irmar

In the middle of ep.4 I was already tired. The same old tropes, like painting by numbers. The plain-looking, bubbly, impulsive and warm-hearted female lead who forgives so easily and misunderstands so easily. The seemingly cold male lead, the nice second male lead, the evil executives, the bully colleagues... So boring, OMG. I feel I have already watched a number of dramas just like this.
Plus a great number of things that are hard to believe and illogical. People in the Viki timed comments were calling them out all the time. How did he know she was there? How this happened? Why does she do this since it would have been much easier and more natural to do that? Absurd things to bring the plot that the writers want but were so contrived.
I meant to drop the show, but there was something in the female lead that kept drawing me in.
Zang Chun Xuan is a very expressive actress. Yes, she sometimes overdoes the pouting/cute thig, but she's good in the dramatic parts too, and there's never a boring moment with her.
At the end, you fall under her charm.
Yes, the drama is super cliché and old-fashioned, and you know exactly how it's going to end. But it's not that bad, for a Chinese drama. Especially since I was down with a flu and I wouldn't be able to stand something more mentally stimulating. I think it's a solid 7, right?
(Poor cat, did they drug him during the filming?)

I thought that in this drama this cold director persona was much more childish and endearing. He let himself show his true emotions many times even from the very first episodes.

It's on Viki now, subbed. https://www.viki.com/movies/40076c-a-day-in-tongyeong

Very good drama! Really gripping and deep. I binge-watched it until the wee hours.
A very good account on how trauma works and can really break you, making it difficult to function even as an adult. Their relationship was interesting, and the actors were all very good. The atmosphere in Motel California was very well captured. The coziness, Mr. Gwon and so on.
The heartless cruelty of small-town people is also very realistic.
There were some flaws, though. The back story was confusing, the way it was presented.
WARNING. MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD
I saw many people in the Timed Comments not understanding who had an affair with whom and whether mother Mia was pregnant (and with whom) when she eloped.
The fact is that there were two different incidents:
1) when she was pregnant, and the husband couldn't come quickly to take her to the hospital because he was away, to help his childhood friend (nasty MIL) with some problem.
One has to ask, is he the only person in the whole town that could take her to the hospital?
2) Here there's a gap. Presumably after this she became resentful and started seeing another man, taking their children with them (so presumably no sex, just having a nice time together).
3) Now the husband promises to go to California together with his family, but someone scams him out of his money. He beats the scammer, ends up in prison for the night. The wife, who had been waiting with her suitcase outside the motel (why outside?) gets very disillusioned, and decides to abandon her child and elope with the nice guy. Because presumably you cannot leave your husband taking your child with you (WHAT?). The little girl, who for some reason was afraid that her mother would leave, the night before had sabotaged the exhaust of the car.
But which car? Presumably the mother would leave with her lover's car. So did the girl go to that car and sabotaged it with the stuffed doll? But they didn't leave with that one. Instead that car was taken by the wronged wife (the nasty MIL) to go and kill herself (which unfortunately didn't happen). Then whose car did the two fugitive lovers take?
There were other inconsistencies. Really, in South Korea, you can adopt someone in 10 minutes? I made a quick search, and it seems it's complex as everywhere else.
I also disliked the way they treated the question of animal welfare. The hubae wants to save lab dogs (who are notoriously tortured, even undergo vivisection), and our kind hero tells her that it's enough to make them as comfortable as possible. Then she repeats this conversation to her lover, who is mourning the sale of his favourite cow, who obviously is going to be slaughtered. She tells him that it's enough that she had a happy life when she was with him. So he will go on raising cattle as a job, knowing that he's raising them to be killed?
It would have been more realistic and more honest to not give the characters this hypocritical kindness and concern towards animals, to say "Oh well, people must eat meat, that's the way it goes, and we cattle ranchers must also make a living, so there's nothing to be done", rather than serve us those BS excuses.
I found the ending a lacking, too. Suddenly the bullies turn a new leaf and apologize en masse - what? Only because they saw she succeeded in her job? Or because her lover asked them to say this? The toxic elders are revealed to supposedly be kindly after all and we are told that basically she didn't know their good sides like volunteering at the old people's home? But when she visited that farmer to get his signature, he treated her horribly and wanted to make her kneel to even consider signing, and told her that everything bad in his life was her fault. Now they magically became nice because she thanked the elders for keeping her father company?
The fate of the father is uncertain. I understand that they wanted to end on an upbeat note, but we heard her say (after talking to the doctors, obviously) "Turns out that he is very sick". Chemotherapy might work, might not work. It was one of the cases where we could have appreciated a "one year later" last scene.
We hear her say to her lover "I'm not going anywhere, I'll stay by your side". Does this mean that she will stay in her hometown? And what kind of work can she do there? Yes, she will remodel the motel to make it into a care home. And then? What? She had co-created a company in Seoul, she had started to build a future. He was willing to do veterinary research in the capital. So what's the plan exactly? Stay with her father until he gets better and then leave? Stay there as a stay-at-home mom? We are left completely in the dark.
Last but nto least, the two examples of the FL's work as a designer (her apartment and then the pool terrace decoration) were both horrible! Couldn't they hire a better designer for this?
And her hair colour, why was it greenish blonde? That's another bad aesthetic choice on her part (since we have seen from the flashbacks that her original hair was pitch black).

