luckz

Is there a list of things C-viewers complain about?

Pros:

The mockumentary style can be entertaining, usually when blending one clip into another, or when a character responds to what the previous one said in their clip.

The vast majority of the time, the complaints expressed between characters are convincing and the viewer can sympathize.

Most of the runtime and viewer attention is wisely allocated to peeling the main couple's onion rather than trying to explore all characters equally.

The chemistry between the leads is decent. Romance is portrayed more "like in the real world" than being the usual implausible (supposedly) heart-fluttering 'catching her fall' or 'stumbling into each other, lips on lips' stuff with overdone slow-motion. Basically in that regard it is the opposite of JCW's previous drama Backstreet Rookie, which has a lot of slo-mo teasing but virtually zero skinship.



Cons:

The mockumentary style follows no rules, which often breaks immersion. Sometimes character get to hear others live and have a back and forth dialogue, other times they get other's views as phone text, and very often only the confusingly defined audience is given some piece of information.

Characters often exist to do the writer's bidding rather than staying true to themselves. They often do things just to delay the plot and frustrate the audience. Especially the various plot resolutions towards the end gravitate somewhere between undercooked, unconvincing, and unnecessary. Every single couple pairing is resolved poorly. (This isn't just due to insufficient time budget since many things in the middle could easily have been cut. There's a bunch of filler material despite the short length.)
For how much the main couple torments the viewer (maybe 40% of The Red Sleeve?), their resolution in particular was incredibly arbitrary and flat.

While there is a lot of more or less appropriate older commercial music, some of the original music is straight up awful in the way that the viewer actually takes notice when the music doesn't suck.

Do you have an episode / timestamp for that?

It is either attempted second-degree murder (she decides on the spot that she will kill them to prevent them from exposing her) or attempted voluntary manslaughter (she wants to stop them by any means, even if that means risking their live).

However, FL's parents have to die either way at exactly that time because those are the terms of their supernatural contract with the ML. While the behavior of the grandma sets the place (where the car flips over), it does not cause their death. The ML effects their death.

It's much better than the 4.4 IMDb rating would suggest, with both some decent acting and uninhibited film-making creativity (for better or for worse). However, beyond disjointedly adapting a lengthy work into little runtime, it's also filled with content that really didn't need to be there – from the involuntarily comedic to the potentially disturbing.

I personally thought the classical music was quite fitting, whereas any other attempts at incorporating music were a train wreck.

Kim You Jung is fantastic in this, much better than in My Demon.
Everyone and everything else is somewhat between okay and pretty decent.
A bunch of the comedy is far better than the average k-drama. The first four episodes in particular are really good.
Unfortunately, various plot arcs keep going on and on and on without being interesting or ever getting anywhere, and a lot of resolution happens last-minute, or in an unsatisfactory manner, or not at all.
Han Sun Hwa's completely boring character takes up what feels like 6-8 hours of this and adds very little to it.

The IQIYI (~= Amazon) and Netflix versions are missing at least some music, like a Chuck Berry song near the end of episode 02.
Example timestamps to check for generic replacement music (will be some 15-20 seconds later in versions with the intro):
EP01 03:27
EP01 16:33
EP02 57:27 (again/re-used at the start of EP03)

Chemistry is alright, but not like it's been hyped.
Adverts are out of place / intrusive (and really dumb).
The comedy characters are all overwhelmingly unfunny.
(( Stuff at the end is stupid, but not as painful as it could have been. ))

They died because of a popped tire etc, she didn't hit them or anything.
If you watch the scene before, they kept going on about having to leave and not having time — they presumably knew it was time for the collection of their soul(s) to happen.

There were a whole lot of Goblin wannabe scenes.
(In some way even the scallion stuff is from Goblin.)

They kind of have the same ending too.

The cat did not become human because of the FL's webcomic.

Meeting the FL was the very first memory of the ML, long before she started drawing her comic. After that, the ML turned into a kitten found by Jae Seon.

