autumn carrot

Harem Drama Lite.

Is this you? Have you just read a certain fanfic for a certain fandom that is a Harem AU and now the story hasn’t updated for weeks and you are just craving that good concubine no. 3 feels? Are you really tempted to watch one of those big harem dramas like Yanxi palace but you see the 70+ episode count and you feel like it’ll be less painful to take your organs out of your body with your bare hands than sit through that many episodes? Are you just itching to watch a bunch of stir-crazy people fight over who gets to sleep with an average/mediocre/ok-maybe-he’s-cool dude? THEN BOY DO I HAVE A SHOW FOR YOU!
With a humble 45 (GOOD GOD! FORTY-FIVE?!?!?!?) episode count, the sword and the brocade gives you all that good “my love, I may have many in my harem, but there’s only you in the harem of my heart” feels while not actually making you want to crawl up a wall from all the palace intrigue melodrama. This is a show about two sourly yet genuinely good people slowly falling in love while every single character around them gets b*tch slapped by Karma! It’s fun…until it’s not.
I can’t in good conscience recommend this show though, mainly because I had such a negative experience making it through the last fifteen episodes of this show. It starts really well, it’s very gripping and there are so many delicious feelings throughout but the pace slows around episode 25 and just about becomes unbearable after episode 36. So maybe watch this only if you are very desperate for a Harem drama that isn’t as cut-throat or extreme as those palace ones.

You should watch this if you like:
1. Harem dramas
2. Murder mysteries
3. Happy endings
4. Meddlesome mother-in-laws (the real villain, everyone!)
5. Arranged marriage
6. Enemies to lovers but not very intense
7. Cinderella stories
8. Ming dynasty misogyny
9. Pro-monogamy harem plot…
10. Sewing (?)

Summary: The main character is the daughter of an unfavored concubine. Now it has come the time for the official mother to marry off her unfavorable concubine-born daughters in the most politically advantageous way. But best-laid plans of mice and men, everything goes the exact opposite way as she wanted, so now her least favorite daughter is married off to a beautiful, jade-like marquis of a man, instead of an abusive, drunkard womanizer and that’s karma for you! There’s a murder mystery, a skippable political plot, lots and lots of concubine drama, and the MOST unlikable, meddlesome, STUPID mother-in-law in the whole world, there too.

The story: I will give them a little credit. They were trying to say something, about women’s lives in the olden times, the terrible conditions of concubinage, the unfairness of the social hierarchy and they do manage to do that for the most part but it’s just so weak and it seems like they gave up on nuance very early on as they fall into the pitfalls of cliches and cinematic stereotypes of catfights that have proven to bring in excited viewers in the past. That’s my way of saying, they tried to be woke but realized it’ll make more money if they just go for the good old melodrama. I think Yanxi palace tried to do a similar thing but they achieved it with a lot more grace and elegance and the point was more solid there (even though that had its melodrama shenanigans too). There's also this bait-and-switch plot that is used too many times to show the change of tides in the plot that was cool the first time but got annoying when they did it over and over again.
The story also has something to say about getting lost in traditions and rules that can lead to denying people their agency to make choices for their own life. The show starts with this truly jaded man who has been forced into marriage and taking concubines and just putting up with all of this, even though he really couldn’t care less. He’s completely disillusioned about women and sees them as opportunistic people who will use sexuality and beauty to gain money and power. This is the best detail of the show because you can see how the female lead changes his perceptions throughout the show and finally makes it possible for him to figure out what he wants and what his problems were all along and how to ask for things that he wants.
But this also means that the female lead barely had a character arc! She was a pretty smart and level-headed person from the start and she is validated all the way to the end of the show. Her only change in the story is to fall in love but other than that she is a fully formed woman with a great understanding of herself and her principles from the very beginning.

The acting: Despite all the problems I had with the plot, I actually liked the two main actors. I prefer the more subdued and calm acting that Seven Tan did here and I also liked Wallace Chung’s acting. Not sure about the couple's chemistry, though. One was more into the romance than the other, I thought. I’ve also decided to add a new criterion to how I judge the acting, by judging the ensemble’s acting as a whole and basically judge how well everyone’s acting worked together. I have to say, here the acting was very homogenous. Everyone was on the same level. Shout out to He Hong Shan’s acting, she gave this very bratty voice to her character and it was brilliant. It made you want to slap her so bad! I also feel bad for Daddi Tong. I didn’t like his character but he did a good job and I hope he’ll get male leads in the future so he can be less pitiful.

