Loved this - in particular the Temperature of Love and Hyun-soo reading.

Thank you for sharing. I haven't met any of these women, but this makes me want to.

Love this. Thanks so much for sharing.

manic pixie dreambot

What every casting director is trained to look for?

Saya, ♥! This piece started out about your own thoughts, but by the end it felt like you were speaking for a lot of us. :') Thank you!

I completely understand this contradictory thing. How can you relate to polar opposite characters. How can they be a mix of you? I find it so interesting that you relate to the characters I find the most infuriating. Granted, i never watched any of the dramas you mentioned so it's highly possible id find myself relating to the same characters as you. But contradictory characters for me are almost a HUGE no no in my book. I lose patience with them so quicky, and theres always a fine line you tread when we watch them that goes from, wow i get it, to OMG JUST GROW UP. And im saying that FULLY knowing that im the worse of the worse, AND the most contradictory person of them all (im contradicting myself again). An example of this would be another goo hae ryung. I found her infuriating. And yes, she was bold, she was vulnerable. She worked hard. But she needed to move on.

ALSO, about jang geu rae: i luff him not because of the work place obstacles necessarily. But because of his life story and morals. He gave up his dream, and moved on with life. He was a misunderstood underdog and proved himself to the world. He will forever be one of my favourites and i strive to be as good as him.

@saya - such a great piece!

Even though I haven't seen Temperature of Love (yet - I have to say after reading this piece) I love dramas with what I call my 'difficult daughters': the women that people seem to find 'so annoying', especially for the first few episodes. I love the angry, non-comforming, rebellious ones and will man my one-woman barricade to argue that they're actually pretty awesome. ❤❤

I am also the type that will forever be disliked as a weirdo. Getting called a freak and crazy monster really hurts but I try not to show it. I actually think of going by the words of my favorit writer Hunter Thompson: "If you want to behave crazy you btter get paid for it!" so anyone know of a job wher you get paid to be crazy?

Lovely piece as always, Saya. I haven't watched Temperature of Love but I can say that Gong Hyo Jin and Kim So Yeon's characters in the dramas that you mentioned are somewhat similar to friends that I'm close with in real life. They can be infuriating but really these are women that I envy for being true to themselves, despite what society thinks.

"I’ve always had an irrational fear of being figured out. I can’t quite explain it, but I wonder if it’s because I’m so far from figuring myself out, that the idea someone else might know me–really know me–before I know myself, is somehow disenfranchising."

WOW. This entire piece nails how I have been feeling the past few months, but this snippet took my breath away.

As we often see in dramas, when the main character meets someone who truly knows them, they start to become that version (an often better version) of themselves. But at first there is lots of angst because what you're being told you are does not align with what you think you are or how you're acting. I think cognitive dissonance can be healthy and a motivator of change for the better, but god does it hurt. Growing pains, I guess.

Or perhaps we have always been this better version of ourselves. It just takes that cognitive dissonance related to our self-image to make us see it.

"As women, we’re meant to be sensitive, sensible, emotionally available…but what if we’re not?"

Ah. That's me. I have a personality like a typical guy -- I don't want to talk about my feelings, I could care less about fashion and makeup, if I'm just sitting there and you ask me what I'm thinking about, I say 'nothing', and it's true! It took a while to get comfortable with myself this way, but it's all good now.

Thanks for the lovely post, as always!

". If we create stories in order to be known, we consume them to know ourselves" - wow I love this quote so much...it is amazing to find characters we relate with and those are usually the stories that stick deep within our hearts

This was a very good writeup, and I loved your analysis on the Temperature of Love characters :D

If I were to add another woman, I see Oh Hae Young while reading this piece. May be together with another character that Seo Hyun Jin portrayed, the one in the drama with Han Suk Kyu.
All these characters aside, it is so good to read a piece like this. I mean, I wanted to express and write a piece like this, and now I’m here. And it is so beautifully and insightfully written on behalf of these female characters.

"I guess you could say it’s all about perspective: Relatability is in the heart of the beholder. If we create stories in order to be known, we consume them to know ourselves." THIS. Is incredibly true. Thank you for articulating it!

But more than that, thank you for sharing this piece and letting us know you, even if only in words (though written words can reveal much too). I think I got a bit teary at certain points. I've always loved your recaps and reviews, particularly your writing, and I think I now get to know a bit of why it is the case. Your mind is beautiful, truly.

I didn't get to finish IOTL, but I think I just might after reading your thoughts. Might also watch Temperature of Love too.

I fall in love with the women most people hate. The strange, disappointed kind, with hearts covered in thorns. They’re used to being misunderstood and disliked, they’re used to swimming against the current, but they refuse to apologize for not being palatable.

❤❤❤❤❤

I've only watched It's Okay It's Love but I'll be adding all the other dramas in this post cause @saya your words hit me square in the heart. It reminded me why I love relatably prickly characters like the daughter in Dear My Friends.

'I’ve always had an irrational fear of being figured out. I can’t quite explain it, but I wonder if it’s because I’m so far from figuring myself out, that the idea someone else might know me–really know me–before I know myself, is somehow disenfranchising.'

I think this might be a little true of myself as well, although I never realized it until the last couple of years. I think my loneliness and desperate desire to be loved was so strong that it hid the secret fear I had of people actually getting to know me and hating what they learned, because I've been there, multiple times, and that might hurt more than being rejected before someone even gives you the chance to show them who you are.

'But I’ve always wanted to be the same as everyone else: to be able to function in everyday life without every single thing being so hard. Maybe what I want most of all, though, is to be forgiven for being different in a way nobody else could really understand.'

I've been tested, twice, for Autism, and both times I've received a diagnosis, but there have been issues with both testing's that make me question the legitimacy of the diagnosis. I fit many, many criteria, but there are also whole sections of the listed criteria that I don't appear to experience at all, and it makes me think that maybe there's nothing wrong with me, and I'm just using this to make me feel like not such a freak. I've just always known that I was different and don't seem to have all of the tools you need to get through life successfully. But if there's not something Wrong, then it's just Me, and that hurts. It hurts a lot.

'They’re used to being misunderstood and disliked, they’re used to swimming against the current, but they refuse to apologize for not being palatable.'

I honestly wish I could be more like this, less ashamed of the things I can't really control about myself/the not so palatable parts of myself, because it would help so much.

Thanks for this write-up. It's beautiful.