shall we go to sapporo

eun ah and dong man using terms like "brilliant" and "shining" to describe each other and their dream lives is just so beautiful because when you consider the main theme of the drama being worthlessness combined with them relating a 500 won coin to finding happiness in a day and to dong man fishing out that coin from the gutters versus eun ah collecting a bag to sprinkle around dong man.......

I'm absolutely losing it over how protective dongman and euna are of each other without either realizing it!!! euna sticking up for dongman every chance she gets, even as it further alienates her at work. throwing the rock through the agit window and later saying "yeah, it was me." telling his entire ex-friends group "he's brilliant and he's mine" in the place they gather to shit talk him, where there's a sign taped to the door banning him entry. dongman confronting her ex and calling him out for using her, for not putting her on the pedestal she deserves!!

he tells her this......

what makes romance in park haeyoung written kdramas so special is that the characters never explicitly say “i love you” or even share many outright romantic moments.

absolutely genius of rf kuang to elaborate on virtually nothing about speer's culture. the only things said about speer are "speerlies are mindless savages" and "speerlies are most definitely not mindless savages". there are no deep dives, no explanations of their way of life, nothing beyond the glimpses that disproves nikan's belief that they are nothing but a violent group. we saw that they had leaders that cared about their people and children. we saw that they are people who found joy in life. but that's really not much.

I will never get over Fang Runin who didn’t have the privilege of having a heart. She destroys her uterus and any chance of having a family and writes to no one in her hometown because she can’t afford to be distracted from her studies the way that her classmates can. The people around her open up about their past and their feelings and she can’t comfort them, she can only tell them to be stronger because that’s all anyone ever told her. She falls in love with someone who betrays her because his whole life’s purpose is creating a future that she can’t exist in. She actively refuses to see her enemies as people because she couldn’t live with the choices she made if she stopped to think. She couldn’t even hang onto the love she had for her best friend, the one person she loved more than anyone and swore to always protect, because she is so consumed by rage and grief and despair that in the end, she kills both him and herself.