The music: This is probably the best part of this show. The background music is just okay but the soundtrack is very romantic and it really worked well for the romance. As a whole the production was fine. Nothing special to say about it.

Rewatch value: None. Unless you’re THAT desperate for a harem drama that isn’t in the palace actually.

The negative: There’s a lot of weak writing in this show. For instance, there’s an attempt made to connect the political stuff with the harem stuff and the murder mystery all together, and yeah they’re connected but I don’t think anyone who was watching cared even a little for that political stuff, and for good reason. It was boring and very simple and it just took up a lot of space that had nothing happening in it. The other problem was the pacing. The show has a lot of little arcs and these did not mesh well together. Instead of having one big arc and small arcs intertwined together, each tiny arc is resolved separately. This means that we end up with the same story over and over again. Getting rid of a bad concubine? Three separate arcs that are solved one at a time, fighting over the second male lead being a potential homewrecker but with different intensities? Five different arcs! It just makes the show feel like a broken record because they keep arguing over the same things over and over again. After episode 25, everything just turns into a Groundhog Day. Everyone just goes around each other repeating the same issues again and again and each time only one thing is resolved until FINALLY, it’s all over. Really this show should have been 30 episodes. It was too long.
There was a lot of nothing in the show too: getting on and off carriages, purring tea, just moving from one place to another. You’d expect them to omit these in editing.
There’s also a bit of a negative bias in the story. Those women were all victims. The mother-in-law was a monster and she created this poisonous environment that only nurtured poisonous snakes. But the story somehow puts the main character on a moral high ground over these other victims. Even though there was no reason for her to be holier than the others. It’s not even her fault, it’s just that the show gets so twisted around itself that it ends up reaffirming the traditional values of women that the show was criticizing at first.

Overall: This show came into my life just as I needed it. I did binge some twenty-something episodes of it like my life depended on it. It’s a skippable watch unless you know mandarin and can just let it play in the background then maybe it'll be better. Just be ready to get annoyed.

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Why did I watch this?!

I did not enjoy this movie. I was very intrigued by the description which makes the movie sound like something it just wasn't. I wouldn't recommend watching this unless you are a fan of the actors and you're willing to support them through tedious plots and bad narratives.
This movie fails in my opinion, not by being fundamentally a bad concept but somewhere in post-production something went wrong. The editing of this movie is tragic but I can't even blame the editor because the plot is complicated and the movie is trying to be so many different things at once that it fails to truly master any of its concepts perfectly. The cuts are jumpy, it goes from one scene to another without any logical connection or flow. It's just like separate paragraphs cut and pasted together. This makes the movie disjointed and messy. Mainly the issue is that the movie was trying to be an arthouse aesthetic movie, palace intrigue movie, erotic obsession movie, a commentary on power and corruption, and a revenge plot all at once and each of these would have made a good movie if they had just focused on one thing and centered the plot around that but no, they had to do it all at once and it made no sense. There were also some very questionable cinematography choices, and I wouldn't bring something like this up if they weren't so bizarre that it actually affected my enjoyment of the story. Some scenes have gorgeous framing and very symmetrical setting but then sometimes the camera is on the wrong person during conversations and it just really ruined the emotional impact of the scene. (Like when the king accuses his mother of attempting to kill the king and when he does this, we don't see her reaction and there's just this awkward silence before she starts talking and it's so wrong because I'm pretty sure the actress was acting her heart out for the reaction they didn't show!)
Obviously, the script had major issues. As I said, it had too many complicated plotlines that all get the bare minimum effort put into them and so they're all so cliche and disjointed. This also means that the characters don't get enough space to be developed. Especially the two mains; THE concubine and her former lover. Both are such cardboard characters with so little time put in actually developing any personality or clear motivation for them that they are as unknown and one-dimensional at the start as they are at the end. Also, the lover was barely in the movie, he was so pointless and he honestly didn't deserve any of the things that were done to him. I think the writer should pay for emotional damage to their own character!!!!! The king gets a better development though it could've been better? Like I said: the bare minimum.
What was good in the movie was the set design, the aesthetic they were going for, and the choreography. The movie looks pretty? They do try to make it look smarter than it is (and what it was, was just softcore p*rn barely masquerading as a historical drama) but it was such a wasted effort. I don't remember the music so I'm thinking it was either so good it became invisible or so inconsequential that I didn't remember any of it.
The acting...could've been better? Some parts were overacted in my opinion. Others seemed confused about what they had to go for, so they just went with blank stoicism, which might be to some viewers' preference but I only like stoic performances if the eyes can communicate the deep emotions and there was none of that here. I don't blame the actors though, they were hardly given anything to work with.
Lastly, what I just hated about this movie were the excessive, gratuitous, pointless sex scenes that were very explicit and numerous, and maybe if they had made those a little more tasteful and MUCH shorter, there would've been more time to develop an actual plot for the movie. I don't know, just a suggestion.... (I know why they put them there but in the absence of a cohesive plot, this was just in bad taste)
Overall, I wasted precious time watching this movie and I regret the sequence of decisions I made that led me to watch it. I think this story should have been a tv series, (a miniseries maybe,) instead of a movie but given the number of gratuitous sex scenes in it, I can see why they chose to make a movie instead.
Please go watch something else if you want to watch a good movie. If you're here for the nudity or the actors, then go ahead and watch it!

