It’s a sad fact that all the hue and cry about the ending overshadowed a good discussion on the theme of the drama.
The genre of the drama is a coming-of-age story. The theme of the drama is first love.
From Episode 3
Yurim: You were my first love! So you should do that much for me.
YiJin: I was your first love? Past tense? Not anymore? Because my family went bankrupt?
Yurim: Yah!
YiJin: When you were in the ninth grade, right? Should I tell you the truth about your first love? (Flashback of him driving up in his red convertible and offering to drop her off at her practice.) Your first love wasn’t me. But my sports car. You thought I was a pathetic loser before then.
Yurim: I did not.
YiJin: Yes, you did.
Yurim: I did. Damn it. How annoying. That means my first love wasn’t a person.
YiJin: Hey. What’s annoying? It means you’re still waiting for your first love. Isn’t that exciting?
And I refer to @Grace’s comment. She wrote:
I happened to chance upon on insta story feed of someone who talked about the production company Hwa and Dam pictures on their goal of the show. I quote “We wanted to reflect on the meaning of first love that remains in the faint memories of Na Heedo and Back Yijin from the moment they met and then parted.”
Hwa&Dam is the production company for 25-21 and a subsidiary of Studio Dragon. Since this is coming from the production company itself, I’m going to take its word that the theme of the drama is first love. Although the friendship of the 80-liners and the competitive world of fencing were nice to watch, these are secondary to the central theme of the drama.
First love can mean many things. It can be loosely applied to non-romantic attachments. For instance, it can be argued that first love for Heedo means:
fencing (she wouldn’t give it up no matter what),
Yurim (her “rival”),
Her father (whom she missed dearly), and
Sweety-pie (her experimental boyfriend).
In the same way, Yijin’s first love can be:
his two previous girlfriends,
his dream to become a NASA engineer,
his family,
his red car, and
his job (which he chose over Heedo in the end)
However, in context of the story, and as substantiated by the Hwa&Dam production company, the first love of Heedo and YiJin was each other.
YiJin corroborates it in the final minute of the drama:
Who is your first love?
Na Hee Do.
If the topic is first love, then what did this 25-21 writer have to say about it?
Kdrama writers have always toyed around with the concept of first love, so this 25-21 writer hardly accomplished a groundbreaking work. This writer spent 16 episodes writing about first love so it’s impossible that she failed to get a single point across of her “unique” insight on first love.
🙂
Based on what I’ve seen in kdramas, there are three conventional understanding of first love.
The most common understanding of “first love” is linked to chronology. ❤️ First love is the first experience of romantic love. ❤️ Puppy love, infatuation, and crushes fall under this definition of first love. It’s the first time ever that an individual feels romantically attached to another person.
By this definition, YiJin’s first girlfriend, the one he confessed to in the tapes, is his first love. Not Na Heedo.
And going by this definition, Na Heedo’s first love is…
Yurim.
Okay. I didn’t say sexual love. I said *romantic* love. Na Heedo had a crush (or girl-crush, as some people would call it) on Yurim. She did the most romantic gesture of dropping an umbrella from the rooftop for Yurim while she got drenched in the rain.
The second meaning of “first love” is defined by its long-lasting impact. ❤️ First love is the romantic encounter that MOST affects and MOST alters the individual. ❤️ This feeling goes deeper than puppy love, infatuation, and crushes. It’s lifechanging.
Even when the lover suffers a heartbreak because the relationship doesn’t work out, he’ll always remember the first love.
YiJin’s feelings for Na Heedo go under this category of first love. Despite his having previous girlfriends, Heedo is his first love because their relationship is transformational.
It’s like a “password.” She’s the key to his growth and transformation.
Then there’s a third meaning of “first love.”
The third meaning of “first love” is linked to permanence. This is what most kdramas hype up. ❤️ First love must be true love.❤️
That’s why we often get leading characters who are inexperienced at love. They’re novices, rookies, virgins and monks. Not to mention goldfish…
…with the fish-eyed look.
