Cora

**Disclaimer: Yes, it’s long. Yes, I tried to shorten it. No, I failed. So buckle up and bear with me.**


OVERVIEW:

Song U Yeon has always been “the other one.”

Overshadowed by her genius brother, ignored by her parents, and scarred by vicious bullies, she’s learned to survive by shrinking herself. That is, until she crashes head-first into Nam Ki Jung, the sharp, beautiful, maddening model who comes from a wild but fiercely loving family.

Ki Jung sees U Yeon in a way no one ever has… and suddenly everyone else does too. Old tormentors crawl back, rivals circle, and hidden family fractures crack wide open. Surrounded by misfits, troublemakers, golden boys, and ghosts of past hurts, U Yeon must decide whether she’ll stay invisible, or take up the space she’s always deserved.

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COMMENTARY:

• Overall Thoughts

I fell for Spirit Fingers because it understands two things instinctively: how art heals small, private terrors, and how ordinary cruelty shapes ordinary people. The club itself is not a MacGuffin or a stage prop; it’s a living organism. Everything that matters, such as identity, tenderness, protection, belonging, grows from that space where people sit and draw each other. That premise is clean, elegant, and emotionally generous. The club gives the main character a literal room to breathe and a literal group that sees her, and the way that practice-of-drawing becomes practice-of-being is beautiful. I don’t say that lightly. Many stories try to make “a hobby” into spiritual salvation; here, the hobby earns its redemption by changing behavior, vocabulary, and relationships. It’s tactile: croquis practice, sketchbooks, models holding a pose. Those details sell transformation.

• Song U Yeon and Nam Ki Jung

Song U Yeon’s arc is the center of gravity and it’s handled, for the most part, with care. She is not a blank we’re supposed to project onto; she’s a scarred, academic, self-effacing girl who learns to assert herself by making marks on paper and then into the world. Her growth is incremental and believable: she doesn’t leap into confidence, she gets small victories, and those compound into agency. It’s satisfying because the storytelling gives us the micro-steps that justify it.

She steps into the orbit of an art group and is given something as simple and radical as attention directed at what she makes rather than how she performs for other people. That drawing she’s handed, the one from Seon-ho, is less about flirtation and more about recognition. In the story’s logic, recognition is the most subversive act. She starts to practice croquis at school. She asks friends to pose. She makes small incursions into the world she was taught not to occupy. That’s when the seed of confidence, not arrogance, takes root.

Her relationships are true to the mess of teenage life: friends who are unequal in their support, a best friend who scolds from love, a loud friend who barks criticism as a way of caring, an older-brother who’s a trophy more than a companion. Woo-yeon’s feelings aren’t simple: she first has a crush on the artist who sketched her and later, as she actually grows, her heart migrates to someone who has been clumsy and generous in equal measure. That evolution feels honest because it’s rooted in her interior change. She isn’t switching boys for plot convenience; she’s choosing someone who matches the person she’s becoming.

Nam Ki-jeong is the textbook example of a character who seems shallow and gets denied the credit for feeling deep. He’s gorgeous, naturally charismatic, and yet he arrives with a comedic tag that could have reduced him to a joke. Instead, the story uses that comic relief to humanize and disarm him: he’s a hot mess with a tender heart. He parades narcissism like armor, but the armor is paper-thin; underneath, he’s a kid who’s never been properly noticed for who he is beyond surface perks. When he first notices Woo-yeon, it’s not because of her looks; it’s because she treated him differently. That’s devastatingly simple and true. People crave being treated as people, not trophies.

I don’t love the way he initially behaves toward her - teasing, stubborn, immature. The writing gives him room to be obnoxious in a way that realistically works: the boy who bothers the girl is often the boy who flails at affection. But then the story refuses to let Ki-jeong off the hook. He matures by doing the unglamorous work. There is a point when his childishness could have escaled into irredeemable toxicity; instead, it becomes the raw material for growth. He is not remade into a perfect man; he learns steadiness through repeated acts, the very sort of “labor of love” that Woo-yeon deserves.

His relationship with Woo-yeon is the sort of slow, bumpy, convincing coupling people actually have. He confesses in a ridiculous way, “marry me” like someone tripping on sincerity, and his inability to cope with the emotional fallout is sometimes laughable and sometimes endearing. But the important thing is that his actions follow his words. He protects, defends, and, crucially, helps Woo-dol. When Woo-yeon’s younger brother runs away, Ki-jeong is the one who steps between doom and the child. That’s a moment where his growth becomes clear: he is no longer just a charming nuisance; he has chosen to be responsible in the face of pain.

