Welcome to my weekly blog post where I give thoughts on dramas I’m watching but not recapping.

Next week I’ll be finishing recapping Love Between Fairy and Devil and I just started recapping Utsukushii Kare Season 1/My Beautiful Man Season 1.

This week I finished:

Love To Hate You – 연애대전 – 2023

A recently aired modern Korean romance of 10 episodes.

A female lawyer who doesn’t trust men and a popular male actor who doesn’t trust women meet and comedy and love ensue. Love to Hate You came close to being a rom-com I could love, though ultimately it landed at “I liked it a lot”. 

Main credit for nearly winning me over goes to the characters, in particular the female lead. She was a strong modern woman written in a way that didn’t make me grit my teeth. She had flaws, life experience, enthusiastic interests, an outgoing personality, and an ability to grow and learn. 

It wasn’t hard to see why our prickly on the outside, sweet and sensitive on the inside ML would fall for her. The secondary characters’ romance didn’t quite work for me, but they were caring and intelligent people. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen people sincerely apologize for their mistakes as often as in this show.

But to me, this clashed with the old-fashioned, Hepburn-Tracy battle of the sexes setup. It’s like they wanted to have modern characters in a classic, sexist, old Hollywood comedy. Ultimately, I couldn’t believe such deep, complicated characters would have such black-and-white thinking about the opposite sex. Their motivations and backstories for their extreme opinions also felt dated and simplistic. It didn’t help that they got over them fast.

The final conflict and ending were also disappointing. Like many comedies, they went with angst for the climactic conflict rather than a clever punch-line. I think they could have done something more fun with their characters.

Despite all that, the comedy and the characters still kept my attention and had me laughing. I really did love our main characters. “I liked it a lot” is probably the highest praise from me for a rom-com.

This week I started watching:

My School President – แฟนผมเป็นประธานนักเรียน – 2022 (Pictured)

A recently aired Thai BL, I’ve watched 3 of 12 episodes.

The president of the school has a secret crush on the singer of the problematic band club at risk of being dropped. In order to help the singer keep the club the president pretends to be his enemy.

The comments I’d been reading about this drama were so good that I’d been keeping an eye on it for a while. Seeing Gemini/Fourth in Moonlight Chicken finally pushed me over the edge into watching yet another school BL also happens to be a rom-com.

So far it’s as good as the comments promised. The comedy veers into silly and the characters are over the top and I’m laughing on a regular basis. Our singer is beyond dense and the lengths to which the president has to go to help him are both adorable and absurdly funny. 

While the singer is treating the president as an enemy, he’s still charming and kind so it’s easy to see why our president fell for him. There are no real bad guys so far, just characters with honest reasons for doing things that create problems for our leads.

I’m really looking forward to when the characters start getting past these extremes and start getting a deeper understanding of one another.