physically ill that this barrage of red flags and crime are perceived as romantic.
The problems?
1. The SeKrit Backstory runs the premise off the road so they don't have to deal with the systemic misogyny.
2. Kim Mi So doesn't exist as a character, so neither can a romance exist. Also misogyny.
1. The SeKrit Backstory.
I don't think I've ever seen a plot reveal so totally invalidate the first half of the show the way this one did. Re-read that plot synopsis. That's how the series plays it initially; that LYJ doesn't know why KMS wants to leave, or why her leaving/dating other men upsets him. He spends the first few episodes confused and trying to win her heart in a plethora of cringe ways. LYJ treats KMS like shit and she's tired of it. Simple. LYJ has to fix his ways, right?
No. All that gets abandoned when they introduce TeH SeKrit Backstory. You see, Yeong Joon and Mi So have history; as children they were kidnapped and imprisoned by some Rando Lady! LYJ has scars from the cable ties she restrained him with, and he calls the kidnapper 'mom' in the flashbacks which seems to indicate there was some weird shit going on, which spawned his phobia around physical intimacy with women. The specter of molestation rears it head, but it's never really addressed. Nor is why Rando Lady kidnapped them, or why she later hangs herself in front of them.
Once she's dead, the kids escape and LYJ takes KMS home where she vows never to forget him, blah blah blah, she's five years old. Of course she forgets. It's all very stupid and artificial, designed to give them traumas to be plot obstacles.
Oh, you thought that was the end of the trauma? Nope. See, LYJ got kidnapped because his elder brother Lee Sung Yeong (Lee Tae Hwan) has been bullying him for years, and abandoned him alone to be hurt. In the aftermath of the kidnapping, LSY has a mental collapse in which he absorbs LYJ's experience as his own. So, LSY believes HE was the one kidnapped because of LYJ's actions and starts terrorizing LYJ.
And rather than, say, get their children any help, the parents just accept the delusion as truth and go on with their lives.
Yeah, you read that right. These revolting parents allow the child to invert his guilt. LSY takes over LYJ's room, he screams and physically attacks LYJ, and constantly brings it up to guilt him into things. The parents, rather than help the child with the complete identity crisis, allow him to continuously re-traumatize the actual kidnapped child. In fact, they make it LYJ's responsibility to uphold the narrative to stop LSY from acting out. At a certain point they just assume LYJ lost his memory of having been kidnapped so they gaslight him, perpetuating phenomenal levels of emotional and mental abuse.
I thought we'd see a Golden Child/Scapegoat dynamic to explain it, but no. The best I can come up with is Asian filial piety; that the appearance of normalcy is worth any sacrifice, including the mental well-being of your children. Both LYJ and LSY were abused in the name of pretending there weren't problems. The parents get weepy about it later, but don't ever fully own their culpability, nor does the narrative think they should. In my culture, this is unacceptable levels of cruelty. Your mileage may vary, I suppose.
Somehow these layered traumas morph LYJ into an arrogant, self-absorbed man who constantly boasts about his physical perfection, intellectual prowess, generosity, and wealth. It doesn't track. None of it is framed as compensation for a damaged ego. He truly believes it.
Anyway, they grow up separate and one day KMS gets a job at LYJ's company. So, of course, LYJ masterminds KMS into becoming his secretary, despite the fact that she is severely under qualified for it. Not only that, he immediately takes her to a foreign country where she doesn't speak the language- and then berates her for not knowing the language, the full scope of her job or the customs and culture. So, entrapment.
With a combination of isolation, constant criticism, and back-handed assistance, LYJ provokes KMS into becoming a perfect employee. Not just a secretary; she handles much of his personal life, including dressing and dining help, visits with his parents and assists him in romancing (and ditching) women. KMS has learned all his foibles to cater to his every whim. She's rightfully tired of it.
That entire premise is never resolved. LYJ never comes to terms with the fact that he's been horrifically selfish and manipulative. The SeKrit Backstory becomes a giant, grotesque trauma float meant to excuse all of LYJ's behavior, and distract from the very real problems that exist between them that the show would have to take a good long look at their gender politics to resolve.
