grapejuice

You don't have to find something excellent about LR. But why try to talk people out of the things that they thought were excellent?

Instead, you could tell them about First love - Hatsukoi and suggest it as a next drama for them to try. I don't agree with you that it's better than Lovely Runner. They really are too different to compare, especially on the comedy front.

But First Love - Hasukoi is a really satisfying drama and it might be a good choice for a lot of the people who enjoyed the fated love part of LR.

Can't people watch and be moved by both of these dramas; each for their own relative strengths? Why compare and put one down when they are both excellent in their own way?

I'll raise your low key to a high key. That's a great idea!!!

The quality has decreased, or it has gone in a direction that you don't like? You would have written it differently and so you are not as engaged?

Why is someone with these opinions here in the first place if not to be a troll among people who accept that kdramas reflect Korean culture; if not to give voice to their ethnocentricity and disrespect others? You can feel whatever way you want about my calling someone out on their prejudices. It's one thing to express shock but it's another thing to plainly put down a culture that is not your own. So it seems we must agree to disagree. Shall we stop it here?

This isn't about my defending a popular drama against the tiniest of criticisms. This has nothing to do with Lovely Runner, at all.

If you are going to watch kdramas, you kinda have to learn, acknowledge, respect and accept that there are cultural differences that you're not always going to appreciate. @kopiko_kdrama isn't criticizing the drama so much as she is critiquing the culture for being different than what she (as, presumably, an outsider) would want it to be.

Sometimes people don't realize the difference. They'll criticize aeygo because they don't realize that Koreans just really like cuteness when others may not. They'll criticize conservative attitudes or particular themes in kdramas without realizing that they are realities in Korea.

But @kopiko_ is an experienced kdrama watcher who should probably have realized the differences by now. And realize what her criticism is actually cutting into.

So, you don't think that's worth a counter-critique? Ok. But I do.

And yes we all have the right to express our opinions on an open forum which means that, once you've spoken, you have to expect and allow counter opinions such as mine since I also have a right to speak my mind.

Troll. Nobody here cares about or shares this opinion. So you should probably take it somewhere else. I mean, what are you even doing here? It's sad that you'd go so far out of your way to try to make trouble.

Yes. You're right! We'll be getting the romance and all the bromances too. That really is an excellent trip to look forward to :-)

Ah a troll is lost in the wrong place for people who think that Kdramas are cringe. This is humour. Not serious or cringe. They literally got together 5 seconds ago. This is the first anybody has heard or seen of it and he has a hundred condoms in his bag. LoL. Also, cultures and times differ ... so try to catch your thinking up to that too.

might you be in the wrong thread perhaps?

Same !!! How can it be this funny, this often and in every episode? It has shot to the top of my kdrama comedy list; leaving even Welcome to Waikiki in the dust behind it.

Ooooh. But how many times have you said that up to now? Before every new episode? And how often has it been right? Every time or, at least, most of the time? There has to be a lull coming up for us to catch our breath before the final episodes. I wouldn't even have thought this was possible. For each episode to be as good or better than the last. Every single time :-)

It doesn't matter what the teacher thinks though. He made a number of serious mistakes. To start, if there are two interpretations and answers for a question, you shouldn't put it on the exam. It's careless. It means you didn't fully consider what you're doing; didn't have full command of your subject.

So, if you make that kind of mistake, you should just quickly admit it, apologize to the students who were affected, take the opportunity to show to the whole class why both answers are correct and then gracefully move on to give full marks to everyone who gave a correct answer.

Digging further in to the mistake and blowing it up to be a huge war of wills just makes you look small and incompetent. And that's not to mention the fact that he put his hands on and pushed a visitor to the school. That's so far out of line that it's ridiculous; something that could get him fired especially if anything like it has ever happened before.

So, he made a fool of himself and made some enemies too. The students and parents were upset. But, worse, his colleagues and his superiors will all be resentful that he made them look bad in front of the academy teacher. And they have to do the exam all over again, which is a whole lot of work, when he could have done a better job in the first place or fixed the end result quickly and quietly.

