L13

This sounds like an updated version of Nirvana in Fire and the cast is gorgeous. I will be seated! I love me a scheming protagonist with a hidden identity on a quest for revenge. It’s not an original concept, but it always hits the spot for me when executed well.

A lot of students at "elite" universities dabble in sex work in the US. It's a way to make money.

I'm on episode 12 and I'm loving this drama so far, but it's hilarious to me that Lin Qiang has been working for a nasty drug cartel for months now and no one has asked her to 1. have sex, 2. do drugs or 3. kill a person yet.

NOOOOOOOO

If I got cucked by Sakaken I'd just say thank you instead of fronting like I was gonna get my girl back, but I guess they need to fill 16 episodes somehow...

I would bet everything in my bank account that her father was abusive and she killed him in self-defence (even if it was premeditated and/or excessive or whatever). That's just how kdramas are.

I'm really excited for this, but I hope they change some elements of the movie, especially the ending.

(SPOILERS FOR THE MOVIE AHEAD)

I think the ending where Duri sacrifices her youth and her chance to live an easier and happier second life with a good man in order to save her grandson works well/has an emotional impact in the movie, but it would annoy me too much in a 16-episode drama. I really hope she doesn't go back to her old self at the end and disappear without a word from the life of the guy who liked her so much.

Like, they could still give us the same climax where the grandson has an accident and needs an urgent blood transfusion and Duri chooses to donate her blood to him and thereby give up her youth, but after that—cue ONE YEAR LATER time skip or whatever—I need her to be walking down the street one day and find the magical photo studio again, take another photo, go back to her younger self, and go back to the producer dude.

It's not that I don't understand the message of the movie, which would be undercut to some extent if Malsoon/Duri just got to live out her life again and did it differently, but I like my romance to have a happy ending too much to tolerate angsty/melancholic bullshit like that.

I also need the drama to spend more time on Malsoon's daughter-in-law and I need Malsoon to realise how terrible she was to her and to make up for it by doing nice things for her DIL as Duri. In the movie she got neither punished nor redeemed by the narrative for abusing her DIL (and favouring her son and grandson over her granddaughter). What was the point of showing us her internalised misogyny without doing anything about it? Isn’t seeing that women could and should live better lives one of the big opportunities for growth/personal enlightenment inherent in the premise of giving an old-timey granny a second youth?

I think this is a relic of the Japanese original, which is all about getting into the University of Tokyo. Though of course your point that any good university would be transformative for these kids, not just the top ranked one, applies equally in Japan… Now that I think about it, you see a similar pattern in American shows and films about high school, where characters are often obsessed with getting into their dream school (usually Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, etc.) even though they could probably be just as happy and still succeed in life if they went to, like, Pomona or the University of Virginia. I suppose making one university the end goal is a way to simplify the stakes and amplify the drama.

Thanks for the recs! A Moment but Forever is probably not going to be my cup of tea, but In Blossom looks good and I wasn't aware of it, so I added it to my to-watch list.

This is not what I wanted to hear, but it makes sense. Thank you!

I need this immediately after Prisoner of Beauty got canned. It looks so good! Do we know when we might expect it?

I don't think it's "rude" to make movies that show the Nazis were evil and I don't think the UK has stopped doing it...

Thank you! Wow, I didn't recognise him at all in the first episodes.

It's not uncommon for kdramas to display too much wounded national pride and obsession with the past whenever they mention Japan, which I as a foreign viewer don't relate to (and as someone who despises nationalism in all its forms, even as a reaction to historical injustice, I don't like it much either).

However, in this particular case, the drama literally takes place during the Japanese occupation of Korea, when Japan ruled over the peninsula and exploited and oppressed Korean society with remarkable violence and cruelty. This is a historical fact.

What is more, Unit 731, which inspired the human experimentation subplot, is also a historical fact and the show actually shies away from representing the full extent of their evil. Both their methods and the number of people they killed were even more horrific than the drama reveals.

Considering all of this, the show humanises its Japanese characters to a degree I wouldn't necessarily expect from a kdrama. Some of them are shown to be regular people just trying to live their lives within an unjust system that happens to benefit them, and some are shown to be horrified and disgusted by what the Japanese military is doing. I've watched plenty of kdramas that didn't extend quite so much grace to their Japanese characters but portrayed them as categorically evil instead.

Depicting a fictionalised—and softened!—version of a real-life atrocity is not unfair to Japan. Like, they did do all that in the 40s, and the drama takes place in the 40s. What do you want?

If this was a drama about Soviet or Polish characters during WWII and it showed some Nazis committing crimes against humanity that were extensively documented in real life and can be looked up on Wikipedia, I should hope you wouldn't complain that the show was stoking anti-German prejudice.

Is the actor who plays Sachimoto credited in the cast? I don't think I see him.

The drama had some really touching moments, but it also got draggy in episodes 5-6 and frustrating in episode 8, in which all other subplots and characters were suddenly sidelined in favour of Igarashi's illness and death. The drama should have spent less time milking the tearjerker scenes in the finale and a bit more time on the exam results/aftermath and resolving the other characters' personal stories. In particular, Maki and Yuta's romance was concluded very poorly in my view.

Are we supposed to find this pairing cute or romantic just because it’s historically believable? People aren’t complaining that matches like this one never happened in the past but that they don’t like it in the drama.

OK, it felt good to see the entire Class 11 back up Li Ran and embarrass that rich bully, but you just know he's going to retaliate with something even worse. The way he's been threatening Li Ran's grandma/aunt (I forgot what their exact relationship is) to get Li Ran to lick his boots is so disgusting.

Yeah, JQL is a bit immature compared to them. Which is not a bad thing because he's still a kid! But CYS and LR both had to grow up faster than others because of their family situations and would understand each other's feelings if they had an honest conversation about their lives IMO.

Isn't this literally the plot of You Are My Glory...