hyunjin we love you so much
highlights:i think hyunjin was characterized beautifully as a first-time struggling mother. her sister. who functionally doubled as her mother died, leaving whj with a baby at a time when she JUST graduated from college and was struggling to even find work. everything she did was perfectly reasonable for someone in that position. she had a baby and was a temp contract worker, of course, she threw herself into the job in hopes of getting hired permanently. she needs MONEY to provide for the baby as a SINGLE mother? delusionals wanted her to be a single housewife becausing apparently raising a child is free? actually if she did that, the tatecels would have attacked her for starving wooju and leeching off of his and taehyung's money. she can't ever win with the mdl freaks. anyway, she cared about wooju so very much, and every minuscule expression on the actress's face proved it. (roh jeongui is just a brilliant actress.)
from her side, the story with the sml also makes sense. she's always given up everything she wanted to give space to other people, as an orphan, she's never been able to own anything herself. she finds out that the man she gave up in college actually wanted her too, yes of course, she's going to be into it. she went out with him a few times, realized this man was from a different point in her life, and didn't fit into her current life, and shut it down. ultimately, the only problem with this was that it occurred in ep 10 of a 12 ep show, and if they condensed the timeline into something more reasonable (or added more episodes to flesh out her endgame) it would have been truly perfect.
sun taehyung's storyline was also amazing. his background as an orphan, someone abandoned by the only family he'd ever known, and how that impacted his ability to connect with hyunjin and wooju was written so well. bae in hyuk is also an incredible actor; i think i might have cried with him in that episode where he finds out his brother left him to protect him from his abusive father. him slowly falling in love with hyunjin and wooju, creating a family of his own, learning that he can also love and BE loved by others, that his childhood wasn't his fault, everything about taehyung resonates with me so much.
also the baby is cute too. there's that.
lows:
the romance. what were we doing, genuinely?
i said that the sml line made sense from hyunjin's side, and it did. however, it made no sense from the sml's side. he has no personality aside from liking hyunjin, we barely know anything about him, and that makes his love of her so shallow. and they dragged it from episode 2 to episode 10 so they definitely could have thrown in at least one hj-centered trait. he's so generic webtoon ceo it hurts the eyes. again, it would have been perfect if they either shortened his arc OR developed him as a character. what's worse is that is that sml is a full-blown stalker in episodes 9-10, randomly showing up at hyunjin's house and also threatening taehyung like his abusive dad is somehow his fault, and sabotaging taehyung at every turn. and then in episode 12 we completely forget that. sml is overly kind again, supportive of taehyung as hyunjin's boyfriend, he's invited to wooju's birthday, and everyone loves him?? actually it's not even a case of split personality, it's everyone in-universe treating the stalker behavior as perfectly normal, including hj and th?? please address the gray trunk in the room.
the main romance is adorable (two sad people finding each other always is), but it's sprinkled through until episode 10, when they finally get together. the last two episodes do make it worth it, however.
watch if: you're normal about women, you can enjoy interesting characters even if they're not mother theresa incarnates, you don't care about romance
don't watch if: you admire andrew tate in any way, you're there for the baby, you hate working moms, you think mothers should kill themselves for their children, you get really invested in male characters and start projecting on the fl, boy moms in general stay away. roh jeong eui should legally be allowed to * some of you
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severely unfortunate execution
so many things wrong with this show, i barely know where to start.1) the main characters are insanely bland. no personality traits, no individual characteristics. they are cops who solve cases and that's it. there's general archetypes - poor little rich girl/sad french girl, her broke genius girlfriend, the porn addict comedic relief, and the nerd - but they don't even delve into these archetypes aside from two scenes for sad french rich girl and clothing for the nerd. i'm being so serious when i say i don't even know their names. for a show discussing misogyny, you'd think we'd get a little insight into how a female inspector and a female forensic doctor fare in the highly patriarchal police system, but they talk about it for three minutes in the first episode, and then it gets shoved underfoot. the police chief who seems to be against women taking on dangerous cases/doing fieldwork? he's just worried about his favorite niece (sad rich girl). the uniforms who verbally sexually harass them in ep 1 are actually perfectly happy to be working under female inspectors the rest of the show. ??? the doctor has no money and lives in a chicken coop in addition to being a woman, but do we get any sense of how this might have impacted her career trajectory?? absolutely not. what's funny is that there's actually a case with a female nurse who grew up poor and thus was severely abused by her superiors, so you'd think they might tie that in with our *main character,* but nada.
