Queen of Tears (2024)

Lacking in plot development and character motivation

Queen of Tears is story of Hyun Woo & Hae In's unhappy marriage life, threatened by chaebols and Hae In's fatal illness. A classic soapy melodrama, with star-studded ensemble cast and cameos. The production quality is top, with the stylish wardrobes, wonderful scenery and romantic OSTs. However, the execution was not up to the par.

The first 2 episodes set the story quite well, but they didn't make their characters' motivations sensible. At least give a reason to make me believe why their relationship was failing, instead of crying too much and lack of communication. Really, most of their conversations were ended by crying or fighting to the point I got numb. I was bored with the villains' suspenseless and super slow scheming. By the end it gets ridiculous with all the cliché tropes shoehorned. What ended up to be the most anticipated scenes was the cute auntie Beom Ja's romance, it's fluffy & gave off immense heart-fluttering moments. Overall, the flaws of the drama amounts to my disappointments.

Thanks for reading!
April 2024, Find me on instagram: @kdramajudge

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Dear lord…

I started watching this show because I liked the casting and everything else, but this is it. I watched the first two episodes and decided that I wouldn’t watch anymore, but my mom started watching, so I just went with it.

Why in the great heavens a couple that has been married for 3 years and almost had a child together so against skinship? Don’t get me wrong, I know they aren’t close anymore because of their fights and lack of communication, but this is beyond that.

Hae In got pregnant with Baek Hyun Woo’s baby but was surprised just by seeing him shirtless, like, let’s be real, PLEASE. I’m saying this because they didn’t seem like a real couple that married each other because they were in love and attracted to each other. It was so robotic and weird. And the damn plot of Hae In being sick was so dragged through the episodes and solved in like ONE episode.

The only thing that I really liked about this drama was Kim Ji Won’s acting and her character clothes.

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Overhyped and Overrated

With the amount of hype this show was getting, I was really curious as to how good this show must be to boast being the highest rated TvN show of all time...but of course as usual it's nothing new. It seems like these days any show with a good looking cast and high budget set and cinematography is enough for people to rate it a 9, completely overlooking the lacking story, plotholes and clichés.

Initially the plot seemed promising, most k-dramas do not start out with the leads already being married. Although, the cold CEO fl and sunshine ml has been done before (ahem My Demon ahem). The hype seems to stem primarily from praise for the actors, cinematography and OST, which are important factors for a good show don't get me wrong but like...does anyone even care for the story? Nobody cares that when Haein awoke from brain surgery (although it was supposed radiation therapy) she looked fabulous? Perfectly normal? Perfect hair, makeup??? Did they even TRY to make it realistic?? Am I supposed to believe she just underwent a major brain surgery?? And oh god they didn't even try to make Park Sung Hoon's character interesting. Just made him an obsessive evil rat with no personality whatsoever, it was such a disappointment considering his character in The Glory, that's what I call a real villain. Everytime he came on screen it was excruciating to watch, but Park Sung Hoon's visuals make it a lot more bareable so there's that. The family is your typical chaebol money hungry ruthless evil family, who turn into a big happy family toward the end to unite against a mutual evil force. The progression in their characters was lackluster and more depth could have been added into Haein and her mother's reconcilation. The story is extremely lackluster and honestly I feel like 12 year olds on Wattpad could do a better job than Park Ji-Eun. Most overhyped show of 2024 fr.

It seems like the writer Park Ji-Eun doesn't know how pacing works, she wasted the initial 5 or 8 episodes making them completely meaningless, plotless, boring which added close to nothing of value or substance to the story, and then rushed a crucial plot point in the SECOND last episode?? AND THE ACCIDENT??? HELLO??? Shock factor does not equate to good storytelling. It just makes for pointless tension. I guess this is what writers had to do to stretch the show to be 16 episodes. I never found it interesting even in the initial episodes, I kept watching because the ml and fl couple were eye-candy and had great chemistry, but if you overlook that, this is nothing but mediocore, maybe even less than mediocore. I kept watching and watching hoping it would get better but nooo oh god. You all need to seriously pick better shows to make popular. It's My Demon all over again. A less than average clichéd show which gets popular because of the cast and high budget set. How superficial. Truly a disappointment. But I must give credit where credit is due and I will admit that the stellar cast did live up to their names by delivering an exceptional performance and the cinematography delivered, truly an eye-candy show. Overall, if you value your time, don't watch it.