He's definitely trouble.

Free, but mandatory, public schools, as well as the lesser private schools, and all of their teachers, are often dismissed and abused by parents and the academy system that's fuelled by parents who will spend a lot of money to 'improve' upon what the regular school teachers are doing. They are seen as being less professional and less able to produce results, so the academies most often get the credit for students being admitted to the big universities.

So, there is a huge pay gap and an increasingly large respect gap between teachers from these two environments, which means that the FL was, indeed, pushing her boundaries, and her luck, when she went into that argument, in a public school, with an older man who also happened to have more conservative and dated ideas than she did.

She kept trying to find out what the man's colleagues thought because she guessed, accurately, I think that he was out of step with them. He's obviously belligerent and unable to admit when he might be wrong. So, he blew the issue up out of all proportion because of his pride, inferiority complex and animosity.

But, then the school decided against his wishes, in favour of her argument and that just adds insult to injury. I wondered if he had been fired or put on probation but maybe he was just told to apologize. You can see where it's going though, either way. An enemy has been made and he'll most likely be back.

This makes a lot more sense. Accident, not murder.

But there's only one more day til we might find out ... :-) See you back here after the episode!

And the little girl purposefully wanted to kill herself and/or her mother? Sorry, but isn't that's kind of ridiculous? I can't think of an explanation that would be less likely. Unless there was an accidental switch leading to an unintended outcome. Like she had a sudden impulse or whim to drive fast or fly, maybe. But still. Really unlikely imo :-)

It's true that this kind of FL isn't new to kdramas but she doesn't come along very often. Women don't forgive other women very easily so this kind of FL will have to show redeeming characteristics but soon or the drama will get trashed right along with the character.

And, it's also true that the heroic, or misunderstood, ML who is half of a fated love story will always, in fact, be a virgin. It's a part of his being a hero or his being misunderstood :-) but we do get morally grey ML's whose sexual history isn't explored.

It's not talked about or reviewed visually, but you know that they're not virgins because it's just so incredibly obvious. They're so good looking that women fall at their feet. And they're so entitled that they see this silly behaviour as being a given. Of course they're sleeping around.

Actually, you don't see it as much in more recent dramas, but, for me, it's more irritating that the women who write kdramas show so many women worshipping a pretty face even if the owner of it is a reprehensible person. I guess it's accurate that pretty boys and girls get away with too much in life but it's disheartening to see it portrayed so often.

I totally agree with you on every point. And it really irks me that this only seems to happen with unlikable FLs. And, at it's heart, it's a kind of sexism that the bar is set so much higher for the behaviour of female characters.

I mean, you don't hear much about it when the drama's ML starts off as a horrible person. He's just described as being 'tsundere' and everyone lets it go even if he doesn't actually improve much throughout the drama, or he only improves, as a rudimentary human being, in relation to the FL that he's fallen in love with.

A FL that begins a drama with bad qualities rarely gets away with it. People just love to hate them, won't tolerate them and become incensed enough to drop the drama because of them, even though they will obviously undergo some kind of transformation to improve as human beings.

So, this kind of dropping is silly, really. Why not wait for that predictable thing called character development and enjoy the transformation?

Go Mun Young in It's Ok Not to be Ok is another case in point. People were outraged at her behaviour and were slow, or quite unable, to forgive her even as she changed and you learned why she had been the way that she was.

I thought that the daughter was experiencing her power for the first time while they were driving in the car. Not sure what it was, exactly, but her eyes lit up bright blue. And that's when her mother lost control of the car. I didn't think that the mother or the daughter had done anything deliberate to cause a deadly collision. No murder-suicide or anything like that. It was just unfortunate timing that caused an accident. But it seems that, ever since then, the daughter has been seeing herself as being at fault for the accident and every misfortune that has occurred since then. Poor kid. Someone needs to help her feel better about what happened.

No. It's a bad look and the only weak link so far, so Aeon, is making a poor (imo :-) joke over it.