Family by Choice (2024)

A Plot that Betrays the Title

This review is not for you if you haven’t watched the show. It’s a rant—an emotional outpouring—but one I believe the community of fans needs to hear.

Finishing this show was exhausting! I’ve read several reviews, yet none seem to address the glaring issue I had with it.

At first, I was captivated by the premise. The show laid a strong foundation, introducing three main characters with compelling backgrounds. It beautifully conveyed the idea that family isn’t about blood or legal ties—it’s about love and connection. I wholeheartedly agreed.

But then came the 10-year time skip, and the show completely derailed. One particular moment sealed my disappointment—Hae-jun makes an offhand joke about marriage that, in hindsight, foreshadowed the troubling path the story was about to take.

Is family just a joke in this show? How do you go from being family to being lovers?

“As long as they’re not blood-related,” some might argue. But don’t you see? That logic only works if they were never truly family to begin with. If they genuinely saw each other as siblings, the idea of romance wouldn’t just be uncomfortable—it would be unthinkable.

The relationship between a brother and sister is fundamentally non-romantic. If Ju-won really saw the San Ha as a brother, she should have consistently shut down his feelings. Instead, within an episode or two, she agrees to date him. I kept asking myself, Do you realize you’re falling for the man you called your brother your entire childhood?

The show started with a powerful message: family is more than blood or legal ties. But in the end, it contradicts itself. Hae-jun struggles with the concept of a chosen family and only finds peace when his biological mother returns. Meanwhile, San-ha and Ju-won end up romantically involved. So what was the point of it all? In the end, blood and documents still define family in this story.

Perhaps this is a cultural difference, but as an African, I know family to be sacred. It isn’t something shallow. It is taboo to even introduce the idea of romance within family.

And that brings me to my final realization: they were never truly a family. They were just close neighbors who played house as children. The show never truly encapsulated what its title promised.

I was honestly too irritated to enjoy the rest. The only way I could finish was by mentally erasing their childhood memories—because otherwise, it was unbearable.

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This was a total disappointment. I love Go Ahead. I have watched it so many times. Most Chinese dramas can’t bring out the emotions in you like most Korean dramas do.
Episode 1 was going great. I thought this would be a good remake. But after 2nd episode it went downhill. In go ahead we can see how much importance a mother has in everyone’s life. Especially in the female lead’s life.
But this remake has not even a single scene of that.
I couldn’t see their siblings bond. We can see from the start that Juwon is biased towards Sanha. In go ahead both the male leads had each other's back when they were young. There were no unnecessary fights. The pain of being abandoned by their mother was understood by them. But here haejun was always fighting with Sanha.
I don’t like that.
The birthday scene where the aunt spoke nonsense and the father took a stand for the second lead was so perfectly portrayed in Go Ahead. But here it was not good.
I couldn’t understand Sanha’s mother's character as well. And according to me she never felt sorry for what she did. It was in the last episode where she cried when Sanha told her about his wounds. But I was accepting a sincere apology.
In 16 episodes they could have covered a lot of details from the original one but they didn’t.
I wanted more of Sanha’s trauma. When the female lead got to know about what he has been through I wanted more of that.
The writing of this drama is sometimes so lacking.

One thing I liked most about this drama is how amazingly the kids did their job in the first episodes, especially Sanha’s and Juwon’s Kid version.

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