madjellyfish

She ended up kissing him but he didn't react at all and I thought the way he let her down was quite kind all things considered. You could tell he cared for her but not in a romantic way, so I personally wasn't put off by that scene (though maybe I was also sufficiently prepared for it by reading the spoilers ahead of time). Next season seems to feature some romance, though that looked more like a (failed, by the way she obviously knew what was happening) honeypot.

Tbh I was kinda worried about the romance aspect since the comments made it seem like there was any. The whole discussion about student/teacher and how old ajin's character really is had me expecting some actual reciprocation but what it ended up being was just a crush the fl had. (rest of comment under spoiler jic)

Yeah, even with the weirdass excuse of giving home the haunted properties, so he has to actually do some work to sell them, it feels really off. Cause the first episode suggested that those were still the biggest part of the inheritance? So it must have felt like such a weak excuse to somkid when he heard that, I can kind of understand that he snapped.
But what bothered me the most was still the fact that all those misunderstandings were so, so avoidable, and no one ever acknowledged that. Wtf do you mean family curse? It's just that you didn't know how to have an honest conversation even with your life on the line, grandpa. That and the fact that everyone treated the aunt kind of like an afterthought. Grandpa didn't even talk about her if I remember correctly, though by how he handled his biological children I'm willing to believe that he has a hand in raising her into the person we see during the show. What family curse, obviously grandpa is the family curse...

Am I the only one who really didn't feel the ending? I mean somkid being the bad guy was foreseeable from the start (they never have genuinely nice ppl without a plot twist in this kind of story) but the reasoning behind it was so unbelievably stupid it took me out of the story entirely.
Couldn't even enjoy the gang getting together and celebrating at the end, at least not the way I would have without the logic finally losing me.
Don't get me wrong, I wasn't expecting it to be perfect (they literally know the aunt killed her maid and they still acted like the worst she did was attemted murder and then saying she should get a lighter sentence, I mean what? You can be kind to your horrible family if it's just a family problem and you really want to act the saint but please consider the other people involved here) but the resolution was so far past avoidable misunderstanding it felt deliberately cruel.

I'm not even blaming somkid here, the grandpa was arguably the biggest problem. Not only did he know how a misunderstanding from somkid's childhood affected him, he never made an effort to explain even when he realised his own son was literally poisoning him. He had to have known he was gonna die (he was deliberately talking about the will) so his plan was what? Gonna have his son kill him and then find the extra inheritance and feel really guilty? That sounds quite cruel when he could have literally had a conversation instead but if that's how he wanted to punish him for going off the deep end all right. But then what about home? He just left the guy who was actively killing him to take care of the grandson who inherited what somkid thought should be his? Did he really not consider how dangerous that would be to home or did he just not care?
And that's not even taking into consideration the terrible aunt. Like, what exactly did the grandpa want out of this situation? I get that he's big on people figuring out their own answers but this is to a degree that just feels malicious. Especially whan he acts all loving grandpa with home and home doesn't even question why he didn't try to resolve the situation before it became unfixable.

Idk, sorry for ranting but the way this plotline resolved just made the happy ending feel kind of hollow for me. I really enjoyed the rest of the show so I'm just bitter it ended in what felt like such a half assed way to me.

This probably works better for ppl who didn't like the original or never watched it tbh. It's quite different and a lot more dramatic and exciting, where school 2013 was more slice of life.

I think this might have been easier to get into for me if they made it even more of an individual story that just takes some inspiration from the original for the general setting, because a lot of the things they kept kind of worked better in the original circumstances imo. The things that felt out of place for me where mostly the parts that mirrored the original skript and it often felt like they just forced those parts into the story bcause it's a 'remake'.

I'm not finished watching yet and I find it quite engaging so far, I just wish they'd made it entirely into an original story that's just inspired by school 2013 instead of an adaption.

The mother did say she was going to talk to the kid about meeting with the lawyer, so maybe she did and that's why the kid went along with him? It felt a little weird to me as well but maybe they thought implying the conversation happened was enough...

