Ooooh, very good review. 👏👏👏👏👏

The last part about the repercussions of JoJo's decision and what it means to us viewers. That's good. That's really good.

I really like this drama for the romance and also for the message it wants to convey in the society we live in. The drama is already beautiful, and this review helps make it more meaningful than I thought it was.

I was not a big fan of this drama. I really liked the questionning about the app. It was interesting, the good like the bad.

My issue was the characters. I found the FL too pitiful, I mean I'm not against tragedies, but too much make me feel that the only way the author found to make you like the character.

In a general way, I didn't understand their decisions or motivations.

For the actors, I really liked Kim So Hyun and Jung Ga Ram but Song Kang was below in terms of acting, it's the same in When the Devil Call Your Name, he is the weakest in the casting.

This show makes me feel like what would happen if BLACK MIRROR got trapped inside the world of Korean Dramas. Lol

This drama is a bit of a mess, I like it though, poor Jo Jo. She goes through it. I want her to love herself first though, I hope they address this.

To be honest, I never ended up finishing this drama- I struggled to root for Sun-ho because I couldn't get over him actively flirting with and kissing the girl he was pretty sure his friend was crushing on. Like, what a dick move?

HAHA "fool me twice? not happening" lmao. i almost got fooled again and i watched my first first love.

I’m not sure if I like this “two season” format. I like Love Alarm, but I wish that I’d waited until the second season was out to watch it. Thanks for the MFFL warning!

Reading this review, I somehow get a feeling the second season might take a thriller turn and introduce a virus to the app which distorts the feelings the app picks up which produces more conflict and severe grudges. I'd watch that.

I'm a little surprised at how positively this drama has been received by a lot of people. I thought it was terrible. I really wanted to like it because the premise seemed interesting but the characters frustrated me and the plot wasn't fun to watch unfold. It all felt very messy.

I almost feel like I'm missing something that everyone else seems to have understood when watching this drama. Maybe I'm just too old for this tbh.

I have been binging this drama for a week now. With Netflix, once you decide you want to watch, there are 8 eps of it so, you keep watching!!

Anyways, I mostly watched because I was curious about why that app came into existence and what exactly they are going to do with it and if there was Black Mirror kind of message.

The drama itself is not very good unfortunately. The characters are very old Kdrama stereotype. Candy female, rich male interest, poor male interest, bitchy/jealous second lead etc. etc. There is barely anything new.

The female lead has a huge trauma and quite possibly has PTSD or something like that but drama does not handle it very well. Instead, I was mostly very annoyed with her almost all the drama. Everyone is against her at home and school and it is quite hard to watch that cruelty.

Drama shows there were 3 guys interested in her w/o even trying to explain why. Out of them 2 have not even had a conversation to know who she is.

I could not root for the main couple because it starts off such a bad place. The guy knows he is flirting with his best friends crush and goes at it very aggressively. It was off putting. Plus, it was not this epic romance that you want to root for.

You could not root for the second lead because hello...Don't just watch on the sidelines with sad eyes. It is difficult to root for someone who does not even try to do anything about their feelings.

One of the pattern on the drama was how boys are fixated on one girl/boy and if they do not like them back, and even treat them very badly, keep looking at them sadly. Something about it just did not feel right to me. It actually feels very stalkery behavior rather than romantic.

Overall, I think it is a bit of a mess really.

Om My God ..I can't believe you made a review of this drama. I just finish it on the weekend (the whole 8 episodes) and I'm so excited to hear your review

I love the drama but one thing that I hate is Why I need to choose one?!

I'm Sun Ho team but Hye-young is not bad at all but I have set my heart to Sun Ho already, so if Jojo choose Hye-young, I'm going to cry out the river TT___TT

This is like a dejavu for me when I read Fruit Basket manga, I love both of the male characters but I like Kyo more and I am so happy because Tohru choose Kyo over Yuki and I like when Yuki realize that his feeling for Tohru is more like a son to his mother because Yuki yearn for a mother's love and they even give Yuki a girlfriend.

But in this Love Alarm it looks like the other around. I'm afraid that Sun Ho love for Jojo is because he's lack of mother's love and he so comfortable with Jojo and that darn apps, Sun Ho so depending on that.

Hye-young old fashion of wooing the girls takes a great points and looks like he loves Jojo as a woman not anything less.

