skizlock

It is only a good watch if you see it in full, the starting 5 or 6 episodes are very slow and the situation isn't very good so i was not able to enjoy the romance. A few highs in a sea of lows. After this things pick up and it does become interesting enough to watch the next episode.

Well in your lifetime it will become potent when you are in old age, its next generations that will suffer through it. That's what puts responsibility on current generations to choose with that in mind. Be a bigger person than just the individual.

When you don't have children, your prospect of realizing it is kind of bleak.

And well writing here, is not just a conversation between us two, but maybe thousands will see it and read it. That's why I tend to explain more.

Your second para, I only saw it now.

Your argument relies on a false dilemma, either a woman gets an "equal partner," or she’s stuck with someone treating her like a maid. Nobody is advocating for toxic or dynamic less marriages, but reducing traditional roles to mere servitude is a deliberate distortion.

You say if society suffers, people will simply pivot. Demographic collapse doesn't work like a business strategy where you can just pivot when things go wrong. When birth rates fall below replacement levels and family structures disintegrate, the economic, social, and cultural foundation collapses permanently. You can't "pivot" a nation out of an inverted age pyramid in one generation.

Holding personal standards isn't inherently selfish, but when an entire media apparatus systematically redefines normal human compromise and family duty as "oppression," it sets standards that are intentionally impossible to meet.

Women (and men) haven't escaped relying on others for protection and stability, they've simply outsourced that reliance from a spouse and family network to corporations and the state.

Why do you think Japan has not pivoted away, it instead has become the example. Why South Korea is going downhill regardless of such highly visible studies and stats, showing their relentless progress towards societal extinction? Majority primary schools in SK have shutdown, literally a single enrolled student is being celebrated with great fanfare.

You’re missing how modern market dynamics actually work. This isn't a passive mirror reflecting organic consumer taste, nor does it require a shadowy conspiracy. It is simply manufactured demand, a highly calculated financial model.

In any mature industry, the most profitable strategy isn't waiting to see what consumers want, it’s conditioning them to want what is cheapest and most profitable to supply. By flooding the market with engineered tropes that validate pure individualism, media platforms create a self-sustaining appetite for that exact content. Audience taste isn't being reflected, it's being systematically cultivated.

The messages in most modern drama aren't accidental artistic choices. They directly align with the broader economic environment.
- A culture hyper-focused on careerism and individual autonomy expands the labor supply and drives consumer spending.
- Content that hits specific ideological check boxes gets preferred funding, higher ratings, and global distribution backing.

This kind of drama works because it weaponizes relatable human friction like domestic violence, abuse, burnout, bad relationships, societal pressure, and offers a surface-level, highly marketable escapist solution, abandon traditional structures, prioritize only yourself, and find liberation in the market.

It packages complex societal dynamics into simple, dopamine-driven clichés that feel empowering on the surface while serving a very specific economic reality underneath.

Entertainment doesn't just mirror culture, it constructs the market conditions that dictate culture. It leverages recycled cliches and emotional tropes to create an appetite for lifestyle choices that ultimately benefit corporate bottom lines. You don't need a conspiracy theory to explain it, you just need to follow the economics. Follow the money haha

Nobody is saying women are brainless or that individual choices should be stripped away. The point isn’t to police what one person does, it’s to look at what happens when an entire culture is systematically persuaded to value one specific lifestyle over everything else.

You say, "Respect women's choice." Sure, people are free to choose. But choices have consequences, and culture actively shapes what people want to choose. When media, corporate incentives, and policy constantly message that family is a trap, marriage is archaic, and corporate employment is the ultimate form of "empowerment," that isn’t neutral. It’s progressive propaganda.

Ask yourself who benefits most when the nuclear family breaks down?

Corporations get double the labor supply, which depresses wages and ensures you spend your best, most energetic years producing value for a company that would replace you in a week if you died.

The State gets a fragmented population of isolated individuals who rely on external services rather than strong, self-sustaining family structures.

The modern framework preaches absolute individualism, "It’s my life, my choice, me, me, me." But a functional society cannot survive on pure self-indulgence.

You mentioned you don't see the correlation in the show. Media doesn't need to explicitly tell you "don't get married", to influence you. It works through normalization. When every successful character is a hyper-independent, single career person, and every traditional family dynamic is portrayed as toxic, suffocating, or outdated, it subtly shifts what a generation considers "normal" and "desirable."

No one is attacking women for having a career or making personal decisions. What is being criticized is a globalized, corporate-driven ideology that tricks young people into sacrificing long-term human connection, family, and community duty for a seat in a cubicle, all while convincing them it was their own revolutionary idea.

Meh that's just typical pseudo feminist / globalist agenda, the writers enriched in the whole drama. It was wrong from the get go, doesn't make it better if they make the script again go that direction at the end.

