Destined with You (2023)

This show hates all the women in it

The writing hates the female lead and all the other women characters too, even the men to a much lesser degree. Hong Jo starts off dealing with work place bullying with an unfair amount of work assigned to her and that is absolutely all her teammate's fault. I know it's a cultural thing for the team to eat together or get drinks together, but these people are not obligated to spend time with her on their breaks and after work with her, especially if it's not on the company dime. Her constantly trying to friends with these truly mean spirited, shallow, selfish people is really pathetic. None of her work co-workers do anything meaningful that redeems them by the end of the show. The show treats the two women getting gossip about Hong Jo's office scandalous relationship or imposing on Hong Jo to skeeve on Jae Kyung as heartwarming "friendship". She's also later falls for Shin Yu who also treats her with near the same level of disdain. Hong Jo herself is a walking red flag, literally putting a weird drink to make someone unknowingly consume without their consent. The security officer had footage of it, but no one was watching or was concerned that some weirdo is pouring liquid into the glass from her own thermos before the meeting starts.

Jae Kyung after learning about this was fine with it, but this is much after he's gotten time to know her and more of his personality has been shown. Jae Kyung and Hong Jo match each other's freak, while Hong Jo and Shin Yu enable the annoying parts of each other. They are either annoyingly arguing or just doing lovey dovey moments later. They don't get to know each other as people like Hong Jo and second male lead Jae Kyung do. They actually balance each other out, bringing her cartoonish over acting down to being a real person while you can see his introvert layers peel back the longer they know each other, bringing out his warmth and quirks. Her moments with him are the only time she gets to have a personality. They build an organic relationship throughout the series. It made sense he would reject her confession when he had barely met her a few times and gradually fell for her once he actually gets time to know her. He's always there for her and never forces his feelings on her. It's a bummer that this is the healthy relationship that can never happen in this show. Jae Kyung is also the only one that has the most complete and interesting arc in the show, with him seeming like he's tempted to corruption which seems to be confirmed when it shows his role being a court enforcer chasing down Hong Jo's past self Aeng Cho. Jae Kyung turned out to be collection information as a whistleblower all along and brought down the corrupt mayor and he moves out of the house for a better life. Good for him.

This series also undercuts every single one of it's good or interesting ideas and doesn't bother to develop the main characters nor their main romance, choosing to brute force with tropey moments rather than build the connection, leaving a hollow feeling every time Hong Jo and Shin Yu are together. There was such potential to the work place bullying storyline when Manager Ma comes back to work and shuts down that behavior from all of the team members, but then totally annihilating her cool character by making her and the head bully Seo Gu be in love with each other and she ends up fighting another otherwise very capable leader whose brains are also scrambled by Seo Gu for no reason. He forcefully does a public proposal to Manager Ma who kept saying she doesn't want to marry and ends up marrying him. This creepy guy also felt entitled to drink from Hong Jo's thermos that she brought to work, just like the murderous stalker did. I hate how this show hates women having agency so much.

Of course Shin Yu happens to be dating Hong Jo's school bully Na Yeon who slaps Hong Jo for messing around with Shin Yu. And Hong Jo 100% deserves it for making both Jae Kyung and Shin Yu drink that nasty homemade liquid, intentionally to roofie a man without consent. Shin Yu fighting the effects of the love curse was a pretty good illustration of how creepy it is at first. She had the gall to be annoyed at him from being upset. Deserved more slaps. They make Na Yeon to be cheating (as well to what the main couple is doing) to try to lessen to how absolutely awful Hong Jo and Shin Yu's magically co-erced and stockholm syndrome relationship is. The spell work suddenly stops and never plays into anything that gives Hong Jo power or agency to help herself at all, it's only the impetus to force Shin Yu to be obsessed with Hong Jo. The set up where she offers the get rich spell to her co-workers goes nowhere. Hong Jo has zero survival instincts, choosing to open the apartment door because someone out of frame of the door video rang the bell even though she was strangled through the second floor window grates like an hour before, then choosing to go to the trap set by her stalker knowingly to "catch him" but with zero plan to incapacitate him and nearly gets murdered by him before she's saved like the useless damsel she is. They randomly let her have a backbone in the last episode, standing up to Na Yeon for the school bullying at the reunion, which again also had to be the guy in the situation to film and leak the video for Na Yeon to truly receive any repercussions, just to have her willfully put her own life in danger so male lead can be the hero. They didn't even let her shoo off the playground bullies on her own. They could have just had the male lead observe and be proud, but nope.

It turns out it was Shin Yu's past self Mu Jin that killed Aeng Cho and didn't even bother dying with her as it's revealed he's very much alive and fine burying the Aeng Cho's spell books in a scene at the end. It follows through to his current life where he doesn't let her choose how she wants to do, he just makes that decision for her and his current life follows that pattern of being that macho guy who will withhold information, be territorial, put her down then love bomb her echoing how his father treated his mother etc. The show tries to have it both ways with his self admittedly unhinged behavior caused by the spell and later having the characters suddenly come to a conclusion that the spells were fake even though we see that the magic is real, so his unhinged obsessive behavior is just him then if the magic is not real. The show also has her messing up the curse breaking spells and Seo Gu never being obsessed with her. The show should just have a clear stance on whether they want it to be real or not.

The other healthy and cute relationship that could have been was Shin Yu's bestie Lawyer Kim with Shin Yu's mom Yun Ju who was sick of years of being belittled and mentally put down by her husband which legally constituted the verbal abuse grounds for divorce which she has consistently wanted for a long time. She even says she kept having to postpone it for various things happening to her family and ultimately she gets back with her husband after he love bombs her into staying and she gets pregnant, which will most likely impact her career that she just re-started again. She was happy and free with a lot of commonalities with Lawyer Kim who respected her as a human being first and foremost. This drama is really terrible at actually seeing what is a good ending or how to get there except by accidentally Jae Kyung, though he also doesn't get to be with the woman he's got fantastic chemistry and genuine connection with.

The show feels like it was just weakly built around the striking initial imagery of ghostly dirty and bloody hands groping the male lead, without any connective tissue to give it a heart or soul.

Lees verder