What Dramas Did I Finish This Week?

Hello and welcome back! These are the dramas I finished this week. If you're interested in previous reviews, click here and if you want to see a list of my Favorite Asian OTPs and Ships, click here!

KDRAMA

FINISHED My Holo Love (12/12): “Me Alone and You” is about the events that occur when a lonely woman meets the artificially intelligent “Holo.” The drama is filled with stories of heartbreaking loneliness and tear-stained love. Go Nan Do is the owner of an IT research company. As a genius inventor, he started the company, and all projects were created through his hands. However, the only people who are aware of his existence are his stepsister and the official CEO. He was a hacker in a major case 10 years ago and supposedly died while being pursued. Han So Yeon is an assistant manager at a glasses company. Whether it is working on brand marketing or the logistics of the launching party for the company’s flagship store, she shoulders on her work and stays ahead of the industry’s trends. She meticulously takes care of her clients and her work. However, when it comes to her personal life, she keeps her distance as she suffers from prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize faces.

I was watching this cdrama called Love Crossed in which a girl falls in love with a guy who's the model for a dating sim that the world is obsessed with and though I liked the concept for that show, the execution was spotty from disliking the female lead to not being a fan of the writing. Looking for something similar but with better writing I stumbled onto this show. I had heard about it when it first aired but I never watched it cause I'm really not a fan of stories in which people fall in love with AIs or robots or anything in that genre so I tend to skip shows like these all the time unless it's something like I'm Not A Robot in which a girl was acting like a robot. This time I was able to read spoilers and find out that the love story actually isn't between the female lead and an AI but the AI's inventor and that was enough to sell me. Having said that there was still a huge chunk of this show that irritated me (as in too much time spent on the "love triangle") but I did like the ending and I liked that the love So Yeon felt was actually a misunderstanding cause every moment she thought she shared with Holo was actually with Nan Do. I also really liked the second couple cause I'm always a fan of the bad boy falling for the good girl trope. In the end this was a fairly passable show but if you're a fan of the genre it could be fun! 7 / 10

FINISHED The One And Only (16/16): When Pyo In Sook was a child, her parents abandoned her with her grandmother who raised her. Her life has never been easy or comfortable. She now works at a public bathhouse scrubbing customer's bodies. Her defense mechanism is to not express her feelings to other people. One day, a doctor tells her she has a terminal illness and will die soon. Even coming face-to-face with her own mortality, In Sook remains emotionless. She begins receiving care at a hospice and meets two women with lives very different from her own: Seong Mi Do, a social media influencer, and Kang Se Yeon, an ordinary housewife who feels lonely and taken for granted. One rainy day, In Sook meets Min Woo Cheon, a contract killer who works at a private detective office. Woo Cheon's cool exterior masks a deep sadness. Each of the three women decides to end the life of one person who has done them wrong before they die, but in becoming friends, their anger begins to subside. When In Sook and Woo Cheon develop feelings for each other, though, she begins to rethink her plans.

This show is hands down the example of a show that was fascinating in concept and started out so strongly only to fall apart about halfway through and limp slowly to the end. For so much of my viewing experience I was so hesitant to say that I was disappointed cause I so badly wanted to adore this show but now that it was ended I can see more clearly. The best thing about this show was the relationship between In Sook and Woo Cheon because my oh my the actors had chemistry! Like I know they basically fell in love at first sight but guys they were so cute! I'm such a sucker for two trauma babies who find comfort in one another like in Come And Hug Me and Just Between Lovers and seriously they were the only reason that I bothered to finish this show. It felt like so much of the show was spent watching the same scenes over and over again. Like we knew the answer to the murder mystery almost halfway through the show and yet we had to struggle to watch one cop figure out the truth! And let's not even talk about how annoying and inconsistent all the other characters were. In one world I would be fascinated by Mi Do and Ji Pyo's romance and the fact that he was clearly a sociopath who managed to find a version of love (I mean we can't exactly judge since Woo Cheon was a hired killer) but here we had Mi Do go from In Sook's biggest fan to wanting her to take the fall over and over again and the romance was mostly just there to give her something to do. By the time the finale came around I was mostly just glad that it was over! 7 / 10

FINISHED User Not Found (22/22): A romance drama about two female high school students who happen to share the same name. When they both transfer to a new school at the same time, hoping to use the opportunity to turn their lives around, they forge a secret contract to swap identities. Shin Yi Joon is the most popular student at his high school. Although he seems tough and aloof on the outside, Shin Yi Joon is actually a huge softie on the inside—and far from getting into fights with other students, he even has a hard time saying no to other people.

Tbh I don't really have much to say about this show cause no one is more surprised I finished this hot mess of a show than myself! I have a soft spot for web series and that's why I started this but it was nowhere as good as any of the other web dramas I've watched which includes those that are also set in high school. The concept for this show isn't terrible and I've definitely watched a ton of these types of shows but I think I'm just not a fan of shows where the main couple aren't both in on a secret. I think that's honestly why I never watched School 2015 cause I know that I'd 100% get SLS given that the second lead is the one to help the female lead with her secrets. I like my main couples to be a team and when that doesn't happen I'm not that into them which is the case here. Like setting aside the fact that Yi Joon's actor couldn't act to save his life, I felt like the romance was so subdued and honestly it went from 0 to 100 in two seconds flat. Like one minute they both thought the other liked someone else and the next they're all but confessing to each other! If I did have a positive though I guess I'd say that I really liked the friendship between the two Min Jae's. 6 / 10

CDRAMA

FINISHED Love Scenery (31/31): Liang Chen is devoted to bringing good music works to the listeners, expressing the idea of being kind, real, and perfect. Lu Jing loves computer and big data research. He is highly recognized in the academic field through studying complicated human behavior and psychology, thus influencing the classmates around by his solid specialty literacy. They are strangers first but then brought together by big data and they become closer in the journey of pursuing dreams.

As you can see I've really been on a streak recently in binging dramas on my to be watched list and the next one up was this show! I'm a pretty big fan of gaming dramas even if I'm not a gamer myself cause there's just something so interesting about the esports world especially as it's depicted in cdramas. To my disappointment though this show actually wasn't about professional gaming and actually ended up reminding me a lot more of a mix between Love O2O and You Are My Glory though I don't think it was anywhere as good as You Are My Glory. If I'm honest this show was kinda a hot mess which is unfortunate cause it started out so strong! I thought our leads had intense chemistry and my favorite scene to this day is still the dance the two shared at the masquerade party but the show really squandered it with the writing. I really am not a fan of female leads who act like shrinking violets when they're in relationships but I also don't like female leads who are too scared to stand up for themselves. I hated every scene we had with the second male lead and I could not understand why Liang Chen didn't tell him to shove off ages ago! It also doesn't help that the gaming aspect was super weird cause the show treated it more like the characters were really in the game rather than just playing but I guess since that was the only interaction the leads had for the first third of the show that it had to be more cutesy than realistic. Speaking of it made so sense that the reveal was dragged out for so long and I prefer the You Are My Glory version where the leads figured out who each other were almost immediately. All in all this show isn't bad but if you wanna watch a show with a celebrity and the gamer guy who teaches her to game then I'd recommend You Are My Glory instead tbh.  7 / 10

xoxo Allie