Dear X Who Doesn’t Love Me: Episodes 7-10 (Final)

by DaebakGrits

As our bite-sized drama wraps up, it concludes in a typical fairy tale fashion — with our heroine learning a valuable lesson. But will this positive message be enough to undo our leading lady’s questionable actions that have not only affected the men she’s dated, but her loved ones, too?

 
EPISODES 7-10 WEECAP

Goldilocks and the Three Bears is a nursery tale that is often perceived as a cautionary story warning children that it’s dangerous to wander off on their own, otherwise bears — or other types of predators — might harm them. Except, the moral of the story doesn’t quite fare so well when you realize that Goldilocks is a self-absorbed home-invader with no respect for other people’s (re: bears) belongings.

So, what does this old nursery rhyme have in common with Dear X Who Doesn’t Love Me? Well, Hee-soo is kind of like Goldilocks, in that our dramavella wants us to believe she’s a sympathetic victim on the path to self-enlightenment. And while that’s an accurate depiction of her characterization, her road to becoming a better person is also littered with the men she’s put under her literal spell.

After last week’s episodes, I wanted to hold off on my judgments of Hee-soo’s behavior until I saw how the story addressed her actions and the journal’s magic. Maybe there was a more palatable take on the situation. Like, what if the men who dated her really did like her, but her self-esteem was so low that the magical journal was a delusion she created to rationalize why they would like her? And what if the men all dumped her after a month because she self-sabotaged the relationships with her low self-esteem?

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case, as we discover in the opening moments of this week’s episodes, when we return to Joon-young’s conversation with Se-jin. She asks him about his dating experience with Hee-soo, and he describes feeling as though he was possessed. He even says he’s disgusted by his actions now that his head is clear — but apparently not so repulsed that he continued to use her after the spell had worn off.

Two wrongs don’t make a right, but this dramavella seems keen on glossing over our heroine’s behavior, using the convenient plot device of magic (**spirit fingers**) to distance her from direct culpability. Her backstory also makes her more sympathetic than her magically love-struck exes, who have been portrayed as one-dimensional jerks. So, it seems like this story is just going to ignore the men’s lack of consent because they’re less pitiable than Hee-soo.

Back in the present, Hee-soo and Shi-ho have discovered that the journal is missing, and Hee-soo openly mourns its disappearance. She admits that she enjoyed her dating escapades, which is disgusting to hear since we just found out — make that confirmed — that the journal takes away her victims’ ability to consent for the duration of a month.

Her confession makes Shi-ho suspicious that she’s hiding the journal, and as he searches her room for it, they tumble onto the bed together — a moment that is charged with sexual tension. Hee-soo remains flustered and unable to face Shi-ho the next day, but her limited brain function doesn’t prevent her from following Shi-ho’s advice that she should pursue song composition.

She applies to be the songwriter for a campus band, and lead singer KIM DO-BIN (Bang Jae-min) likes her lyrics so much that he asks her to become the songwriter for their band. Hee-soo agrees, but under the condition that he teaches her how to compose her own music.

After a montage of Do-bin and Hee-see collaborating and looking cozy together, it comes as no surprise that Do-bin uses a rather serendipitous fireworks show to confess his feelings for her. But, of course, Shi-ho overhears Do-bin’s confession and drags Hee-soo away — not because he’s jealous. Okay, I’m sure his jealousy is part of it, but when they’re alone, Shi-ho accuses her of using the notebook again.

I can’t say that I blame him for thinking this, given how unremorseful she was about her previous behavior, but his words hurt Hee-soo. He doesn’t believe in her sincerity, and if his condemnation had been an arrow, it would have struck the bullseye of her biggest insecurity — that she’s unlovable. It’s a belief that’s so ingrained in Hee-soo’s being that even she questions the sincerity of Do-bin’s love confession.

Hee-soo tries to drink away her sorrows, but she drunkenly twists her ankle and has a nice cry-fest on the sidewalk, which is where Do-bin finds her. He gives her a ride home on the back of his bicycle, a romantic move that also happens to be her biggest fantasy. Hee-soo has only shared her fantasy with Se-jin, and it’s at that moment that Hee-soo realizes Se-jin stole her journal.

Hee-soo confronts Se-jin, who’s pale and literally sick from trying to write in the journal — a fact Hee-soo is either too self-absorbed to notice or is too incensed to care about. Instead of asking her friend what’s wrong, Hee-soo immediately begins accusing Se-jin of stealing the journal. I mean, Hee-soo isn’t wrong, but — dang girl — maybe show a little concern for your friend?

The two argue, and Se-jin finally unleashes all the feelings she’s kept bottled up for the sake of their friendship, and in the process she tells Hee-soo that Shi-ho likes her. Shi-ho’s affection for Hee-soo is palpable, which makes Hee-soo’s constant pity-parties extremely annoying and unbearable to watch, and having Hee-soo encourage a relationship between Se-jin and Shi-ho is like rubbing salt on Se-jin’s wounds.

Se-jin admits that she has the journal, but she refuses to hand it over. She says the journal should have come to her instead of Hee-soo, who already has Shi-ho to love her. She’s tired of Hee-soo acting like the victim and being the heroine of the story, and when Hee-soo questions Se-jin’s change in personality — is it a change in personality or her just dropping truth bombs? — Se-jin claims it was Hee-soo who made her this way.