That’s also why we often get the children-reuniting-as-adults tropes, like in “Lovers of the Red Sky.” The message here is that true love is pure love. And you can’t get any purer than the two innocent children feeling affection for the first time.
First love = pure and true love = lasting love
In this drama, we see this third meaning of “first love” in Yurim and Jiwoong’s love. Despite all the obstacles and barriers, their first love survives, thrives, and overcomes. This is the first love that Kdrama viewers are accustomed to seeing in their lead couples.
Now, what about Heedo then? How do I see her first love?
Here’s where the confusion begins because of the contradictions.
We can see that her love affair with YiJin has long-lasting impact on her in the name of her shop. But we also know that she dismissed her memories of their beach week with nonchalance.
We know that she broke up because YiJin couldn’t be there for her. But she doesn’t mind her current marital state wherein her husband is often away, and she raises their child on her own.
We see that she’s content with her marriage. But she still has lingering regrets about her break-up after all these years.
It’s plain to see that Heedo has never gotten over her first love. She named her shop after their breakup. YiJin was still a sore topic when her mother brought up YiJin. She didn’t respond. Instead, she gave her mother a silent look.
Thus, in my view, first love for Heedo means ❤️ unforgettable love. ❤️
She convinced herself, her mother, daughter, and most importantly, her husband, that she got over YiJin. But deep inside, she knew she never truly moved on from him. She just buried her memories of him in her heart, like a secret.
That’s the final symbolism of the tunnel for me.
Back in Episode 2, she proposed a secret world with YiJin where they could find happiness, even if it was temporary. The tunnel was an apt location spot for her proposal because their first love would only be a temporary passage for them.
So, it’s rather fitting that, in Episode 16, she returned to their tunnel. Only she knew the significance of the tunnel. She had dug a metaphorical tunnel in her heart to hide away her first love and regrets. It was time for her to make peace with them.
That’s my two-cents.
That makes sense, @packmule3. Her heart was still bruised from her first love break-up. It looked to me as though she went into her marriage knowing that the love she had for her husband would always be different from her first love, but there was no going back. For YJ it was the same. When he said to Seung-wan that he didn’t need to hear about her (his ex-girlfriend); he could read it in the news, I thought it was something still a bit raw – he didn’t want to speak about it.
Thank you @pkml3 for your 2 cents. In a sense it is priceless if it can bring closure or more resolution in the hearts of many befuddled, unhappy viewers.
I, too, thought of the tunnel as a symbol of the passage of time or a sign of a rite of passage that the young people had to go through. This popped into my mind when I watched the memory of the 5 together, running through the tunnel and then the memory of the single, joyous beach trip.
You asked and I ask “If the topic is first love, then what did this 25-21 writer have to say about it?”
One conclusion: That it can come in many forms, that it can last but it does not have to, and even if it does not, it does not invalidate the fact that the love is real.
Another: One person can have more than 1 kind of first love and that is not a contradiction.
I mentioned before that for HD her first love could even have been her father, fencing, and YR (even as Injeolmi), before YJ.
Ultimately, although we don’t see it in the present day (a sad gap in the ending) I’d like to believe that she retained her first love, YR, as her close friend til the end.
Despite everything, I still regard this as one of the most enjoyable, nostalgic, sentimental trips of kdrama love that I’ve taken in ages (maybe since Healer?) I’ll probably make revisits to happy 1998-2001 scenes which make me smile a goofy smile.
Thanks for giving us your thoughts and helping to round off a lovely Show.
@packmule3 and @Fern, I think your post and comment helped me understand why I still feel bereft when thinking about this drama. I also think that having so many issues present like all the stuff around competitive fencing, the news business, family bankruptcies, bullying, the main theme got lost in the jumble. We got the feels, i.e., melodrama, but we got preoccupied with a barge of topics. I also think that the change of actresses in the lead role was jarring. Does it mean that the .ife changing love made for what seems like a new person. I think, for the sake of continuity, Kim Tae Ri, 8s more than capable of doing the job. Her last interview with YJ showed not just a change in hairdo but a change in countenance that was seem through her eyes-no mean feat. Even if our nosy questions like who is the dad, weren’t answered, I think we could have used a clearer narrative to let us see the forest for the trees.
