Yoon Ji Ho (Jung So Min) is thirty and stalled in her writing career, always being relegated to barely respected assistant writer, even though she's smart and determined and even went to a top university. When she returns home after a few months to the apartment that she shares with her younger brother, she discovers that he has a newly pregnant young wife. Even though she is the one who paid the deposit and has been supporting him, in her patriarchal family, the boy is everything. So it's her that winds up moving out but she can't afford anything and she doesn't want to crash at her friend's place long-term.
Meanwhile, Nam Sae Hee (Lee Min Ki), a rather taciturn and logical programmer who owns a house but has no extra disposable income (house poor) has had to kick out yet another tenant. Through friends of friends, Ji-ho winds up moving in. Se-hee thinks she's her brother from his snooping on social media; Ji-ho thinks he's a girl (Bo-mi, who also works at the same company and was in the picture she was shown of her new landlord). They don't run into each other for a few days at the apartment (where Ji-ho is proving herself to be the best tenant he's ever had with her cleaning and taking care of the chores & his all important kitty) BUT they do have an accidental kismet-like meeting out at a restaurant where they bond over football, Ji-ho experiences a humiliation related to a guy that she thought was going to ask her out, and then ultimately winds up kissing Se-hee at a bus stop thinking that she's never going to see him again. Her first kiss. This is a story of firsts.
Hmmmm. This is going to turn into an entire re-cap if I don't dial things down and I don't mean to do that. What I really want to do is talk about what I loved about this drama and what I didn't and my somewhat complicated feelings about the ending. So...
To sum up very quickly and leave out a lot...Ji-ho and Se-hee wind up married but they don't intend it to be a "real" marriage but instead a two year contract marriage. She needs a place to live. He needs a good tenant. People will object if they live together unmarried (especially parents). Predictably (this is, after all, a K-drama romance), they both soon find that things aren't that simple.
I need to introduce the other people now, as while this is primarily their story, it's also the story of two other couples, all of which have their own challenges to overcome. Ji-ho's two best friends are Su-ji (a fiercely independent career woman who had dreamed of being her own boss, but is suffering under the misogynistic pervs she works with--OH how much of what she goes through is so familiar to me and nearly every woman who has ever worked in a male dominated industry) and Ho-rang (a fluffy confection of a woman who's dream was to be married and live the stereotypical nice-house+kids homemaker lifestyle. I'm not actually trying to be snarky here, though it probably sounds like it...it's a perfectly acceptable dream).
Se-hee's boss is Ma Sang-gu (often known as CEO Ma, a bit older but rather whimsical man with a definite side of earnest ridiculousness and who once slept with Su-ji and has never forgotten it). Sang-gu is also a mentor for Won-seok (Ho-rang's boyfriend of seven years who has been supported by her as he works on an app that is, quite frankly, stupid and doomed to fail, though he is a smart guy).
Let me quickly (I keep saying that word, but obviously I don't know the meaning of it...) break down their relationships because they both have some lovely character development.
In the beginning, Su-ji has no thoughts of anything but hooking up with men for her own pleasure because her goal is to make enough money to help care for her disabled mother and because, I surmise, most of her experiences with men have proven them to be assholes. Certainly the men she works with on a daily basis are generally scum of the earth. And, oh man, does it remind me of my time working for Ernst & Young right after university. Blech. Sang-gu slowly wears her down by always supporting her, even to the point of losing out on a venture capital investment that would have taken his company to the next level because he couldn't stand how they were treating her. Seriously, Sang-gu is pretty awesome. He's ridiculous and he gives terrible advice but he's what Su-ji needs in her life. They wind up talking about marriage at the end and honestly, I don't think there's a thing I would change about their story arc (they are the middle couple in the picture above). So I'm not gonna talk about them anymore.
Ho-rang and Won-seok, on the other hand (the bottom couple in the picture)...they've been dating for seven years. They fight, they make up, they love, they argue. Repeat. Over the course of the show they wind up really seriously breaking up (and Ho-rang is even courted by another guy who matches what her "ideal" should be while Won-seok is asked out by Bo-mi who he is imminently compatible with). But, at the end, they realise their love is stronger than their differences and get back together. I'm okay with their ending, though it would have been just as strong story-wise if they had either wound up with their new partners OR an open-ending where they've just recovered from each other. Any of those options would have made sense, including how they did wind up back together. So, yeah, I'm done talking about them too.
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| This is Bo-mi. She was awesome, though she didn't have a huge part. I'd seriously watch another show about her character. |
Can you tell that they are my least favourite out of the couples? I think it's because I identify the least with their characters. I can see myself in all of the other four but I can't see myself in them. But I like that they were in this drama and I do think that they provide a nice counterpoint as all the different relationship dynamics are explored. They were needed. So...
A lot happens in those first 14 episodes and I've actually just thought of the one thing in there that I would have changed and it's probably just a K-drama thing (seriously, I think every single one I have tried has relied on this to one extent of another)...the sheer plot convenience of Se-hee's first love (a woman he lived with in college who became pregnant, though the baby was lost and she disappeared from his life completely, leaving behind a message that he didn't deserve happiness that he took too to heart...and his parents did not approve, etc. etc.) being the producer who miraculously shows up to offer Ji-ho a new writing job. Oh, I'm not complaining about the character, just how they shoehorned her into the story. I get it. They wanted to make her someone important to both Ji-ho and to Se-hee but it was all just so convenient. Anyway, it is what it is.