2. Kim Mi Who?
Kim Mi So is truly a farce of a character. I was astounded by how little she existed in a story ostensibly about her. She's the titular character, for fucks sake, but she's such a nonentity. Not one single thing in this whole damn plot was actually about her, her wants and needs.
For example; How was Mi So kidnapped? Did anyone notice? Her mother was dying somewhere and a five year old goes missing for a day or two and no one notices? Her experience of this massive plot point which takes up half the show is never revealed. The kidnapping is life-changing for LYJ. For KMS, it just seems to be a thing that happened to put her in LYJ's orbit. The only consequence is her fear of spiders. It is ornamental at best. You'd think she might share the fear of cable ties, but no.
KMS's entire character is written to loop back to LYJ in a really sick way that denies her a basic person-hood. We know nothing that happened to her in the intervening years which does not relate to Yeong Joon. Even the fact that she somehow has to be the one to pay off the debt accrued by her father's shitty life choices and her two older sister's educations, relates back to LYJ, because it's him she has to appease to keep her job.
This might be another culture barrier I can't see, but why is it KMS's responsibility to shore up the family finances instead the older sisters? Why don't the older sisters go 'hey, you supported us at a job that made you miserable, but now you can quit, and we'll support you while you find a career/path that will make you happy'? Well, because then something would NOT be about LYJ, and we can't have that. The sisters never have one conversation about their family situation. All of their exchanges are about LYJ and how awful he is. They, of course, later become obstacles to the relationship for extremely valid reasons the show refuses to acknowledge.
Mi So's only distinct thing you can point to her liking is the Morpheus books. And even that isn't about her. It's about her interacting with LSY to expose The SeKrit Backstory with LYJ.
So not only can she not have her own experiences and history, they didn't bother to give her an actual personality beyond competitive, determined and perky. But even those traits serve LYJ's story; she's not competitive or ambitious enough to say, take what she learned with LYJ and get a job elsewhere, only to become the perfect employee for him. She's determined—to get to the bottom of the kidnapping story, but not to quit, date other men and find her own life. She's perky because it seems like most Asian Drama heroines are for no other reason that it's a feminine virtue. She starts out being So Done with LYJ, but the first time he starts throwing money at her, she caves. Like, bitch?! Sure, you can't be bought with cold hard cash, but if you put a thin solicitous romantic skin on it and you're all in?
Her laundry list of very valid complaints about LYJ come to naught, and are then exacerbated with the 'romance' of harassment, bribery, stalking, love-bombing, intimidation and wealth flexing. It's not romantic. Romance is not guilting women into compliance with your trauma. At no point does LYJ recognize his power or his abuse of KMS. His romantic efforts are in service of keeping her in his employ and under his power, not for sincere affection.
KMS molded herself into the perfect secretary for LYJ, fully acknowledging that she'd sacrificed her identity to do so, and the plot isn't troubled by that in the slightest. If anything, there's an insidious, tacit kind of approval; She should be molding her whole life around a man who doesn't care about her or others. She should be happy with the crumbs he gives her all while espousing his own glory. She should continue to work for him, a complete subordinate in every single avenue of her life. That's what women should aspire to. She has no protection from him in the future, and that is an incredibly dangerous thing to encourage women to do in the name of romance.
The gender politics of this show are everything that South Korean women are protesting with the b4 movement, but you'll find nothing but the same sexist agenda aiming to promise women that love is service and access to our bodies.
What's Wrong With Secretary Kim? She woke the fuck up, and you put her back into a gilded female prison under the guise of True Love and It's Not His Fault, It's His Trauma.
Fuck. Off.
It isn't much of a question, actually. Kim Mi straight up tells LYJ that he's a narcissist and she's had no time to have her own life while working for him. So, since she is finally in a secure financial position, she's quitting. This is just the Sandra Bullock 2002 movie Two Weeks Notice, Korean style, right?
