Was It Love? No, It Was Not.

Okay, so I almost didn't finish this post because I knew I couldn't form a cohesive take-down of Was It Love. The issues with the drama come from so many different directions. But I need to put something out there to warn people away from this show, so instead this post is structured one issue per paragraph. It's different from my usual style, but what's wrong with that, right? So let me break down the (consistently) worst drama of the year and why it was so bad. (Also, this blog post will entirely use pictures of Song Ji-hyo's face, because it makes me laugh.)

The Importance of Wish-Fulfilment Stories
Was It Love belongs to a subgenre of rom-coms with an uneasy reputation. Netflix describes the drama like this: “When four very different men appear in her life, a single mother who hasn't dated in years begins to rediscover love — and herself”. This is a wish-fulfilment story; a show that screams easy watching, aimed at women, asking them to put themselves in the position of the heroine and feel irresistible. Stories like this tend to be criticised and dismissed, which I would argue is because media intended for women is judged by a different set of standards than media for men. But I think there's a necessity for these kinds of stories. They let their audiences breathe, live in a kinder world for a while. Why are only the fantasy stories with guns, robots, superheroes, knights and battles considered valid escapism? Was It Love is not immediately invalid for belonging to this genre - it easily could have been great. But it wasn't. I did not, for a moment, wish I could be Noh Ae-jung.

The (Ignored) Premise of Was It Love 
The first episodes of Was It Love make it clear that it wants to be no more and no less than a wish-fulfilment romantic fantasy – we open with the heroine, Noh Ae-jeong, plunged in massive debt by the boss of her sinking film production company, floundering to put together the box office success that will save her and the company. And then, one by one, four men enter her life, becoming involved with her movie and then her. It was a delicious introduction, and I was excited to watch all these men enter into her miserable life when her one priority was to make her movie. But Was It Love slips as soon as it finds its footing. It is not about rekindling old romance. It’s not about a woman rediscovering love and herself. It isn’t even about a woman being courted by four men. It’s not wish-fulfilling, it’s not romantic, and it’s not even fun by the halfway point. It descends into genuinely pointless angst and destroys most of the characters. 

I have No Ae-jung for Noh Ae-jung (Get it?)

I ought to say that Song Ji-hyo is admirable for even attempting to make such a terrible heroine likeable, but honestly, Song Ji-hyo's performance baffles me. In the dramatic moments, she gives me nothing, and in the comedic moments she is drastically over the top. And then there's just those moments where I'm gobsmacked that she was directed a certain way. Look at the scene on the side. This is a deeply serious kidnapping scene. I should be feeling something, but instead I'm just amused by her hysterical flailing (trust me, it looks even more ridiculous in motion). Is that really what they were going for here? I genuinely don't know. 

Still, Noh Ae-jeong is pretty compelling upon her introduction – she is shown to be a woman whose life is a rhapsody of misfortune. Every day is its own struggle. But that is about as far as her relatability goes, because I'm convinced that half of the struggles she faces as a producer mostly exist because she's incompetent. Every step of the way in this drama, it's the men that enter her life - the writer, the investor, the actor - who make her movie possible, not any skill of her own. These men don't even really believe in her skill! Dae-oh and Jin are faces from her past doing her a favour, and Pa-do is just intrigued by her because she's identical to someone from his own past. All of her success and acclaim occur through a time-skip, too, so I really can't think of any reason to be rooting for Ae-jung. Here you may be saying: Frabby, but what about her personality? And to that, Naive Reader, I say that any and all of Ae-jung's likeable characteristics are immediately assassinated. I'll be going into more depth on that further down, just you wait. 

These Assholes All Deserve Each Other
How am I supposed to root for any romance when the heroine and all her suitors are completely awful people?
Yeon-woo and his puppy love were nauseating. He essentially tries to insert himself into parts of Ae-jung's life where he is not welcome - in the past, discovering Ae-jung's pregnancy, he just decided he would become Ha-ni's step-father without discussing this with Ae-jung first. In the present, he decides that Ae-jung WILL end up with him eventually, even though he makes very little effort to woo her. I can't say I was disappointed when the drama totally side-lined him in the second half. Then there's Jin, who honestly, I did root for for a while. But the way he killed his decades-long friendship with Dae-oh over Ae-jung was a turn-off, amongst other things. Finally there's Dae-oh, the only one of these four who managed to make himself somewhat likeable by the end (in no small part thanks to the talent of Son Ho-jun, who is waaaay too good for this show). He spent no small amount of time torturing Ae-jung is private and professional spaces over the way their relationship ended. Well, what she did to him was worse, but still. 