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A dancer dies twice.

"A dancer dies twice—once when they stop dancing, and this first death is more painful.” Martha Graham

This show is hands down, one of the best Kdramas I have ever seen and probably the most touching one since The Red Sleeve, for me. I feel like it should be going down in some book as one of the most poignant shows made about music, art, the artist's connection to their art, tradition, and the slow painful death that culture goes through when the times move on with a faster speed than it can keep up with. This show is a love story. Not a romantic love story, though. It is a love letter to Pansori and Gukgeuk. They have crafted this story with such compassion and care that you are moved by the slow tragedy that unfolds, twice over; once on behalf of the characters who are going through it, and once again as you absorb the enormity of watching an era's slow but dignified death.
The story follows country bumpkin, Jeongnyeon, who loves to sing but is forbidden to do so by her mother. After finally escaping home, she comes to Seoul to audition for a position at a gukgeuk troupe called Mearan. After finally getting in, her true journey starts: honing her craft, learning humility, making friends and foes, and overcoming the unexpected hardships that life puts in her path.
The story is heartbreaking as things first go up but unavoidably come down again, as darkness overcomes the light. And one comes to understand that sometimes determination and love are not enough and despite wanting otherwise, some endings are unfortunately inevitable. The only thing that remains is the love for the music. For singing. For dancing. The joy of bringing that art to the insatiable audience. This is not a love story but it might as well have been.
Unfortunately for this show, it is an adaptation of a webtoon, and as all webtoons cast a curse on their good adaptations, this one also had the misfortune of being a significantly inaccurate adaptation, or so I've heard, and that has come to harm the show's intergrity. The source material being an explicitly sapphic romance, the show falls short of bringing that from subtext into text and in addition, has erased a key love interest out of existence, so it seems to be suffering from a boycott by the original source's fans.
I haven't read the original and, not being a fan of Korean webtoons, it's unlikely I will ever read it so I can't judge the depth of the betrayal but as a casual viewer with no prior knowledge of this webtoon's existence, just watching the show as a show that exists separate from its other associations,I thought this show was magnificent. There was also definitely multiple romantic subplots but the romance is not the center of the story here. At all! But its existence is pivotal to how the characters behave and move the plot forward so despite not being centered, it is a critical part of the story that helps connect every character and their motivations together. That said, the main pairing of the story wasn't my favorite and my investment in their romance was very low (hashtag Team Jeong-Seo 4ever!) I was more interested in another dynamic that never actually developed fully into a romance. However, the sapphic themes are obvious and crucial but not central as the story takes great pains to put the love for gukgeuk at the forefront of the show and I loved that decision, actually. The way that this show talks about music and art is magnificent and something I have rarely seen done with so much love and devotion to the craft. So I still think this is still a love story but not a romance.
The acting is pure perfection. I'm actually speechless. I can't find enough words to praise this ensemble. Every single actress in this show was perfect. They were so good! They were glorious! Artful! Sensational! I don't know! Kim Tae Ri doesn't even need an explanation. Everybody knows she's amazing. But holy f***, I did not know Jung Eun Chae had that in her, woah! Also, the rest of this cast need to be 50 times more famous, already. Shin Ye Eun was so good and so was Woo Da Vi and everyone else too! And I haven't even gotten to explaining what magic they created when they were performing on the stage within the show. I cried so much, watching these actors as their characters put on shows in which they played other characters!!!! That's two layers of acting and they did it with such passion and refinement, I was crying during every Changgeuk performance. Which brings me to...
Music: So the music in this show is a solid 10 out of 10 stars because the music is out of this world. This is essentially a musical, with at least two musical performances per episode throughout the run. Each song is performed again and again by multiple characters in parts before we see the full performances later on. Each freaking performance brought tears to my eyes. I'm not Korean but my god!!!! These songs based on Korean folklore touched my heart like I had grown up with them! I cried A LOT! Because the music was so pure and the artistic value was so high that it did not require education or knowledge to be moved by it. And that's how it should be. I love pansori but I had never listened to it to this extent and honestly, it was a bit heartbreaking hearing this heavenly music of the past and thinking of what is called "music" today. We live in hell.
The production of this show was immaculate too. The quality was so high that I have no comment besides pouring out many praises. Nailed it!
Rewatch value: Girl, I might! I don't know! I already wanna rewatch some scenes, to be honest...
Overall: I don't know. I loved this. Storytelling: perfect! Plot's progress: devastatingly touching. Acting: Awards are not enough. Music: Ethereal. Production: Professional and flawless. I don't know, this was as good as it gets both in substance and production. We rarely get shows that are so uniformly good and I just feel like it would be the loss of a lifetime to miss out on experiencing such a feat.