It ain't.
Don't be fooled by reviews calling this sweet and fluffy with 'a great plot'. This is a nonsensical, over dramatic, badly written garbage fire of abuse and misogyny. I was three episodes in when I started feeling physically ill that this barrage of red flags and crime are perceived as romantic.
The problems?
1. The SeKrit Backstory runs the premise off the road so they don't have to deal with the systemic misogyny.
2. Kim Mi So doesn't exist as a character, so neither can a romance exist. Also misogyny.
1. The SeKrit Backstory.
I don't think I've ever seen a plot reveal so totally invalidate the first half of the show the way this one did. Re-read that plot synopsis. That's how the series plays it initially; that LYJ doesn't know why KMS wants to leave, or why her leaving/dating other men upsets him. He spends the first few episodes confused and trying to win her heart in a plethora of cringe ways. LYJ treats KMS like shit and she's tired of it. Simple. LYJ has to fix his ways, right?
No. All that gets abandoned when they introduce TeH SeKrit Backstory. You see, Yeong Joon and Mi So have history; as children they were kidnapped and imprisoned by some Rando Lady! LYJ has scars from the cable ties she restrained him with, and he calls the kidnapper 'mom' in the flashbacks which seems to indicate there was some weird shit going on, which spawned his phobia around physical intimacy with women. The specter of molestation rears it head, but it's never really addressed. Nor is why Rando Lady kidnapped them, or why she later hangs herself in front of them.
Once she's dead, the kids escape and LYJ takes KMS home where she vows never to forget him, blah blah blah, she's five years old. Of course she forgets. It's all very stupid and artificial, designed to give them traumas to be plot obstacles.
Oh, you thought that was the end of the trauma? Nope. See, LYJ got kidnapped because his elder brother Lee Sung Yeong (Lee Tae Hwan) has been bullying him for years, and abandoned him alone to be hurt. In the aftermath of the kidnapping, LSY has a mental collapse in which he absorbs LYJ's experience as his own. So, LSY believes HE was the one kidnapped because of LYJ's actions and starts terrorizing LYJ.
And rather than, say, get their children any help, the parents just accept the delusion as truth and go on with their lives.
Yeah, you read that right. These revolting parents allow the child to invert his guilt. LSY takes over LYJ's room, he screams and physically attacks LYJ, and constantly brings it up to guilt him into things. The parents, rather than help the child with the complete identity crisis, allow him to continuously re-traumatize the actual kidnapped child. In fact, they make it LYJ's responsibility to uphold the narrative to stop LSY from acting out. At a certain point they just assume LYJ lost his memory of having been kidnapped so they gaslight him, perpetuating phenomenal levels of emotional and mental abuse.
I thought we'd see a Golden Child/Scapegoat dynamic to explain it, but no. The best I can come up with is Asian filial piety; that the appearance of normalcy is worth any sacrifice, including the mental well-being of your children. Both LYJ and LSY were abused in the name of pretending there weren't problems. The parents get weepy about it later, but don't ever fully own their culpability, nor does the narrative think they should. In my culture, this is unacceptable levels of cruelty. Your mileage may vary, I suppose.
Somehow these layered traumas morph LYJ into an arrogant, self-absorbed man who constantly boasts about his physical perfection, intellectual prowess, generosity, and wealth. It doesn't track. None of it is framed as compensation for a damaged ego. He truly believes it.
Anyway, they grow up separate and one day KMS gets a job at LYJ's company. So, of course, LYJ masterminds KMS into becoming his secretary, despite the fact that she is severely under qualified for it. Not only that, he immediately takes her to a foreign country where she doesn't speak the language- and then berates her for not knowing the language, the full scope of her job or the customs and culture. So, entrapment.
With a combination of isolation, constant criticism, and back-handed assistance, LYJ provokes KMS into becoming a perfect employee. Not just a secretary; she handles much of his personal life, including dressing and dining help, visits with his parents and assists him in romancing (and ditching) women. KMS has learned all his foibles to cater to his every whim. She's rightfully tired of it.
