The first few episodes were so fun and fresh and I loved how the show made fun of typical teen-fic plots. So when this drama came out I was super excited to watch it.

I must have read hundreds of books with the same generic characters and plot lines, but somehow I just couldn’t get enough of them 😀 But as the show went on, both the romance and the general storyline felt less and less innocent or fresh.īefore K-dramas I was obsessed with Teen-Fic stories. To be fair, I enjoyed it quite a lot when it could be just that: innocent and fresh. If they wanted us to feel it was more profound, they didn’t nothing to show a more profound or passionate romance. It feels hollow as soon as it is portrayed to be something bigger than the fresh, budding and innocent romance it started as. So they went nowhere.Īlso, I feel like you’re absolutely right about the main romance. The fact that we get not one answer about their actual situation or why Haru can help change the stage, that the rules of the shadow and the stage always feels like hogwash, that some characters are pointlessly added at the end (the little brother and the old, thought-to-be dead Squid Fairy’s gf) and end up literally serving no purpose – all of that makes the show feel like they didn’t know where to go once the spark of their premise settled. Basically, this show didn’t know how to handle the different on-stage / off-stage drama and failed to make it a fun dynamic to explore throughout the latter half of the show. Talk about turning her shadow character into something completely off-putting and opposite of what she was shown to be.

Around the last quarter of the show, I just started to dislike Yoo Jo Da because she became such a random character that loved two guys at once (for some reason that didn’t connect with me), decided to date the main protagonist (for some reason I’m not sure exists) and low-key asked the guy she rejected if she could date him on her off-days. And then, all the time we were forced to spend on the “main characters” really felt incredibly hollow (and exhausting) by the end. They get the most unsatisfying, unsurprising, undeserved happy ending I have seen in a long while. First, all of that set-up in the premise leads absolutely nowhere. And you did good to skip those last episodes. My experience was exactly the same as yours and I am going through to the end to see where they went with this. My thoughts can be summed up like this: the incredible premise that started this show with a mystery and a bang just fizzled out into a pretty bland romance. I mean, I get that she says she’ll stop trying to change her setup because she’s afraid that it’ll cause her to lose Haru again, but to see her so over the moon at the little romantic developments between her and Haru, and seem to have no concept that if she dies she won’t be around to have any more moments with him, is really odd. She’s only interested in her romantic developments with Haru, and I found this distinct lack of interest in her very possible death, very weird. This, when she’s had insight to the storyboard about her impending death. I know that Dan Oh is a manhwa character and all, but I found it decidedly weird that for a good stretch in the middle of our story, she seems to have absolutely no negative emotions – fear, sadness, wistfulness etc – about dying soon. In the context of such an iconic story, it’s somehow easier to identify what’s pure set-up and what’s real.Īlthough I mentioned earlier, that I found Dan Oh endearing, I have to admit that the more Dan Oh spazzes over Haru and gets all dizzy over how much she likes him, the less interested I actually became, over the supposed OTP relationship, and also, the less believable I found her, as a character. Even Goong comes to mind, with the female lead spilling stuff on the male lead. The nod to Boys Over Flowers is also a clever choice, because that’s not only an iconic story, it’s also a story context that’s been done in multiple variations. It’s quite thrilling to see how these things unfolding on my screen fit so perfectly into what I would expect of a manhwa writer to do with their characters. That’s basically the extent to which the writer has put thought into developing Dan Oh and Sae Mi. They’re also very minimally developed, with just a few things attributed to them, which is why Dan Oh finds her friend Sae Mi (Kim Ji In) consistently saying the same thing to her, and it’s always about Baek Kyung (Lee Jae Wook) and whether everything’s alright with them, and how much Dan Oh likes him. They’re placed in scenes for specific purposes, and that’s why Dan Oh finds herself suddenly inserted into different scenarios, and suddenly offering tissues to Joo Da (Lee Na Eun).

Extraordinary you