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Something in the Rain korean drama review
Completed
Something in the Rain
0 people found this review helpful
by Rabbil
Dec 22, 2021
16 of 16 episodes seen
Completed
Overall 8.0
Story 8.0
Acting/Cast 9.0
Music 7.5
Rewatch Value 8.0
This review may contain spoilers

Beautiful yet bewildering

This show was always on my list of things to watch but continuously shelved in favour of something else. But then, having watched One Spring Night, I decided to finally give this a go.

The show is divided into three parts: a very good beginning, an excellent middle but then a lacklustre ending that collapses in its own contradictions and frustrating character decisions. I enjoyed the budding romance between Jun-Hai and Jina-a and really liked the social commentary on why certain people are looked down upon. The growing conflict between Jina-a and her family regarding her personal life boils once they find out. On that front, the show does really well.

But it's problems are namely two things: lack of attention to different subplots that have little interaction with each other, and basically character stupidity. I'm going to focus on the latter first. I don't understand the hell Jina-a gets from everyone, especially her best friend who, only few episodes earlier witnessed Jina-a being sexually assaulted. There's a bewildering lack of empathy amongst the support characters for what Jina-a is enduring. But both Jun-hai and Jina-a are frustrating for acting like martys, paragons of suffering who just silently endure all abuse yet reprimand each other for these very same things. Jina-a's ex-boyfriend was a serial creep, yet Jina-a's method was to keep ignoring and enduring as his behaviour got worse. Her habit of keeping things a secret from Jun-hai, knowing he'd be annoyed, only to then apologise later sheepishly knowing he'd be too seduced to stay angry, these things didn't sit well. She has a tendency to allow conflicts to fester through her passivity, be it with her family, her best friend or even in the workplace.

Jun-hai is similarly frustrating in his inability to convey to his sister that he wants freedom to make his own choices, in his persistence in silently tolerating things knowing fully well this upsets Jina-a even more. I really didn't like the pressures he put on her regarding her housing problem. I loathed how he was in many ways crippling her independence.

The other thing the show suffers from is the lack of connectivity between different subplots, although perhaps it's intentional to show that no-one understands what Jina-a goes through. The workplace conflict was extremely interesting but it only ever got 10 or 15 minutes in any given episode and this just was never enough time.

I became really frustrated with the show towards the end. Both the lead characters simply are not likeable enough.
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