My Demon (2023)

Just ok, not the best!

***DISCLAIMER: This is just my opinion. We don’t have to agree and I’m not here to argue with anyone.***

To keep it brief, they had me and then they completely lost me.

GENERAL REMARKS:

Listen I’m not really a fan of any of these actors so i’ll try to keep this review as unbiased as possible. When I heard this drama was being produced I was unsure because I don’t really like Song Kang’s acting. I was only convinced to watch because I have been impressed by Yoo Jung in some of her previous works and thought hey maybe if this is not the best she will at least carry on her part.

But I was wrong. This story was lackluster in every single way. I only was kind of intrigued for the first 5-6 episodes of the show but then everything started to go downhill after Gu Won rescued Do Hee from the burning gas station / shop in episode 8. They built up the plot so much at that point only the bring it back down and then throw in a lot of other useless side plots and the past lives / reincarnation trope. It was not necessary to say the least.

I feel like all Yoo Jung and Song Kang have in this show were their strong visuals. I feel like the color grading was over done… they made them look paper / milk white and you could not see one pore or any texture in their skin at all which was kind of off putting. Yes their visuals are good but what else? To me it felt like they could not really deliver on the chemistry after a the first time they kissed and did the do. It just seemed like as the drama progressed it was unnatural and they were both trying too hard to convince us the audience. I see more of a friendship bond between the actors especially in the BTS videos (these were super cute ngl) In my opinion, when they were bantering / not on the best of terms it was better than their romance / relationship and marriage era in the drama.

It’s so ironic and hilarious how most of us suspected Seok Hoon would be a bad guy but he turned out to be one of the good ones from the beginning with no hidden agenda or plot twist. Not gonna lie it was a bit of a let down just because he's a good actor and it would've been refreshing to see him take on the role of the villain, but no he's always the second guy and it's almost like he plays the same character every time.

Gu Won was brought back far too soon in my opinion, and there was no build-up or explanation of what happened to him after he vanished or even if he could still see what was going on in the mortal world. Also I believe they incorporated the story of the deal Do Hee’s father made with Gu Won so quickly. I kind of predicted that he had saved her mom and her as a baby after they were in some kind of accident and I was right. To be honest, they tried to make it seem like her father was desperate enough to make a deal with the devil for his personal gain but I knew that could never be the case.

The way she learned that Gu Won was the man her father had struck a bargain with and then seemed to be shocked when he performed his demon responsibilities since the contract had expired really irritated me. Like come on, she was aware of who he was the entire time, so her sudden display of shock and surprise irked me so much. She started off as such a formidable character, but as the drama progressed, it was like her character development stalled and she grew weaker. She became a damsel in distress who was always waiting for poor Gu Won to come along and save her.

I’m happy Do Hee and Gu Won got their happy ending but I can't help but think at what cost. Do Hee lost so many close / precious people to her and that asshole Noh Su Min is still alive and able to be living while rotting away / losing his mind in prison. To me not enough justice was served, I needed to see Gu Won fight that man and hit him harder for real.

The uncanny bromance between Gu Won and Seok Hoon became so heartwarming. I’m glad both he Gu Won and Do Hee are able to consider each other as friends / family and get along well even if it did start out with him being madly in love with Do Hee. I’m actually glad they didn’t write the drama where he still would’ve tried his luck at pursuing her even after Gu Won disappeared like most other dramas. It was refreshing to see him give up from early on.

I cannot believe they made my man No Suh Min Ugly. His poor face (I’m half joking half serious but he was good looking before him taking such drastic measures and burning himself) I could not bear to look at him anymore as the drama went on. I have to say I really enjoyed Tae Hoon's performance. He had me convinced he was an abusive father and husband, the devil reincarnate and a psychopathic murderer all in one.

