Not my cup of tea

This show did not work for me. First off, the mother, Young Soon is abusive. She was abusive when Kang Ho was a child and she was abusive after he became a disabled adult. The show puts in a lot of work to get you to sympathize with Young Soon. They even pull the terminal illness card to gain extra sympathy. Which was unnecessary in my mind. They show us why Young Soon was the way she was and the way she acts towards Kang Ho is understandable but just because I understand the why, it doesn't make her abuse okay. At some point she realizes she was a bad mother to Kang Ho and yet she continues to abuse him at every chance. Kang Ho becomes paralyzed and she abuses him multiple times over to get him to speed up his rehabilitation. She repeatedly abuses him and the show makes it seem like all this abuse is okay because Kang Ho needs to recover quickly so he can be okay on his own. So she abuses him out of desperation but again that doesn't make it okay. What about taking accountability? What about the Young Soon owning up to being abusive? What about the her using othe methods that don't involve abuse? Young Soon abuses Kang Ho at every opportunity but I guess it's okay because the end justifies the means. After all her abusive tactics have gotten her son to become a prosecutor and they've gotten him a speedy recovery, and he's not traumatized any of it. I have no problem with Young Soon being redeemed I just felt like she never did any of the heavy lifting it would take to realistically repair the mother-son relationship.

On top of that, and these are just my own personal feelings but the show felt very ablelist to me. Lots of characters went around calling Kang Ho a fool and an idiot. Young Soon acted like Kang Ho needed to learn how to walk right now, right this instant because how could he live if he stayed in his chair and she wasn't around? There were several implications that Kang Ho being disabled was the mom's punishment. The harmfulness to imply that someone who was once able bodied becoming disabled was a punishment for someone else's behavior, or punishment at all for that matter was not it for me.

I skipped over the villagers because I didn't find them funny or useful, though admittedly they were kind of funny in the last two eps.

Despite the amount of things I didn't like, the show was okay. I can understand why others enjoyed it. I personally continued to watch to for the acting and some of the interactions. I enjoyed Mi Joo as a character and I enjoyed her and Kang Ho's relationship. I also loved the twins. They were so adorable and I love their scenes with Kang Ho. I was just disappointed that what I thought would have been a pivotal moment happened offscreen.

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It's cute but...

I started watching this show because I heard it was pretty cute. Good news? It is. Bad news? It leaves a little more to be desired.

The first half of the show was fairly light and cute. The boys have good chemistry and the acting is decent. If this show was a little shorter, I'd say it could have been enjoyable with no real storyline and just fluff, but at 8 eps it feels like a little more than fluff needed to happen, which it does, but the plot points that were brought up just weren't executed well in the time given. With 8 eps I think they could have covered everything properly if the writing had been better. The fight between Ray/Ah Jian felt rushed especially because it didn't feel like the reason Ray was mad in the first place was fleshed out and the stuff with Ye Guang's parents felt like it was glossed over. A better writer could have made it work with 8 eps, this writer would have needed at leat 12.

I wasn't as interested in the second half as I was in the first half, but overall the series is cute. The guys are cute. They have good chemistry. I liked that the dynamic between the leads was different than your usual BL (the taller one is the soft cute one), loved the supportive mom, and the OST is really nice. Definitely worth a watch if you're just looking for something cute.

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It's not perfect but it's wildly entertaining

Weeks ago I was going to drop this at episode 4 because it wasn't what I wanted it to be. It was so silly at the beginning and I was looking forward to something more serious and gritty.

I kept reading all the comments and discussions about how people were loving it and I was like why? But before I dropped it I decided to give it one more chance. I stopped thinking about what I wanted this show to be and decided I'd take it as what it was...a romcom with a mafia backdrop. With that in mind, I watched 5 and thankfully it started clicking with me. I'm glad I didn't drop it because it's been a wild rollercoaster of a ride since.

Kinn and Porsche: A lot of people seemed to find them boring after a while, but I loved their chill, fluffy domesticity we don't get to see a lot of that. Plus their chemistry was always on point.

Vegas and Pete: I do think their whole thing was rushed, but I loved all the angst. Who doesn't love two tortured men in love? I just wish they'd given it more than a few episodes to flesh out and really breathe. I'll be on the look out for Bible's future works because he's so compelling as an actor.

Kim and Chay: I liked their cute/innocent thing. I do think there was a lot more they could have done with them, but I also think Barcode's age played a role in that. Like maybe they were holding back on a proper story because it could be uncomfortable? I don't know. I feel like Jeff and Barcode both were underutilized .

As for the production, There were some things in this show that weren't done well. Definitely some head scratching moments, some things that probably happened solely for the shock value, and some super weird product placements, but there were lots of things I think were done extremely well, the directing, some of the acting, and some really great scenes. I'm glad Beyond Cloud picked this up, because despite this show not being anywhere near perfect it was fun and entertaining and I personally saw a lot of potential for greatness from their future works.

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The entire show is pretty much about hiding Tian's Big Gay Secret and along with that comes lots suspense, intrigue, and um...murder. Why? Because no one can know Tian's secret! You know, the secret that we talk about very loudly, all the time. But that's beside the point. The point is people can't know and if they know? Well, they gotta die. Because obviously that's the only solution. But how do we kill them? With glitter of course! Lots and lots of murderous glitter! Yes it's every bit as ridiculous as it sounds, but I absolutely did not care. Literally nothing stopped me from devouring this series. (Except the wait time between subbed eps but I digress)

When we're not doing arts and crafts, our good guys get to fall in love. Sweet sweet Yang gets sweet Lady Pin. And sweet sweet Tian finds himself falling for secret assassin turned secret sort-of-spy, Jiu. This loveline has one of my favorite tropes-I tricked you and then I fell in love, so of course there's angsting but Tian and Jiu's love story is also one of the corniest, cheesiest things ever, and yes I ate up every bit of it. Could have used a little more screen time, but that's the tiniest of complaints. Now, the best love story here is the one between half brothers, Tian and Yang. Nothing could stand in the way of these two. The love, the friendship, the loyalty between these brothers is brilliant and worth a watch even if you don't want to watch anything else.

I don't normally watch a lot of lakorns. I've tried multiple lakorns and I usually watch a few episodes before I ultimately give up. They're just not typically my style. From what I've seen they're usually over the top, ridiculous, the acting is all over the place, the villians are cartoons, they're full of cliches, problematic tropes, redemptive arcs for people who dont necessarily deserve them, and plus everything and everyone in a lakorn is just so incredibly dramatic. This would normally be ther part where I'd say "except this lakorn is none of those things, it's so refreshing" or whatever, but that would be an abosolute lie. This lakorn was all of those things and then some, but regardless it was ridiculously entertaining, and ridiculously addictive. Who do I have to beg for another lakorn like this one?

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