I’m giving this a try for Na In Woo.
I’m not wild about Seohyun. She looks like a pampered princess to me. I’m more a fan of IU who’s made of sterner stuff, and Kim SeJeong whose sassiness in “Business Proposal” won me over.
Gifs from yesdramas’ tumblr
But if SeoHyun can enchant me like KSJ did in the first 30 minutes, I’m prepared to stay for the whole kdrama. I need something light and funny these days.
@nrllee, are you with me here?
Let’s enjoy the show.
@packmule3 I decided not to start this one because Link had me hooked. And I can only manage 1 drama right now because real life is keeping me very busy. I haven’t even kept up with 2D1N since Ravi left. Sorry. Let me know if it’s worth watching.
Awwww. I’m sad. 🥹
I’ll get back to you after I watch Ep 1. I hope it’s on Viki.
I’ll try this one.
Yoon Sang Ho: experimented director (River where the moon rise)
Jang Yoon Mi: wrote 5 movies but first drama, I’m curious.
About the actress, she should be ok, at least for aegyo. As ex-idol she already have a good acting experience. She don’t have a smooth and perfect face, what make it better, and beautiful gaze. Ex-member of the mostly fun and light girls-band SNSD.
General Choi’s choice:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQzu7NYlZNQ
(orange hair, flower in knotted hair)
Sad clip from Moon Lovers Scarlet Heart:
EPISODE 1
I am very excited about this episode.
High dramatic stakes, good logic, fast paced.
Focused writing (movie like), princely direction (movie like).
Let’s say it… not to be missed!
It’s been a while since I’ve had this kind of blast on a first episode.
It’s a bomb! 💥
********** SPOILER *************
10.
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BOOOOOMMMMM!!! 🤯
Admittedly classic but effective introduction. Starts with the girl (the heroine) to give depth, then… Historical recap, simple to follow voice-over (fairly short sentences or spaced out in time). With a good directing! Some details to notice, like the wilting flowers. Cinema quality montage. ^^
I wonder of course… was it better to tell this in a linear way, or to create more surprise about the heroine? While I prefer the second way, as long as the audience has read the pitch of the story, the linear choice is very valid. There is no point in making it a mystery.
Some outstanding guests among the actors in the montage!
Choi Yoo Hwa (SFL in RWTMR) and Lee Ji Hoon (SML in RWTMR). Funny, isn’t it? The director thought of his former partners. Of course he thought of Na In Woo, who saved his previous drama from sinking. 😉
Then it leads to the woman who married a man who is successful because of her. A president. There is a good logic, I can imagine the approach of the scriptwriter… A woman brings good luck, a superpower, someone can reach the top because of it. A king, or a CEO. A CEO who is much less noble and sympathetic to his wife than a king. A theme in the way people are exploited in our time?
The heroine is locked up in a golden prison (there is certainly a tale with that!) Socially maladjusted by this solitude. Her feet twitch, she is afraid of her supposed father. Seems rowdy and whimsical.
Then, a pretty bad part with the business intrigues. Entirely by dialogue. I was able to verify once again that talking about things or people who are not there and whom you don’t know… severely lowers the concentration of the audience.
Gosh! This CEO is even worse than I thought… He forbids her to read books that help to develop important knowledge and critical thinking skills of the heroine. This better explains the heroine’s weird personality. To be sure that his daughter will also be his lucky slave. Make ignorant to better control, this reminds me of something like analogy/metaphor…
Book of the Medusa: analogy with the heroine’s current situation, who is prevented from growing up when it is her natural aspiration. She reads mostly children’s books or fairy tales apparently.
Good cut to follow the action in the secret room, the main living room, with scenes from one to the other.
Soo Kwang: Supposed to be unlucky. I wonder how this will be shown. But for someone unlucky, it’s strange to see him reach a position with such rich people around him. Note: it is mentioned later, he makes up for his bad luck with talent and hard work!
Again some hard to follow dialogues, used to give everyone’s names and some info. But it never really works this kind of thing.
Jab: I don’t know what the mother is injected with and why. Sounds like an inhumane treatment. A candy to make the girl sleep, aaaaah, infamous!!!
The captive princess waits for the prince who will free her. A fairy tale!!! The door opens … I do not know why! Correction: the explanation is simple. She had a kind of contact with Soo Kwang through the door, that activated the lucky ability. So, by “luck”, the door opens only because he touched the stone without needing the eye scan. Using the high-concept. 🙂
Soo Kwang is now being chased by… a crazy girl! Or an eccentric girl from another world. Lot of clowning around. 🤪🤪🤪. Seul Bi has good general knowledge about everything not related to society. I wonder if she is good at math too?
Goosebump scene! Soo Kwang’s mother recognizes the pendant and knew Seul Bi and her mother.
