First Look at Yoon Eun Hye as Fashion Designer Lee Soo Yeon in Missing You
I know I’m never going to convince the fans of all three YYYs (Yoon Eun Hye, Yoochun, and Yoo Seung Ho) that Missing You really is quite shoddily written. I have no problem with that (the heart likes what the heart likes), but I scratch my head when folks try argue for a qualitative adjustment for a work. Take Lie to Me, a drama on my personal top-10 list, but I have no problem accepting that its on other people worst drama list since qualitatively it was just a big ole mess that worked solely because Yoon Eun Hye and Kang Ji Hwan were pretty much dating onscreen for our viewing pleasure. When it comes to MY, the reason the writing is shoddy is because there is no context for the narrative and the story isn’t grounded in any semblance of possibility. Horrible shit just happens, coincidences abound in the connections between the characters, and ultimately there is no foundation laid for the characters so that we care about all the horrific things that befall them. The rape scene was excruciating to watch because Kim So Hyun and Yeo Jin Gu‘s acting sold it, but the writing was terribly contrived to pile on the excess of woe on the female character. I cared because (1) Kim So Hyun was acting like her life depended on it, and (2) I knew this character was the future adult version played by Yoon Eun Hye. The writer didn’t lay the foundation for Soo Yeon or Jung Woo, so we are left watching wretched woe happen to good people (kids, no less!) and feeling appalled on principle when we should be feeling appalled on personal connection. Nevertheless, we’re now headed towards the adult section and I am completely rooting for Soo Yeon to become Korea’s most famous designer and kick ass all around because she’s earned it. Check out the gorgeous new still of fashion designer Lee Soo Yeon.
On the romance front, after four episodes I am completely on the Hyun Joon-Soo Yeon ship. I’m giddy with glee at the glimpse of the chemistry between Yoo Seung Ho and Yoon Eun Hye plus I like Jung Woo on principle because he’s a good kid but I don’t connect with him to want Soo Yeon with a guy that reminds her of the worst day of her life. Whereas Hyun Joon and Soo Yeon is so my cup of tea. The way he looks at her makes my toes curl.
Like you said, “the heart like what the heart likes” and for me, my heart likes….
The stills of Yoon Eun Hye looks amazing…. Love the clothes.. I want…!
And can’t wait for this Wednesday’s episode…
It looks beautiful Yoon Eun Hye, I love the change in the life of LSY, now a great designer and a successful woman. It is brave of the writer daring With This Type of situation, the show as a family falls apart after the tragedy, pain, madness and the hope to Which We cling like a hot nail
I thought only me who fell hard under YSH spell when seeing him gazed at the sleeping YEH in the preview.. His dreamy-full of love-bed room eyes are just awwwww~~~ Mesmerizing, swoonworthy… ♥ ◡ ♥
…How come HE IS NOT legal yet?! I love Micky, I truly do… But, my heart tend to ship YSH and YEH in this drama.
I remembered all those times when YooChun used to address YEH as noona during their X-Man days….and that is ONE reason why i cant bring myself to ship them in this drama nor watch it. I love YEH and YooChun, individually. But not together. It suck coz i adore SeungHo as well. He rocks my socks off as an actor (my forlorn puppy in those stills…sigh…) but that incentive is not enough for me to venture a glimpse of this drama.
Thank gawd for recaps
I liked this ;
” I like Jung Woo on principle because he’s a good kid but I don’t connect with him to want Soo Yeon with a guy that reminds her of the worst day of her life.”
That is God damn sooooooooooo true but since I team HJW , sorry koala I am not gonna get on Hyun Joon-Soo Yeon ship !
Thank you for showing us a glimpse of adult Soo Yeon. 🙂
I’m so glad she looks sassy/has personality in her fashion show. At least there’s an aspect of her life that she (seems) confident in.
Yoo Seung Ho = yum
YEH’s getup makes me think of girl groups these days. She look like she could fit right in with 2ne1 or something. lol. It must be the jacket.