But I just see that Sun Ho and Jojo completing each other because they are the same foot so one can cheer another and I just think that's perfect!

Jojo is so unfortunate to have a cousin like Gul-mi. I don't think I encountered such a character that you love to hate. Also, her so-called best friend? Can an app called Love Lens also accompany the Love Alarm? It can gauge how fuzzy your love lens is versus reality. Posting those photos of her best friend in the name of her crush is unforgivable.

No wonder Jojo had to have the affection of both boys for her life to be fair.

I think that this drama ended up better than the sum of it's parts. On one level it's just your typical High School to College age love triangle story, with the extra cliche of one guy being a rich heir and the other being the son of his housekeeper. But what elevates it, I think, is that the fantastical premise of the show is treated like serious science fiction. The Love Alarm app somehow senses your attraction (not really LOVE is it? It's attraction, a crush, a physical attraction...) and puts it on the network the app shares. But it has the drastic effect of Outing gay people and announcing your feelings to the world at large. But as the show demonstrates, it also subsumes people making their own decisions about how they feel. "Do I love this guy? Let me check the app so it can tell me." While it's true that culturally a lot of Asian cultures are much more hesitant than Western cultures so as a Western man I have to calibrate how I look at the characters for that cultural difference. But that being done, the show doesn't shy away from people feeling isolated and rejected because of the app. And as good science fiction often is an allegory for something the real world, that's what this show is. It's an allegory for the way that people use social media to connect with others but actually can become severely isolated as a result.

I do think making only 8 episodes was a huge misstep. The only way it would be ok is if Netflix wanted to base it on the ongoing web comic and was actually open to it being multi-season. Based on how the first season ended, I am actually not sure if the Love Alarm 2.0 app might cause enough problems that a 3rd season could unfold, but it would be interesting to see that.

Thanks!

Netflix totally fooled me! 😂😂😂😂

So, there's ep 9, right? 🤔 ska season 2?

I totally enjoyed your season 1 review. After reading it I went straight to Netflix to watch the drama and thoroughly enjoyed it as well. Thanks for the rec!

I finished this over the weekend (while trying to stave off Tale of Nokdu withdrawals, ha!) and liked it quite a lot - it's your classic first-loves kdrama story but with the Joalarm providing a darker background to it and forcing us to consider what feelings actually mean.

Kim So-hyun's wonderful as always (seriously, that girl has never given an underwhelming performance in her entire acting career, right since childhood), and she was the perfect choice to give a tragedy-struck Candy like Jo-jo some sense of having an actual backbone. Of the two male leads, I'm less than impressed with Song Kang. On the acting front, he's something of a weak link and KSH carries all their scenes together, he just comes off as a bit of a cipher but they do have fantastic chemistry and it's absolutely believable that these characters are attracted to each other - which, after all, is the most essential element of a love story. Jung Ga-ram does a lot better with the acting, even if he's playing another walking trope ie the lovelorn and silent second lead.

What I do find interesting is that the four-year time gap actually allows the characters to grow and change - Jo-jo starts pushing back against her obnoxious cousin (even if it takes the theft of her tuition money to do it, and for her aunt to passively back her up), Hye-young decides to stop being silent and actually woo Jo-jo (and why not, she and Sun-oh have been broken up for four years and Sun-oh even has a new gf). It's like the refreshing directness that Sun-oh had in high school, got passed on to him, and Sun-oh is in some kind of relationship with a new gf but his heart clearly isn't in it - quite a contrast from his high school days, when he would never have been that way. At this point, it's a real question about whether he'd be willing to set the app aside and express his feelings the way he did four years ago when he first met Jo-jo.

Joalarm itself seems like the dramaverse stand-in for instagram or any of the like-dominated social media, only with the added element that it can reveal your feelings without really needing active participation - plus I found it interesting that the anti protests mentioned data collection too, with v 2.0 threatening to get even more intrusive by predicting feelings. I'm looking forward to season 2!

So guys instead of arguing about who she should end up with can we talk about who is the creator of love alarm because it clearly was the boy from their school who created it but in the present time it looks like he was the one in the anti love alarm van saying bad things about the app in the last episode so now I'm confused.

Terrible writing. Shallow portrayal. Messy plot. I really tried liking it but I stopped at ep 4. I couldn't bare to watch more of it.
Was not impressed nor hooked. Just being honest! Im Just glad others "loved" it though. NEXT!