Then again he's apparently going to an internet café by himself without first telling anyone (and his mom didn't react like that was a problem when he tells her) so it's not so unbelievable that he'd just go along with a stranger, especially if it's his mom's lawyer.

The main character is in love with his friend, but she is married to someone else and pregnant.

None

Why would they need a pean of all things, which to me seems like a fairly large foreign object to just leave in someone's chest, when to my understanding all it does is clamp something shut?? How could a pean possibly permanently fix something a surgery could not, and to the point that it couldn't have been replaced with something smaller? And if it was really that desperately needed, why couldn't they explain that instead of covering it up? But oh, let's put a large foreign object in the guy permanently that doesn't show up on x-rays cause that wouldn't possibly ever lead to any trouble should the dude have, like, idk an accident and lands in some random hospital. Like surely that won't ever possibly get into the way of emergency treatment or anything.

It just seems so lazy with no actual explanation and we're just expected to take that as a good enough reason to accept all the other bullshit about he ending? The villain character being essentially wasted by being forgiven with no regard to his actions during the show, and the fact that tokai goes 'ok I guess' and just let's it go after that bullshit while revenge was literally his driving force for the whole show?? All for the explanation that 'oh we kinda need this pean for unspecified reasons and you wouldn't ever understand but your dad did and so he ruined his life for me instead of explaining anything and uh, yeah'. I'm used to having to turn my brain off for some parts when it comes to realism in fiction especially in medical or police stories but I wasn't aware I had to chuck it out entirely and put it through a blender. That just seems shockingly lazy writing to me.

I just rewatched this and remembered again why the last pisode made me so angry. I agree with all the criticism about the ending in the comments, but my biggest gripe was with the medical aspect of it?? Like, I don't know much about medicine and this show might as well be fantasy for the surgical parts sometimes but wtf is the whole pean thing about? It absolutely defies any logic. I'll put the rest under the spoiler tag but if any ppl with actual medical knowledge read this pls answer me lol.

I have watched nearly all of the tv adaptions and tbh most of them are objectively just kind of bad (it's part of their charm). So if you're determined to keep watching shows that are part of this universe it might be better to (significantly) lower your expectations. 😅

Having read all the books (even the unfinished ones) as well as most of the side stories, I can confidently say that the show(s) having plot holes and inconsistencies is being very faithful to the source material. I mean this in a very loving way, it's one of my favourite series (book and tv), but it's just better for the overall enjoyment of any part of it to overlook anything that doesn't make sense or to simply have fun with it because of all of the chaos!

Yeah exactly, that's why I still liked Manager Kim a lot and it didn't bother me there at all, while it nearly makes Falsify unwatchable for me. Thanks, I'll go check your rec list, maybe I'll find something new :D

(I'm replying here so the text column won't get so narrow ;P)

Yeah, Stranger is definitely my all-time favourite for this kind of genre. Do you have any other recommendations?
I enjoyed The Guest, though it's been a while so I don't quite remember if it had any of the problems we discussed (other than dumb side chara cops, you can't really get away from those...), though it felt more like there were a lot of red herrings instead. Memorist was also really decent as far as I remember. Both of those have an end goal of taking down a powerful enemy associated with an (also powerful) association/company behing them, but it's never really about gaining the upper hand, it's more a process of slowly collecting clues and finding out more, which I prefer to the endless (and mostly meaningless) tit for tat exchanges. They both have fantasy elements though.
I think the only show that I genuinely enjoyed without reservations, even though it had all the problems we talked about, was Manager Kim. It was unapologetically whacky so I kind of just didn't mind the mostly comically incompetent villains/side charas, the dumb mistakes or the endless guessing game of "who actually has the upper hand". I actually even enjoyed that, probably because the show didn't take itself very seriously and mostly managed to sell those tropes as comedy. So I guess it always depends on where they are trying to go with their drama . Ones like this, which seem to want to portray a serious mood for a large part of the story, really should avoid those problems though.