I have a doubt that Seul Bi is the CEO’s daughter. Note: later confirmation that she is not, as he reserves Seul Bi for his son, whom she looks at hatefully. 😡
Confirmed later at 41:30, the CEO says “take care of your daughter”, not “our daughter”. I also have a doubt that the child in the picture is Seul Bi. It looks more like a boy.
Fluff scenes… the only thing missing is that the hero is said to be unlucky, except that we haven’t seen anything of that so far. So it’s impossible to perceive a contrast. For this, the hero should have been introduced before, but I don’t know how in the architecture of the script. Perhaps considered, but abandoned to keep the pace. A movie screenwriter could logically make this kind of decision.
Amusement park opened by… “luck”. ^^
Seul Bi cries thinking about Soo Kwang’s fate that she guessed. Hook!
Funny detail: the scene of Soo Kwang with his mother under the rain. One, he breaks his back to give her a hug. Two, the mother seems to be looking at the moon in the sky when he holds the umbrella.
AND SHIT!!!!! The – white – truck!!!!!!!!!! 😲
… driven by… we’ll never know who!
A guy who dozed off (by bad luck).
Maybe that’s what Seul Bi saw.
Maybe Soo Kwang is not naturally unlucky?
He became so after touching Seul Bi. She would bring good luck when she’s around, but bad luck when she’s not around.
Except… the white truck was a murder (Soo Kwang was targeted), and the maid who took care of Seul Bi will probably end up in a psychiatric hospital (or executed).
AND RE-SHIT!!!! The sledgehammer blow to the head!!! 😲
From then on, the situation is nightmarish especially for Seul Bi!!!
An INCREDIBLE chance… the fisherman had not reported the death of his son! And yes… it is like that in the old villages too far from the city hall. 🤠
TIME GAP, 2 years later… And yes, at the 3/4 of the first episode. Why waste time? ^^
The process is better explained. I was right! He became a jinx. So he wasn’t a jinx before he met Seul Bi?!
The CEO’s son seems to be more caring… But that’s until he will realize that he is the second lead, ahahaha.
He agrees to take her out a little. Of course, extraordinary coincidence, luck… Just where Go Myung Sung (new name of the hero) is. This will help her to find him later, the purpose of the scene.
Seul Bi mother has more than an oracle power, but a kind of convincing oracle power. Not telepathic control, but rather making a person obsess about what to do next. I guess it works on weak minds or people with poor destiny.
On the way out, the mother touches a kind of blue table on purpose. As if to imbue it with a power of luck/unluck. But I don’t know what it did.
Then she has to sacrifice herself (was it really necessary?). What happens to her afterwards? Prisoner again?
Everything is going too fast to know how Seul Bi found the way to travel (money) because the conclusion of the episode requires… Reunion of the two leads at the end. Yellow umbrella! With a song that starts with a good guitar intro.
FLASH, end image. 🙂
Wow. Thanks for the detailed recap, WEnchanteur.
It just showed up on Viki so I’ll try to catch a few minutes of the show before heading to bed. 🙂
@Pm3, with all this good stuff, paradoxically, the acting performance is the least remarkable. As it’s fast paced with a lot of details here or there, you should find things.
——–SPOILER———-
I forgot to mention, but when the story goes 2 years later, the reason why we get the time gap is because: it’s the right moment to escape. We see a dove flying, then the mother make a divination ceremony. Certainly, she see it’s the good moment. Probably she know there will be this tourist group, she steal a big white hat and put it on Seul Bi. Looks like a “dove” fashion look, then Seul Bi fly away with the tourists. 🙂
With @WE’s recap I thought I would give it a try. 😂. I was a bit put off by the trailers and how ditzy FL was. But after the explanation in the first 5min, it made sense. So I stayed to watch. The story flows. Yes there are plot holes if you think really hard but if you just follow along, it’s not too bad. The FL is growing on me.
Questions after Ep1
– SuGwang’s mom looked at a photo taken when he was a child (with another woman). She saw the necklace on SeulBi’s neck and remembered a woman she took a picture of who had the same necklace. Just so happens that the woman was SB’s mother. I was of the impression that SeulBi’s mom was kept in seclusion by the Chairman? Hence SB was born in confinement and stayed in that hidden room for 20years. Then the next scene has SB’s mom thanking SG’s mom. Does that mean SG is actually SB’s mom’s biological son? Which makes SB and SG essentially half siblings? Same mother different father? So same father? Is Chairman SB’s father? Hmm… is SG then SB’s brother? 🤔
This isn’t particularly taxing for me to watch so I might just stay.
^Or same father? (Sorry typo)
@nrlle, I made the mistake to watch a trailer too. Feeling like I was spoiling myself. I was:… ok ok… rom-com fluff… ok ok, now I saw the best of the fluff in the thriller… Shouldn’t have done that. YAAAWWWW, should I really watch that?