Anyway...maybe I should go back to the things I love about this one. I love that there's nary a chaebol in sight. That the characters all have flaws, that they struggle, that they support each other, that it does pass the Bechdel test (though, yeah, they talk about their love troubles too), that all of the characters have a story arc that works, that there are some absolutely lovely perfect moments, that it's painfully honest about the struggles of real people in South Korea, that all of the actors really shine and there weren't any particular moments that took you out of the story.
Now then...the thing that has bothered me since I finished watching the show...I think I've finally figured out why it was bothering me. It's because I want Ji-ho to be better than she is. And that's not necessarily right (on my part). At first, there were a lot of things I would have changed. The last two episodes are a bit rushed and the "feel" of them is different from the rest. It's not just me; other people commented the same thing. When I first finished the show, I couldn't stop thinking about it and what I would have done differently. But after thinking about the characters more, I think the ending was acceptable, though I still would have tweaked it.
But...er, maybe I should explain what the ending was first.
Basically, after their trials and tribulations and the stuff about Se-hee's past and Ji-ho's as well, Ji-ho decides unilaterally that she needs to terminate their contract. But the show (I think) makes it obvious that she doesn't consider this the end of their relationship. She tells the ex that she doesn't consider the divorce a "sad ending," she talks about it being an intermission, she says things about how they took marriage too lightly. Her telling him coincides with him about to finally confess his love for her in a clumsy kind of way. And he doesn't do it because she says things first. And then she leaves. He thinks she's gone off to travel. Instead, she just moves into a hostel of sorts and stays in Seoul and hangs out having spa days with Ho-rang. She doesn't take the job that he thought she was going to take. Then she returns some indeterminate time later (this is another quibble -- one bit makes it sound like she's been gone a few months but other things, like how Se-hee takes off 15 days from work out of his 20 days that he has saved up, makes it seem like it might be less...the passage of time in general in the last two episodes isn't very clear), bakes a cake (maybe for Valentine's?) that says basically "here's to our first day of our new relationship" and goes to find Se-hee at his old apartment. But he's sold it. Because the dude was that depressed; he couldn't be in the place where she used to be even though that house had been everything to him before. They coincidentally both wind up at the roof top apartment that used to be Ho-rang and Won-seok's together. While she was gone, Se-hee had been drinking himself into a stupor, had stopped going to work, etc. etc. He was broken. They make up, etc. and the end is that they do file their marriage and find a place together, she becomes a successful writer, and they compromise by not following all the traditional Korean things that you're "supposed to do" and remain true to themselves, putting their love first.
So...at first, there was a lot about that I didn't like. Why did she leave? Why didn't she try to talk to him when she knew he was finally about to open up? Why did she pull the disappearing act? But the more I thought about it, I think most of it does work from a character standpoint. Ji-ho isn't perfect. As her mother (who is brilliant) tells her, she's kinda full of bullshit sometimes and she's stubborn and once she's made up her mind, she goes forwards no matter what, even if she's wrong. So, okay, I get that she needs to sort out her own feelings, to make sure all the confused jumble of feelings and regrets inside her actually equals love. Untie the knots. I can even take her leaving.
But the thing that doesn't work for me after all that is that even though she could very, very easily get information about what he's up to while she's away from her friends, she obviously doesn't. She has no idea that he's sold his house. She doesn't know he hasn't shown up at work. How would any person do this? I find it inconceivable that she wouldn't want to know. While they show him suffering abjectly, they show her giggling and having fun. They don't show her introspective and pondering. There's some voiceovers that hint at it, but it's the barest of hints. So it makes her seem like a real asshole and unnecessarily cruel. All of it would have felt better if they had just shown her angst-ing over things. Then it would have worked for me. Sure, there had been a power imbalance in their relationship at first, but this makes it swing too far in the other direction when the ending makes it clear that the writers were trying to make them more equal. Also, they seem to be stressing that he had to open up and show his emotions, like anger, for her to feel like he is letting her in...but BEFORE SHE LEFT he actually very clearly shows his anger by beating the crap out of the guy that sexually assaulted her in the beginning of the show, though she wasn't there for it (but would certainly have heard about it from either the ex or one of the friends as she was in the middle of a lawsuit about it). They show the ex being astounded that this man -- that Se-hee, who would never hit anyone, that man that would always bottle everything up -- actually beat someone up. Badly. So he'd clearly shown emotion and was about to confess. But the show basically doesn't address that whole thread and she leaves anyway.
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| I don't normally like the scenes where the character thinks they are dreaming and says things they may or may not normally say because of it. But I'll accept it here as there were about 9 empty beer cans and he'd been drinking himself into a stupor for days. So, okay. But man, poor Se-hee. You ought to say you're sorry, Ji-ho. |
But, anyway, all that said, the show was generally brilliant and I loved it. It's definitely the best Kdrama that I've seen so far and the moments that worked well were perfect. And there's not a lot of things I say that about, ever. Books, movies, games, whatever. I know I can be too critical sometimes; it's a job hazard. 3/4 of my day is thinking about character motivation and story arc and other crap like that. And I would never ever claim that any of my books are perfect. Man, I SO wish I hadn't agreed to a few editorial changes on my fourth book that I did because they weakened one of the threads I was trying to get across (and readers did notice; though that is also the only book I've received a starred review on). And I wish I'd fought to keep the dead dog, though, yeah, I know, don't kill a dog in a story; no one likes it. I'm still learning. Always will be. So I consider this high praise; Because This is My First Life was very nearly perfect.
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