Yoo Seung Ho looks darn good in the end credits. That worried, i’ll-only-look-at-you look and vibe he’s giving off makes my heart tingle with both joy and sadness for him. I guess I got my answer why his name shot up the search rankings last thurs/friday night.
I’m still not on the IMY bandwagon though. Waiting for the drama to complete its run before I decide whether to watch this or not.
The jacket reminds me of the one I saw in the just ended season of Project Runway.
The jacket is Balmain and 2NE1 wears them through their “Lonely” promotion and some “I Love You” promotion so your guess is correct. and btw, YEH also loves 2NE1.
I’ve liked plenty of dramas that I happily admit were badly written and overall guilty pleasures (I mean, I am an unshamed lover of Spy Myung Eol!) but I don’t think MY falls into that category. I happen to think MY is well-written and it has nothing to do with my love of the adult cast – they haven’t appeared yet, for one thing, and for another, each one of the leads has at least one drama I could not stand under their belt. I think it’s just a matter of opinion and different tastes – just like you and a lot of people were moved by Nice Guy and cared for the charcters immensely and i was utterly unmoved and so bored i ditched the drama four eps from the end.
I think there can be some, very limited, objectivity in evaluating writing (Shakespeare > Bertrice Small), but in the realm of a fairly competent kdrama-writing (which I think more kdramas than not fall into), it becomes subjective, IMO.
Hmm, am I the only one here who likes MY? I’ve watched all 4 episodes and so far I like how the foundation of the story has been laid, although it may not be everyone’s cup of tea. The premise of the story is indeed about the heartache of a first love, and I think the writing has been fabulous so far, not far-fetched at all. Gotta mention the solid acting from the child actors too.
I’ve watched NG too. It was good at the start, but I slowly started to lose interest and in the end I was rooting more for Maru-Jae Hee than Maru-Eun Gi. I probably only watched like 20 minutes of the last 4 episodes. And I thought the whole amnesia thing was overplayed.
But then again, this is a subjective matter. Can’t wait till the next episode of MY.
Me! me! Me! I love MY 🙂 I found it, so far, a very solid drama. It can always disintegrate later (dramas do so often enough), but for now it’s very good and I adore it.
Me too, I love Missing You. And I’m counting the days, hours, minutes and seconds to see the following episodes
MY is awesome! Never thot i wud love a melo but it is amazing! Cant wait for the grown ups!
Totally agree with u dangermousie. Personally think Missing U is better than “drama which has never-ended memory loss , what cognitive impairment going back to like a kindergarten kid due brain damage, then regain memory (and how funny the brain damage seems to have recovered together with memory regain which makes no sense at all)”. “Rape scene” tho is upset to be covered in a drama, but is indeed a common crime found in the society, more common than memory loss n regain n loss…. Carried on watching only because i like Song Jong Ki and Park Shi Yeon’s acting.
Also, just like how all the other people here expressing their opinion abt how they root for which pairing and not which, i m saying my opinion as well: that i def will not root for ysh and yeh. Yoochun and YEH all the way.
HHmmmmmmm I can relate and totally agree with your feelings towards Nice Guy (it’s totally 3.5 eps for me) and the subjective writing assessment of K-dramas but instead of Sly Myung Eol, it’s Lie To Me for me. . .
For me, I don’t know anyone who has amnesia. Maybe selective memory loss when they owe you money and does not want to pay you back..LOL
I think the writing’s great actually. And I’m totally with you. I was really excited about Nice Guy, but didn’t stick around very long as I didn’t care about the characters. I already care about the MY characters so much to want to stick around until the end. I cared about them enough after the first two episodes that what happened in the third episode meant a lot to me.
All the K-melos have improbable elements, but MY is bad writing IMO because there is no narrative context for the tsunami of bad things that keeps happening to Soo Yeon. We must assume she is literally the a character who has THE worst luck in the history of dramas (beaten up dad, tormented by school mates, meets cute boy and immediately he’s abducted and she happens to witness it and gets taken along, rape, the run over by a car, then everyone thinks she’s dead…).