Do you think there are plot-holes already? I don’t see when.
I expect the high-concept will be farfetched sometimes in the next episodes. It’s the kind of concept a writer can stretch at will, depending on the plot. Should be Ok if it don’t lead to big contradictions and the twists and pace are good enough (then I forget the small holes).
I cross fingers it keep on the good I saw in first episode. As it (sadly) comes from a manhwa… I have doubts. 🤞
@nrlle, CEO isn’t SB father.
It’s not sure SB have a father. Can be a “Marie the virgin” kind of birth, Oracle have daughters without father. And not sure they can have sons.
I don’t think SB mother is SG mother.
The photo and how they meet is a mystery! Let’s see that later. 😉
@WE the reason why I thought there wasn’t immaculate conception was because of the first 5min. Where one of the shaman ladies bedded the King and said there will be a daughter? And the King said she would be a Princess?
Plot hole 1 – SB’s mom had mind control abilities. She could’ve used it on the ladies any time in the past? To stop them from injecting her etc. So escape could’ve happened much earlier.
Plot hole 2 – I don’t know how SG survived being zipped up and then dropped into the sea/lake. Fisherman who rescued him couldn’t have been around when it happened. He would’ve been well and truly dead when the fisherman netted him.
Plot hole 3 – MinJoo (?) 2ML rich son and his friends didn’t even notice that SG disappeared from their company? They weren’t that drunk.
I am wondering if what happened to SG in the 2years is what would befall the men who used the Shaman powers for their benefit. Karma. Where if they ever lost contact with the Shaman, they would receive “bad luck”/misfortune as a result. All the misfortune that should’ve befallen them had they NOT encountered the Shaman would now revert back to them. Making it look like they always bring bad luck to anyone they meet.
Okay, Ep2 revealed that (as @WE suggested) the shamans aren’t human. They are different. Thematically they are following The Little Mermaid. SB wants to be human because she has fallen in love with SuKwang. This is a fun watch, nothing too hard so I might stay. 😂. For NIW. SB’s character is supposed to be ditzy because she’s supposed to be childlike. Still her ditziness is a tad over the top. I much prefer her in her moments of rational thought and when she’s serious. I can tolerate her then. There’s not much happening in the acting stakes in this drama. Much of it is fluff so far.
Heeeeeyyyyy! I thought you weren’t going to watch this, @nrllee. Glad you’re here. 😘
@packmule3 me too. 😂. But I got sucked in. It’s fluffy and I don’t have to think too hard so I’m watching for now.
FLOP!!! Episode 2 goes back to “this is your normal fantasy rom-com drama”.
It hardly works after such a great episode 1. Or at least I’m disappointed.
I’m still hooked enough to see the follow-up though…
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@nrlee, your plot-hole list. Yes, I had noticed all that, but it didn’t bother me.
Plot hole 2: lack of time? will be shown later? the writer manages to get that across by not showing how he is saved, thanks to a line from Seul Bi that predicts he survives. Not really a plot hole, but a hole nonetheless.
Plot hole 3: it would be more like a scene hole.
– The first time is even weirder, what is this guy doing wandering around in someone else’s house like a rude man? But since Seul Bi was tapping on the door and only he could hear him, it’s ok. Kind of like a guy who hears a siren.
– When he leaves the party, his friends should have realized that he had left before. It would have been better if there were more people at the party. Here they just invite a few girls.
Plot-hole 1: I kept it last because it is interesting.
-> It’s a plot-hole by omission.
Something not done before, rather than an inconsistency triggered after. There are several possible cases from the screenwriter’s point of view.
– Case 1: the screenwriter didn’t see the hole. This is the kind of plot-hole that is difficult to detect. Or it was in the manhwa as a basic idea, and taken as is without discussion.
– Case 2: the screenwriter saw it, looked for various ways to explain it. It can’t be changed (otherwise it would change the whole story), it just needs to be justified. However, the various explanations to do so became too cumbersome and time-consuming (for little narrative interest), so he chose to sweep the situation under the rug, as it was better to keep the inconsistency than to waste time justifying it.
– Case 3: the screenwriter knows it and will justify it later when possible, a reason like “we had to wait until Seul Bi was able to use her power” for example. The main problem with this method is that until the drama gives an explanation, the audience may think that there is a plot hole.
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I’ve experienced this problem… So at the stage where the drama is in the form of structure. Complex, very difficult to handle, impossible to detect.
And later on in writing…
Oh shit! This situation could logically not happen at first.
Now I’m thinking… Actually, there is a deep reason why this could happen, but the audience won’t know it until 2/3 of the way through the drama. I might have run out of luck and there can’t be an explanation. However, I think that the intuitive process of creation and inspiration only reveals a story that is already there, whose hyper-links are already present. It’s quite logical that there is a valid explanation hidden. And it makes me think that I need to consolidate that reason a bit beforehand with various touches (which I couldn’t do since the problem was invisible to me).
