I've been struggling this entire year to get hooked on a kdrama, most of the ones I've started seemed promising but when I gave them a chance dissapointed me. I began watching Castaway Diva without really having a lot of expectations, but it quickly grabbed my attention and I devoured it in 3 days.

The acting of the child actors on the first episode was amazing, and really sold me on this show. I liked their future selves, and thought that the reasons they were kept apart were reasonable, instead of just an excuse. I found all of the characters interesting and complex, they felt like actual people. They were not steryotipes or just tropes. There have been some dramas (coughKing the Landcough) in which the characters feel like caricatures and you get tired of seeing them, but I felt the opposite with the characters of Castaway Diva.

The only complaints I have are:

I wish we knew more about what happens with Ran Joo. Like, it seems like she's become the producer of the entertainment firm, but she chose to stay with somebody that she had a romantic relationship with and screwed her over multiple times? I did ship them at the beginning, because I loved the angst of it and there were scenes in which he was considerate towards her, but he went way too far, so I'm a little yikes that she chose to stay on the company that treated her like shit instead of building her own. Or at least have her get part of the ownership of the place so they could co-direct it, something that gave her more power of choice.

I wish we had more of the romance. We only had ONE kiss between the main couple, and not really a lot of scenes in which they're happy or like go on a date together. We've seen A LOT of them supporting each other, which is good to make the relationship believable, but I wish we'd had a few more scenes of them happily together after all the suffering and time apart they went through.