onto the two main males. like i mentioned before, one's purpose is to be the porn addict funny boy. there's a case with a brothel sex trafficking girls and he's ooh aahing and making sex jokes about visiting the *rape victims.* like okay. and no one checks him. like aren't yew a feminist @main girl 1 and 2?? then there's the nerd. he's actually not uber smart or anything, he just dresses like a starving victorian newsboy. his only purpose is that they needed an extra body to make their unit, or the chief would have benched the girls (literal plot point in ep 1 by the way, that chief was not letting them do anything at all, but we magically forget about it in the other 30 eps. bizarre). what's hilarious about newsboy is that in the last episode, he's crying over his dead grandma, and it's like i don't know you and i don't know her. who gaf. who are you.
the utter lack of characterization for these people made the last episode amazing, like they were doing these closure scenes for people who were never open in the first place. mind-boggling what these writers come up with.
2) the cases started off interesting, but after the first two, completely fell off. the characterization for the opera case (1) and the child kidnapping (2) were incredible. regardless of whether you like the victims or not, they had vibrant personalities and every decision they made, even if it was illogical, you could understand their motivation and how they got there in their situation.
then came the brothel case (3). it's so insane how unempathetic the mcs were to these girls who were trafficked. these girls basically have guns to their head forcing them to say they've consented to being prostitutes, and it's *your* police station handing out licenses to chinese ghislaine maxwell, so take some accountability. the fuck. they care about their one victim, and not a single other girl in that brothel. this fatass 400 pound BEAST tries to rape a girl, a girl who's barely an adult mind you, and one of the other girls kills him to protect her, and they arrest the girl. for killing a man in the middle of raping someone. ?? ghislaine maxwell, of course, gets off scot free, in exchange for our one favorite victim being able to escape. but what about the other victims? what about the girls that freak will traffick in the future? a lot of these cases is them arresting the victim instead of offering them help (except the kidnapping case i guess). i know it's to be realistic and historically accurate and blah blah, but i'd just like to say that the law is not neutral, it's pro-male. it was 500 times more pro-male in 1920. them upholding this law and going "all murder is murder" is not a neutral act, it's protecting rapists. you have cops now and certainly back then who will do backflips to protect rapists and wifebeaters and femiciders, so a woman cop who upholds the law to revictimize another woman is a gender traitor and a collaborationist times two. and half these cases, the victims will tell you to your face "i went to the police and no one believed me." your male coworkers will feign blindness every time to protect the male class, but you're sitting there jailing women and i'm supposed to root for you? go to hell. you have a male coworker *in your team* being a freak towards these girls and you won't even address that. like go to hell actually. the characters' normalization towards brothels/dance halls in general gives me the creeps. but apparently this is a story about women or whatever.
moving on to the two final cases, the female doctor (4) and the other child trafficker (5). the female doctor case was both insanely boring and also just off thematically. they focused more on the dead male instead of the woman at the center of the story (until the confession), and i just don't care. it's thematically jarring to sneak in dead male hospital director right in between two child trafficking cases. like i'm sorry, not all victims/stories are equal. the second trafficking case (to distinguish from the first) had potential, but it ended abruptly (there's a problem with the transitions between cases for all of them except the first case, but that's a miniscule issue compared to everything else, so i won't get into it). it's also incongruent with the first trafficking case. we have a girl who was about to be murdered but her brother stopped it by killing the murderer, and neither was arrested this time. the moral of the story is that self-defense is legal if you're a man.
tldr; white bread characters, including one porn addict who's a protagonist you're meant to empathize with, shitty execeution, excruciatingly pro-male brothel case that takes up ~eight episodes, underwhelming ending. 3.5 stars only for the lesbian opera actors, so watch for the first six eps i guess.
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