It’s not the rape, or her bad childhood, or her being in the wrong place at the wrong time, it’s all of the above combined without any foundation laid. I find that exploitative writing – making bad things happen to good people to manipulate the viewers feelings.
I’ve written enough about Nice Guy so I won’t reduce the brilliance of its characterization and narrative prism into a paragraph, but I get why the drama can be cold. It’s got laser precision in carving through the bad things and making it mean something.
But I’m so glad you love MY~ I know how much you love melos!
Out of curiosity koala what do you think is a justified reason for all the bad things happening to her? What kind of narrative context are you talking about? I’m watching MY and thinking its awful and I have no clue how she deserves any of it but I can’t help thinking that sometimes bad things happen (granted not as bad as the things we see in MY but its drama land so I’ve learned to accept it…).
Its not about justification. Its context. It lies on the characterization. Basically the writer just dumped a bunch of evil characters with no context other thant they’re evil and they all did bad things to the girl. That’s just lazy writing.
@ Jinny
@Mars responded before I could. That is exactly the point I’m trying to make. You can like Missing You, and enjoy the writing, but objectively this drama is very poorly constructed. It consists of a series of “events” without context or situational flow. Coincidentally everyone is connected with everyone else and bad things keep happening.
For example – Soo Yeon’s rape – that is of itself a truly horrific incident and is enough to render her life destroyed and make me care about her overcoming the odds. I would rather she is a plucky ordinary girl who is shy and doesn’t have much friends and met a cute guy and then the kidnapping and rape happens. Also cut out the ridiculous car accident scene as well. Pick one of the many bad things and stick with it, it would work. It would be sad. It would be dramatic. But piling on is just bad writing, trying to show that Soo Yeon is the saddest most miserable heroine who has ever existed. Her abusive dad, her murderer’s daughter ignominy.
Yes, sometimes bad things happen, but a good writer would lay a foundation for why that narratively makes sense, and then lead us to the moments so we feel invested in the characters. Great melodramas do that. Poorly written melodramas are just a series of bad things happening all the time.
Are the events of MY probable? I will definitely agree that the answer to that is no. Are they possible? Sure, especially since a young woman of disadvantaged background is a lot more likely to be sexually assaulted (though probably not as a collateral damage in a kidnapping of her rich friend).
I cannot think of a melodrama that had a realistic (in a sense of ‘likely to happen’) set up. Take the much loved “I am Sorry, I love you” – the premise of a man with a slow-moving bullet in his brain, trying to get revenge on his birth mother and falling in love with the daughter of the man who threw him away is beyond insane. Or A Thousand Days’ Promise, with poor Soo Ae (who I think wins worst luck award from Soo Yeon in MY), being the world’s youngest Alzheimer’s sufferer who is also involved in a complicated cheating affair that would be enough to fuel ten makjangs by itself. Or Padam Padam, with its murder frameups, the hero alling in love for the daughter of the woman who tried to prove his innocence and the man who put him away (not knowing of the relationship) and the guardian angel who can unwind time. Or even the recently concluded Nice Guy, with its bizarre revenge plot(s), Eun Gi’s on-and-off amnesia (not to mention her inexplicable attachment to Maru). Or even the writer’s previous Can You Hear My Heart. I could keep going on and on. To me, all of these make MY seem ripped-from-headlines realistic. Yet, I happen to love all of the dramas I mentioned except for Nice Guy, which is a drama whose quality I appreciated, even if not loved.
I don’t really watch melodramas for a reflection of our world’s factual reality. I watch them for a reflection of our world’s emotional reality, if it makes sense. The set-up the unfortunate protagonists are faced in may be far-fetched, but what sells me is how they react to it, how they are shaped by it – if they react in ways I find realistic, if they resonate with me, I find the drama well done. If they don’t, I don’t. (I don’t mean to keep bringing up Nice Guy in compare and contrast so this will be a last time, but as an explanation – the on-off amnesia did not bother me. I had a problem, however, with never understanding how and why Eun Gi, with her personality as written/acted, glommed onto Maru at the start. Even thouugh amnesia is freakishly rare in real world, and falling in love with undesirable people is common, it’s the latter that bugged me because it made no emotional/character sense). Even something like Five Fingers, which is unabashedly makjang, keeps my interest despite events being piled on and on (unlike in most weekeday melos I listed up top) because more often than not, I buy the characters’ reactions. To me that is key.