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Hell is other people.

Happiness is a tv show about the inherent horror of having to quarantine in close proximity to other people! Initially, I refrained from putting this show in my To-Watch list because I thought watching a show about quarantine while I’m stuck in quarantine for the nth wave of the covid pandemic, might be a bit too much on my psyche but I am glad I ended up watching it. It was worth it. Weirdly validifying too. Like, yeah, I have to deal with jerks in my quarantine too. Thanks for acknowledging my struggles!!!
Let me give you some rundown: this is not a zombie apocalypse show, nor is it a survivalist show. This is a show dedicated to the complex and unexpected developments of human behavior and psyche when people are forced to stay put in one place due to a crisis. A study of humanity in high-stress situations which is also sprinkled with jump scares, actions scenes, zombie attacks, and so on, yes, but those are the conditions that provide for the real goal of the story: The plague is humanity!
I really enjoyed this show, even though I hate gore and thriller stories and never touch zombie stories. They really scare me because to me nothing is worse than twisting into a monster that no longer has the ability of human thought and control. It’s just terrifying to watch a human distort their body in all the wrong directions, snarling and groaning and making grabby-hand gestures, okay?! But this show was so graceful about it. Because it showed all the ways that humans can lose their ability to think and control their worst urges and instincts while looking perfectly normal. You really don’t need to be a zombie to suck the life out of the people around you! The real zombies are the bad company! (I love all these ah-ha! takes I can have about this show! lol) I just love how this show displays just that.

You should check this out if you can handle:
1. Zombies
2. Humans acting like monsters
3. Seriously. There’s some heavy psychological deterioration displayed in this show
4. Effortless chemistry and romantic dynamic that is super subtle and not overly-emphasized
5. FOUND.FAMILY. (YAAAAAAASSSSSS!)
6. Quarantine shows
7. Thrillers, horror, jump scares, gore and blood
8. People being stupid
9. Regressive narratives (no one is really having a personal growth here in that cathartic way that hallmark-level romcoms will provide with convenient monologues and stuff)

Summary: The story follows three characters: Yoon Sae Bom, a special task force member who after a difficult childhood is desperate to have a home of her own™, Jung Yi Hun, her best friend, and an ex-baseball player who is now a detective and is desperately and secretly in love with her, and Han Tae Seok, a Machiavellian out-hire in the military in charge of containing and managing a new and bizarre disease spreading through Korea. Long story short, people are becoming zombies. Sae Bom and Yi Hun have just moved into their new, fancy little apartment and want nothing but to live a happy life but all that is put on the back burner when their entire apartment complex gets quarantined for being the epicenter for the disease. What comes after is just…human horror!