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When you try to be too many things and end up being nothing.

Queen of Tears is a show that is trying to do it all. It wants to be a complex story about a dying marriage. It wants to investigate the fragility of mortality. it wants to look into twisted messy familial relationships. It wants to explore the tragedy of losing your children. It wants to be a thrilling chabeol game of thrones. It wants to be documentary about toxic unrequited love from an obsessive villainous male lead. The end product is a sopping misshapen mess that manages to be none of the above .

It claims to be a journey of a married couple at odds finding their way back to each other (but the male lead spent half the show trying to divorce the female lead or hoping she dies) it attempts to be a meaningful essay on death and sickness (but haein's illness seems to be an afterthought half the time, merely a plot device to remind the people around her that she exists and that shes human and that she deserves to be loved) it takes multiple sloppy shots at trying to play the inheritance games (but the chabeols you're supposed to root for are so stupid and pathetic you feel no sympathy for them when they get taken for all they're worth) The messy familial dynamics fall flat as we watch a mom very unreasonably neglect and villainize her 10-year-old kid over the apparent murder of her other child. It tries to skim over the terrible topic of miscarrying your child into a mere oddly placed 10 minutes.

The show is its own worst enemy. it stages an effective angsty scene between the leads about the difficult choices u need to make when ur ill and then undercuts it in the editing room by immediately following it up with an oddly placed flirtatious and humorous scene. It tries to impress upon us the terror of yoon eunsong's controlling, manipulative ways and immediately follows it up with Haein freely stalking her apparently abusive lying cheating ex-husband with a smile on her face. some shows are capable of maintaining a light tone while speaking about heavy topics and still pay them the respect and significance they are owed [refer: oh no here comes trouble] but queen of tears is not one of them. Rather than a show that uses comedy cleverly as a way of bringing to light its complex subject matter, it comes across as a jarring whiplash of moments thrown together by two different editing teams who were given two very different instructions.

This is a show that tries to tell more than show. They want to tell you that these people love each other but when you think upon it for more than two seconds you start wondering why they fell in love, why they fell out of it, why the miscarriage that got 8 minutes of screentime tore them apart so viciously that the husband began to wish his wife would die and her terminal illness would make her more likely to leave him with some soft cash to fall back on. On the surface level, it's all there, Hyun Woo's self-centeredness, and Haein's inability to communicate her emotions but it's too little too late for the depth of the melodrama they plunge us into.

Despite Kim Jiwon's and Kim Soohyun's stellar performances, you exit the couple's showdowns thinking "damn is it really that deep?" and that's where a romance drama fails for me, it fails if I think the romance is too soppy coz that means that the foundation or crust of the writing is too weak to hold the decadence and the intensity of the acting job.

Queen of Tears ends it's run tonight as a show that tried to do too many things and ended up doing none of it satisfactorily. Rather than introduce terminal illness, scheming villains trying to usurp wealth, and obsessive friends from college they should have delivered on the one thing they promised, a married couple at odds finding their way back to each other. If only they had stripped down the additional dressing and focused on the messy terrible marriage of Hyun Woo and Haein and their respective and combined issues and how they overcame it without the unnecessary roadblocks like amnesia and evil second male leads, maybe it could have been worthy of the acting performances of the leads.

if you want to watch a messy married couple falling back in love its better to watch hits like flower of evil or go back couple coz this one was just disappointing.

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Become Predictable and Boring in the end.

I watched the whole series, but it didn't bring anything new or exciting. At first, it seemed promising, especially in how it explored the main character's story. When Vincenzo made a cameo, things got interesting. But then, it went downhill. The show became all about drama, ignoring other important storylines. Some scenes dragged on too long, with lots of unnecessary emotions and twists that didn't matter.

