A beautiful, wonderfully scripted and impeccabaly casted show that impacts the viewer. Now that I've said that, lets drop the straight praise and get into the sentimental feels that is 25 21 and why I gave it a ten, despite feeling an entire range of negative ( and angry) emotions after finishing it. I'll also get into why it's a very biased, and maybe even undeserved ten.

The entire show is an essential summary of this quote that stuck with me since a long time ago, " Any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again."

You get it, youth is fragile and what we have, all we do is just picking memories blah blah blah. Now that the gist and vibe of the show is provided, lets get into the meat of the matter that had the fandom divided and asking themselves " did I really like that or am I a sadist ?"

The writer of this show is a very talented individual who knows how to make characters click like clockwork. The consistency and quality affects the audience in a perfected and almost magical way. I'm sure the comments and reviews are absolutely raving. She's great, I admit. But she dooms herlself by taking herself too seriously and the overall picture thus becomes muddy and distorted, losing it's original feel and texture. I tried to watch her previous work ( by God I tried my darn hardest) but her writing there has the same problem ( just in huge dollops). Her writing is great is in all ways except that her ambition to create something serious and timeless always seeps through like a big fat insecurity. It's like she's begging her audience and herself to view it as something that's emotional and beautiful and it ruins the effect a bit, in my opinion. Art does not beg, it simply exists and makes the viewer FEEL. The show did make me feel a range of beautiful and not so beautiful emotions at the start but by the end of it, I sort of questioned If I even processed the entirety of it completly, let alone feel it.

She takes herself so seriously at some points that it becomes the singular flaw of this show. And for those of who are thinking that I'm saying it should have taken itself lightly by having everything tied up in bows, that's not what I'm saying at all. You can do "melo" without trying to overly shock the audience and being a try hard about it.

The only reason I gave it a ten is because of sentimental value cause I'm a young adult trying to find my way etc. etc. and so I became attached to the first fourteen episodes of the show ( also subtract all the scenes with the present Na Hee Do which leaves about three quarters of perfection in this show) . As a viewer however I have to say, that ending was poorly executed and in a way kind of cliche if that makes sense.

Can I just say that I, for one am a sucker for happy endings and gravitate towards them with record speed. I, also however, see the beauty in tragedy and the glory of simply letting things go as nature had intented ( I have a whole list of depression juice tittles on mdl cause I have a thing for pain). But, the way this drama was wrapped felt anything but natural. The spoilers of this show are not hard to guess. I knew which way this show would go the minute I listened to the theme song " twenty five, twenty one" by Jaurim which the show is clearly based on way back when the first episode aired. " I thought it would last forever, our 25 and 21" I mean come on, at this point Jaurim wrote this stuff over ten years ago?!!?

So I was expecting doom from the beginning but in a tasteful, natural way, patiently spoon fed to me with the writing and production I so admired. It's not what I got, but hey! I gave it a ten so give it a go if youre bored and wanna feel something again for (most!) of this show.