littlepoodle

I don't have an exact quote, but I could have sworn that in one of the first episodes, Eunho had a vision of the future where Wooseok was famous and Si-yeol became a nobody. Then the fates switched when Wooseok got into an accident. I honestly don't understand why that first vision was there, as it didn't seem to mean anything.

I really liked Genie, too! And there was a lot of emotion in that drama, in my opinion, much more than in this one. But I found the ending itself a big letdown. (I actually thought the past life backstory had much more emotional payoff.)

You're right, there's often something like this in recent dramas, like a weird disconnect between the events and the consequences/payoff. As well as a disconnect between earlier and later episodes. And also an emotional disconnect of sorts - like things happen, but characters don't react quite like human beings. I've said in another comment that it's made me a bit paranoid about AI being sometimes used in the writing. Past dramas had clunky writing and disappointing endings as well, but they were a different kind of bad, somehow. Some recent examples have felt almost uncanny. But it could also be that being aware of AI's existence has made me search for potential signs of it.

I agree. I'm trying to analyse what the problem is, and I think it's mainly that there's no consistency of character. Eunho in particular: she started out as thoroughly materialistic and amoral, gradually grew more human along the way, went through extreme grief in the climactic afterlife part, aaaaand... came back as thoroughly materialistic and amoral. Right back to square one. What am I missing here? What was the point?

With Si-yeol it was less noticeable because he had fewer extremes in his character overall, but even with him, the drama seemed to forget he was supposed to be a bit cocky, career-focused and obsessively strict when it comes to football. Most of the time he was just sweet and a bit spineless, didn't come across like he had a will of his own at all.

Oddly, I had the same problem with Genie, Make A Wish recently. Not to spoil anything about that drama, but the FL also went through something that should have been a drastic character arc and still managed to remain unsatisfyingly static (IMO).

It seems like a no-brainer, doesn't it? If I had to pick a reality where I'm rich and famous, or one where I get to live with my deceased loved ones longer... I know which one I'd pick, and it's not the fame and riches.

(Not that the story was about "picking a reality", exactly, but the drama should at least have acknowledged that part.)

I was actually scratching my head about that one. Why did the drama even introduce that bit? It was never explained in any way.

I second that! He was a green flag, and in a very natural way. I don't know how to describe it, but when they were exploring the ancient village as tourists, he somehow came across as very real. Like a real, sweet person instead of a character on screen.

This was so frustrating. I liked so many things about this drama, but everything fell *just* short of being satisfying. No real payoff for anything. Watching the last episode I felt strangely deflated, like the story that happened didn't even matter in the end.

I feel like there was a much better, and more emotionally satisfying, story in here that they didn't tell. All the interesting stuff and character development happened in the "ordinary life", and I honestly thought the drama would be about them both finding true happiness as ordinary humans. Eunho finding her humanity, and Si-yeol finding a different type of success with the 4th division team. And getting to keep grandma longer as a part of their life. How did the drama just forget about grandma in the end? Many dramas these days forget about little human touches like this, which makes me a bit paranoid about AI being used in the writing, if I'm honest.

Even the supporting cast was much more interesting in the "ordinary life" version. Geumho included.

I guess they wanted to be subversive or something, but it just ended up feeling like the story wasn't about anything at all. If you asked me what the theme might have been, I wouldn't be able to come up with any answer whatsoever.

Same here. I've come to accept that my taste in dramas is very old-fashioned overall compared to most people. I'm also pretty tolerant of slow pacing. I think it was around the time "Romance Is a Bonus Book" aired that I started noticing people online were always hating on the stuff I liked best, so it's been going on for many years now! Maybe *my* taste is bad, who knows, but ultimately it doesn't even matter. I'll just enjoy what I enjoy without listening to others.

I was a bit frustrated with the first episodes of this one, as the drama seems to have many great ideas but does relatively little to explore them. But at some point, I just started enjoying it as it is.

Wait, wasn't the FL a virgin though? I thought that was the irony of it, it was her first time and she got pregnant. She was so inexperienced she even thought it was customary to leave money as a payment. And in a past flashback she overreacted badly to her date just trying to hold her hand.

Not that it matters, but I definitely saw the FL as more inexperienced than the ML! Maybe I got it all wrong.

I haven't read all the comments so I don't know if others have already said this, but doesn't this have rather uncanny similarities with Dynamite Kiss? What's especially bizarre is that these similarities apparently aren't even in the original webtoon. Like the SML being so similar to Seon-u, and the SFL persistently pursuing him despite being rejected. The evil sister(-in-law). The ML being the FL's boss... I haven't read the webtoon, but I've gathered from other people's comments that none of these things is in the original story.

To some extent, yes, these similarities are just common Kdrama tropes. But it feels more than that, in this case. It's like the dramas have two different premises but are still constructed of some of the exact same building blocks, stacked in the exact same order, and painted over in the exact same colours. Like, let's take the sequence where the ML tells the FL to do the report over and over again. He buys her special tea because he's worried for her health (despite being a jerk to her). The FL has been so stressed that she ends up in the hospital. The SML calls her phone, and the ML takes care of the call. Despite the context being different here with the pregnancy, the way it was all put together felt like déjà-vu.