Her roles are one better than the other, she shines in everything, her career is going well. I would say her manager is brilliant.

Go Su Ra was a throughout solid, honest and earnest character, and I'm happy everything turned well for him.

That's exactly why the cousin had to be king and not our kind ML. He was not fit for that life. And if he became king, there was no way he and Jae On would have been happy.

Didn't you remember the bit about not having much time? And that her children, when they learned about her illness, put her in a nursing home, from which she escape to be with her sister before dying? Something like that. (The whole plot was confusing so I'm not 100% sure of anything)

That's "cheating" on the writers' part. And on the taxi driver's part. Because it's one thing to know you'll be dying in 6 months, and another thing to have your whole life in front of you, even without memories. How can you choose if you are given misleading information?

It's not the implausibility that irks us, it's the inconsistency. Even in fantasy, you create a world, you create its rules and you have to honour them. To change the rules at the very end is cheating.
And the ending was incomprehensible to me.
That said, I agree with what you say about the relationship among the women - I also liked that a lot.

That was cheating. To make a choice you must know exactly what each option entails.

But the real Emily or Janet or Kkeut Something was supposed to die of some illness (cancer?) and said "I don't have much to live anyway". But one year later she's still there?
No, the ending was a hot mess in every way.

Oh, so that's what the ending meant? "Disappear" meant her memory disappearing?

Oh, because you understood the ending? Lucky you. I didn't get a thing.

I liked the plot premise, it held a lot of promise. But there were many flaws. The main one is the main character and also the actress playing her.
I didn't like the main female lead's actress at all. The "playing the granny" got old very fast (excuse the pun!) And it was more of a caricature. The old actress didn't walk stooped and with her legs apart so much as the young one. And a young body would naturally not need to have this posture. Not to mention the fact that she was always dressed in those oversized sports clothes. And that, although she has a very good voice, she had zero dancing skills from episode 1 to the end. I have seldom seen a less graceful woman. It's probably all acting, but even then, shouldn't she show some development as the show progressed?
Her facial expressions were very exaggerated, sometimes even clownish. Very irksome. No subtlety at all, going for belly laughs. Probably also the director's fault, but nobody else acted like that in the whole show.
Her character is supposed to desperately want to become a singer, but we are shown someone who is not careful at all, who is more interested in solving family problems, hangs out with men with no fear of scandal and speaks arrogantly to the chairwoman with no fear for her career. Frankly, she acts as if debuting was the last on her priority list.
The age gap between the two leads or the fact that she chose love instead of other things is not what bothered me. What bothered me is that throughout the drama, although she did clutch at her chest once or twice or fanned her face with her hand to show that she was affected by his romantic words, but otherwise she never showed that she had fallen for him. She usually looked at him with an amused or ironic or condescending expression.

He did notice, and he told her in a episode 10. "Who are you? I know you're not Emily".
He just fell in love with this new interesting person.

In Namib he DID sing, and quite well too.

That's exactly why the writers made him go crazy like that. So that we wouldn't have regrets for him staying a second lead.

So it will be a Secret Garden situation.

Well, we keep seeing this in most Korean dramas. And in this one, you remember the 2FL's mother, who in ep. 4 said that maybe it wasn't a good idea for her to adopt her late brother's son because this could compromise her chances to find a husband and get happiness?
So I think that South Koreans do think like that.
To be fair, in the West too, many people see a previous child of a potential spouse as a minus. Not everyone wants to be a stepmother or stepfather, with all the struggles this entails, especially when the child is a pre-teen or teen. You have difficulties enforcing discipline because you suddenly become the "mean stepmother" and you get the "You don't have the right, you're not even my own mother" attitude from the child. You feel you have to overcompensate to win their love etc. etc. Not to mention the potential problems when a child is born of the new couple. The previous child will get even more jealous because the step parent will love their own biological kid a bit more, even if they try very hard not to show it and treat all children the same.
Of course I'm not saying it can't be done, lots of people have success doing it. But let's say that it adds a layer of difficulty to family life. So it is understandable if some people prefer a partner who is free of baggage. It's not nice but it's understandable.
I'm saying this as someone who has raised 2 children on her own.
Only if you love this person very much you are willing to do whatever it takes, in any circumstance, everything is better than living without them.