There’s one week left for Castaway Diva, and I have thoughts that I need to express.

I enjoyed the first half. It wasn’t exactly what I was expecting it to be, but that was ok, because I ended up liking a lot of the things it ended up being. The abuse was unexpected going in, but I think it worked well, and it instantly made me feel for the leads. But the father plotline has annoyed me almost the entire drama.

Why couldn’t dad just stay in the past? Why did we need him to show up again? Why couldn’t this have been a story about two young people overcoming their childhood trauma, about a family having a happy life, about Mok Ha surviving on the island and surviving being thrust back into society while also navigating the music industry all in what would have been uniquely her own way?

This is honestly one of the reasons I’ve moved away from Kdrama’s. I’ve gotten so tired of their constant need to throw everything and the kitchen sink into their stories. They can’t ever have a story that’s straightforward and simple. It always has to be a mashup of genre’s and subplots. And while I enjoyed many of the unexpected elements of Castaway Diva, this has definitely been an ‘everything plus the kitchen sink’ kind of story.

I don’t want to drop the drama, but this does seem to be how I always end up disliking or dropping a Kdrama (except when the drama is just objectively terrible or something). I go in all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, excited for the type of story the drama is portraying itself to be, then it starts throwing a bunch of other stuff in there that I don’t exactly like but put up with because I like everything else, then I’m over halfway through when I realize that I’ve been forcing myself to keep watching when I really don’t want to anymore.

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    One last minor complaint, but it was too jarring of a switch, in my opinion, the way the brothers completely changed their minds on whether they should reveal their identities to Mok Ha or not. It’s not the worst thing ever or anything, and I think if there had been an extra episode just before that happens to show the characters changing their minds, it would have worked fine. I just found it a little too sudden.

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      A lot of characters’ action (especially Ran Joo) in this drama seem on an impulse and the show isn’t even trying to make sense of it.

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