The last scene where Ga Young / Star Jin met the little girl who was being abused by her father broke my heart and tore it into a million pieces. Oh my gosh the tears kept flowing… her character arc / redemption is one of the best to come out of the show. I am so proud of her… the way she looked at the child it was like she herself was finally healing her inner child and able to protect someone the way Gu Won protected her all those years ago.

Unlike Gu Won she told her “Don’t forget angels always come and save you.” Finally she changed the narrative and gave the littler girl the hope and words of encouragement she needed all those years ago. To me that was just a really full circle moment and the only moment in the show that literally brought me to tears.


FINAL THOUGHTS:

In my opinion, this drama had a good beginning, an alright to mid middle, and an unimpressive conclusion. The drama twists Christianity and Demonism while maintaining certain aspects of the familiar; if you watch closely, you'll see all of their subtle allusions. I liked this drama to an extent, but I didn't believe the plot was properly developed or that the ending was plausible.

The Gu-won recantation sequence was one that I thought should have received more attention because I didn't think it was compelling enough. Do Hee is human, while Gu Won is still immortal. To be honest, I honestly believed that they would have caused her to spiral and become into an immortal or demon herself working alongside him or they would have caused Gu Won to reincarnate as a human or be reborn somehow. Simply put, it makes no sense for them to be together if Do Hee has a limited amount of time left on earth, which means that Gu Won will have to survive without her. Like LMAO? They really should have watched more supernatural movies/shows (eg. Twilight) before making this show so they can understand how human / immortal relationships have to play out. Granted, this story was written by a 13-year-old, but that's no excuse because the writers could've tried harder to improve the story and make it more logical.

Honestly the only good thing about this drama was the occasional funny moments, heartfelt moments and most importantly the OST. I could listen to it over and over again though I do think the song "Say You Love Me" and "The Way to Lose You" were played much too frequently. I like the songs don't get me wrong, but they used them so much that it was just a bit of an overkill.

I don’t think I’d recommend this drama to anyone because they’d be disappointed or feel that it lacked a lot. Unless cliche / underdeveloped fantasy romance is your thing I'd advise you stay away or just go into this with lower expectations. If you decide to press play just remember you're primarily here for entertainment not so much groundbreaking acting or even a half decent plot.

With all of that said, I gave this drama a 5.5 rounded up to a 6/10 and mainly for the performances by the entire cast.

✌️

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Full of clichés and the looks of a rich style magazine

This show is for some reason very overhyped.
This drama was a chore to finish for me, but I'm the completitionist type and so I endured. Otherwise I would have dropped it around episode 4 or 5.

The plot in this show is laughable. It had potential as a premise if they had gone on a different direction but as it is, it's just pointless and it doesn't even bother in explaining how things work in the fantasy of this world. One of the main things that annoyed me so much is how they decided to include once again the super cliché of main leads knowing one another from previous life (hers that is) while completely ignoring the core christian believe that the whole series wants to portray. Nothing is really that explained anyway, even his powers as a demon are mentioned superficially. Actually, the fact he's a demon is just overall brushed over and it's a background prop to be used in some scenes. It could have been cool and more explored but it wasn't.

Both main characters did have a bit of personality at the start, something that made them more individual, but this is dropped very early on as soon as they start being together, they become baseline neutral with nothing unique. Their quirks are completely dropped . Rich girl meets rich boy and they fall in love, how refreshing. She also becomes damsel in distress and he's your average "bad boy" that is actually not bad but that it gives him the edge to be appealing to viewers. Whether he was bad or not it's not really explored, because except for a couple of grey area situations the show always wants to portray him as good.
In other clichés we also have here, we include two forgettable side characters that are interested in the main two (and mid show they were almost unbearable, especially Jin Ga Young).

All scenes and environments are very fabricated as if taken from a photo-shoot of the actors for a fashion magazine, and so it happens in outdoors scenes too, the little magical details are very on the face put there purposely, some little fireflies, some bubbles, some water droplets...etc.
This also brings me to the fashion. The whole show is basically a catwalk for upper fashion trends and their hair and makeup is always ˖⁺‧₊˚✦perfect˖⁺‧₊˚✦ Not even when they are in bed there is a hair out of place nor they stain the bed sheets despite having a cake of makeup on.