That being said, @packmule3, so glad you took the time to provide the most meaningful way to view this ultimately upsetting drama. Thank you so very much.
I appreciate your thoughts on that.
Breaks my heart to think that she went back to the tunnel and who is waiting is a crying Yijin and she needed him to walk away for her to find closure. This just makes me want to cry and wail again.
I have never experienced a break up and this show has made me feel the depths of despair of breaking up. I am being extra dramatic haha.
Sometimes in life it can be easier to compartmentalize and lock the pain or regret away. True healing comes only when we face the unbearable and process and deal with it.
Hello everyone and thank you for this post @pm3! It’s my first time posting for this kdrama, I’ve watched it and enjoyed the love lines of Yijin and Heedo. The way it was shown to the viewers would make you get hooked and expect a deep seated love between them.
I like your analogy of the tunnel and Heedo’s unforgettable love for Yi-jin. She confined his unforgettable love in a tunnel like container in her heart but some parts of that she tried to erase from her memory. That’s how painful it was because it took a long time for her to let go and say goodbye to that unforgettable love.
It’s my first kdrama with this kind of flow in the story. I am also not happy about the way it was presented but I already guessed the ending from Episode one because of the title and MC as she read the diary.
🍪🍪🍪 👏
Thank you @PM3 for sharing your thoughts on first love and Heedo’s unforgettable love. It’s a great bookend to close the chapter of this unforgettable kdrama.
This is the kind of content that draws me to BOD. I’m an emotional person and I find that @pm3’s posts and other BODers’ comments calm me down. Thank you @pm3 and BOD.
This does help in giving closure to me. It gave me the courage to re-watch the ending scene (the break-up scene that HD imagined). My mind was not able to absorb what they were saying the first time I watched. Like @Chocoflip, I’m being overly dramatic. LOL.
Now, I’ll just be content that they were each other’s first loves and that they’ve been there for each other when life was difficult for them.
And on to the next one… but nothing seems to be catching my interest with the April kdramas. Happiness will be on Netflix next week so I think I’ll watch that, the posts on Happiness a few months ago were interesting.
@Welmaris,
I’ll remove your post from here and transfer it to the Final Open Thread. I’ll answer you there.
Pm3
Thank you @PM3 for your thoughts on the symbolism on the tunnel. Yes, the tunnel was blocked at 55:44 (Ep 15) when ajumma HD was still haunted by the hurtful words during their breakup. It was cleared when she got her diary back at the end of Ep 16.
@haengbog, Nice catch! It’s true. I’d forgotten that there had been a break in time between when a barrier had been up and when the barrier was gone.
It’s a beautiful 2 cents @pm3, the various forms of first love. It really puts things into perspective.
I knew at the back of my head that they were not going to end up together, and the fact that the production company said so, it was going to be so. I held on to a glimmer of hope, like most people, that they will still have their happy ever after, though it would require quite some crazy plot twist for that to happen. To see it realistically, it really made sense and probably such an outcome happened in real life more often than not.
There were so many lessons to learn in this drama. And the beauty of the diary that MinChae read was that it was written in the moment when the memories was the clearest. No wonder 40yo HD said she couldn’t remember the beach trip…some memories has gone faint. And I believe the only one is her regrets that bugged her even till she is older.
@Lz, same here…not feeling for the dramas showing now. Maybe still lingering in these few dramas that just ended.