The show looked good with its camera work, acting, and music, but it had some big problems. The bad guy was shallow, just after money and power. And the main girl's family was portrayed as kind of dumb, which didn't make sense. The story was too predictable, following a basic pattern with choices that didn't seem real.

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One big mess

I am a fan of most of the actors cast in this, so I was very excited but this drama was a big disappointment

There some enjoyable moments here and there, but the plot is a mess anf honestly there are way too many things that didn't work here (ML is happy that his wife is going to die soon, FL has memory problems but doesn't do anything about it, like never.... I would have hired someone to check on me every 10 minutes... anyway I'm getting angry again)

each episode keeps repeating the previous one. We see a lot of:
- They don't talk
- Oh they love each other but don't show it
- they love each other but don't know it
- They seem to get closer
- Oh, no, they don't talk again
and REPEAT over and over again
Writer-nim run out of ideas and this show could have been a movie!

What I hated the most was the villains arch. I couldn't understand why they did what they did! Why did they have to con that family? I hated that they were villains because they were poor. Being poor is not a good backstory for a villain. Poor people don't want to steal rich people's money and live in their big houses, they just want to be not poor anymore and not live in a basement.

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Should be called King of Tears and Ice Maiden

This is a single layer story about a greedy woman who abandoned her son and coiled herself around a rich ceo to inherit all hus wealth by destroying his family. And she is truly wicked - doesn't shy from murder, sending her own child away to America etc etc.

In this straight layer you then have multiple players who are entangled. Then there are subsets to these people.
Simple, boring, clichéd, seen that before, yawn.

What then races these dramas to the top are the players and their nuances - both of which are absent here.

Let's start with the players.
Stand out performances by Grace (the spy), the FL wimpy brother, the FL secretary, the ML attorney friend and the bad villain (abandoned son)..

And now the leads:
One would think that if the premise is love/marriage /divorce/remarriage to same person, then there has to be an iota of chemistry.. Should they not test this in the audition? Maybe the stars are so big they discarded the auditions.
So Alas Alas - here we have to use our wildest imagination and fantasy to assume the two are madly in love.- because frankly they behave like they are allergic to each other.

There is not one heart fluttering moment between them, no sizzle, no intimacy, no intensity.
We have miss ice maiden who is mean to the ML through ep.15 and then agrees to hold his hand in16.
We have the king of tears who spends 80% of his screen time with wet eyes.

What a pitiful drama.

I think k dramas need to stop focusing on these so called big regional stars and get back to making their old classic story line with real actors.

Think about it - we've had 3 dumps already in 2024 with hot shot actors :
Doctor Slump, Welcome to Samdalri, and now this Queen of tears........all dramas that totally missed the point.

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Overrated show that you will watch only for its leads

First of all...what the heck. Second of all...who in the world is writing this soap opera story. Anything is happening out of nowhere. I stopped making sense of the story after a while and people are not trolling when they said it is highly overrated. This worked only because of the two amazing leads. They are the backbone of this drama. I had this bad feeling from the get go that this story is walking on the edge of becoming a complete mess and guess what it did become one. Highly disappointed with the writers. It could have been so good but who wants that...better test out every single scene that comes to mind and create a story that will blow the minds of the viewers. And it did! In a bad way.
Don't watch this show with your logical brain, better throw it out of window, only then you can forgive the writers and move on. The family's reaction to everything and and second ml and his mother though promising in the beginning, made it into a soap opera after a while. I enjoyed every single interaction of the two main leads. Well, they were just wonderful in every single scene. Acting is promising and the music is beautiful. It's definitely a tear jerker and will leave you devasted many times (but don't worry writer won't cease to amaze you with their flawless ideas). If not for the main lead I would have dropped it half way but still watched it. Sigh. What a trauma!
Watch it if you are too happy with your life and want to check out if your tear glands are properly working or not. (I thought 'Penthouse' was the only drama that could make me this riled up...but unfortunately I was wrong.)

