@anonybean, thanks and wow, that's a great alternate ending! I confess to being so annoyed by the insane twistiness of the plot, and the overarching power of Noface compared to the limits our good guys had to work within, all of which could not quite be explained by any logic of the dramaverse, that I gave up. I watched sporadically and without enthusiasm. Your ending, however, would have kept me hooked until the end. 😆

I dropped that drama exactly when that marriage thing started because of exactly the reasons you pointed out. So the only thing I can shout out to your version in total appreciation and bewilderment what could have been and what i would have liked to see:

F**k Yeah!!!

The rollercoaster emotional ride with this show was really tiring. It started with excitement, then confusion and ends with me wanting to throw few things to my monitor LOL.

I still wish Su Bong was characterized as a stronger sidekick who really kick ass and actively helping the main characters instead of a sidekick used only for gags.

I did not like where the story was heading after episode 7 but just like you @anonybean, I also watched all the way to the bitter end, hee.

I loved your version of retaining the first/original No Face, as well as the "drama" you wanted to happen between Kang-chul, Yeon-joo, and Yeon-joo's dad. Anyway, thank you for writing an interesting and creative alternative ending 😊

Well done! While lots of things about the way this drama went in the second half needed fixing, I would feel much better if KC got his memories back...they lost me with the Kang Chul 2.0 etceteras started popping up!

Great ideas. The writer herself was stuck on this idea that creator and creation are at odds and thus dad and Kang Chul couldn't both end up alive. As an artist, I think that's a pretty misguided relationship. Your ending where dad and Kang Chul are willing to sacrifice for each other is the opposite: creation and creator save each other. It's really a shame the writer was so stuck on that duality.

This is sooooo good, @anonybean! I agree with everything you said. I still didn’t mind the noble idiocy/amnesia plot in the seventh episode… that is until Kang Chul 2.0 got on the romance train again.

It was so inorganic. It felt like he didn’t really love Yeon-joo but since he learned from the manhwa that he loved her BEFORE, he just kinda accepted that and all. I wanted him to fall in love with her AGAIN but instead all we got was angst. I know, I understand, the stakes are high and most of the time in the drama was spent on trying to BE ALIVE and romance can take a backseat but I just hoped for more build-up. Something that I can believe in. Instead, it was like, okay, so the romance is back, you guys! But nope, no time to dawdle and make it feel organic. It was like I was forced to like the romance still because they’re ~inevitable~ no matter what so let’s just get on with the show. That’s not how you do it, Show. Still, I wanted a happy ending for them but it wasn’t because of the romance, it was because I wanted Kang Chul to be a ~real boy~ in the ~real world~ being ~happy~ and being happy meant Oh Yeon-joo.

I think it all unraveled from there, not only on the romance front, but in everything, as you've eloquently stated and discussed.

I still like this drama because it was really engaging but I don't want to sit down and think about it because I know my liking of it will fall apart once I really get on the nitpicking. Hahaha

Great submission! Loved reading it and I wish this could have been what happened huhuhu

Remembering those scenes, I too was rattled by how yeon joo didn't confront kang chul about shooting her dad but then I suddenly remembered yeon joo's stupid dad provoking kang chul unnecessarily, at that time it did make sense to me as a viewer(the fact that kang chul shot him out of pure rage, not the fact that yeon joo didn't seem to mind it).
But I was STILL onboard all the crazy hijinks until, the plot derailed towards the end & I found out I wasn't the only one left with no idea about what the heck actually happened, or what they served at the end was a conclusion that made no ultimate sense in the universe of "dramas with senseless endings", I swear I found the ending of arang & the magistrate better.

I almost forget that the wrost ending in last year belongs to this drama.

I came prepared to fight because I personally think W is the best drama ever written.

But you made a lot of really great points. My one issue with this writer is that her female characters are weirdly passive and spend a lot of time hooked up to IVs while the action passes them by. (I mean this literally, BTW, have a look at her other dramas and count how many times her female leads pass out. It's insane). So she never writes dramas where the male and female leads have a true partnership, which is the scenario you described. She came the closest in this but fell short. Yeon-Joo was always just a supporting part in a man's story, whether that story was her father's or Kang Chul's. My inner feminist was disappointed by this and I'm often surprised this writer is female.

My other issue with this drama was also that Kang Chul never regained his memories, especially when she could have restored them with a stroke of a pen after their reconciliation. Having him fall in love with her again was emotionally satisfying but then, as you said, I felt like he was missing half their relationship.

But, to me, these were quibbles in what I thought was a work of pure genius. The ending was complex and left my mind reeling but once I thought it through I loved it.

Ultimately, this was Kang Chul's story. He was the one who gained self-awareness and he was the one who was controlling it. W ended exactly the way he wanted it to - with the main character dead so there could be no sequels. If he'd lived in the Manwha then there was always the potentiality of more story and with that potentiality, the world would continue to exist. He wanted the story to end completely and it did. With no lead character and no author, it was finally completely over. The Manwha world is gone.

The reason the show was called W was because there were two parallel worlds, ours and a second one. The manwha was a bridge between the two like the two Vs overlapping in the letter W. That world continues to exist but the bubble universe version of it is gone.

As for her father, he was ultimately killed by bad writing which I completely loved. By writing a poorly-crafted antagonist, he was the story's antagonist. Everything Kang Chul went through was because of him. That's why he lost his face because there were never two of him, there was no manwha antagonist. He was always the bad guy.

W is an allegory that questions if humans truly have free will and the lengths a human will go to possess it. In W, KC represents humanity and its desire to control their own life. Writer/Daddy (Creator) represents a god. In this drama, KC thinks he truly has control of life but realizes that he does not. Once the Creator realizes that KC is self-aware his response is to end the world. KC response is to kill 'god' in order to assert his existence and free will.

Though not well-executed, the Creator used the world of W to deal his own issues. He became the person he always wanted to be in reality through his characters. He liked being able to manipulate the characters so much that once they no longer served a direct purpose, the character ceased to exist. This placed Creator and KC at complete opposite odds. Kang Chul wanted to control his own life and destiny. Having the Creator be a collaborator in ridding the world of No Face still places him as an authority in KC's life, and essentially gives the Creator another position of authority. The Creator becomes father-in-law and teammate as well.

The fight in W, and where the writer lost sight, is not between No Face and whoever else, it's between Creator and KC. No Face was a poorly introduced plot device that made the story fall apart. So, for me, I think had the story stuck closer to creator versus character, W would have been analogous to a Greek tragedy than a mushy mess t.v. series.

This alternate story arc seems so... conventional. It gives the viewer exactly what they would expect, like a menu from a not very good chain restaurant. I much prefer the original story line.