tldr: im no drama producer but the change in director threw this show down the drain. don't change the tone to seem more adult and mature if you can't follow through with the character development and dont add dystopian type elements if you're going to leave the storyline hanging. oh and holy shit please give sunoh a real apology??

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i dont really write reviews but dear god do i have a lot to say about this drama. i dont know if im even going to bother watching episode six as i've read the spoilers but i still think i can express my thoughts without fully seeing episode six. i want to preface this with my problems dont come from the hy x jj endgame, i know a lot of negativity is being written off for that reason but for what it's worth my own problems with the drama are more than the endgame.

listen if you want to tell your writers to go off the rails and let your new director take a completely different direction i'm in no place to stop you but i dont think i've ever seen it be done as bad as this. love alarm is a fantastic concept (the forever unmuted phone problem aside) and im disappointed it turned to this. i knew it would feel different - they're adults and far more mature than they would have been in season one but it didnt feel mature. it felt like they were trying to make me think everyone had grown up and the characters had developed even though they were still being written as kids in adult bodies. that's what made almost everything about jj/so/hy's interactions feel so forced to me.

in season one i could feel bad for jojo. when she said she put up the shield to 'protect' sunoh i could acknowledge that was a stupid decision that could have been fixed with communication but i understood why she did it, especially considering she was a kid. in season two she never considered either sunoh or hyeyoungs feelings and yet jojo kept being written as the victim? like how could you expect me to feel bad for her? shes an ADULT now... why is she still doing all that running she did as a literal teenager? she put up that shield without considering sunoh's feelings but i wrote it off as her being a kid. then four or so years later she never actually apologises to sunoh properly and would probably have let him live with the heartbreak if he didn't confront her after finally finding out what she did after all these years. she never considered how hyeyoung might feel about receiving that spear. when he first talks to sunoh about it in ep5 he's clearly gutted and emphasies to jojo later on that he would wait for her as long as her actions were sincere, implying he understands how the spear's love (for lack of better phrasing) wasn't actually real.

there are going to be parts in shows where you get confused, where you think that a different direction should have been taken. but when i'm consistently confused as to why this character would keep doing this thing then there's clearly something wrong. by ep three me and my friend were barely paying attention. everything we saw just made us irritated and we were so bored of seeing jojo keep running from her problems but not before trying to 'fix' them exclusively in her favour of course! there was no attempt at all to develop her character, she kept running and adding more fuel to the fire and then running again. sunoh wasn't developed well either, he was kept as this sad teen boy who's life revolves around whether jojo likes him or not and i get that the shield situation broke his heart but they're OLDER and MATURED and DIFFERENT now. if you're going to change the whole tone of the show to try and make it seem more adult then you need to develop the characters too.

parts i did like and things that could have been tweaked a little to become better imo. i thought gulmi was super funny, especially when she was going so out of her way to gain hearts. sure she's not really a good person but i found the things she did and her personality quite fun despite being as irritating as she was in season one. somehow she feels like the only character they tried to develop. i also found the dead bodies thing and the whole ringing world instagram account interesting but it felt like they just left it at what we had in season one. they threw in a couple shots of the dead bodies in this season, had a couple scenes that referenced it when jojo looked at her drawings and that was basically it. overall, i felt like the show was structured quite poorly? parts of plots were thrown in and moved on from too quickly and some like the dead bodies were just left undeveloped. but i think that's just a me being stupid thing lmao. oh i also liked yukjo too, i wish they built her up a bit more rather than just being sunoh's girl because this whole thing must have had a huge effect on her. this was truly such a waste of a great cast.

final thoughts, im incredibly disappointed as this had so much potential. nothing felt logical, jojo did things for what felt like no real reason and there was no real apology from her for literally everything she's done. there wasn't enough character development and i really felt like i was watching a different show. in season one i was absolutely jj x so endgame because they were just so happy together but now i would've just preferred no endgame. i couldn't see her and sunoh happening again from the beginning but i really don't get why they put her back with hyeyoung? no chemistry no real love no nothing between them. it felt so forced. also dont throw in dystopian type elements (the ringing world, whatever dukgu and brian had going on?) if you're not going to pull through.

edit: just finished episode six and my opinion still stands.