niaoniao

Watched December 5, 2024. I gave it a two that night and never moved off it. Only one drama I've ever seen has gone lower. I left it alone for a long time after that because enough time had passed, enough dramas had come and gone, and I wanted to know if I still hated this thing or if I'd simply been in a particularly foul mood that night. I've learned more since then, too. I notice the places where Neo-Confucian ideas creep into a story, get dressed up in modern clothes, and quietly start telling everyone where they belong. So I thought maybe I'd see something different this time. Maybe I'd been too harsh. I watched all sixteen episodes again.

The two stays. Consider it a rounding error in this drama's favor.

What's Wrong With Secretary Kim is one of those dramas where the premise becomes more offensive the longer I sit with it because the woman at the center of it is making one of the most reasonable decisions anybody could possibly make. She wants to quit her job. She wants a life that isn't built around somebody else's schedule, somebody else's family, somebody else's needs. That's it. That's the thing this drama spends sixteen episodes trying to defeat. The title asks what's wrong with Secretary Kim, when the more interesting question would have been what's wrong with everybody who refuses to let her leave.

Lee Young-joon makes me furious because the show keeps stripping away the context that makes his behavior so ugly and replacing it with expensive suits, pretty lighting and that smug little expression that apparently means I'm supposed to find him irresistible. He is her employer. He signs her paycheck, controls her working hours, controls her reference, controls the environment she has spent nine years surviving in, and then acts personally betrayed when she resigns. She tells him she wants to leave and he simply refuses to accept the answer. She tries to find another job and he interferes with the replacement process. She says no and he keeps pursuing her. There is no complicated mystery here. A woman is trying to leave her boss and her boss decides that her decision is something he gets to negotiate. The fact that he's rich and beautiful doesn't make that less disturbing. It just means the drama has the budget to make it look romantic.

And I hate the physicality of it. I hate the wrist grabbing, the blocking her path, the way he backs her into walls and desks and corners and uses his body to occupy the space she needs to move through. The camera keeps treating those moments like sexual tension, with soft music and close-ups and that breathless little pause dramas love when they're telling me two people are about to kiss. I'm sitting there thinking, why is he still standing there? Move. She is trying to get past you. This is not chemistry to me. It's a man taking advantage of the fact that he is physically bigger and socially more powerful than the woman who is trying to tell him no, while the production desperately begs me to find it sexy.

Then there is his dependence on her, which might be the part I despise most because the show turns his inability to function without Mi-so into evidence of how deeply he loves her. He can't sleep properly, he can't organize himself, he can't manage his own life, and apparently this is supposed to be adorable because it proves how important she is to him. No. It proves that he spent nine years making another human being responsible for his existence. He has built his entire life around her labor and then acts devastated when she finally decides she wants some of that life back for herself. It's emotional blackmail dressed up as vulnerability. Stay because I can't function without you. Stay because I'll fall apart if you leave. Stay because you'll feel guilty watching me suffer. And the drama looks at this enormous adult man making his employee responsible for his emotional stability and goes, isn't love beautiful?

It gets even worse when I think about what those nine years actually mean for Mi-so. She wasn't starting from some position of freedom when she took that job. She was already carrying her father's debts and the needs of her family, already accustomed to putting herself second, already living a life where being useful to other people was treated as her responsibility. She has spent her entire adulthood being needed. Her father needs something. Her sisters need something. Her boss needs everything. And then the romance comes along and tells her that the solution to spending her life orbiting other people is to find a man worth orbiting. Father, boss, husband. It's a relay race and she's the baton. Everybody celebrates when the final handoff happens because apparently she has finally found the correct person to belong to.

And none of that structure is an accident, which is the part that actually makes me want to scream. Confucian doctrine gave women three obediences. Her father before marriage, her husband during it, her son in widowhood. Cradle to grave she belonged to somebody, and her autonomy was never hers to hold, it was passed between men like property changing hands. Now look at Mi-so's life and tell me what's different. Father, employer, husband. The badge is corporate and the tower is in Gangnam and the script is four hundred years old. This drama isn't inventing a romance. It's larping Joseon in tailored suits with a good colorist and hoping nobody clocks the shape of it. I clocked it. It's the same arrangement, just better lit.

A Joseon father handed his daughter a silver knife and called it protection, and everybody understood what it actually meant, which was die before you're dishonored. Young-joon hands Mi-so a bag. I'm aware one of those objects kills you and the other doesn't. The message underneath them is the same message. Your worth is fragile, your worth is conditional, your worth is somebody else's to assess, and here is the beautiful object that proves you've accepted the terms. The knife made the arrangement obvious. The bag makes it feel like being loved.