They are not stupid. They are promoting a globalist agenda of remaining single and working. They couldn't show that they can work and have a family. The whole show only had one such couple with one kid.

All in all they successfully promoted this agenda throughout the show so much so that even the ending was not spared.

This is just the same slop that has plagued American/European drama scene for a long time. Its a well known phenomenon now. And yes they categorize it maliciously under female empowerment and feminism.

All these shows are pushing the agenda that women should work just like men do and remain single. They must prefer their career over relationship and family or god forbid have kids together. Marriage is maligned and labeled archaic. Being a single parent is promoted if you want one.

Similarly the egalitarian culture. they are pushing, where genders are equal and must be given equal rights and equal boundaries. Both genders suffer under it while crime attuned people thrive. If ever genders are going to be equal, its going to take centuries of targeted sustained evolution, it will not happen in one measly generation.

This all essentially is most beneficial to the corporate sector hiring you. They get a large supply, can reduce wages, exclude all women specific long leaves and have an optimized law structure which is same for both. It has been a very successful drive in the developed world. Especially now with AI revolution, only specific fields need humans to work in, driving demand and thus, higher salaries.

This is actually a level of sophistication and optimization developed countries achieve after being in that status for a long time. Later recent developed countries simply buy this experience, case in point of South Korea, which is only now getting this agenda pushed on them harder especially through Netflix, and now their own streaming platforms.

Unfortunately many Korean women have taken it up wholeheartedly - as was the case in the west. It does appropriately pieces itself in the current virtue signalling culture very well so one can't blame young people to get trapped.

How is this prevalence achieved, you might ask? Through laws and organizations that provide heavy investments with such agendas. They have "compliance" criteria, ratings and even rewards. European Union is famous to have such in an official capacity. This all is very organized, mature and systematic.

It was great at a first, utterly boring in the middle and well it didn't recover much later. After a long long time I have watched such a meh drama.

People hated that the son lost his girl crush to his father who is same age as him. They forget that the woman is an adult and his father was her choice.

One of my favorite dramas.

What are you even saying, Chinese dramas don't have such expansive freedoms to even explore such intimacy or even explore layers of intimacy and passion through that. In mature story telling so much can be conveyed through such. To expect it from Chinese limited artistic expanse is outright dumb.

I was literally flabbergasted when I saw one in the Legend of Shen Li. But then again I didn't understand its placement either, when you are not going to show the passion, it was so awkward.

Chinese dramas will remain in their current domain not that they aren't enough for an immersive romantic experience, but their is a limitation to that emotion and immersion nonetheless.

Pacing from the start is the key, in the middle and you lose credibility.

Wall of text reduced to legible points through AI:

## 🌑 Chen Yi’s Early Life: A Childhood Built on Survival
- Victim from the very start, living entirely in **survival mode**.
- Father tortured him, believing he was a “bastard child” born from an affair.
- Father never sought the truth—he needed someone powerless to unleash his anger on.
- If the child were proven to be his biological son, he’d have to face his own cruelty—something he was too cowardly to do.
- Abuse intensified after Chen Yi’s mother died; she had been the only good thing in his life.
- A new family arrived, forcing him to share what little he had with people who meant nothing to him.

## 🔥 The Spark of Ambition and Its Destruction
- Despite everything, Chen Yi developed **resentment toward his father** and a belief he could be better.
- Worked dirty jobs to survive, planning to enter the **police academy**.
- His father sabotaged this dream, unwilling to lose his “torture device.”
- After losing his chance, Chen Yi concluded that **good things don’t happen to him** and misery is his fate.

## 🏚️ The Apartment, the Scam, and the Fight to Survive
- After his father’s death, he discovered a scam that forced him to work endlessly to keep his mother’s apartment.
- The apartment—his only connection to her—became endangered.
- He chose to fight for survival once again.

## 🌱 Miao Jing Enters: From Parasite to Partner
- Initially a burden, Miao Jing became his friend and eventually his companion.
- Both were at rock bottom, offering each other a **broken shoulder to lean on**.
- Chen Yi used his strength; Miao Jing used her intelligence.
- Together, they chased the same goal: survival with dignity.

## ⚖️ Zhang Bing, Debt, and Double Lives
- Chen Yi believed he owed Zhang Bing for saving his life.
- He worked tirelessly to secure Miao Jing’s future while navigating the criminal world.
- Tried to help the police as a double agent without compromising himself or Miao Jing.
- Just when he believed he could finally build a family, the fire happened.
- He pushed Miao Jing away to protect her, believing her happiness would give meaning to his suffering.
- From that moment, he erased “Chen Yi” and lived only as a **cause for Miao Jing’s better life**.

