Im Sol is a villain. Ryu Seon Jae is a cardboard cutout.
Im Sol is a villain. She treats the experiences, the memories, of everyone around her, most notably her younger self, as disposable. She treats their feelings as trivial, meaningless except in context to her own. She is selfish and has no character growth, no improvement to her personality, no expressions of remorse, aside from when not getting her wishes fulfilled, and no action demonstrating regret. She is the pleasant face of the casually destructive personality increasing common in this world, but no less repugnant for it.Ryu Seon Jae is a cardboard cutout. He has no personality beyond he likes sports and singing and must always and forever, no matter how badly he is treated, love Im Sol and be willing to die to her. It is truly disheartening to see such a non-entity as a leading man.
As to the secondary characters, her mother and his father were mostly background noise, and their moments in the spotlight felt like forced distractions from the plot. His friends and band-mates were even less three dimensional then he was, if you can imagine. Her brother and friend were obnoxious, though their future scenes were actually lovely and one of the few purely pleasant parts of the show.
Her grandmother and Kim Tae Seong are special case. Dementia is portrayed as imbuing her grandmother with additional cuteness and wisdom, which is just wildly inappropriate. And Kim Tae Seong is underdeveloped despite being one of the few engaging personalities in the cast of characters.
Lovely Runner is not a great show. It isn't even a good show. It manages to get by being inoffensive to most modern sensitivities and offering fans an unhealthy fan fantasy to feel encouraged by. Regrettable.
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