Literally Zero Plot
So this show was shockingly good at letting the hours pass without a single hint of plot. The first episode where I felt legitimately frustrated by this was episode nine - until now, the goofy characters and situations were enough to make up for the severe lack of plot, but this episode especially was full of spaces in which they should have given us some information and didn't. At this point, withholding all these important things from the audience was pointless and basically just showed that Was It Love only had one card in it's deck to keep the show going: the mysterious reason Ae-jung broke up with Dae-oh all those years ago. It was working, I was curious, but putting so much stress on this easily-answered question left the fear that there was no way the answer could be satisfying.  And, surprise surprise, it wasn't. Basically, my point here is that the show made me spend an unreasonable amount of time watching the actors repeat the same arguments over and over, and all I could do was scream at the TV, "GIVE US A FLASHBACK ALREADY!" 

At episode ten, I could not fathom how they would make up enough plot for six more episodes. How did they do it? Trope soup. But we'll get to that.

The Kids Deserved Better
This show was often carried on the shoulders of child actors Uhm Chae-young and Yoon Sung-woo, who play Ae-jung’s daughter Ha-ni and Pa-do’s son Dong-chan respectively. Researching the two of them revealed that they’ve only really had blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearances in things until now - I can only pray that this show will, at least, lead them into bigger and better roles, because they were incredible. 

Everything surrounding Ha-ni is particularly upsetting because Noh Ae-jung is the worst parent in the universe. She loves Ha-ni, sure, but she showers Ha-ni with endless lies, denying her the right to know anything about her father and essentially treating her as an object she owns and refuses to share. Thanks to her, Ha-ni gets the impression that her father abandoned them, when actually it is entirely Ae-jung's fault that she never knew her father because she didn't tell him about the pregnancy. So Ha-ni rejects any contact with him for the sake of staying loyal to her awful awful Mum, isn't that nice? Witty, loving, sensitive Ha-ni deserved more.


Gangsters, In My Romcom? The Episode 14 Problem
Okay, let's talk kidnappings, shall we? My sister and I called this about four episodes before it happened - when there's a Gangster-related B-plot happening in the background of your boring rom-com, you have to assume at some point it's going to tie in. The fact that I expected this doesn't make me any less furious that it happened.

Back in episode ten, I truly hoped that the reason A-plot had already burned through its reveals was because it wanted to spend the remaining six episodes with the characters as they resolved decades of misunderstandings and resentments. Instead, three episodes were spent turning in circles and utterly wasting everyone's time.
The reason this kidnapping has happened now is that the writer's needed a quick solution to wrap everything up, rather than make the characters put in the hard work. This way, Dae-oh got to be a hero for Ae-jung and Ha-nee, earning back their trust. No difficult conversations required. Oh, and look! A quick way to reveal Pa-do's past to Dong-chan without his father just, you know, talking to him. How convenient! This is the perfect example of an issue specific to Korean dramas – the average drama is sixteen episodes, and very few have enough plot for sixteen episodes. Most dramas experience a dip in quality in the second half, where the writers just don’t know how to carry the narrative all the way to the end. Then things come back around in the last few episodes. Was It Love is one of the most extreme versions of this I’ve ever seen, where we go from literally nothing to gangsters and action and explosions and comas.

What Might Have Been
The kidnapping ended up presenting an even more complicated problem - episode 14 was both the product of bad, bad writing, and possibly the most engaging episode. Pa-do and Dong-chan's story was so lovely, so well acted, that I'm devastated the drama wasn't about them from the start. If it had been given proper roots, not left in the background of a far more boring story, it could have been something fantastic. That's the true tragedy here. Every so often there's a glimmer of the fact that this had every opportunity to be better. There was no need to write these characters as horrible people and subject me to their ridiculous interpersonal drama for 16 hours when this could have been a thoughtful story about unconventional families, resilience in the face of adversity, and how communication is key in a romantic relationship. This show had themes. So why didn't it do anything with them?