That's the whole trick, and it works on millions of people. The drama makes the cage look like the way out. Mi-so is exhausted, she's carrying debts that were never hers, she has no time and no life and no room to move, and the story offers her exactly one exit from all of it, which is a bigger and better decorated version of the same room. She's allowed to be competent. She's allowed to be the most capable person in the building. She just has to be capable at him, permanently, and hand the whole thing over to a man's emotional needs before the credits roll. That's not liberation with a romance attached. That's the oldest confinement there is, restaged with money, and the show has the nerve to film her walking into it in a white dress like she chose it freely. So I guess servitude is fine as long as LV made the uniform and Hermès made the collar and leash.

That's why the gifts bother me too. The show keeps presenting all the expensive things Young-joon gives her as evidence that he appreciates her, as though bags and clothes and access to his luxurious world somehow compensate for nine years of labor. He doesn't give her freedom. He doesn't give her time back. He doesn't give her the years she spent organizing his life. He gives her things. That's not the same thing. Those gifts feel less like generosity the longer I look at them and more like a leash with a very expensive clasp. The cage gets prettier. The bars get more expensive. The cage is still there.

And then the kidnapping storyline comes along and somehow manages to make an already infuriating drama even more unbearable because Mi-so's own trauma becomes another thing other people control for her. She was the child in that room. It happened to her body and her mind, and yet her memory becomes something the adults around her can suppress, debate, carry, write about and eventually reveal when they decide the timing is right. One brother turns the experience into a book. The other carries the memory for years. The family buries the truth. Young-joon stands beside her with information about her own past that she doesn't have. Everyone has a piece of her history except the person whose history it actually is. Then the drama hands the truth back to her like a romantic revelation and expects me to be grateful for the emotional timing. I'm not. I'm furious. Even her trauma gets processed through other people's decisions before it is allowed to belong to her.

Park Min-young is the one reason I can still see Mi-so underneath all of this. I am biased and I don't care. She is doing an enormous amount of work to make this woman feel like she exists beyond whatever the plot currently needs her to do. There are moments where Mi-so is supposed to be happy and I can still see the calculation in her face, the exhaustion, the little flashes of someone who has spent years being competent because everybody around her expects her to be. Park Min-young gives her an interior life that the script keeps trying to confiscate. That's what makes watching the drama so frustrating. I can see the woman. The writing keeps seeing the assistant. Then it sees the girlfriend. Then the fiancée. Then the wife. Every time Mi-so starts becoming her own person, the story finds another relationship for her to disappear into.

And then we get the ending, which is where the whole thing finally becomes insane. She quits because she wants a life of her own, and she ends up marrying the man whose life she has spent nine years managing. She still organizes his day. She still takes care of him. She still fixes his tie. She still revolves around his needs. The difference is that now she doesn't have a salary, a job title or an end of shift. The employment contract was at least a contract. What replaces it works more like a nobi munseo, the paper that used to certify a person as somebody's property, except this version gets signed in front of flowers while everybody cries about how beautiful it is. Marriage is where the show quietly deletes the paycheck and calls it happily ever after. I am supposed to look at this woman who spent the entire drama saying she wanted to experience life outside of service and feel moved because she has voluntarily made her service permanent. She didn't escape the job. She married the boss.

That's why I hate this drama as much as I do. It's not simply that I dislike Young-joon or that I think the romance is badly handled. I hate the fundamental argument the story keeps making about Mi-so. She says she wants to leave and the narrative treats that desire as something that needs to be corrected. She wants independence, so the plot gives her romance. She wants her own identity, so the plot gives her a husband. She wants to stop spending her life taking care of somebody else, so the plot gives her somebody else to take care of forever. The show keeps calling the thing she wants a misunderstanding while presenting the thing she is trying to escape as her destiny. And yes, it's a romcom. I'm aware. That's the packaging, not an alibi. A story doesn't stop arguing what it's arguing because the lighting is warm and everybody in it is beautiful. Sixteen hours is a long time to spend saying something, and this one said it very clearly.

Nothing is wrong with Secretary Kim. That's the fucking joke. She was the only person in this entire production who knew exactly what she wanted. She wanted to go home. The drama just couldn't stand the idea that home might be somewhere Lee Young-joon wasn't. So it spent sixteen episodes dragging her back toward him, dressing the cage up in romance, throwing confetti over it and calling the result freedom. Park Min-young fought like hell to make Mi-so feel like a person inside that story. I could see her fighting. I could see the person underneath it. And I could see the script winning anyway.