Continuing with the clichés we also have the funny side character couple that while it made me chuckle a couple of occasions and overall I think they were better than the main couple, some others it crossed the line too much into second-hand-embarrassment territory.
Side characters are just very superficial and add nothing to the story nor we learn much from them either despite sometimes having longer scenes than they should for that amount of pointless dialogue. This is the case of all office workers for example as well as some of the family members of FL.
The villains here are very cliché and their motives are just plain bad, and they all had itchy rashes because... they're sooo *evil*. There is a bit of a motive for their actions but then towards the end it crosses the line of absurdity. The cherry on top was main villain falling from that tower and surviving, eyes rolling I saw stars✧˖°

Some of the moments with more tension, like for example that moment between the end of episode 15 and beginning of 16 are solved in such an anticlimatic and fast way that you wonder why they even bothered. Clearly the whole idea of this drama was creating those ˖⁺‧₊˚✦perfect˖⁺‧₊˚✦ moments where they hug, kiss or look at each other and they filled the rest of the episodes with things in-between so it looked like something. But it seems they didn't even manage enough fillers to do this since after the beginning of episode 16 when they already solved the main issue they still had so many minutes to fill the episode with little bits of secondary characters that no one cares about because the plot didn't care for them before anyway. Also, Jin Ga Young spent half the series saying she was going but didn't lol and then when actually something interesting happens to her in the last episode that could have been explored as a small side plot and it's just left there. What the actual hell is this writing lol

There is not really a discussion on anything obviously, like morality for example. At one point FL is taken aback by the reality of the ML's work as a demon, but then it's brushed off because the script said so and because they have the lame excuse he saved her mother when she was pregnant with FL. It was as weak of a plot point as expected.
The most interesting character in this show is God, but obviously is a background character just so she could save him in the end. I liked the detail of her hat.

Overall I think that while there are shows that can be entertaining and use some clichés, this one almost was playing a bingo to see how many of them they could include in this show. For me personally what makes this one worse than some other shows that also use clichés is that overuse of very crafted scenes, fashion and hair/makeup that make everything look so much more fake rather than fantastical. Even their more intimate moments are just so on the face "we're doing this now" that it was taking me out of it and I didn't find it cute. This is paired with the fact I didn't think the main actors had that much chemistry and specifically ML actor was so stiff at times.

Something else that I found extremely annoying in this show are the recap scenes. Sometimes you would have a recap of scenes two minutes after some of the scenes in that recap had happened. This was so overused that I started skipping them. As I said, they simply didn't have enough material for this show and they reused as many scenes as they could as recaps of cute moments between characters or to reminisce about some character.
Product placement is also quite on the face many times.

Music is also very annoying, they reuse the same couple of songs continuously to no end. Also the song that one of the bad guys in the beginning was using and that becomes a trigger for FL, who in their right mind would say to their partner "now it's our song". Like, excuse me sir? just because you say now it's our song it doesn't mean the trauma is going to disappear. But here it does because script said so. I didn't suffer what FL had and yet every time that song appeared again it was irksome to me as a viewer so imagine someone that has nearly died and associates that song with a psycho. I would knock my boyfriend's head with a saucepan if he told me that song is "our" song now. No thanks!!


If you want to watch because of the ML, or you don't mind extremely thin plot and very fabricated everything then you might enjoy this. If you care about plot AVOID this, it's not worth the time I assure you. If you care about certain level of realisticness even in fantastical settings then avoid this too, there are no explanations for almost anything and the main focus is put in the main leads intimate moments and them walking from one place to another in ˖⁺‧₊˚✦perfect˖⁺‧₊˚✦ fashion.

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