That entire premise is never resolved. LYJ never comes to terms with the fact that he's been horrifically selfish and manipulative. The SeKrit Backstory becomes a giant, grotesque trauma float meant to excuse all of LYJ's behavior, and distract from the very real problems that exist between them that the show would have to take a good long look at their gender politics to resolve.
2. Kim Mi Who?
Kim Mi So is truly a farce of a character. I was astounded by how little she existed in a story ostensibly about her. She's the titular character, for fucks sake, but she's such a nonentity. Not one single thing in this whole damn plot was actually about her, her wants and needs.
For example; How was Mi So kidnapped? Did anyone notice? Her mother was dying somewhere and a five year old goes missing for a day or two and no one notices? Her experience of this massive plot point which takes up half the show is never revealed. The kidnapping is life-changing for LYJ. For KMS, it just seems to be a thing that happened to put her in LYJ's orbit. The only consequence is her fear of spiders. It is ornamental at best. You'd think she might share the fear of cable ties, but no.
KMS's entire character is written to loop back to LYJ in a really sick way that denies her a basic person-hood. We know nothing that happened to her in the intervening years which does not relate to Yeong Joon. Even the fact that she somehow has to be the one to pay off the debt accrued by her father's shitty life choices and her two older sister's educations, relates back to LYJ, because it's him she has to appease to keep her job.
This might be another culture barrier I can't see, but why is it KMS's responsibility to shore up the family finances instead the older sisters? Why don't the older sisters go 'hey, you supported us at a job that made you miserable, but now you can quit, and we'll support you while you find a career/path that will make you happy'? Well, because then something would NOT be about LYJ, and we can't have that. The sisters never have one conversation about their family situation. All of their exchanges are about LYJ and how awful he is. They, of course, later become obstacles to the relationship for extremely valid reasons the show refuses to acknowledge.
Mi So's only distinct thing you can point to her liking is the Morpheus books. And even that isn't about her. It's about her interacting with LSY to expose The SeKrit Backstory with LYJ.
So not only can she not have her own experiences and history, they didn't bother to give her an actual personality beyond competitive, determined and perky. But even those traits serve LYJ's story; she's not competitive or ambitious enough to say, take what she learned with LYJ and get a job elsewhere, only to become the perfect employee for him. She's determined—to get to the bottom of the kidnapping story, but not to quit, date other men and find her own life. She's perky because it seems like most Asian Drama heroines are for no other reason that it's a feminine virtue. She starts out being So Done with LYJ, but the first time he starts throwing money at her, she caves. Like, bitch?! Sure, you can't be bought with cold hard cash, but if you put a thin solicitous romantic skin on it and you're all in?
Her laundry list of very valid complaints about LYJ come to naught, and are then exacerbated with the 'romance' of harassment, bribery, stalking, love-bombing, intimidation and wealth flexing. It's not romantic. Romance is not guilting women into compliance with your trauma. At no point does LYJ recognize his power or his abuse of KMS. His romantic efforts are in service of keeping her in his employ and under his power, not for sincere affection.
KMS molded herself into the perfect secretary for LYJ, fully acknowledging that she'd sacrificed her identity to do so, and the plot isn't troubled by that in the slightest. If anything, there's an insidious, tacit kind of approval; She should be molding her whole life around a man who doesn't care about her or others. She should be happy with the crumbs he gives her all while espousing his own glory. She should continue to work for him, a complete subordinate in every single avenue of her life. That's what women should aspire to. She has no protection from him in the future, and that is an incredibly dangerous thing to encourage women to do in the name of romance.
The gender politics of this show are everything that South Korean women are protesting with the b4 movement, but you'll find nothing but the same sexist agenda aiming to promise women that love is service and access to our bodies.
What's Wrong With Secretary Kim? She woke the fuck up, and you put her back into a gilded female prison under the guise of True Love and It's Not His Fault, It's His Trauma.
Fuck. Off.
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