Annyeong,
@pm3 You’re awesome! Can we meet in person? LOL
First Love ~
It’s interesting that the seconds leads had forever love happy ending, but not for our main leads. If Yirim and JiWoong made it through that long distance relationship, why couldn’t our main leads? Kdrama, thanks to relating to real life and those of us who didn’t end up with our first loves, but… golly gee.
i want to blame Yijin for not “sharing” his burden and sorrow to HeeDo. HeeDo, have mercy! is this noble idiocy for Yijin? I mean, Jiwoong didn’t take No for an answer from Yirim when she let go of him. He persisted. and Yes, maybe one cannot marry a reporter? that’s what i get from this. like her mom, she sacrificed even family for career. such a heartbreak that Yijin chose career over love. that’s the price to pay. one can’t have it all. but i must say that when he went to NYC~ it really brought home the reality of 9/11 once again. never forget! i think they did a good job for this portion. i now have an empathy to reporters. i know they will never forget each other ~ their first love.
about this tunnel, i notice it a lot in kdramas. first time was with the show “Hotel Del Luna” 💙
Later, BoD’s
@HK_Lady, I think that a romance between a regular person and a reporter is possible. In 2521 we see two reporters, HeeDo’s Mom and YJ who made choices to rise in their organizations. We see other reporters who have remained local(see New Year’s Eve) and others like the people who are important to HeeDo, who chose to take an international assignment or to cover a story , thus failing to attend her husband’s funeral. These were priorities to our two reporters. A case could be made that both had mitigating circumstances-for HeeDo’s Mom, the need to support her family, although Mom was still in a two parent family until the funeral, and the fact that she is a woman in a profession dominated by men. For Yj, we see that he probably has to work harder to prove himself because he is not a college grad. His other priority is to reunite his family. We see the circumstances where HeeDo being a third priority for both of the important people in her life. The one person who made HeeDo an important priority and consistently showed it was her father, who died when she was young.
Upon thinking about this, with the death of her father and the absence of her mother and YJ, HeeDo must have dealt with the feeling of abandonment. Her final decision to break up with YJ was, in part, colored by that feeling. On a happier note, she was able to come to terms with her mother as we saw post their visit to the cemetery and their relationship when HeeDo reached adulthood. We know that HeeDo made the only tenable decision possible regarding her break up. In a way it was self-affirming.
As discussed here before the tunnel was symbolic of the passage from youth to adulthood and when there was a road block, we saw that it belonged to HeeDo. Once she was able to read YJ’s note, was the roadcthrough the tunnel reopened,and, after many years was she able to find closure. She did make choices in the interim, including to marry and have children. We find her paying homage to her father in her choice of profession(carpentry-we know she wasn’t academically incined). We also see her paying homafpge to the time of her life, 2521, the name of her business, when she experienced her first love and when her youthful friendships were most intense.
We need to view this drama in a limited way as a snapshot of an important time in our protagonists’lives.We are left with gaps because, to our story, they are extraneous. We can only imagine why HeeDo was no longer exuberant or who she married or why she seems to have abandoned fencing for her quiet life. The same can be said, in part,for YJ. All that we know of him is that he gained professional success and reunited his family. We don’t know about his romantic life and the rest of his personal life.(In some ways, because we see what seems to be an abrupt end of YJ’s story, he almost becomes a fictional construct). For some, like me, this absence of detail remains a point of frustration. We want more and want to fill in the gaps that our writer tantalized us with. However, in retrospect, we see the dramatic choices as deliberate. It remains for us to imagine and ponder-to perhaps, write our own fan fiction. My bottom line-will this drama be considered a classic? In keeping with its limitations-a qualified yes. Why? All one has to do is look at the discussions during and after it’s ending. We are still touched and we still debate. Nevertheless we have been deeply touched. Isn’t that the role of drama.
@OAL I applaud you!!! 👏 👏 👏 😆 Yes, this is how I see this Show.
I do think that it was not just a coming-of-age story, but a slice, of a section of coming-of-age. It aimed to depict nothing else, but to give the ‘then’ and cut to the ‘now’. For a change, it was not a story that was fairytale-like, with the main couple ending up together, but that’s not to say that being quietly, comfortable ever after is too different from happily-ever-after.