Plot: If you’ve had the displeasure to come into contact with a little story called “The Lord of flies” then you’ll have a general idea of just what this show is trying to achieve. A definite nod and modernization of that same premise, this show is the most current concept out there, dedicated to all the terrible ways that quarantining and having to stay in closed spaces with other people can just suck the life out of you! The show puts a bunch of characters with personal motives and unique kinds of hidden skeletons in one apartment building where as time goes by, everyone just transforms into a more exaggerated version of their initial vices or rise to the occasion to reveal hidden depths. It’s all about the study of human behavior. Because from the get-go the story presents the zombie situation as a disease, then the show is not about blowing zombie heads off for brownie points but instead, it constantly goes to lengths to highlight the humanity hidden behind their situation. This distinctly differentiates it from a zombie apocalypse story. Because it’s not an apocalypse. I think the whole thing is an allegory. Although the show mentions covid by name, really the zombie disease is also covid. From people who refuse to follow health protocols to those who want to get out of the quarantine even though they have nowhere to go, to the essential workers who have to go out against their better judgment, to those who are just looking to make profits from a dire situation, it's all so familiar and real. The show goes to some dark places about humanity and if you can handle those stuff, it can be so interesting.
And to top it all off, even though this is not a romance show, there is such a dynamic chemistry between the leads, and their harmony with each other and their deep love and care for the other is what carries the show. It’s just a sweet treat in the heart of an upsetting story. At the same time as this, I'm also watching a show, explicitly marketed as a romance and that's just giving me nothing while this show's barely-there romance plot is so profoundly lovely.
I also want to add that the side characters are all so interesting and the more you watch them, they all reveal more of themselves and become more defined in a way that encourages you to care about some and just hope the others die in the most violent way possible... (Plot twist: the viewer becomes a zombie in the process of watching jerks do jerk-stuff!)
Lastly, the show does a great job of highlighting class divisions and social caste systems. I’ve come to notice that Kdramas are particularly good at telling stories about class and this show is another good example of it. There are so many detailed nods to it here and there and it was morbidly delicious to watch it all unfold.

Acting: Everyone did an amazing job in their roles. The show had clear main characters and those guys were awesome with Han Hyo Joon and Park Hyung Sik having some of the best chemistry I’ve seen all year but the show is also an ensemble affair so it matters that the supporting cast members are good in their roles as well. I think they achieved that for sure. This might seem like a super random shoutout but Hong Soon Chang was a delight in his role as the elderly neighbor. His character was not even particularly likable but his manner of speech and body language were just so natural and interesting that he felt like an actual person you can meet in real life. I really enjoyed his screen time.

Music and production: The music was very good. It helped elevate the emotions of that every moment without being too predictable The zombie attack theme was so heart-throbbing but also it wasn't just the same horror movie beat. The music also stopped in all the right places so as to add to the gravitas of certain moments. The production was also very good. It just looked very nice and cool and I don’t know, I liked it.

Rewatch: I don’t really rewatch so probably I won’t but at least I can acknowledge that the 12-episode run makes it accessible. I usually lose interest in kdramas around episode 12 of 16(Unless they have 20 episodes, then I’m fine!!!). That’s where I pause a lot of them, check out my on-hold list, lol. So, it was a great delight that this show ends right before I could get bored/irritated.

Negatives: Um, I saw some people nag that the show’s premise is not realistic and ask for a scientific explanation of the disease…sweetie, it’s a drama...about zombies!!! It’s not a scientific article! It’s all fake. Zombies are fake, sorry if that’s a shock so…don’t expect realistic science from it?! Idk, I can’t believe this has to be said. The characters do stupid things, they are mean and evil occasionally and bad stuff happens a lot and there’s probably a good amount of plot holes but none of it will really affect your enjoyment of it if you are inclined to like this. There’s also the matter of the ending. I already said this in a comment but this is a petri dish story. A bottle episode, if you will. The plot doesn’t care about the cure, it cares about the humans in that very specific, simulated situation and ends right after the situation is no longer held together. It might feel a bit like the ending is left open without a closure. So just prepare for that.

Overall: This is more like a long movie rather than a short show. It has the same beat and flow as a movie and it’s also just a very interesting story. I wanted to give it a lower rating, a 9 or a 9.5 but ultimately, I really did enjoy watching it. It does infuriate at certain points but that’s kind of the point. I think this show captured our very bizarre and traumatic times by creating an even more bizarre and traumatic allegory and I appreciated that. I also liked that, ultimately it had a heartwarming message. At one point in the story, one of the characters says that they won’t catch the disease because they haven’t done anything wrong, and that is very ironic in many, many different ways but it also brings up an interesting concept; that bad things should and will happen to bad people. Not necessarily. Not really. But it sure does feel good when you watch good people overcome bad things just because they are good.

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I knew this was the gay year!!!

