luckz

As a heterosexual, I was pretty appalled how this was handled among the "dumb kids", when Yoon Jae refuses to take Jun Hee's feelings for him as anything but a joke.

And then disappointed how – after Yoon Jae found out by spying on a private conversation – he did absolutely zero, literally zero, to address this, or even apologize for his past behaviour. And the extra back hug later was the *exact same thing* he did during his "dumb kid" years!


Of course I'm writing this from my contemporary moral compass, I don't have one calibrated for the 90s or early 2000s and South Korea.


Anyway, it's 99% different from the respect shown to a transsexual in It's Okay, That's Love (2014).

This drama taught me that circumcision is (or was) widely performed on male *teenagers* due to post-WW2 US influence, instead of being done at birth for similarly hard to justify reasons, or merely when medically necessary as practiced in most of the civilised world.

Beyond two minutes of jokes it has no plot relevance. Perhaps it's also supposed to be a "nostalgic 90s thing".

I really enjoyed 12+13; before that the middle was really painful to bear, and the last episodes were relatively flat.

(I guess it's supposed to mirror the earlier scene when she unlocked his laptop and almost played a porn movie in his office. As for consent, it's hard to judge that with so much yelling and regular beatings between ML and FL, as well as her parents.

The first kiss on the school yard was definitely not consensual.)

It's probably in the bottom 25% of disturbing things in this show for me. :c

The first sister seems to be roughly his age, so there's no issue there. He was giving her private tutoring it seems, which is very different from being her school teacher in a position of power. The girl also pursued him first!
It's perhaps an issue that this kind of teaching situation goes for both, and that he actually likes the younger sister only when she replicates things he remembers about the deceased sister.

But with the FL, he's her teacher, and IMMEDIATELY in the moment he retires from that post, he declares his romantic intentions to her. That seems really problematic.
That her family might rely on his financial support might additionally wedge her into playing along with 'dating' when she has no feelings of that sort for him.

(As a bonus, the age of consent in Korea is higher now than when this was filmed, and Korea has an ancestral system of calling babies one year old at birth, so deciding how old these characters are might not be that easy.)

Are these WAY too close camera zooms where an actor's face fills the entire screen intended for the (small screen size) smartphone audience, as well as low-bitrate streaming, or is there any other reason for them?

It gets a lot better after the first two episodes. IMO the middle ones are the best.

I would call it the most uniquely realistic drama I've watched, and the majority of characters are written as proper humans.

(Seems you still didn't finish it, right?)

The first episode is awful, the second is mildly better, and then it eventually gets really good.

It does so so often that it's almost like edutainment at times, I assume paid for with tax money or similar.

I agree that the last episodes were rather frustrating once they tried to do a "story arc" as opposed to mostly just character interaction.

For what it's worth it's *entirely* different from other K-dramas, so it won't give you an accurate impression of what they're usually like.

The first episode is one of the most unintentionally comical things I've seen in my life. Like a 4/10 at best.
I suppose the first episode or two are why people would drop it.

Very happy that I didn't stop there!
(For me the very start was worst, the middle was great, and the last episodes were weaker again as the writers try to steer towards a conclusion.)

It's completely unlike any of the 30+ other K-dramas I've watched – 90% of the characters and their relationships are very real! Only a handful of scenes have side characters that morph into whatever the writer wants in that moment, and that's so refreshing compared to how in other shows the supporting cast usually are in stasis when they're not needed by the leads.

This show also has the most open (and accepting) conversations about mental health and sexuality of anything I've watched.

Three times actually.
- grabbing a knife
- baiting serial killer 1 (at the lake)
- baiting serial killer 2 (in her home)

Honorary mention:
- goading serial killer 2 on to kill her at his childhood home

Yes

Agree with the gist, and instead of the last two episodes being "let's catch the culprit and lose him and try to catch him again and get outsmarted by him and ...", I would have much preferred an earlier closure and instead to see how FL and SML growing up together changes the future.

Also, how the tunnel thing itself functions is rather peculiar. The characters themselves express that there should be some logic to it, like needing both the ML and the killer in the tunnel together for the ML to time-travel, yet it becomes 'begging the deities' in the last episode.

Just a tiny bit. He travels back and forth once, which has immediate effects on the future, so it's the same timeline being altered.
The problem you describe is true though, that how going back to the past (after the story arc concludes) rewrites the future entirely is not shown at all.

... Black.

Well, we didn't clearly see that he caught the killer in the past, or how, probably because the writers didn't come up with a good way to show it.

But yes, essentially.

It's not as bad of a "the whole show never happened" as ...

He's a country bumpkin from the 80s and unlike his partner doesn't have a university-style police academy education. It's hard to make him not uneducated (and rude).