User Not Found (2021)

Self Acceptance vs Social Acceptance

I watched this drama with little expectation. The only one that attracted me is the unique title which started with @Account Has Been Deleted (@계정을 삭제하였습니다) to User Not Found. There is a connection between the drama title with this review title I will explain in the end.

STORY
There are three plots in this drama according to its genres:

Youth/School Genre: Coming of Age/Growing Up
The drama focuses on the first Female Lead who, no matter how boring her character is, represents many of viewers’ common personalities. She is quiet, introverts, shy, compares herself with others, fantasizes a lot, and mostly in desperate need of social acceptance of her new classmates. So this is shy Yoo Min Jae (played by Shin So Hyun) or we call it Pop-Min (as her friends call her later) to distinguish her from the other Yoo Min Jae. Pop-Min is transferred in the second year of highschool to a new school. On the first day she already freaked out of not being be able to find friends in any group no matter she tries, as she experienced in the past schools. Unexpectedly, some girls mistaken her for a Yoo Min Jae, who is a popular fashionista and a social influencer on Instagram. Pop-Min just accepts her ‘luck’ by saying nothing. However, since she’s not confident enough to carry out the lie, the pressure is enough to get her thinking of “disappearing from this world”.

Romance Genre: Slow Burn
And this is where Male Lead Shin Yi Joon comes in. No, he’s not a knight in the shining armor. He overhears her saying it by the bridge. No, she doesn’t try to jump and kill herself. Later, we find he had the same thought before. Thus, a friendship begins base on the same understanding and sympathy between Pop-Min and Yi Joon. Yi Joon, surprisingly, is not the typical ML in romance dramas. He is equally quiet and shy, but he doesn’t give a damn about what other people think or say about him. Something happened to him in the past.

The romance is slow burn, mostly due to Pop-Min and her secret that she’s hesitated with Yi Joon. No love triangle, no annoying second lead. There is a little misunderstanding that resolves quickly.

Drama Genre: Past trauma
The knight in the shining armor for Pop-Min is actually in the form of the other Yoo Min Jae (Han Ye Ji) or we call her Moo-Min. Something happens in the past that makes her transfer to... Pop-Min’s school, in fact, to her class. But Moo-Min disguises as a plain Jane. She just wants to go to school as quietly as possible until graduation. Of course, she’s surprised there is Pop-Min who uses her Ig identity. An agreement strikes between the two Min Jaes to swap identities, and an unlikely friendship begins.

There are other character’s past traumatic experiences that shape how they think and do in this drama.

ACTING
You can’t expect much expertise from newbies. Since the nature of Pop-Min and Yi Joon are basically quiet and shy characters, there are a lot of scenes that look draggy, showing how these two characters think and act. Audiences are mostly root over other lively characters in this drama. And that what makes me disappointed is actually the production of this drama, as explained below.

PRODUCTION
I mean, though the actors are newbies, but with good directing, a rookie actor can bring up a character no matter how hard it is. But I guess the director is a noob too. The story is not based on a novel or manhwa, where dialogues can have a powerful source from. There are a lot of monologues of what characters think, that are not as interesting as dialogues between two characters. Therefore, I’m not impressed with the scriptwriting too.

VISUAL
A bunch of characters with eye candies, nothing to complain. Even Pop-Min is pretty, in my opinion, far from an appearance of a girl who supposedly regular and has low self-esteem. The cinematography is okay too, despite of most location is their highschool. I like the costume of Moo-Min when she’s in her own fashionable self.

OST
- G=ONE & Jang Daegyeom “Lamose”
- Jo Jin Ho and Kino from Pentagon “A-HA!”
- Saula “Love Confession”. Bae Jin Young, the actor who played as the ML, covered this song for his love confession to Pop-Min.

Fortunately, the drama ends with character growth of Pop-Min. She becomes self-confident, especially when the story of what happened to the popular Yoo Min Jae (Moo-Min) comes out and the ‘undercover’ Pop-Min is affected. Many viewers are disappointed at the ending of the drama in which doesn’t really resolve Moo-Min’s problem. But since the drama actually centers of Pop-Min, not Moo-Min, it ends up well in my opinion. No, the forever strong Moo-Min has already resolved her own problems. No need to clarify the misunderstanding of what happened to her from the authority side and public. And this is what I like about this drama. The theme is growing up without having other support system than your school friends, when the other supporting system (parents, teachers, older characters) is not available. The matter brought up by this drama is learning how to choose genuine friends wisely.

In conclusion, as I wrote in the beginning about the connection between the drama title and the review title. There is a scene close to the end in which Moo-Min deletes her Ig account that symbolizes her past. Hence, where the drama title @Account Has Been Deleted or User Not Found comes from. At first I wondered why she deletes the account she has worked hard to build her popular reputation. That’s when the moral of the story comes: self-acceptance is more important than social acceptance. Both Pop-Min and Moo-Min especially (other characters too but not explicit) in the end accept themselves with firm support of each other and true friends.

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It had potential

I was really waiting for this webdrama since the first teaser was released, the story looked promising and the cast pretty cool but it was more disappointing every new episode, the idea is good and they had 22 episodes to develop it, BUT that's where they lacked, the couple started dating in the last episode when we all were waiting for it to happen soon, the main plot was rushed at the end, they lied to all the school but it was resolved easily, the story of Minjae was uncompleted, just flashbacks to try to understand what happened to her and her ex, the introvert Minjae acting was so so, even for a webdrama.

The only highlight for me was the friendship story of the two Minjaes

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