Finally! Finally a 2024 kdrama worth 10 stars! And it's such an atypical, unconventional drama! I had been waiting for a drama with a gay lead that wasn't just a low-budget. web drama for ages. We've had some really good short, low-budget dramas like Sematic Error and The Eighth Sense but they were still very basic BL shows. Now, we finally get a quality drama with queer characters that is on par with the best-produced kdramas out there. I love it. While the show is still shorter than the usual 16-episode kdramas, this is unlike any "BL" content we have seen from Korea, so far.

First of, as always, I don't like calling this show BL because...I don't know, I associate that tag with a very specific kind of storytelling: no significant female characters, laser point focus on one conventional (sometimes toxic, sometimes overly heteronormative) romance, no plot or character development beyond fluff or whump. This is not that!
We have a very touching story here, following a young gay man in modern South Korea, who appears to be cynical about the probabilities of finding love in the modern age but who is secretly a hopeless romantic, desperately hoping that he can find love. Only to fail over and over. And then when he finds it? He can't recognize it for what it was: rare, imperfect, precious love.
Our main character here is imperfect, messy, and so real. There is no euphoric character development but you can see his personality and world-view change as the story progresses and his experiences shape who he is. Just like real life. I love the whole cast of characters as they are all well-thought-out and developed, in such ways that make the world of the story richer.

Acting: The acting in this is so good. Still, none of the cast members stands out as much as Nam Yoon Su himself who truly knocked it out of the park here. He went out and beyond bringing the character of Ko Young to life. He was so perfect, it didn't even feel like he was acting. He was just so natural that you would think he is Ko Young and has been for all his life. That said, everyone else was so good. I can't pinpoint any cast member who didn't do their part. Everyone was great. Just A+ performances. Jin Ho Eun makes you fall in love with his sincere and open-hearted Gyu Ho, too. So devastating!

Production: Finally! Finally, we get a queer drama with good lighting and camerawork! I could shed tears! Oh, how I have waited for this! The production level in this show is great and I truly appreciate it. It really adds to the watching quality.
The music choices were very specifically designed to match the storytelling and so while I didn't always like every song, I thought everything fit perfectly in the scenes they were used in and that's a bigger compliment than "I liked the song" in my book.

Overall: If you like good shows, watch it! It's a sort of slice-of-life drama with imperfect characters and heartbreaking plots that are beautifully brought to life thanks to the high-quality production, good writing, and stellar performances.
(And honestly? 16-episode dramas are overrated! They all sucked this year, anyway!)

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It takes this show entirely too long to get good.

It takes this show entirely too long to become enjoyable. The beginning was so boring that I repeatedly fell asleep while watching this show to the point that I had to drop it. But...it's my uncle's favorite Kdrama so I had to give it another chance for his sake, he was really excited, okay?! Even though I didn't like the execution of this, from the start I thought the concept for this show was interesting.
It flips the cold rich CEO who falls for the cute poor girl trope on its head by making the rich ceo a woman and the cute pauper a man, and then it challenges the Cinderella's happily ever after by showing the miserable marriage these two have. Then you get a black widower set up and the show is on the go. Except the first 9 episodes were genuinely cheesy and intolerable. I suffered through though(for the sake of my uncle *sigh*) and eventually, things got good. Now, I still think the show was kind of lame. It's full of tropes, dumb plot twists and so predictable that I constantly could predict the next event before it happened. But it was enjoyable and you slowly get invested. I personally liked how no-nonsense the Female Lead is. She does not let miscommunications fester. She doesn't do the lame "lying to spare them" thing that Kdramas love to pull. She rejects coldheartedly and exposes the villains like it's her favorite pastime. And while I dislike the actor, the male lead's character is basically flawless. He really does everything competently and with a good heart. So you want to root for the characters. Especially when the stakes become higher.
The acting in this show was not particularly good. It's the time of exaggerated acting you expect to see in the romcom genre which I think this show falls into. It gets a bit cringe at time but it doesn't really matter.
I did not pay attention to the music and I find the production a bit too polished. It's like a candy cane world!
Overall, I would say this show was set to be hated by me but I ended up enjoying the second half of it (with a generous dose of scrolling through the Heated Rivalry tag on Tumblr whilst watching because I have my limits, okay?!) I don't think it was bad but it isn't as good as everyone made it sound but it's watchable and you won't be mad at your wasted time by the end. Probably. That said, I'm not interested in this types of shows anymore so it was a bit of a drag for me for the most part with moments where it got interesting.