What I admire most about Ki-jeong is that his arc refuses to make us forgive him before he earns forgiveness. He earns it by being present in the violent, unshowy little moments. That’s often harder to write than big declarations, and Ki-jeong’s final reconciliation with Woo-yeon, and their mutual decision to be together, is the honest outcome of their respective arcs.

Woo-yeon and Ki-jung work because they exist as emotional opposites trying to move in the same direction. She’s scared of being seen; he’s scared of disappointing others. He doesn’t pressure her to be more than she is. She doesn’t punish him for coming from a place of chaos. Their love is gentle, earnest, and rooted in vulnerability instead of fantasy. He doesn’t sweep her away; he stays beside her. And she doesn’t depend on him; she chooses him.

• Seon Ho and Geu Rin

Koo Seon-ho and Nam Geu-rin’s slow burn is also a quiet triumph. Seon-ho’s long, patient, unconsummated devotion to Green is something that alters the texture of everything: his attentiveness, his annoyance at Green’s obliviousness, his little domestic acts... they all build the kind of intimacy that doesn’t need a single balcony speech to land. Geu-rin’s stubborn bravado and the way past humiliation shaped her are real, messy, and make her eventual softening at Seon-ho’s enlistment believable.

• Family

Finally, the family dynamics are gorgeously ugly. The Song household is a study in everyday, generational cruelty, not villainous caricature but a set of habits learned and repeated. The mother’s wounded narcissism and the father’s cold complicity feel like a distilled social phenomenon: a parent who lives vicariously through children, who punishes for being human, who masks loss by demanding perfection.

• Where They Lost Me

The first half is good, but then the pacing starts faltering in the second half, and the last three episodes are so rushed that I didn’t feel some of the emotional moments.

A second major problem is the handling of the bullies: they are useful as catalysts, but the narrative resolution is inconsistent. On one hand, the triplets’ humiliation of Woo-yeon is raw and destructive, and the club’s defense of her is cathartic. On the other hand, the consequences for the bullies are not always weighted enough to feel like a meaningful social reckoning. They get punched and hauled to the police, but the story moves on with relatively little systemic fallout: no serious institutional follow-up, no therapeutic work for Woo-yeon, and the social power dynamics that enabled those attacks are not thoroughly explored. Bullying spirals and leaves residual damage that would merit longer attention. The show treats it as a trauma to be overcome by community punching rather than an injustice requiring structural change. That’s narratively satisfying in a cathartic moment, but it’s also narratively lazy.

Song U-yeon’s arc, her growth from shy, academically excellent but ignored child into a young woman who can run a club is the show’s emotional spine. The critique here is small but essential: the trauma around the makeup incident, the sketchbook tearing, and parental neglect deserved longer, quieter scenes where I could live with her loneliness. There are a few moments of cinematic shorthand where something huge happens and we jump forward too quickly. Slow down in those spaces.

My complaint for Seon-ho and Geu-rin’s arc is the long-simmer is occasionally undercut by telephone-like dialogue where characters tell, not show, their devotion. Smallness will sell them more than speech.

Some secondary arcs are undercooked or get shoved aside for main-plot energy. Khaki and Black have a deliciously slow flame, but their payoffs are more viewer-driven than story-earned: I can feel the audience love for them and the writer’s intention, but the space devoted to them is often too spare. Similarly, Pink-Brown is delightful, but the story often treats adult side characters as color accents rather than fully realized people. When you have such a rich ensemble, the temptation is to scatter slices of charm rather than invest more internal life in each pair; the result is that some become “fanservice” rather than fully integrated human stories.

• The Human Portrait

When I look at everything as a whole, it paints one massive portrait of people stumbling around with their wounds showing, trying to figure out which pain needs to be kept and which pain needs to be buried. It’s a story about inheritance, rebellion, chosen family, beauty politics, survival instincts, and the bizarre ways people discover love in places they never expected. And when you peel it back and really look at it, it’s honestly gorgeous in its own clumsy, imperfect humanity.

