Reel Tastes & Travels – a light dose of entertainment to wake you up

‘The Love Triangle‘

In the immortal words of Britney Spears ‘sometimes I run, sometimes I hide, sometimes I’m scared of you, but all I really want is to hold you tight…’. Which pretty perfectly describes Mi-rae’s state of mind at the moment. 

Seeing Kyoung-nam’s face on Yeong-il, her ‘perfect match’ customized avatar in BOD is the trigger that pushes Mi-rae to finally understand her true feelings. Not without a lot of resistance and confusion though (which is par for the course with her). Notwithstanding her initial instinct to run away, she decides to give the romance with Yeong-il a try. It’s easy, it’s breezy and we get some insights into how Mi-rae answered the questionnaire on her ideal boyfriend. Honestly, it feels a bit like a schoolgirl’s idealised version of the perfect man (not helped by the flashback revealing some of her answers actually did date back to school days) and I think that may be the point. She’s so scared of an actual relationship that she’s built up an idealised scenario in her mind where she can’t be hurt. But I think without opening herself to that risk, she’ll find that the dating experience eventually lacks true emotion and is unfulfilling. And that’s the whole point of this arc. 

At first it just serves to make her see Kyeong-nam in a different light – as an objectively attractive person. It leads to several cringe worthy scenes where she keeps sneaking peeks at him while simultaneously trying to avoid any actual interactions. If you’re someone who suffers from secondhand embarrassment, I’d advise you to skip through a lot of these initial scenes. Ever ready to run from her feelings,she convinces herself it’s just a reflection of her feelings for Yeong-il given their identical features.

However, after a (harmless) drunken interaction after a work event, Kyeong-nam realizes both that Mi-rae is actually single, and that she may not be as averse to him as she claims. And it is game on! He decides to woo her and it is refreshing to see him showing some actual personality after so many episodes of his ‘stoic’ expression. It seems to be working…until Mi-rae goes to BOD to end things with Yeong-il and is reminded of her deep-seated fear of being hurt again. He is like the personification of her fear that Kyeong-nam’s feelings will change just like her previous boyfriend. His staunch reassurance that his feelings will be forever eternal no matter how much anything else changes (easy to promise given that’s how he is programmed!) may not sway her to him but it is enough to feed her doubts and cause her to break things off with Kyeong-nam. But she fails to see how much pain she’s causing herself in trying to avoid a hypothetical future heartbreak. I was ready to scream in frustration but thankfully the two of them have another confrontation where she admits why she pushed him away. Reassured of her true feelings, he swoops in and kisses her. Cue swelling music and…scene! 

Stray Musings

• Kudos to her friend for directly pointing out that her constant complaints about Kyeong-nam are possibly masking a crush instead (ala pigtail pulling in schoolyards)
• It’s sweet to see the start of Kyeong-nam’s feelings for Mi-rae. It may seem like small, inconsequential incidents but it is often from such small beginnings that feelings often grow. To borrow the words of Jane Austen, he was in the middle before he even knew he had begun.
• Bolstering up the main plot, there is also rivalry between Kyeong-nam and Mi-rae’s talents (Hwany and Yun Song) …one that Yun Song is currently losing. At the start of the series, I had held out hope that we’d also get to see Mi-rae being kickass at her job but sadly that has utterly failed to materialize. And with only two episodes to go, I think that ship has sailed (or rather sunk)