Timeline thus:
?? (ML likely cat, but unknown) -> ML human, meets FL -> ML cat, lives with Jae Seon, then given to his new girlfriend -> ... -> FL draws the willow boy comic

For me the show would have worked far better as a simple fluffy rom-com without "characters do dumb things to pad the running time" or "characters encounter sudden problems for an episode or two again mostly to fill the time with something". *
I already complained about the ending of the drama here: https://kisskh.at/32545-man-that-bakes-bread#comment-16421587
..and as I saw a bunch of comments saying the manga didn't suffer from some of the problems this show has, I checked out the last few issues/chapters.

the manga/manhwa/webtoon ends with
- two chapters where jae-seon returns after some absence to celebrate FL's birthday and FL wants to rush out to meet him, and hong-jo the cat protests, and then hong-jo the cat turns into hong-jo the human to cling on to her, but since jae-seon and doo-shik are already at the door he becomes a cat again, and they get drunk to celebrate the FL's birthday and the FL even confesses her feelings to jae-seon despite the WTF experience right before.
- one chapter where FL looks for a suddenly-missing hong-jo the cat and she meets the schoolgirls who talk about a dead cat and she digs it up and realises it's not hong-jo and is very relieved.
- one chapter where FL confronts SFL, who is the only one who knew that hong-jo the guy is also a cat (but promised hong-jo not to tell his secret to anyone).
- one chapter where FL dreams she is actually the cat and hong-jo is actually the human going out to meet other humans and she begs him not to go and can't do anything to stop him, with dialogue pretty much mirroring what she says to hong-jo ("I will be back late today" etc) when she wants to go out to meet jae-seon.
- one chapter where FL comes home and is happy that someone is there waiting for her with a "Welcome!", no matter if that hong-jo is not-human or not-cat or both or whatever.

There's no long 10 year old pining between anyone, Sol(-ah) only meets Jae-Seon as a friend of a friend (and develops a crush on him) and Eun-Ji-Eun (who is called Ala) is the character with the most of a crush on Hong-Jo. The willow love is a mere three or four panels, the abandonment angle is very very minor, Hong-Jo is randomly sickly a few times but without much context. The second couple doesn't happen, but more importantly the main one also doesn't conclude with anything else than a somewhat unclear semi-timeskip ending.


*: Other people have addressed this well for example in https://kisskh.at/32545-man-that-bakes-bread#comment-3220831 and https://kisskh.at/32545-man-that-bakes-bread#comment-3256769 .

It's puzzling how they cut out all these good scenes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbfmq9Sxhzo (not really spoilerish).
I would have liked to watch *that* show more than the unnecessarily-dramatic one I got to see. The things the writers throw in here as wrenches really seem like what a webcomic author without inspiration would come up with to insert some obstacles that prop up at the start of an issue and get solved at its end (with no particular meaning or relevance). It's all the more puzzling that the original apparently doesn't do things like this (but then it's comparatively short anyway).

--
The follow-up comment is only meant for people who have watched the show and discusses the ending of the manhwa.

The whole part where the "don't abandon animals!" guy becomes a full blown catnapper villain was unncessary. Then he was unncessary brought back to throw some threats around. Then he unneccessarily appeared yet another time for, well, silly action sequences that had no particular point. To coax the ML back into being able to transform? I don't even.

I dunno why so many people mind that this show was cut short, it seemed like it only had 5 hours of content to begin with and then was artificially blown up with repetitive drama.

IMO he is a human for good, thus with a regular aging pattern.
https://kisskh.at/32545-man-that-bakes-bread#comment-16421587

I don't think it's your bubble, since otherwise he would have had to be MUCH older. Or the film crew just had a zero out of ten effort day when filming the ending....

The real cat was CGI a good few times, so I guess I was annoyed by that... :D

Since you still have it on plan-to-watch: I would argue it's a happy end, just in the typical Korean rushed-out-in-half-a-workday way.

He's magically turned into a human for good and the time problem is waved away. Just gotta wait the mandatory two year timeskip or something...
https://kisskh.at/32545-man-that-bakes-bread#comment-16421587