• Inheritance of Pain

The first major theme that jumps out is the inheritance of wounds, and the refusal to keep carrying them. Woo-yeon’s mother didn’t wake up one morning and decide to be critical, rigid, and suffocating. She was shaped by a past full of humiliation, pressure, and being overlooked. She passes that fear down like a cursed heirloom, expecting her daughter to become the polished, high-achieving masterpiece she herself was never allowed to be. But the story doesn’t ask the audience to pity her blindly. It shows the ways Woo-yeon is crushed beneath her mother’s ambitions, and then, beautifully, it shows Woo-yeon choosing to step out of that shadow. She doesn’t make some dramatic speech or reject her family outright. She simply decides to stop letting their pain dictate her identity. The courage to say, “No more. This ends with me,” it treats generational trauma as something that can be refused, not just endured.

• Love as Shelter, Not Salvation

The next foundational theme is love. But not the flimsy “you complete me” nonsense. Love in this story doesn’t fix anyone; it simply gives them something to hold onto while they fix themselves. Woo-seok loves his sister but can’t rescue her. Woo-dol loves fiercely but doesn’t magically become whole. Ki-jung loves Woo-yeon deeply but never tries to rewrite her life or erase the scars she carries. And Woo-yeon herself learns, slowly and painfully, that love is not a reward or a requirement; it’s a refuge. This is love as shelter, not medicine. It’s a way of saying that the people who save your life often aren’t the people who should have done it, they’re the ones who show up anyway.

• Two Homes, Two Worlds

Another massive emotional pillar is the contrast between homes shaped by expectation and homes shaped by acceptance. Woo-yeon’s family is suffocating. Every word feels rehearsed. Every emotion feels forbidden. It’s a place where being loved requires performing correctly. Then there’s Ki-jung’s family. They fight like feral cats and love like overexcited puppies. They don’t expect him to be a model or a prodigy or a polished trophy. They just expect him to be alive and be himself. The contrast is so severe it stops being comedic and becomes philosophical. Some homes raise your grades. Other homes raise your spirit. Woo-yeon slowly, painfully realizes which one she belongs in.

• Beauty as Battlefield

The story is also obsessed with beauty; not in a shallow “this character is pretty” way, but in a social, psychological, and cultural way. Beauty is treated as currency, armor, weapon, and prison all at once. An Ye-rim uses beauty like a political tool. The triplet bullies enforce hierarchy through appearance-based cruelty. Ki-jung is valued for his looks in ways that make him uncomfortable. Woo-yeon is punished for not looking the part. It becomes clear that beauty in this world is a battlefield, one everyone is forced to fight on whether they want to or not. The story isn’t condemning beauty; it’s condemning the way beauty becomes a destiny. Beauty gets you attention, but character decides who stays.

• Healing Through Chaos

Then we have my favorite thematic thread: chaos as healing. Ki-jung’s family functions like emotional oxygen for Woo-yeon. They represent a worldview where mistakes aren’t punishments, eccentricities aren’t shameful, and people are allowed to look foolish without being unloved. Sometimes, the cure isn’t calm; it’s chaos that doesn’t hurt you.

• Symbolism

Food becomes emotional language: an apology, a peace offering, a confession, a threat. Woo-yeon’s mother expresses love through snacks because she can’t express it through words. Ki-jung’s family expresses joy through chaotic meals. Everyone eats their feelings in one way or another.

Physical appearance becomes a social ranking system. Height, beauty, hair, body... all of it becomes shorthand for power and insecurity. It reflects the absurdity of adolescent social structures: shallow, ruthless, and heartbreakingly meaningful to the kids stuck inside them.

• The Pulse Beneath It All

If I had to distill all of this into one truth, one heartbeat that the entire narrative syncs itself to, it’s this: healing doesn’t come from being impressive. Healing comes from being allowed to be human. And the people who allow you to be human are the people who become your family, whether you share blood or not.

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FINAL THOUGHTS:

Honestly, Spirit Fingers stuck to my ribs in the best way. It wasn't perfect, but it understood that becoming yourself isn’t some glowing anime power-up moment. It’s awkward, slow, and half the time you think you’re doing it wrong. Woo-yeon doesn’t magically become confident; she grows one tiny, wobbly step at a time. I loved that. It felt earned.

The club that’s the soul of the whole thing. It’s not just a backdrop; it’s a safe zone. A place where “you’re allowed to exist” is the unspoken rule. A place where being seen isn’t punishment.

In the end, what actually actually matters is that you don’t heal by becoming impressive, you heal by being allowed to be human. And I’ll take that over perfection any day.

~Thank you for reading~

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