## 🩸 Three Years of Hell: Trafficking and Dehumanization
- Shortly after, he was trafficked and endured three horrific years.
- Returned believing he was no longer human—just a shadow among people.

## 💔 Miao Jing’s Return and Chen Yi’s Resistance
- When she came back, he fought against her presence, unable to believe she’d return to him or that place.
- But he loved her deeply—enough to try to rebuild himself for her sake.
- He wanted to give her a decent life, even if it meant sacrificing himself.

## 🌼 Miao Jing’s Story: A Life of Being Unwanted
- She had a painful childhood, constantly passed around to people who didn’t want her.
- Abandonment was a lifelong pattern.
- Chen Yi was the first person to give her a **real home**.
- When he destroyed that home and left, he broke her profoundly.
- She knew he did it to save her, and lived with anger, guilt, and heartbreak.

## 🌟 Her Return: Six Years of Healing and Determination
- Once she rebuilt her life, she went back for him.
- Took time to understand his trauma and never forced him.
- Worked patiently and intelligently to show him a way out of darkness.
- She taught him he deserved love and humanity.
- Used every situation to guide him toward a better future.
- She knew when to push, when to step back, when to support, and when to call him out.

## 🏠 The Core of Their Story: Two Broken Souls Healing Each Other
- He got her out; she went back for him.
- They always knew they were each other’s home.
- The beauty of the drama lies in how two shattered people rebuilt one another.
- The storytelling simply elevated an already powerful emotional journey.

That's because of rapid modernization and westernization, say individualism. The current generation in Japan and SK, is hyper individualistic, while the elders are hyper communal. That's why you see the trends of leaving elders in old homes and the extreme suicide rates in their age groups. The elders still want their children to marry and have kids as they did, while the children prioritize themselves more.

SK also has the problem of extreme corruption. The IMF crisis in the past made a few families hyper rich, which carried the country to what it is now with minimal accountability. Thus, such success, shaped the whole nation into extreme materialism, beauty obsession, scoring those few rich chaebols (SK version of rich/elite/oligarch), and that overly apparent obsession towards money in Korean entertainment industry.

But this trend is more vibrant in SK females, thus, SK men have instead started to marry foreign women from Vietnam, China, Japan etc, in increasing numbers. They want to marry, and have kids. There has been an increase in both marriages and births from these foreign couplings. They can't marry their own, when they want multi million dollar homes.

There is also the problem of SK having Seoul as the city having over 52% of their whole population which breaks down the usual life cycle, introduces extreme competition, MH issues and suicides. Similarly the rest of the country is neglected and seen as second class.

Japan has the issue of shame and honor. Its ingrained in their minds to not be extraordinary and be same as everybody else. That's why they do these odd things to hide away so they don't have to protest and be the odd one out as then the whole society turns against you. Its a country where you can't have blonde hair or a disability, and you need a permit from the government, always on you, to prove to society that it is how you are, to save yourself.

Current westernized individualistic generations only consider settling down, if they think, it will not affect their current life and compromise so called freedoms, which is impossible. That's why we have the whole western world slowly dying out. But political correctness forces them to not admit their faults and strive towards change.

All this was fermented by western business interests, and they are the biggest beneficiary to all this individualism, they got to enjoy 50% extra workforce and also used the added supply to suppress the existing salary bases. So much so that it has been so long that western countries have experienced a good salary jump, instead, middle class keeps shrinking.

Look at China, its middle class is increasing by 17 million a year, you can understand that they have their business interests in control. But its also suffering from rising individualism, its clear, its a part of the western system and ideologies combined with capitalism. Something fundamental is wrong and nobody is trying to fix it or identify it, even after so many countries are suffering from demographic crisis.

We want to get married, in fact my whole society wants to. All of my people are married, with multiple kids. My younger brother married last year and he had his first kid, this year.

It doesn't matter whether its expensive emotionally and financially. Its a cost we are willing to pay, to sacrifice for it. Our spouse and kids, drive us to work harder, its a source of endless ambition for us.

Koreans and Japanese as well as most of the developed world has strayed into individualism so much, that they can't make sense of it anymore, but it doesn't mean the rest of the world walks or has to walk the same path.

Finally, no, I don't think a drama has to show MH realistically as then it becomes a documentary, and i want it to entertain me, not cling to reality and show me what I already see in my life.

Documentaries have their own charm and entertainment value, but that is not what we are meant nor we want to derive from dramas.

Hasn't that already been resolved, and the actor exonerated? Why are you still clinging to it? Did I miss something?

The problem is you trying to find realism in fiction.

I am telling you what I think, hahaha.
I have no desire to seek justification or some statistics about prevalence of similar feelings in the general population.

That;s the thing I hate open endings. Period.
I wouldn't have watched it if I had known.