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Rivers of artificial tears

I know, I know, this show is the talk of the town and rating its socks off. However, I’m going to be an outlier. Please allow me to explain.

The star power of our leads combined with the portfolio of our writer-nim (who penned CLOY, MLFTS, etc) should guarantee an instant classic. It is certainly a hit but after finishing the show, I am not convinced that it scored the home run.

At the start of the series, the relationship of the OTP is at their lowest ebb. Of course, the goal is to watch them rise above it all and make us swoon. The series largely archived this with consummate skill. However, this is also its Achilles heel from my perspective.

Even a few episodes in, I can’t help but feel that I’m watching a parade of hand crafted scenes designed to either showcase the visuals of our leads or to hit us with the feels, hard. There is no doubt that this is a S class production on every level. Of course, there are buckets of tears and our handsome ML brought his A game.

However, I feel that the material connecting these scenes are hollow and contrived. This is surprisingly loose and lazy writing coming from a writer of this calibre.

For instance, the plot surrounding the granddad’s mistress is nonsensical. She suffered and schemed for over 20 years because of greed. Really, just greed? She could have built a secret nest egg in far less time than that. Even in the end, it all comes down to a bit of luck and good timing. Ditto the involvement of several accomplices. The script tries to explain it all away, but it is a hard sell when you look beyond skin deep.

Don’t even get me started on the SML. He is obsessed with the FL yet his idea of winning her over is to shaft her family and take her beloved business away. Yes, he offered it back to her but with nasty strings attached. It all feels rather inept and superficial. That seems to be his modus operandi. Just do something over the top and she will submit but there is no solid reasoning behind his various machinations. The idea of him taking over the role of her finance after her surgery and framing the ML for murder is laughable and beyond tropey.

Almost every member of both families is cliché and unlikeable yet so much time is devoted to their petty contrivances. The makjang heavy plot basically seesaws between the protagonist making small gains only to surrender it back to the antagonist in the next scene/episode. There are many outlandish subplots involving the large ensemble cast. The tone of the show yo-yo all over the place because of that.

This highlights how much emphasis is placed on those storyboard scenes. If they were pivotal then I’m all for them but most of the time, they are a quick dose of fan service, or button pushing tropes. They are effective but also manipulative by design.

This brings us to the real kicker. The main theme of the show is the romance of the OTP. This is made painfully clear from the start. However, for this viewer, my first question is why are they even together?! There is nothing to ship. They don’t show any affection. They don’t talk (failure to communicate is a recurring theme). They live parallel lives. The ML suffers daily both at home and at work. This could have been a murder mystery for all I know. Yes, the writer turned it around towards the end, but it is hardly CLOY2, not even close.

A HEA ending is never in doubt once they played the magic cure card. The escalating dramatic tension drops away. All the implausible schemes fell apart as expected. Every subplot is tied off with a pink bow. Was it satisfying? I’d prefer to call it Functional Predictability. I’m sure fans are swooning and elated though. It all ends with an artificial sweeteners overload. Did it go too far? It literally left nothing to our imagination.

Regardless, the gods of makjang will be pleased. Am I being critical? Absolutely. I want this show to be great, nay, perfect. This is god’s gift to the fans of the leads but it is hardly on par with some of the most memorable k-dramas.

If I take off the rose-tinted glasses, I can see all the hype and traffic generated by the highly bankable stars. It served its purpose and made history. Am I the only one not hailing Caesar?

We came. We saw. We forgot™️.

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Full of kdrama clichés

Powerfully dumb storyline that's full of kdrama clichés and it's just unforgivingly jarring, almost like some classic parody too well made. It boasts unbelievable visuals of high concepts but turns out to be practically hollow, dialogues are strikingly coarse and far from relatable, and absurdity keeps coming as the plot goes on. It's not really a bad watch as there are some good parts that are worth rooting for, but the not so clever parts completely overshadow them and it simply becomes not more than just a race of mainstream popularity contest. Even the ending is still full of silly stuff to force a climax that doesn't resonate well, though the faint-hearted might still flutter intermittently.

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