After being forced out of Se-jin’s apartment, Hee-soo acts under the assumption that Se-jin has been writing in the journal. She seeks out Do-bin — and to show that she has undergone some character growth — Hee-soo tells Do-bin everything. Even the magic journal stuff, which he takes surprisingly well given that it would sound absolutely bogus to any sane person. Even more astonishing than his acceptance of Hee-soo’s story is the fact that he isn’t crushing under the influence of journal ju-ju.

That’s right, Do-bin has liked Hee-soo for much longer than a month. In fact, he fell for her all the way back to when Gang-wook confessed to Hee-soo. Wait… if Se-jin hasn’t been writing erotic friendfiction about Hee-soo and Do-bin, then what has she been doing with the journal?

…She’s been trying to remove Hee-soo’s name from the journal and destroy it! But no amount of burning or tearing has worked, and the more she attacked the journal, the stronger her pain and hallucinations became. Shi-ho, who also thought the worst of Se-jin, takes the journal and returns it to Hee-soo.

After speaking with Se-jin and Do-bin, who also pointed out that she does have people around her who care about her, Hee-soo experiences a personal renaissance. She’s determined to get rid of the journal for good and free Se-jin of her painful curse, but in order to do that, she and Shi-ho assume that she will have to write on the final page of the journal. Shi-ho panics, concerned about the consequences and how it will affect her future love prospects.

Before she writes on the final page, though, Hee-soo has the idea to return the journal to the place where it all began: her father’s house. After putting the journal back on her father’s bookcase, he comes home, and they begin arguing because he assumes she dropped out of college. Their fight is interrupted by the sudden sound of his bookcase breaking, and as Hee-soo’s dad begins picking up his fallen books, he comes across the magical journal. And then he finds another one — wait, what? There’s more than one?

It turns out Hee-soo’s magical journal was part of a set that belonged to her mother. While Hee-soo reads over the words her mother wrote while she was pregnant with Hee-soo, we see that her mother — and father — loved her very much, even before Hee-soo was born. Among her mom’s many written wishes for her daughter was a desire for Hee-soo to love herself — whoop! There it is, folks, the moment we’ve been building up to, and it is here that all of the pieces start falling into place.

After Hee-soo was born, her mother’s illness got worse, and — thanks to a few misheard conversations and her father’s busy work schedule — Hee-soo assumed her father blamed her for her mother’s death. If she’d never been born, then maybe her parents would have lived happily ever after. The reality, however, is that Hee-soo was the reason her father was able to keep living after her mother’s death, and he is apologetic for not being clearer about how much he loves her.

I question the fragility of their relationship, though. Yes, he was presumably absent a lot, but it was Hee-soo’s grandmother who blamed Hee-soo — on multiple occasions, I might add — for her father’s unhappiness. So why are Hee-soo’s insecurities tied up with her father and not her grandmother, who actually spoke the words that made Hee-soo feel unwanted?

After reading her mother’s journals — and having a long overdue heart-to-heart with her father — Hee-soo realizes that the only person who has not loved her is herself. Once she acknowledges this, she opens the magical journal and begins writing on the last page.

The next day, Se-jin is well again, and when Shi-ho meets Hee-soo, he’s dying to know what she wrote on the last page of the journal. All Hee-soo wants to talk about, though, is her mother, and so Shi-ho has to forcefully stop her gushing in order to confess his feelings for her. He doesn’t care who she wrote about in the journal because he’s loved her since the first moment he saw her. He promises that he will continue to love her — even after he enlists in the military.

Yeah, that’s right, Shi-ho has decided that he and Hee-soo need some time apart — you know, so she can grow to miss and appreciate him — which leads to the most pointless time skip in the history of K-dramas. We jump ahead in time to watch Hee-soo perform the last set of lyrics she wrote in the magical journal. Predictably, she wrote a love song to herself, and in the middle of singing and strumming her guitar, Shi-ho shows up with flowers.

As far as bite-sized dramas go, this one started off strong, giving us some quirky humor and the promise of a more realistic look at relationships. The story even culminated with the message that we must love ourselves in order to find true happiness in a romantic relationship, a moral that strongly aligns with my personal dating philosophies. I also love, love, love the gorgeous use of wide angle shots in many of the scenes, but there were just as many awkwardly filmed close-ups of Hee-soo’s face.

Unfortunately, my disappointment with this drama doesn’t end with the cameraman’s fetish for Hee-soo’s eyeballs. After Episode 2, there was a noticeable shift in tone that matched the seriousness of Hee-soo’s emotional journey as she spiraled out of control and began unapologetically using the journal to cast a spell over the men she wanted to date, forcing them to fall in love with her for a month.

For obvious reasons, there’s a lot of ethical issues to unpack here, but the time constraints of this short format drama didn’t give it the appropriate attention it deserved. Instead, it glossed over the consequences of using the magical journal in order to focus on Hee-soo’s journey as she learned to love herself. The irony, though, is that the closer she came to loving herself, the more I disliked her. Good thing the same can’t be said of Shi-ho.

 
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