And to me (I understand this is 100% subjective), the writing/acting/cinematography of MY combine to provide an emotionally true picture (thus far, this can always nosedive the way Bad Guy did *shudder*) and so I love it.
But I promise to drop it – it’s your (awesome!!) blog and you have every right to express your take on quality of MY or anything else without me writing lengthy screeds. I just wanted to explain why I don’t think MY is horribly written (though not the best written drama of the year either. To me, that award would go to Shut Up).
Ahh i see, thank you for the clarification Mars and koala 🙂 I’ll be continuing to watch though! I did find the car accident excessive and I can definitely see how the continuous string of awful events coming at her one after another without any narrative context is lazy writing.
Well at the end of the day, all reasonings for how poorly constructed MY is (according to some) and how awesome NG was carried out (according to some) are all SUBJECTIVE. The fact u think ur reasoning being objective is actually SUBJECTIVE too. I wouldn’t explain a whole lot to tell people NG is good/MY is bad, as different people think differently and have different aspects they look for in dramas. Personally side with MY (at least up till now, dunno yet for the upcoming eps). NC was good at the beginning, but sucked so bad towards the end. THATS IT.
I’m sorry but writing is actually one of the elements that can be judged pretty objectively and MY is pretty bad. You can say you like it but it it doesnt change the fact that it will probably fail a writing class. Writing is one of those technical things that should be assesed as good or bad rather than liked or disliked. That’s why it is possible to like a drama with bad writing because writing is something that affects at a more deeper level than the entertainment value of the drama itself. Its more likely that you like the plot/story but that’s different from it being well-written. The problem as koala said is context. The writer has good ideas but poorly executed. The writer has all these plot elements that he/she wanted to show but was very lazy in adding them. Its like sex without foreplay. Some people still enjoy it without foreplay some people don’t. But you cannot say that writing is just in the eyes of the beholder.
Nice replies Dangermousie, I whole heartedly agree. I am not a diehard fan of any of the actors/actresses either. I stumbled upon the drama because I had free time to kill and now I am hooked. I too do not think MY is written poorly and that the reactions of the characters are indeed logical. The writing is great especially for Dramaland. The direction that the director and writers are going with this drama is not only refreshing (for Korean TV dramas)but invokes a ton of emotion which is what a good melodrama is supposed to do. I look forward for the future episodes.
Amen! Well-said!
Oh god, he look like such a little kid… I’m going to go with Yoochun on this one.
I never for noona/dongseng relationship..even in real life or fantasy..but as you mention about the story line…I couldn’t care less too but the actors done a great acting which I love so far.I cried ,I can feel all what they are trying to convey..so far so good, can’t wait for the adults turn to convince me its worth the time to continue watching..I love Yoochun so far and from the stills can’t wait to watch Seungho..But I will never see any flaw with Eunhye..I just love her..I am curious with which guy has a great chemistry with her..I know a few drama she has good chemistry with main actor and second lead.Thanks Ockoala your opinion often made me see things differently..just like Lie to me..you made me watched the whole drama when I almost stop at episode 3…I love it and even collected the dvd and rewatched it often.
Totally agree, I love Micky with all my heart, but I just did not connect with his character, since the moment when Jung Woo left behind Soo Yeon, I got on the Hyun Joon ship … Also the chemistry between Yoo Seung Ho and Yoon Eun Hye is uff explosive, while I do not feel the same way about YEH and Yoochun… I can’t wait for the next episodes.
