BLISS RATING: ★+
“There are things that exist but can’t be seen – like feelings that we tightly conceal and done want to reveal.” – Quote from Heesu In Class 2
Frankly, this series was a bitter disappointment and is ending up on my Bathos List. Oh, it is well acted, and the cinematography is breathtaking and perhaps that is what hides its flaws so masterfully. But its poor content is couched and guised in pretty words at times and nice surroundings. Take that away, and what you are exposed to is anxiety, fear, guilt, and the shame of queerness that is so prevalent in Korean culture and thinking. This series merely highlights their disquietudes about someone being gay in the worst possible way, I might add.
This is your usual and standard series about the misgivings of high schoolers and their bourgeoning into becoming sexual creatures. Some of them are straight while others are gay. Heesu (Ahn Ji Ho) is your supposed guru of dating expertise even though he has never really dated himself. Freely giving out advice about relationships. It was an odd way to initiate a series as one would have thought the story would then be centered in and around him. Unfortunately, it is far from that.
His best friend, Cheng Yeong (Cho Jun Joung) and he have been like brothers since their early years. However, something disquieting is happening within Heesu, as he now realizes that he is falling in love with him. However, Cheng Yeong develops a love interest in a female student by the name of Cho Ji Wu (Kim Do Yeon) who secretly is a budding singer by the name of Summer. She has a good friend Kim Seung Won (Lee Sang Jun) who happens to be the classmate of Heesu. Unbeknownst to Heesu, Seung Won is deeply in love with Heesu from afar. As class president, he secretly tries to get as close to Heesu as he can. To add to his dilemma Seung Won is Heesu’s next door neighbor and in fact both can see into each other’s bedroom.
This story shortly starts to unravel right after the beginning. It gets astonishingly convoluted and into all kinds of details EXCEPT the BL interest. There is a composition of mini-stories not related to a BL. They all superseded and frankly overwhelmed the plot. It goes solidly into the ‘straight couples’ relationships with gusto and detail (of which there are several). However, when it comes to the development of the relationship between Heesu and Seung Won, it is negligible and takes a backseat to everything else. When it is presented, it is unveiled as very dark, suppressed, and concealed.
Heesu does not seem to see anything (except Cheng Yeong) and is only peripherally aware that Seung Won is interested in him even though Seung Won’s overt actions are much like a mating bird in heat. Meanwhile, Seung Won is spineless when it comes to actually saying anything to make it clear what his intentions are or providing any clarifications of the meanings to his actions.
Even early on, there were opportunities for some emotional connection to be made between Heesu and Seung Won that would have been meaningful and showed even the slightest insight of being more than classmates with each other. But the usual banalities and truisms reigned supreme: I am naïve and stupid; I am in love with someone else and the other person knows it; too scared to open up; too afraid to find out who really is in love with me; misunderstand what the signs are; the time to talk about it is just not right yet; etc. As an interesting side note, Seung Won’s mother is in a loving lesbian relationship for years, which of course is kept secret. While Seung Won is accepting of that, he seems to have gained nothing from seeing his mother happy. One would have thought at this point, he at least would have learned something about gay relationships and had grown from experience by it. His timidity in not being more forthright and expressive in approaching Heesu cannot simply be linked to his lack of courage. It is a serious and weak character disorder, particularly when he would not clear up immediately the misunderstanding that HE allowed to continue unfettered about his relationship with Ji Wu.
The lack of communication between both was beyond the pale here. I GET that they were in high school, but honestly, to not see the trees while living in the forest is beyond any level of human comprehension. Even when given the facts, there are still blank looks on faces and pauses in responses. When will this nonsense about NOT being able to respond stop with gay characters, even a little?? It went the entire 10 episodes like this.
More abysmal than this was the way gayness was regarded. Just like a disease. It had to be hidden and pushed into the dark corner of the room. You can only confess it in the shadows. Talk about it in hushed, somber tones, late at night, alone, or with the infinite universe staring back at you, thinking somehow it was going to respond back to you.
Gayness became shameful, something that you could not share even with friends or family and would in essence be deadly if anyone found out about it. Only talked about it in the dead of night and in whispers. They did everything to put gay people back into the closet except not put a lock on the closet door. This did NOTHING to enhance, enlighten, or encourage acceptance of individuals who are gay. If anything, it merely showed how sad, pathetic, weak, unaccepting, shameful, scared, frightened, intimidating, and unaccepting it all is. Know your place. How much agony it will cause you. Meanwhile, the straight couple gets to foster a warm cozy relationship with everyone accepting of that as being normal. And they get to have a happy ending or live out a dream. I am not sure what kind of ending is in store for Heesu and Seung Won as there was nothing to go by at the end.
When you have to go overboard to pretend to be dorky or naïve and dense, the story falls flat and then apart. This is done because you have the wrong performers. It is so obvious that ALL these main performers are not close to being teenagers and that became obvious, as they ‘fake’ their way through their teenage emotions. Some are in their mid-20’s (and looked it) and simply cannot project the angst or the realism of anyone who is 17 or 18. They cannot. It all feels contrived and phony. How about using performers who are teenagers for teenage roles? Plus, as mentioned, the story went out of its way to pretend to be a BL but ended up being a straight story. All good things happen to them, after all. That message is quite clear. The gay couple became background noise and full of uncertainty.
Who really S.T.O.L.E. this series? Heesu lives with 3 of the most neurotic sisters perhaps on the planet. In and of itself, these three would make a wonderful sit-com series, as all three fostered such interesting and entertaining personalities. All were fixated on finding love with each having an idealized yet warped concept of what that is all about. To some degree, all three also influenced the way Heesu sees his own love relationship. The one constant, however, is that each of them deeply loved him and looked after him even though it looked at times that they were cavalier about it. Kim Han Na as Lee Hui Jeong, Park Kyung Hye as Lee Hui Jae, and Jung Ye Nok as Lee Hui Sin have perfect comedic timing and are just spectacular as three sisters trying to cope with one another and with a considerably younger brother with whom they really do not fully understand. In an oxymoronic fashion, the family dynamics at its core is astonishingly dysfunctional but still in a strange way a prime example of family attachment. Even when he gingerly approaches one of them and conveys that he is gay, her reaction is ‘sisterly’ supportive, yet it felt oddly distant. While it looks like the three cannot stand each other, they simply could not operate without one another in their lives. And that they portrayed with honesty and genuineness.
While I have not read the manhwa this is based off, this series failed to deliver as a BL. It did not tell a story; only presented circumstances. Ironically, we got the full picture of the straight couple(s), including a superfluous musical interlude and a tennis match. This is a straight story with two gay guys thrown in to try and make it be a BL. However, there was no intrinsic development of a gay relationship or even a foundation of a strong connection between them until the absolute end. What little we did see about their evevolment, was shown to be dark leading to uncertainty with misunderstanding assumptions and presented mostly despondently.
This is not a good series, and, in hindsight, I wish I had skipped it completely.
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