I wonder if they have the same production company or something, and if the same blueprint is going to appear in their other romcoms as well. If it were just a thing here and there I wouldn't even notice, as tropes are tropes for a reason. But I keep getting this sense of déjà-vu.

Oh good! Thank you!

The suspense is killing me, lmao. Please someone let me know if the fandom thing is cleared in this episode. I won't continue watching until I know I have that to look forward to...

I'm more and more convinced that Hye-joo is basically a rich sasaeng.

They didn't know each other, though. It was chance encounter and he helped her when she was in a bad place. It isn't some random childhood encounter that shows they're fated to meet again later on, like in many other dramas, but the reason she became his fan as a teenager, so basically none of the plot would even exist without that encounter.
I think the story would be better without it, as you don't really need a reason to become a fan of someone. But it's still different from the usual childhood backstory in most other dramas, IMO.

I think Hye-joo cheated with at least one of the Gold Boys, and U-seong was one of them. Possibly Jae-hee as well - or at least he knows about this. I suspect Jae-hee is going to get murdered at some point.

Hye-joo wants La-ik back, and perhaps she was afraid U-seong would come clean to La-ik. Cheating with random guys might be forgiven one day; cheating with his bestie, definitely not.

Hye-joo could be a lot crazier than she seems, and being a chaebol, the world she lives in enables her to do whatever she wants. It would go with the corruption theme, but possibly also with the theme of grey areas in fandom: she might be a "successful fan" who managed to become a trainee and get close to La-ik because she's a nepo baby.

Alternatively, it could be her family wants to bury the scandal - literally - by getting rid of the celebrity guy she cheated with and the celebrity guy she cheated on. They want her to marry someone respectable and hide this part of her past. This would obviously make things very dangerous for the main leads, as they'd be taking on an entire mega corporation.

Also, going with the fandom theme, Hye-joo having been a trainee could be significant in and of itself. Perhaps she has a crazy fan from those trainee days who wants to eliminate all the men who ever touched her. I think this option might have the most potential for many episodes, as it would be basically a lot like hunting down a serial killer. Perhaps someone hiding in plain sight. Someone rich enough to pull strings, and/or someone she already knows.

The more I think about this, the more I am sure that the mystery revolves around Hye-joo, and her being a chaebol is significant. I'll put my thoughts in spoiler tags, as I don't know if everyone enjoys future speculation here.

Yeah, I find his role in the story to be a puzzle. Without the bullying background, he could absolutely be a potential love interest, even an interesting one - the current him is cocky, very much a product of his background, but he wants to find the truth and he's clearly waking up to how corrupt the world he moves in is.

But the bullying disqualifies him as a love interest, unless there's something very misleading about the way the school scenes have been presented to us so far. Though I can't see how there could be. If what we've seen is the truth, he wasn't just a bit mean to her in school - which could maybe be recontextualized - but an actual, disgusting bully towards a helpless victim who had done nothing to him. The kind of bully that gets you cancelled if you're a Korean actor. Even giving him a believable redemption arc is going to be tough.

I think this the point of the drama, no? Being a fan is kind of stupid. It's also fun, and it's a great comfort when your life otherwise sucks. But it's still kind of stupid. You think you know someone, but you don't them at all. You separate yourself from sasaengs and other "bad fans", but you're still a "mini stalker" as you put it. You try to convince yourself you're happy just to admire them from afar, but your heart still sinks when they're dating someone. I think everyone who's been a fan of someone (except maybe the most deluded sasaengs) has cringed at themselves, asked themselves "what am I doing?" and felt at turns humiliated and hypocritical.

I think the drama doesn't shy away from all this and deliberately embraces complicated feelings about being a fan. I also think it was very likely written by someone who has been a fan of an idol. I'm a bit surprised people are saying the drama "normalizes" getting depressed over a dating rumour, because I don't think it does? It shows it as a thing that happens, but also acknowledges it's abnormal and embarrassing. Se-na even slaps herself for feeling the way she does, she's pretty self-aware about it being stupid.

Well, if she were a real person, she could just focus on herself and be alone; but by storytelling logic, her love life is where she has never grown up. The drama explicitly states that she has never dated, and she's poured all of her energy in her career and in her parasocial relationship with her idol. Her core wound is what happened to her father, and the bullying she experienced at school; and this led her to shutting herself off emotionally and getting stuck in the teenage phase of channelling her romantic feelings towards private fantasies about an unavailable idol.

So, the solution to the dramatic problem lies in those wounds. She already has a great career, a good friend, and a pretty comfortable life overall. What she's missing is getting closure about the father and the bullying, and moving on to opening her heart and finally experiencing love in real life. I think this particular story would feel very incomplete without romance.

Yeah, don't get me wrong, I don't actually ship the FL and the prosecutor, and I find his bullying background - as it stands - totally unforgivable. But I can understand why people ship them, that's all. If a drama is a romance, a lot of viewers (myself included, usually) need clear signals as to which couples to root for, and this drama lacks those clear signals. The FL and the prosecutor had the most tropey meet-cute by far, so I think a lot of people latched onto it in the absence of other clear signals.

I don't mind dramas going against tropes, unless they do it as a mean-spirited gotcha, e.g. building up one romance and then bringing in a surprise endgame love interest out of nowhere. This drama hasn't been misleading anyone though, it's all a big question mark so far, which I'm kind of enjoying for a change.