purple_kimchi

Thank you for this comment and your perspective, as someone not in the LGBTQ+ community but who tries to be an ally I enjoyed this episode but felt strange with the portrayal of the president and with the level of VC's disgust. As for everyone else replying to this comment, instead of trying to offer your own perspective and effectively talking over actual gay people we should take the back seat in this one without trying to excuse the writer's decisions :)

Lord forgive me, I felt things during the horseback scene lol

Do you mean the one when he was on the plane? That's original soundtrack, I think, and probably Korean. Or is it another one?

I mean, when was it playing in the episode?

Which song exactly?

The film parody got me dying!

"How old are you?"
"I'm 8!"
"And I'm 7!"

That makes sense! I feel that they're trying too hard to make it seem natural and quirky, so it turns out going to the opposite direction and feels overexaggeratrd and rather disjointed and artificial at times - I'm still enjoying the show, though, and waiting to see how everything develops.

I'm actually enjoying this quite a lot, but while reading the comments I wonder, how come most people think the dialogue is "real" and "natural"? I often struggle to make sense of what is being said, they jump from one topic to another making seemingly random connections and in general I feel like no one actually talks like that in everyday life. OMJ said it herself in the 2nd episode, she felt like KSG and her were speaking different languages. It's still something refreshingly different and I do think the quirkiness is at least partly deliberate and might be building up to them finding common ground - I was just perplexed at how different my impression of the whole thing was compared to others.

She most definitely was! Off the top of my head I can recall two times in ep. 16 :)

That's more or less what I wrote in my answer to the other commenter! Glad I wasn't the only one that felt this way

I think that they dropped the ball on this one - to me it seemed that it would prove to be a plot point, how NDS and HJP both tried to convince Alex about NoonGil and that might end up tipping the scales in favour of one or the other in SDM's eyes... Instead they brushed it off as just networking on behalf of NDS, which is technically not wrong, but it really makes you doubt whether NDS with his flimsy grasp on the business side of things would be able to persuade Alex by himself - so I guess that once again HJP's contribution flew under the radar

So, we never got to find out what exactly happened behind the scenes regarding NoonGil after 2STO acqhired SST - and I mean what was said at the conversation among Alex, NDS and HJP? How convenient...

Love how well articulated and impartial your review is! Agree with many of your points as well - in the end the drama could have been so much better, but it kind of collapsed into itself, didn't it?

That's for sure lol

I know they do, hence the post! You're right in that there are definitely loopholes, but it just doesn't seem realistic the way they portray it (the short amount of time in which they switch, for example). It would've been more fascinating, imo, if they showed the twins at peast being some kind of behind-the-scenes advisors to the company in competition!

Out of the realistic business aspects of Start-Up I especially enjoyed seeing how software developers could hop from company to company in no time - all of which companies compete in the same field, and two of them in the same country, no less - as if "do not compete" clauses don't even exist in this universe...

Just want to say that a SML that only exists to bring the main couple together is an example of a badly written script. Unfortunately, there's too many of them in kdramas and we're almost used to them. But the real success is having a character who's their own person and whose life doesn't only revolve around the ML - example, Reply 1988. HJP had lots of potential for this and was still reduced to a shell of his former characterization - hence the annoyance of the majority of viewers.

I catch glimpses of what the bromance could've been and weep inside. Why, WHY did it have to be this half-assed love triangle instead? And why did they have to nerf HJP, the best written character throughout?

The moment when SDM finally tells NDS why she likes him could be the moment of self-actualisation for him; when he realises he doesn't really need to try to be something or someone else to deserve this, but rather that he already is a person worthy of love. But after the awful characterisation of the last few episodes it just feels like grasping at straws to make the main couple happen. Talk about wasted potential of a good story and characters.

Stranger, hands down

Same lol I read so many interesting theories there