Incredible acting, important series, so so writing

The actors did a great job, I commend to the them cause they brought the characters to life in such an immersive way, even when the writing had some problems in my opinion.

I appreciate the will to talk about the many struggles of a person part of the LGBTQIA+ community, but since the themes are particularly sensitive I felt some issues were rushed into the plot, like Yeong being HIV+. This is such an important question that it deserved more time to breathe into the story.
I feel like the overall length of the series was enough, the issue is how it was spent: some moments and themes needed more time and attention or the writer could’ve chosen to focus on one/two but do a better job. Some others got way too much space and didn’t even add much to the story cause of their repetitiveness (the many club scenes, the multiple scenes in which Yeong was with his mother, she said the same things and he then ran away leaving her with the caregiver…).
The religious guilt linked to the mother and Yeong Su is another sensitive matter and it was barely touched (like the scene where his mum clearly got him locked up in a psych ward when he was a teen?! You can’t just drop that scene and move on like nothing happened!)
I also would’ve loved a happy ending, gotta be honest, and I’m not one for them.
I often hear members of the community saying how refreshing it is to have representation that it is not only tragedy after tragedy when it comes to dramas/series/movies based on their experiences, and I feel like here we leaned way too much into the depiction of the hopelessness of a gay man. As much as it’s the experience of many and it’s important to represent it, I felt that Yeong Su was being the protagonist of a witch hunt more than a coming of age/slice of life to the point of feeling cruel for the sake of it. I feel very torn, cause it’s and important piece of media, but it was executed ok.

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One episode more and it would’ve been perfect

Some dramas get way too many episode resulting in a watered down story.
This one, on the contrary, should’ve had at least one episode to close the story as it would’ve deserved. I would’ve wanted to see Beni talking to her long time friend and almost husband one last time to definitely close their relationship and see his reaction. It’s clear he knew how distant she was but it would’ve been nice to see his reaction: composed, would’ve tried to win her back one last time, pissed as hell?
Also, it would’ve been nice to see what they decide to do: does he move to Seoul, are they back in Japan? He most likely moved to SK, still... Even a slideshow of moments after that last scene of them holding each other’s hands and walk together to see all the ends meet. It would’ve felt a bit more complete. Still, great drama, one of my favorite of the year!

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Did they release the first draft?!

In all honesty, it’s the worst drama I’ve ever seen.
Nothing really works, it looks like they released the series based on a first loose draft.
The budget was clearly high, but it was thrown away.

The characters are so superficial, there’s nothing to them. Some of them are poor, some of them are rich, some are evil, everyone is miserable, that’s it.
The actors are clearly struggling, their acting is robotic cause the dialogues are so lame and dull they couldn’t do much to make it better. They did their best though.
All this led to a lack of chemistry among the cast that I might’ve never seen, they’re literally NPCs.

Some cutscenes are so unnecessarily complex in a drama this basic that they’re involuntarily comic (the hacking scene for example), other ones are shot like they’re meant to be epic but nothing happens before or after so there’s no pathos at all.

There also are some plot holes.
The whole female lead character is built around her monstrous father (he is, not saying he’s not) and how she’s so scared for her life yet when she throws up on the heir she’s supposed to marry we don’t see any scenes with his father reacting to that or when she avoids going to America cause the guy was found guilty of drugs possession… You can’t built all of her story around the fact she fears her father the most and how cruel he is and not showing us his reactions to her actions/things that happens to her that would surely send him off.

The plot itself is so easy I understood everything from the beginning, despite the many incoherences. The whole Rian character is built to be ambiguous, is he really cruel or just a dumb rich guy? To build that ambiguity you have to create more depth to the character and as I said, the characters are just NPCs, so it doesn’t work.

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