hello again! unsurprisingly, the anger hasn’t left my body after almost a month, so i wanted to make another post pointing out all the inconsistencies and failures of the ending when it comes to character and story, for those who need it. if you accept the ending, great! but here’s why i won’t be able to make peace with it, both as someone who fell in love with this show and as a literature and creative writing graduate who’s spent years understanding what makes stories great.
failure to stick to one relationship narrative throughout the story: it’s obvious that this drama was written with the intention of portraying a first love relationship that ultimately doesn’t last, but this is not the love that ends up on screen. instead of a superficial and casual relationship that falls apart under pressure, we witness a relationship that starts when both characters are at their lowest points and survives through a complete communication blackout and a conflict of interest within their careers. in order to portray a relationship that starts as a positive one but turns into a negative one, a writer has to spend more time exploring the relationship while it happens, instead of spending 80% of her drama into getting this relationship to start in the first place. both characters have to be shown to be compatible in some aspects and completely at odds in others, to have an inherent power imbalance or difference in worldview that gets more and more pronounced until it deals a killing blow. instead, we were offered a healthy and supportive relationship that defies ordinary perceptions of love, where both parties are shown to be physically and emotionally incapable of staying away from the other, and where they constantly put effort to meet the other halfway and see the world through their eyes. it’s a relationship that was built on sharing hardships (yijin telling heedo about the bankruptcy, her telling him about her fencing struggles), on mutual respect (yijin admiring heedo for her spirit, her admiring him for his work ethic), and on the ability to create happiness together in spite of the hardships the world puts them through (yijin defending heedo when her gold medal was disputed, her consoling him when he had to report against yurim). it’s extremely disrespectful and out of character to purport that such a relationship that went on for four entire years wouldn’t be strong enough to withstand another external tragedy, especially since people are naturally more mature in their mid-twenties than they are in their late teens, and your ability to understand and communicate with a person grows as you spend more time with them.
robbing the characters of agency to achieve a narrative end: the very need to introduce an external conflict like 9/11 to force the couple to misunderstand each other already demonstrates how artificial such a situation is. the narrative is biased against heedo and yijin’s dating life from the start: instead of showing us an equal balance of good and bad moments, we’re fed a montage of yijin being late to dates, as if heedo herself isn’t extremely busy as a fencer (in ep.10 she says that she was never able to have friendships or experiences outside of fencing because her entire life revolves around it), or yijin is so caught up in a job that he doesn’t have a real passion for besides the need to financially support his family and his natural empathy for people. there’s no inherent need to portray 9/11 or send yijin as a correspondent there than to depress him and stage an unraveling of the relationship that in itself is a threadbare narrative. would someone as emotionally mature as heedo (“it’s okay that he left, i’m sure he did the right thing”, “i’m glad my mom inspires you even though she caused me pain”) not understand the emotional toll this position takes on him and how it brings out his weakest self? would someone as intelligent as yijin voluntarily sign up to continue an internship at a place he calls “hell on earth”? would he completely abandon his personal life to help strangers, given that every major life decision he’s taken in the series was with the future of his family in mind? the characters are rendered chess pieces in a story they’re no longer allowed to drive forward. the only agency heedo is granted is the agency to initiate a break-up, but she’s never granted the agency to process her feelings of hurt and attempt to mend her relationship with yijin when she clearly wants to. yijin is shown to oppose the break-up, but he’s never given the agency to translate his feelings into actions. when before yijin was allowed to confront heedo about avoiding him and heedo was allowed to wait in front of yijin’s house every evening until he showed his true feelings, now they’re rendered voiceless and powerless by a narrative that doesn’t want them to have power, because if they did, they would turn this story on its head.
using yijin as an emotional punching bag without giving him the space to heal: while yijin’s depression is a logical emotional response to what he witnessed, there’s no point in making him go through this traumatizing experience besides presenting a precedent for the break-up. yijin’s melancholy comes out only as a natural reaction to hardships, such as having to scrape by in pohang for months to escape creditors or being told that he can’t date heedo because of conflict of interest. so his depression wasn’t “always going to happen someday anyway”, it’s created by a narrative that relentlessly puts him from one traumatizing situation to the next. instead of using the 9/11 plotline to show him break down and get back up again with the help of colleagues and loved ones, the story keeps grinding him down without giving him the chance to get back up. it renders him passive and powerless, which in itself is a narrative fault, while its claim to realism is undermined by its failure to account for the intervention of family and friends who would never let a loved one suffer without offering them their entire support.
making heedo the villain in her own story: this is the cruelest element of the ending, the way it ignores the willpower and emotional maturity of its own protagonist for the sake of following a pre-determined narrative. the heedo who drives the story forward from the very start, the girl we fell in love with for her ability to find the comedy in a tragedy and offer a hand to her own bully over and over again, would never watch her emotional life fall apart at the seams while doing nothing. it’s true that heedo has a childhood trauma of being abandoned, but part of growing up is learning how to process and heal from our traumas as we gain a better understanding of ourselves and the people around us. if heedo was willing to forgive her mother for years of mistreatment and not hold a grudge against yurim for months of coldness and then lack of communication prior to madrid, why wouldn’t she find it in her heart to understand yijin and meet him halfway? why wouldn’t she see that she was speaking from the weakest place in her heart, and take back the words she doesn’t mean? what makes it so hard for both of them to say, “i won’t be the person who only hurts you, here’s how i’ll make you happy again”? i’ll tell you what: the writer.
missed opportunities to deliver a satisfying and logical resolution to angst: presenting your characters with one last hurdle before perfect happiness is a classic and highly effective story beat known as the “darkest hour”. at the last moment before the resolution, the protagonists lose everything they care about and the audience can’t imagine how they would get it back… until the protagonists prove the audience wrong, cementing their agency and earning their happy ending with a bang. the last episode presents countless opportunities to do this: them meeting at the airport when the suitcases get mixed up, one of them showing up at the others’ house after processing their fight, their friends setting them up on a drunk date that becomes the first step to bring them closer again (the comedy! the drama!)… if the narrative wasn’t biased against heedo and yijin, it would use a last external conflict to help them progress both as individuals and as a couple, to show them getting closer again with a newfound understanding of themselves and their relationship, to help them understand how to never make such mistakes again and build the future they both want with the other. the fact that they learn nothing from this experience and are not shown to have improved their emotional lives because of it renders it a meaningless narrative and a wasted opportunity for god-tier sexual tension, comedy, drama, heart-to-hearts, and falling in love with the other all over again—all things that would inevitably happen if the characters were allowed to grow and act towards the person they very much don’t want to lose.
failure to wrap up plot threads at the end: a guessing game with no revelation, a photo album and a workshop that contradict the apparent narrative, the ridiculous notion that heedo and yijin would never speak again despite having the same friend group and living in the same neighbourhood, heedo’s marriage and pregnancy being completely swept under the rug as if they’re not a major aspect of her life, yijin and heedo being shown as very much still in love but not taking a single step towards each other, as if that longing would not eat them alive until they ran to each other… the narrative has failed to listen to its characters, and so has lost its hold on them. they grow rebellious as abandoned garden roses, growing wild and strong and bigger than the people who planted them.
baratheonpilled
ellievsbear
andulkaphoto
dededos
vaporwave