I guess, not being in Hee Do’s shoes, it’s hard for me to judge… I too may have found it untenable and opted to separate. HD may have felt that rather than to know that her support would not reach YJ, because he could not/would not let it, … that because with the choice he made to become a foreign correspondent it was evident that he didn’t plan to be physically close to her for ages… it was an abandonment that was impossible to bear for the long-term. I feel she did what she had to do to take care of herself as well.
I’m thinking of the IRONY. I know that if we had not been shown the present time, and had been given only HD’s youthful story, up to them being happy on her win in Madrid. We’d all be clamouring to know what happened after.
If the story had stopped at the breakup, we’d also be unsatisfied, wanting to know how HD and YJ would be doing as separate individuals, whether they’d be happy apart or not, etc. We will remain curious about them.
But this story actually gives us the present day situation, which by rights should satisfy our curiosity, but we are flummoxed because it wasn’t our definition of ‘happily-ever-after’. LOL. (At times I kind of agree with some other comments which said that show shouldn’t have given us the present day scenario at all. The great discrepancy between the ‘highs’ of the past and the sedateness of the present was too disconcerting.)
An alternative that might have worked better – have the same break up set in the present day and ending now… so that we cannot clamour for what happened after that, since it hadn’t happened yet. LOL. …No, I don’t think that would satisfy us either.
I agree that because it’s a drama (and a kdrama at that!) about first loves that have an added weight of sentimental value, it rather hyped up the romance at youth, with extra intense colours and much symbolic references to how HD and YJ were ‘meant to be together’. Being used to the first love trope, we expected a sweet romance and against all evidence to the contrary, hoped for/predicted a happy ending for our main couple. What has pulled the rug from under our feet, is that there is no One-true Pairing (OTP) in this Show. To have a love story without an OTP is unthinkable, but to have a coming-of-age story without it, is possible.
@Growing Beautifully (GB), Thank you for these further thoughts. As my prior comments have indicated, it has taken me awhile to get to this place. The conflict between my expectations and the ‘reality’ presented colored my past impressions(note lots 9f ambivalence). The discussion at BOD helped me distance my emotions from the actual drama as written. This is the case of another drama that set familiar tropes on their ears. N the end, I think it provided a gut punch that will last for a long time. It did its job.
@GB and @OAL – even though I can separate the logical and emotional side of how the story turned out to be, I still feel gut-punched (live this term btw!) until now. And I think it’s because of the ending.
Anyhow, congratulations to 25/21 for the Baeksang nominations as best drama, best actress and best new actor!!! I think KTR is a strong contender! Go Heedo!
@Janey, yup, the emotions Show elicited are visceral, so gut-punch is apt. I assume that this was the aim of the Show, and it really worked. Of course the emotions could also verge on the negative or go into full bloom cursing and swearing (LOL), but if the objective was to not leave viewers demurely complaisant, then it certainly did its job.
In any case, the fact that Show got nominated for best drama, says something. To me it was a powerful Show, with flaws, but still so good. I do hope it wins at least 1 if not all the awards for which it was nominated.
@Janey and @Growing Beautifully, Absolutely agree with you. Our drama succeeded in achieving what it set out to do. It was absolutely (to use another digestive phrase, gut wrenching. I hope it wins one Baeksang. My preference is for Kim TaeRi, who pulled off adolescence and the angst attached to it so well. I honestly don’t want Squid Game to sweep these awards.
I hope that we get some good new dramas to discuss going forward. I learned a lot with this particular discussion. Yay BOD!
@OAL *applause* thank you for tagging me with your comment and giving me the bigger picture from your POV (separate expectations/emotions vs reality/actual drama). I agree that this show has deeply touched a lot of people (bottom line)… this is definitely a classic show that is timeless, as well.
Appreciating all BOD commenters 💗 here
Just wanted to say congratulations to Kim TaeRi for winning the Baeksang Best Actress award for her role as Na Heedo on 25-21!!! She also won the popularity vote alongside Lee Junho, who also won best actor for The Red Sleeve!!! 2/2 for these 2 tonight. Powerful casting to have them both as leads in a drama.