1
Sinasina
I had a very hard time to immerse myself in this drama. Ultimately I think it's because the acting was just not that great in the first half and perhaps the pacing was a bit draggy early on and also the OST felt generic. I just did not feel very engaged. On top of all that we had the obsessive asshole type second ML that kept annoying me throughout most of the drama and I hate love triangles as a plot device in general.
Luckily sometime in the second half everything started clicking. It's like the young actors finally figured out how to act their characters well & I don't know what happened with the OST, whether the perceived improvement is just placebo, but I started to really enjoy that too by the time the show ended.
In my experience kdrama writers can almost never produce decent scripts in the "high concept" category. The webtoon it's based on must be quite extraordinary, since the story & the world building just works. Typically high concept shows fall into the trap of over-explaining every little thing, thus ending up having a crazy amount of inconsistencies & conflicting world laws later on. W & Alhambra demonstrate this very well.. Here though everything nicely falls into place, things get better not worse as we move along & miraculously even the ending is nicely wrapped in a way that I can get totally onboard with. In fact the last 4 episodes were perhaps the highest quality kdrama entertainment I've had in 2020 thus far. (well I'm yet to watch "It's Okay to Not Be Okay", but..)
So overall 8/10 seems like a fitting score. The annoyances are not that minor, but everything else is just extraordinary ^^
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I already mentioned how the second ML irked me, but let's talk a bit about the actor. I've seen Lee Jae Wook in quite a few dramas before and I thought he did a great job in them, but I have never in a million years thought that he can pull of being an asshole so well. What a talented actor. I may have hated his character & I think ExYou would have been much better without him, I gotta give credit where credit is due, huge surprise! :-)
Luckily sometime in the second half everything started clicking. It's like the young actors finally figured out how to act their characters well & I don't know what happened with the OST, whether the perceived improvement is just placebo, but I started to really enjoy that too by the time the show ended.
In my experience kdrama writers can almost never produce decent scripts in the "high concept" category. The webtoon it's based on must be quite extraordinary, since the story & the world building just works. Typically high concept shows fall into the trap of over-explaining every little thing, thus ending up having a crazy amount of inconsistencies & conflicting world laws later on. W & Alhambra demonstrate this very well.. Here though everything nicely falls into place, things get better not worse as we move along & miraculously even the ending is nicely wrapped in a way that I can get totally onboard with. In fact the last 4 episodes were perhaps the highest quality kdrama entertainment I've had in 2020 thus far. (well I'm yet to watch "It's Okay to Not Be Okay", but..)
So overall 8/10 seems like a fitting score. The annoyances are not that minor, but everything else is just extraordinary ^^
-----
I already mentioned how the second ML irked me, but let's talk a bit about the actor. I've seen Lee Jae Wook in quite a few dramas before and I thought he did a great job in them, but I have never in a million years thought that he can pull of being an asshole so well. What a talented actor. I may have hated his character & I think ExYou would have been much better without him, I gotta give credit where credit is due, huge surprise! :-)
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