2/3 of the way through the drama, it’s too late! I have to weigh the situation, is it bad enough to have to justify it before? I thought so. But I couldn’t waste much time on that. So I used 3 lines of dialogue in one scene, and 2 lines in another. This is still weird, but it can also be used as foreshadowing for the real explanation.
Anyway, it will have to be done that way. Otherwise it involves a restructuring process so complicated that I’m not sure I can make the story stick, and it involves too much rewriting on too many episodes. Such a hell I just can’t think about that before all is finished about corrections.
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Episode 2, 07:56.
I pointed out that Seul Bi took the cab without money in episode 1. But the screenwriter made sense here. The taxidriver arrives and asks for his money. The ML will have to pay! This is the obvious gag that comes to mind as soon as you imagine the situation. So there is probably something better to do and the screenwriter found something better.
Look at the scene: it’s pretty heavy. The cab driver has to say one line in which he recapitulates that he is a cab driver. It’s not good, but preferable, because nobody remembers the face of a cab driver, even 5 minutes later. Then, a lot of loud discussion, screaming. The scene wastes a little more than a minute of screentime.
I’m sure I would have solved the situation the same way. And probably I wouldn’t have had more ideas for the gag, rather less. Were there other ways to solve this?
Example: when the heroine takes the cab, she has a gold bracelet on her wrist, and now she doesn’t have it. (very subtle, the audience can make the connection that she paid with it, but difficult to see).
However the screenwriter is very clever about the logic of the scene.
– He chooses to show that she could have paid with the gold bracelet. This is rejected by the cab driver (quite logical), otherwise there would be no gag at the end. But by showing the gold bracelet, it dispels a potential hidden hole.
– Then, the ML agrees to pay the cab… except that then, the amount is exorbitant! (better gag!)
– The cab driver gives the explanation, and that clears up another plot-hole: Seul Bi didn’t know precisely the address and which “lucky fishmonger” it is. Not annoying for me, but other viewers could have seen this as a plot hole. Now it makes sense that the cab must have visited other markets before, inflating the costs.
So, with all that, it’s not a waste of time! The scene has a high degree of entanglement, between logical plot-hole resolutions and comedy.
This gives me confidence in the drama. 😉
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Last: Episode 2 there is a subplot with the gang chasing Seul Bi. I’m not fan of this because the gang situation sounds a lot like a plot-device. But Ok, I made that too with school bullies, so I won’t nitpick! It needs foil for the story, revealing characters and maybe some others support characters helpful later (the local gang boss).
Here: we can admire the director job during the chase. Lot of aerial shots (drone-like). Made me think a bit about Sisyphus the myth. As the content of a chase scene is always a bit empty (that don’t move the story forward), at least it was beautiful.
I’m in! Watched the first two episodes last night. I expected this actress to bug me but she actually won me over with her two hand wriggly waves and her interaction with the autistic? Asperger’s? Tik Tok boy. I hope they become friends. I’ve decided to wait for next weeks episodes to get more info before I dwell too much on plot holes. The son is different from his father for now but how will he turn out?
Annyeong 🌼
I am watching this too. 💗
i like the penthouse and secret floor. how many years in that place without leaving? cruel! SB’s mom has no desire to leave? i’m glad she’s helping her daughter at least – to get her to live her life outside.
I also noticed the plot holes… but whatever haha. the truck of doom again folks. ay yay. is this a korea thing? i can’t believe the mom just pushed SG away without saving herself – always the case with these scenes. the mom is meant to die. ok. blah blah.
@nrllee plot hole 3 – i agree. it’s kind’a weird. but i feel like it shows how the guys see SG as *invisible. like it’s all about themselves and the girls. who cares about the poor guy.
the 2nd ML’s dad is really evil. shows how he got this far, i guess. ruthless man. i’m glad to see our 2nd ML has a better policy of treating his lucky charm. hope he stays good and not evil to SG. That they stay friends.
Just like @nrllee, I am also wondering about SG– why is he in the picture with SB’s mom? it makes me feel like he’s a son, thus, sibling to SB? hmmm
i like the scene at the amusement park when SB crowned SG as her prince. too bad they didn’t do the rides and all that.
@WEnchanteur, your recap is cool and funny.
O good more joining for the ride. I decided not to pick this drama apart and just watch it for fun. I find the other stall holders in the market annoying. Their jokes go over my head because it’s language based so they aren’t particularly funny for someone who doesn’t speak Korean. I am just watching for NIW and his interactions with SB.
The second ML (MinJoo)? He’s hard to read. I think because his acting isn’t as nuanced as IW. With IW I can tell straightaway if he’s feeling sorry for SB just by his facial expressions. With the actor playing MJ I can’t tell?