The Bride of Habaek is the best representation of a great manhwa story adapted into a smaller slice of it and forced into an ordinary modern setting so as to appeal to a greater range of people and to cut those budget costs on costumes and sets.
The story barely made any sense and even when it did, it left you wondering if perhaps they wrote a little bit of the script and then realized how many plot holes it has and then added onto it, which made it very weirdly paced and mostly mellowed out and too chill for what this was originally supposed to be.
Kudos to Im Joo Hwan, I'm pretty sure that during the airing time of this drama the commentary that I've read both on MDL and other websites pointed out how fond the viewers were of his character and how much we've all been invested in his story from the very start. The other characters, however, were quite bland and felt a little bit like stand-in cardboards for Twilight-ish kinda roles, definitely not that appealing. I did root for the secondary couples, since the main ship had zero chemistry and even the romantic scenes felt awkward to watch most of the time.
The saving grace of this drama is its OST, which I'm sure we'll all remember for quite awhile, it greatly helped in a few moments in the plot where the acting was terrible and the overall musical background to the scenes was well-thought out.
To be honest, the only reason I could watch this through all of its episodes was because I watched only one episode in awhile, and took it as a slow-paced but consistent messy drama that it is. I would definitely never watch it again, but it was surprisingly such a miss in so many aspects that everything lacking did lower its level to a very linear-feeling experience which was, due to its comfortingly non-changing nature, strangely watchable.
If you're here for a supernatural romantic story, go watch something else from the genre. If you're here for a slow-paced, not so serious, modern-setting varation of the original manhwa that you're not gonna binge watch, you might want to try it. It would be very dishonest to recommend this as anything else, so if you want to experience this kind of a story in a proper way and to enjoy some beautiful art and writing in the process, opt for the manhwa instead.
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