Yes that exactly, my biggest problem is when we get introduced to a character and are told that the character is smart. But then, because they need to be a step behind the antagonist they keep making really dumb, avoidable mistakes or are suddenly really naive bacause they can only win at the end of the show. I like my characters human, neither ridiculously overpowered but also not naive and stupid either (especially if that obviously is only their setting half of the time). Very few shows of this format (big against small, overarching plot with end boss) fill the space between the first and last episodes with actual plot instead of having these wierd tit for tat exchanges of "good guys find clues and gain the upper hand" and then "bad guys somehow end up having another card up their sleeves and good guys go back to square one". It's fine to have that a few times in this kind of story but somehow a lot of shows use that as the focal point of their plot with barely anything else it seems...
Another thing that bothers me is the overstated incompetence of side characters, like "the cops" or "the prosecutors", both organizations that have no business being this incompetent. It's like a miracle solution for writers to all sorts of problems. Using cops as an example: The plot won't work if cops actually manage to get anything done? The main characters have nothing to do if the cops actually do their jobs? The mediocre things the main characters do don't actually seem all that great and intelligent in comparison if the cops actually function at normal intelligence? No problem! Just make all the unimportant cops either so dumb or so currupt that they get nothing done and you don't actually have to come up with any kind of smart writing. That's kind of what i meant with making everyone but the main charas incompetent.
But of course the weird on/off incompetence of the main characters as a plot device is happening just as often, like you said, and mostly these issues happen at the same time.
What I meant with bad guys being incompetent is kind of what happens with the small fry along the way, like the guy who fell off the roof in one of the earlier episodes. He was dumb enough to be easily tricked by the main chara in the first episode, and that happens to a lot of "not end-boss" bad guys. They are often portrayed as really dumb (which makes you wonder how they got so good at being a criminal until the main chara appears) so that the main characters can actually get them in the early episodes and get clues (that can be destroyed by the big bad so we can keep going like this until the big climax).
Tracer is a lot like that too (in case you've seen the show), the main character there seems pretty invincible though and no matter happens he always turns out to have another plan already in place and to actually have had the upper hand all along. But most of the small bad guys there are very, very dumb (to the point of comedy) until they have to be a little smart to make the main character shine by outsmarting them again...

Wow this got awfully long as well, I guess these things bother me more than I thought ^^

I'm used to incompetence in everyone but the main characters (and maybe the bad guys) in order to make the plot work or to make the main characters stand out more/to make them seem smarter than their actions would normally warrant (newsflash, being the only ones noticing something really obvious or being the only ones even remotely competent or with a moral compass does not actually make them all that increadible, it just makes everyone else look really stupid or bad in comparison) but this one even makes their main characters look uncharacteristically stupid at times. I have no problem with smart characters making mistakes sometimes (it's not realistic if they're always perfectly on top of everything) but this show likes to use sudden out of nowhere stupidity as a plot device. That makes the characters feel very inconsistent (like you said) and coupled with the kind of comedy vibes over the top acting of a lot of the supporting cast or even the main cast at times just makes it feel off to me.

Maybe I just had different expectations for this and people who don't mind the things I take issue with or don't think to much about the show and just follow it along will really enjoy it, but for me it's kind of hard to watch. I keep hoping it'll change if I just watch a few more episodes though, so I probably won't drop it, even if I don't manage to enjoy it as much as I thought I would...

I actually have to agree with all your comments on this, I was really looking forward to this drama but there is a lot of what to me just seems like lazy writing.

Thanks, I'll try that!

Kocowa is region locked though :(

I can't seem to find it on amazon prime though...

As far as I know, that part of the story wasn't in the books at all (the music thing). The plot is really different at times and the book isn't finished yet so they changed quite a bit to give it more of an ending. It's been a while since I read the books but I don't think Zhang Rishan even appears in the sand sea novel... (Neither do Su Nan or the film crew if I remember correctly, and Wang Xiaoyuan is a different person in the novel and only meets Li Cu at the Wang base. There really are a lot of differences, even just regarding the characters that appear!) Not being told what is happening or how something happened is part of the daomu biji experience so we will probably never find out :P