Cortanaherondale

I went into Always Home expecting something along the lines of When I Fly Towards You mixed with Go Ahead. In a way, it does feel like a child of those two dramas, so I expected a sweet, fairly typical youth story about friendship, school, and first love. What I didn’t expect was just how real it would feel.

Honestly, this might be one of the most realistic youth dramas I’ve watched.

What I loved most is that the drama never feels like it’s creating situations simply because it needs drama. Instead, it feels like we’re watching a group of ordinary people grow up. Their lives aren’t extraordinary. Their dreams don’t magically work out. Their relationships are messy. They make questionable decisions, change directions, disappoint themselves, and slowly realize that adulthood looks very different from what they imagined when they were younger.

Watching this after already finishing university and entering the corporate world made it especially nostalgic for me. There were so many moments where I found myself thinking, this is actually what growing up feels like.

The heart of the drama for me was definitely the friendship, particularly between Chen Huan’er, Jing Qichi, and Song Cong. I loved their dynamic and genuinely enjoyed watching them grow up together. At the same time, I actually wish the drama had leaned even harder into their friendship. Their bond was always there, but I wanted it to feel even more airtight. I wanted more moments that really emphasized how deeply connected they were.

But even that criticism circles back to what the drama does best: realism. Friendships don’t remain exactly the same from high school to university to adulthood. People get busy, move in different directions, fall in love, pursue careers, and develop lives outside their childhood friends. So while part of me wanted that perfect, inseparable youth-drama friendship, I understand why Always Home chose something more grounded.

My biggest problem was actually the romance—or should I say the love triangle, square, pentagon, whatever that situation was.

It was messy.

There were so many overlapping feelings and crushes, especially earlier in the drama, that I sometimes wished they would stop focusing on who liked whom and simply let these characters be friends. It felt unnecessary, particularly because eventually everyone finds the person they are actually supposed to be with anyway, while almost nobody ends up with the person they originally liked.

Ironically, though, even this was realistic. High school crushes ARE messy. People like the wrong person. Your friend likes someone who likes somebody else. Feelings change. Looking back, school really was full of these ridiculous relationship diagrams. So I can’t even say it was unrealistic—I just personally didn’t enjoy how much attention it received.

I also struggled somewhat with the college portion. This was probably the part where I became the most bored and started fast-forwarding. Their college lives and individual storylines simply weren’t as interesting to me as their younger years. The drama is already very slow-burn, so once I became less invested in that stage of their lives, I definitely felt the pacing.

The romance itself was nice once everything settled down, and the cast had great chemistry with one another, but romance was never the reason I cared about this drama. For me, Always Home works much better as a story about friendship, family, youth, dreams, failure, and growing up.

And I loved how differently it approached its characters.

Chen Huan’er, for example, was refreshing because she doesn’t begin the story with some enormous dream she is determined to achieve. She is simply trying to figure herself out. That felt incredibly relatable. Not everyone is seventeen years old knowing exactly what they want to do for the rest of their life. Some people are just… figuring it out.

I loved her personality too, although one thing that genuinely annoyed me was how little her character seemed to change over the roughly ten years covered by the story. I wish we had seen more obvious maturity and development from her because there were moments where she felt almost exactly the same despite so much time having passed.

Then there’s Jing Qichi, whom I really enjoyed because he isn’t the stereotypical cold youth-drama male lead. Instead, he’s energetic, mischievous, playful, a little troublesome, and incredibly alive. That made him so much more fun to watch.

His story also represents one of the things I respected most about this drama.

He dreams of becoming a football player.

And he doesn’t.

That genuinely broke my heart, but I also loved that the drama had the courage to do it.

Not everyone achieves their childhood dream. Sometimes you can love something, work incredibly hard for it, and still fail. Sometimes circumstances change. Sometimes your body, your family, money, timing, or simply life itself takes you somewhere else.

And then you become something else.

Even when Jing Qichi enters the working world, the drama doesn’t suddenly bend reality around him. The company doesn’t magically change its rules because he’s the protagonist. Life continues being life, and he has to adapt to it.

I found that incredibly refreshing.

Song Cong’s journey was another storyline I really appreciated. He grows up accustomed to being the best—the person at the top—and eventually has to confront the reality that he cannot always be number one. He does pursue his dream, unlike Jing Qichi, but even achieving what you thought you wanted doesn’t automatically answer the question of whether you have fulfilled your purpose in life.

I loved that contrast between them.

One character I personally could not connect with, though, was Qi Qi. She was easily my least favorite character. I found her selfish, bratty, and honestly quite annoying, and I never became particularly invested in her storyline. I also wasn’t especially convinced by her relationship with Song Cong.

But once again, somehow even my dislike for her fits into what I appreciate about this drama.

People like Qi Qi exist.

Not every person you grow up with is going to be perfectly likable or have beautiful character development. Some people are frustrating. Some people are selfish. Some people make choices you don’t understand. Always Home allows its characters to be imperfect in ways that sometimes genuinely annoyed me, but that imperfection is also part of why the world feels believable.

I also really enjoyed the older generation. The relationships between the mothers and fathers, their friendships, their dynamics with their children, and the way the families were connected added so much warmth to the story. It gave the drama that feeling of watching not simply a group of teenagers, but an entire little community growing and changing together.

And then we get to the ending.

I absolutely loved the final episode.

For all my complaints about the romantic messiness and wishing the friendship had received even more focus, the finale reminded me what this drama had actually been about all along.

It wasn’t really about who ended up dating whom.

It was about youth.

The final sequence, especially the characters speaking to and giving advice to their younger selves, genuinely made me teary. There was something so bittersweet about watching these adults look back at the versions of themselves who had all these dreams, fears, expectations, and assumptions about what their lives would eventually become.

Some dreams came true.

Some didn’t.

Some people followed their own path. Others followed what their parents wanted before eventually finding themselves. Some relationships lasted. Others changed. Some people achieved exactly what they wanted and still wondered whether it was enough.

And life continued anyway.

That was such a beautiful way to conclude this particular story because Always Home never needed some enormous dramatic message. At its core, it really is just a story about a group of people growing up.

And maybe that’s why it hit me as hard as it did.

There is something incredibly nostalgic about watching Always Home as an adult because it reminds you of that period when your entire life was still ahead of you and you genuinely believed you knew where it was going. Then you grow up and realize that life rarely follows the plan you made for it at seventeen.

I definitely had issues with the drama. The love pentagon was exhausting, I wish the friendship had received even more attention, the college portion bored me enough that I fast-forwarded through parts of it, and some character choices frustrated me. It is also very much a slow-burn drama, so I wouldn’t recommend going into it expecting constant plot developments or a romance-heavy story.

But despite all of that, I genuinely enjoyed it.

The performances were wonderful, the cast had great chemistry, the family relationships were heartwarming, and the story left a surprisingly strong impression on me.

Always Home doesn’t tell you that everyone will achieve their dreams.

It doesn’t tell you that your first love will be your last.

It doesn’t tell you that your friendships will remain exactly the same forever.

It simply tells you that you will grow up.

You’ll change. You’ll fail at some things and succeed at others. You’ll lose dreams you once thought defined you and discover new paths you never planned for. The people beside you will grow too, sometimes closer to you and sometimes in completely different directions.

And eventually, you’ll look back at the person you used to be with a strange mixture of affection, embarrassment, sadness, and nostalgia.

That’s what Always Home captured so beautifully for me.

It’s messy, slow, imperfect, incredibly heartwarming, and probably one of the most realistic portrayals of youth I’ve watched.

And somehow, its imperfections make it feel even more real.