Hello Miss eps 9-16(end)

[meganbmoore]

Short version:  This would have been awesome if it weren't a kdrama.

Anyway, to keep it fairly brief, as a lot of what i'd say would just be repetition:

I love all the individual elements:

1.  Female clan heir struggling with a complicated family situation.

2.  Hero whose grandfather was once a servant on her estate, and made the family fortune from a stolen cow.

3.  Family conflicts and objections that make sense, and that don't villify the families.

4.  Secondary heroine in in opposition to heroine not because of romantic conflict, but because of childhood jealousy and feelings of ostracism.  Heroine's brother has same problem.  They bond and help each other get over it.

5.  Hero is sweet, angst free, and well adjusted.  Heroine has the angst and complicated life.

6.  Clash between tradition and modern life, and far reaching results of clinging to tradition.

But then we add in the love triangle with Chan Min endlessly pursuing Su Ha, even though he knows she likes Dong Gyu, and vice versa.  Honestly, he has a lot of good qualities, but they got buried by pushing him into the standard role of the secondary kdrama guy endlessly pursuing the heroine.  Then there was the whole bit where Dong Gyu and Chan Min have to fight (with Su Ha as the prize) to see who gets to inherit the business.  These things added nothing to the show and dragged it down big time, even more so than they do for me in other kdramas, because they felt shoehorned in.  Honestly, in these eps, I pretty much just FF-ed through Su Ha's scenes with Chan Min, as well as through any scene with her best friend(no other character could make that one endurable.)

Honestly, it's a good show, I liked all the characters except Su Ha's friend(she was amazingly annoying and served no purpose save to cause trouble and provide supposed comedy relief) I liked the conflict between tradition and modern life, and want vs responsibility(and ESPECIALLY that it wasn't one or the other, with responsibility being bad) and how it sought a compromise between them, not one winning out over the other, and I definately liked that it didn't take the normal routes to villify characters.  But it needed to dump the tropes and stick to the main story, and needed to be several episodes shorter.  (But then, I think most kdramas need to be shorter.  Even Fantasy Couple and Lovers, my favorites, wouldn't be hurt if an episode or two were shaved off.)

All that said, the last half hour, with Hal Mae going to Seoul to chew out the grandfather(still the most darling one in dramas outside of 1% of Anything) for not agreeing to Su Ha and Dong Gyu's marriage and the grandfather going to the clan elders to beg them to let them marry, but Su Ha and Dong Gyu thinking he was going to have it out with them, was amazingly entertaining viewing, for all the right reasons.  (And in Chan Min a "country person lost in Seoul" magnet or something?  He's always the one to find them.

Comments

[filmi-girl.livejournal.com]

I'm glad I skipped this one. I watched the first episode and it just felt way too formulaic kdrama-y for my tastes.

Thanks for the recap!

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Actually, it avoids a fair chunk of the typical kdrama formula. The problem is that most of the typical kdrama formula that's there is shoehorned in, and drags down the story.

[alexandral.livejournal.com]

Honestly, in these eps, I pretty much just FF-ed through Su Ha's scenes with Chan Min, as well as through any scene with her best friend(no other character could make that one endurable.)

Me too, I was ff-ing at the end quite a lot, looking for the brother/evil girl scenes that all were great.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

As I was watching, I realized that the parts I was just skipping were the standard formulaic stuff(chan min/su ha and the hero's family plotting, and all I was paying attention to were the scenes with the pairings, his aunt(the really businesslike one-btw, was I reading that right that she was lesbian? These things are so amazingly conservative that you sometimes need a magnifying glass to pick up on these things) and grandfather, and the plotty stuff with her family and the old people on her estate. I suspect the book was more a comedy/drama with a side of romance, and they redid it to be a normal kdrama.