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Nicksden

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Nicksden

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Strong Woman Do Bong Soon korean drama review
Completed
Strong Woman Do Bong Soon
31 people found this review helpful
by Nicksden
Sep 12, 2021
16 of 16 episodes seen
Completed 1
Overall 2.0
Story 1.0
Acting/Cast 3.0
Music 4.0
Rewatch Value 1.0
This review may contain spoilers

An insult to women and men at the same time

This is surely the worst drama that I have ever watched and it's not because of the production value (which is very impressive sometimes), it's because of its awful writing. This drama is an instant drop in the first two episodes. I dropped it when it came out in 2017, but I made myself a promise to finish it one day, so here we go.
Let's start with the bad (there's a lot – I should have made notes while watching):
- Do Bong Soon's character is the typical fake strong female character. We start with Do Bong Soon helping an elderly man and saving a bus, which are very heroic feats, but the character goes downhill very quickly. Do Bong Soon eventually becomes CEO Ahn Min Hyuk's bodyguard. She completely fails at being a bodyguard. She lets the CEO get hurt because of her, she lets a cop get hurt and she also lets the villain escape multiple times. The writers completely failed to recognize that she heard the main villain's voice at a pharmacy. When girls start getting kidnapped in her neighbourhood, she does nothing. When her friend almost gets kidnapped, she lets the kidnapper go even though she could knock him down in one hit. Why? After some time, Do Bong Soon is an intern at her own personal Planning & Development department with the CEO. Once again, we see her doing nothing all day. If she is shown doing anything, it's working on the same character model and drag and dropping things into a presentation. This was a missed opportunity to show women working in game engines and programming, but instead they showed us a pathetic character who thinks she deserves to be in the actual Planning & Development department without any actual skills... After Kyung Shim gets kidnapped, she goes to beg Min Hyuk for help and then completely invalidates his feelings. After Do Bong Soon rescues kidnapped women (at a location which only took everyone ages to figure out), she goes on to confront the main villain in a dramatic way that makes her lose her strength (even though she basically abused her power all throughout the drama and even hurt innocent people). After losing her strength, she is absolutely useless. She goes unconscious from two blows to the chest and she doesn't even try to free herself from her restrains at the brink of death. She does nothing but cry even though she received training in combat from the CEO. After escaping from her death, the three leads formulate a plan to catch the killer by exposing her out in the open to a sniper rifle while only she wears a bulletproof vest. I suppose headshots don't exist in her universe because that was so stupid.
- Do Bong Soon is not a strong character. She couldn't even tell the man she liked that she liked him. She is very childish and doesn't have much personality outside her powers.
- Na Kyung Shim (Do Bong Soon's friend) only cares about her face and looking pretty after being beaten up by the serial kidnapper / killer.
-Do Bong Soon's grandmother enters the scene at some point and beats up some goons. Which is fine and all, but the first thing she does when she visits her grandchild's home? She verbally abuses Do Bong Soon's father.
-It's inconsistent powers-wise. Do Bong Soon can't run, but she can jump high and basically fly as shown in the last episodes?
-Bomb designed to kill Do Bong Soon explodes into fireworks... What??
-Domestic violence. Do Bong Soon's mother is seen regularly abusing her husband, both verbally and physically. This abuse is sweeped under the rug with comical music played in the background. Even though the writers seemingly tried to redeem the mother in the last episode as having pushed him only once, it's just not believable. She was also physically and verbally abusive towards Bong Soon.
-Extreme homophobia, awful representation of LGBT community and queer-baiting in almost all of the episodes. It's so toxic that it took every ounce of my willpower to get through the scenes.
- Bong Soon and her mother and basically all the female characters are obsessed with Do Bong Soon snatching away Min Hyuk and having sex with him and basically raping him. These are not strong women.
-Min Hyuk goes to convince Do Bong Soo's father Do Chil Goo to return to his abusive wife because he cannot marry Do Bong Soon in such a situation. What a sad moment.
- All three leads are very misogynistic in some scenes. Do Bong Soon's character is misogynistic in itself. She is the opposite of strong and actually serves as a bad example for women.
-It has Kim Ji Soo, who is a known bully, but that's not really the drama's fault, so I would be willing to let that pass.
-Do Bong Soon has her own gang of high school kids.
-The characters are absolutely brain dead most of the time with no logical sense.
-Poop jokes.
-Racist representation of Indians with random Buddhist monk a.k.a. the scammer.
-There is no natural comedy in the situations, only poor writing. The romance was just pure fluff, nothing more.
-Min Hyuk and Bong Soon were extremely possesive.
-Useless police as always.

The good:
-Hee Ji's character was the only normal female character in the entire drama. I wanted to see more of her, but we got very little of her.
-Excellent villain who deserved so much better. He was the only consistent character and the reason I kept watching, but sadly writers didn't allow him more time to shine. The actor's performance was absolutely amazing.
-Some scenes were shot in a beautiful manner, but this got overshadowed by how despicable the characters were.

I need to cleanse my brain from this drama.


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