I will never forgive some people for making me think Star in my Mind would be a bad show
I started watching it while sick at home, and found it to be just the perfect comfort show. It has a good amount of tooth rotting fluff (sometimes a bit embarrassingly sweet, but that's to be expected), while still managing to be quite emotional (or maybe I was just a little more sensitive 🤷♀️). It treated the situation at hand with a lot of love and the writing was really solid imo.
The whole story is a really interesting exploration of the difficulties of confessing and facing your feelings. It touches on how difficult it is to bare your heart to someone while also showing that it can be hard to respond to someone's feelings. Simm shows that the start of a relationship is a delicate exchange of emotions that is difficult for both parties (especially for our main characters who do not really know how to properly communicate their feelings in a way the other understands). Their eventual 'confession' scene was still very cute and fun, and it made the troubles worth the wait.
Kluen and Nuea are very earnest with their feelings. They take their own emotions seriously and work towards being able to consider the other. Because of this serious approach, they can show/voice their feelings (when they are able to at least), which gives their characters a lot of depth and room for connection with the viewer. Plus, there were so many great quotes that I had to pause the show a lot of times to be able to write them down (the episode 6 speech <3). This vocalization of their emotions was paired with behavior that matched it really well and created a solid foundation to help understand where their actions came from.
Despite this knowledge of their emotions, both Nuea and Kluen struggle with fully trying to interpret and trust their feelings, and because of that, confessing or accepting a confession becomes really difficult. They might internally know what they feel but have trouble deciding how to act on that because of the previously mentioned difficulty of confessions. Although the viewer can see how the characters feel, they struggle a lot with understanding what the other means and accommodating for this gap in communication. Because of this, the run-up to the confession is mostly about getting external confirmation that their feelings are not coming out of nowhere.
This led to them needing a certain amount of time together to feel like their feelings were still 'valuable', and it wasn't just nostalgia. Their crushes in high school were based on infatuation, and to be able to actually date, they needed to really get to know each other. I hoped we'd see a bit more of them just having fun together (like the prep for Kluens moms birthday gift), but they did show through other small things how much they cared about each other, so i didn't doubt their love. Because of their time spent adapting their feelings to the new situation, the show didn't depend too much on the existing crushes of the characters and actually made them put some effort into their relationship. I hate it when 'second change romance' shows rely to much on 'the love that once was', leading them to spent to little time showing the connection that the characters have rn (*cough* Jun and Jun *cough cough*), so this was a nice way to go about it imo.
Finally, some little points/opinions: The freshy competition thing confused me a little at the start, but my decision to just not question it turned out to be a good one. The north star and wave symbolism/meaning is so scrumptious. It's such a good use this nicknames and I love it when shows do this (Sailom and Kanghan, my beloved)
Also, elephant in the room ig; the acting was not bad at all and at least didn't spoil my enjoyment of the show.