Alas! It seemed the downtrodden and heavily oppressed LSY came back very strong as JOY (must be used to neutralized her sorrows). This is what I expected her to be – to rise up from that dark sordid life she had back then and look to the future. .
Now episode 5 pray tell how it be. . . .
Oh oh oh Pick me!
I am completely on board with this drama for the good reasons you listed above, and totally rooting for YSH/YEH, I mean whatever their characters’ names are. Toes all a-curl with you!
The fact that she comes back as a strong designer is good, but I really really hope that means we see her working through ALL the trauma that came with it, as opposed to “Oh yeah, that was some bad shit there, but I’m really really strong.”
I am slightly (ducking now) worried about MY as YGJ the Elder. Not that either of them is better than the other, but I just don’t like watching Micky cry, and he is going to. Buckets.
It’s kind of interesting if they’ve set up a conflict where JW is desperate to find SY because of his guilt over what happened to her, whereas SY has left it behind and is equally desperate that it stay buried so as not to destroy her new life. Now that will be a heck of a first meeting!
But to be honest, it kind of feels like the first love thing really…isn’t. Their puppy love sort of pales besides the terrible events that happened. The intensity is about those events, not about true love. Like, I can’t see SY ever wanting to be with JW under these circumstances.
All of your points are excellent!
If JW loves loves loves her, wouldn’t he just kinda spy on her to see if she is OK, but leave her be if she is?
There is no constructive reason for her to see him, of course,unless it is something SHE wants.
It’ll be interesting to see if JW is capable of seeing beyond the demons driving him, and how SY reacts to the possibility of seeing him again. Having the intensity be around the damage they’ve suffered, rather than teen-age true love, makes it more intriguing to me. It’d be really compelling to see the conflict between their draw to each other, assuming it still exists, and the pain/horror/anger/resentment that seeing each other again could bring to the surface.
I wish there is “like” button for this comment area.
LOVE your perspective. And Jomo’s too.
I wonder how I could get the ability to see the depth of human being. Maybe I still am a selfish person.
*got to self-instropection more*
IMY love, and I can not wait to see the ep 5 and see the actions of adults.
This time should I disagree with Mrs Koala far I think this very well written IMY I was hooked from the first chapter, his argument is very substantial, it should be rather than Mrs Koala tastes.
I’m loving those stills. She looks so fierce and badass in the 3rd picture! I’m glad that her character seems to have put the past behind her and is looking stronger now. And her jacket!! I’ve been drooling over it since I saw these stills lol.
I also think MY is an average melodrama where the heroine is always unlucky and gets abused by the villain for no reason. The writer just insert the ‘rape scene’ to make it stand out of other K-melodramas. It actually works. Some people thinks MY is amazing because of that particular scene.
Have you watch to arrive at that conclusion? Because if you haven’t, then the assertion is hollow.
EEEP I cannot wait! I wanna see how her character develops!
haven’t watch it yet but love Yoon Eun Hye and the last picture in this post
that is why we are all here bcoz we all love to disagree lol!….The way MY is going I am totally with it all the way…I can’t wait to see YEH and YSH…From the stills and bts shoots you can see their chemistry….You can’t even tell the age difference. The way YSH looks at YEH wow that is something to look forward to and when they were laughing in the car during the shoot just so cuteeee….
thanks for posting of YEH drama.
I haven’t seen the drama but QUESTION please… So the guy that is stating at her while she sleeping… Is HE the main guy in the drama ???? If so… I’m totally watching this !!!!
Please someone/anyone.. Let me know !! 🙂
thanX !!!!!! 🙂
No, he’s the 2nd male lead.
Uh oh… I think I know what this mean…. They are totally not geting each-other. (T^T)
I’m not going to watch this. 🙁
Hey all. First timer. MY brought me here. Enjoy reading your comments.
I’m a YSH-YEH camp. To be frank, this is my 1st time watching YSH on screen. He’s really good – to top it, he has the most amazing smile & gaze…
Anyways, the age gap between these two aren’t so obvious in the drama, as the netizens are blowing it.
Can’t wait for the coming episodes!!