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Drama of the year, indeed!

It is so me to find the best dramas of 2024 only retrospectively in 2025! This show was so good and I knew it would be but I didn't expect it to be this perfect and I had to postpone watching it for a while but I finally got around to it and I loved it!
The most amazing part of this show is the main character. The lead actor is so perfect? I knew of him only through the infamy of his viral "oppaaaa" gif but that was enough to know he is a good actor. He was amazing though! I'm discovering (all these already super-discovered, well-known, applauded by literally everyone) older k-actors and I don't know, I may go back and watch all their old dramas!
This show is a murder mystery with a pressure point that is about to explode like a ticking bomb. The main character's personal investment and involvement in the situation, adds a necessary urgency to the plot that will keep viewers on the edge of their seats until all is revealed. I have to say, this was very well-planned. The plot moved so smoothly...that said, there were some parts of the final reveals that I did not love. But overall, everything connects, just as the name of the show promises, like fates connected with a red string of fate. I also loved the characterizations. From the main protagonists to the main villains, to the minor characters, everyone seemed well-thought out with motives that moved the plot forward and helped unravel the mystery.
The story is also strewn with melancholic nostalgia. As the plot progresses and secrets are revealed, old connections are dug up and people are forced to face each other after years of estrangement, you feel sorry for what could have been and what was lost along the way.
In addition to the interesting characterization and sufficient plotting, the show had perfect production. You know how I know it was perfect? It was basically invisible! You don't even notice it! Everything went so smoothly that it never stood out like a sore thumb.
I wouldn't rewatch this probably but it was still such a great drama.
Overall: If you like mysteries, action that isn't just mindless violence, tense plots and interesting characterization, look no further! Watch it! This was the best 2024 show I have watched so far!

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Atypical KDrama

Perhaps disproportionately rated high but this show was such a confusing enigma to me when I was watching it that it deserves a nod of respect, at this point. In a landscape where mediocrity was reigning over an unusually lackluster year of disappointing kdramas, Atypical Family was released with little fanfare. It wasn't a hyped drama. It didn't start trends or move viewers to rally behind its fantastical romance or revenge plot. I had no expectations for it. I didn't even like the first episode. The acting seemed meh, the plot seemed meh, the nonexisting romance felt meh, nothing about this drama was particularly interesting or outstanding.
And yet, I kept going back to it, week after week. It was so bizarre. If you asked me what I loved about it, I wouldn't be able to come up with anything. But then, week after week, the show ended on an intriguing note that brought me back for more, then before I knew it...I cared! I cared about the characters, about their lives, about their ending.
That's just so bizarre until I was hooked. But then I was hooked on, like, episode 9! It took forever but the show had the longevity to bring you back each week until you got invested.
No one has so subtly managed to succeed so quietly, just from being unassuming. So I have no choice but to salute this show.
That said, there were definitely certain elements to this show that set it aside. It was in fact an unusual kdrama with elements that are either taboo in kdramas or challenge what is widely accepted as a natural part of the rom-com of SK. Perhaps that's why it went under the radar because I have noticed most seem to prefer watching the same repetitive stereotype with massive plot holes instead of trying something new. I kind of get the comforting familiarity of that but then you miss out on the unexpected interesting stories.
This show had an interesting female lead. She was experienced, scheming, and not cute. The male lead is a depressed blob who has no machismo or masculine charisma. The rest of the points...I don't remember! I watched this show so long ago and I should have reviewed it then but I was too confused then and now it's too late! But there were more stuff setting it apart!
The acting here was okay. I know some people didn't like the male lead. But I don't think it was the actor's fault. The main character is literally depressed. He's not gonna be your typical drama oppa, okay?! The whole point is that he drink to forget he is alive. And same goes for every other character. They have a lot of personal defects and those are intentionally highlighted in the show. So, the characters are intentionally irritable, distant, lethargic or moody.
What stood out from this was the production value. The sets are gorgeous, the lighting is immaculate. The music is so beautiful. The outfts are meticulously chosen to fit everyone's personality and their consistency game is off the charts because little changes in scenes are all part of the plot and one mistake would ruin that.
Rewatch: I still won't rewatch unless I was determined to pitch it to someone else.
Overall: I highly recommend this as it's a good show and it keeps it interesting in a respectable number of episodes. Some say they wanted more but experience has shown that Kdramas don't do well with MORE episode! Less is your way to go.

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