Letter #88: Doona!

Good morning, Erin.

Every once in a while, I feel…tuned in to the frequency of the universe, like I can sense the rhythm of my surroundings, see the various permutations of unfolding events, and, as such, guide myself along the path that will lead me to not just where I need to be—but to where I will find the exact place I want to be.

…and then there’s the much more common scenario where I prove myself utterly incapable of making a single good decision without you telling me what to do. 

In totally unrelated news, I watched Doona! 

Would you like to hear my thoughts? Oh, how nice of you to say yes! 

1. I think we can start with a quick roll call:

• Suzy (or, as I know her, Little Sister from Start-Up) as the titular Doona

• Start-Up Third Guy from Start-Up (mini-reunion! woo!) as Roommate #1

• the gangster from Sweet Home as “P” (Doona’s manager)

• the head of the mothers’ association blog from Crash Course in Romance as Doona’s mom

1A. …which means I’ve now seen Start-Up Third Guy in a show with both Big Sister and, separately of course, Little Sister from Start-Up. Which probably isn’t all that interesting, but it gave me a light chuckle. 

1B. Also: the show never tells us what “P” stands for, but I assume it means “producer.” Because that’s what it stands for in idol anime series. Which, yes, is a specific and popular genre of anime. Which I maybe have seen a little bit of maybe. 

1C. #WakeUpGirls

2. All in all, this show is…fine. I actually really enjoyed most of it, even if I didn’t think it was anything particularly special. I basically gave it a shot because Netflix promised it would be a lot of two people standing across from each other and staring longingly, which I’m all about, and I got enough of that (or close enough to that) to keep me happy. 

3. …until about Episode 6 or 7, where the show starts to lose me. And then completely loses me in Episodes 8 and 9. Because it is a rough third act, let me tell you. Which is what really dropped my rating from “yeah, it’s pretty okay” to “it’s…fine.”

4. That said…if you’re interested in Suzy’s feet, this is the show for you. Because 10% of the show is just looking at her feet. And I mean lingering on them, at that. Which, hey, maybe is them being accurate to the illustrations in the web comic. I’m just saying…I have my doubts. 

4A. Now, in fairness, there’s a thematic element about whether or not she’s wearing the socks Won-jun (the male lead) got her, so I think there’s some measure of excuse…for seeing shots of her having the socks on. Prior to establishing she’s kind of infatuated with him. After that, it’s just wanting an excuse to linger on Suzy’s feet. Which I’m sure made someone happy. 

4B. Or maybe it’s them being accurate to the illustrations in the web comic. Who’s to say. 

5. That Doona chastises Won-jun for staring at her every time he’s around makes perfect sense. But, like, every time she’s on screen at that point, she’s in profile, languidly smoking a cigarette like a French seductress. Of course he’s looking at her. EVERYONE should be looking at her. 

6. It did not escape my notice that no one ever calls her “Doo-na.” She’s always referred to as “Doona,” the pop star iteration of her name. (Yes, even when she’s called by her full name, it’s “Lee Doona.”) Though I can’t tell if that’s deliberate and significant, or a failing on the part of the subtitles. 

7. Speaking of subtitles: when the third girl in the harem enters the story, she’s fighting with her non-Korean boyfriend. Significantly, she’s fighting with him IN PORTUGUESE. Because he’s Brazilian—and so, in some sense, is she. This matters not only to her character but to the story. Do the subtitles ever hint at this AT ALL? No. Of course not. Because the subtitles on these shows never tell you that people aren’t speaking Korean. Ugh. Wait until the letter that’s coming…hang on, let me count…three letters after this one. Boy-howdy am I going to have something to say about this when we get to that one.

8. Okay, I just referred to Not-Quite-Brazilian Girl as being the third member of the harem, but I also recognize that she’s not actually interested in the male lead like the other two girls on the show are. So, we don’t technically have a harem (...which I’m using in the anime-genre sense, where it’s one guy and a bunch of girls are trying to win his heart), but this is totally set up like it’s a harem story—particularly when Not-Quite-Brazilian Girl and Jin-ju (Won-jun’s first love) move in with with Doona. I literally cheered when that happened. It’s right out of my anime cliche wish list. And I loved it. 

9. …for the three seconds it was a thing WHAT THE F*** SHOW?! I’ve literally read multi-volume manga series with this as the main plot. How dare you end it almost immediately after it started!

10. Doona keeps her apartment in pretty much the same state that I keep mine, which makes me feel bad for…well, for at least one of us. 

11. If you guessed immediately that I was going to side with the cute, short-haired high school crush in the main love triangle…you were right. Sure, she’s less of a character than she is a plot point, but she’s still cute and has short hair and isn’t a massive f***ing red flag like Doona is, so…easy choice.

12. …except obviously Doona being a red flag is part of what makes her so alluring, so of course I sort of fell under her spell for a bit. I’m not a robot. 

12A. Like, when she follows him to his job at the amusement park and then performatively whoops it up on all the rides so that he can’t avoid knowing that she’s there? Alarm bells for days. But…dammit, it’s charming. Really, really disturbing. And mortifying. And hot. 

12B. Also, that scene is hilarious. What a total nutjob. 

13. Speaking of: all of our main/recurring characters are really, really chill with Doona being, y’know, a megastar celebrity who’s just suddenly…around. I know I’m an antisocial self-pessimist, but that seems very unlikely, doesn’t it?

14. Any scene with Not-Quite-Brazilian Girl was fantastic. She was fun, funny, and full of good energy. She should have been utilized more. And she was totally #BestGirl. 

15. To wit: the pants gag. Won-jun comments on her ridiculous flouncy fringe-y pants, and she tells him they’re awesome and that she got them for Doona and Jin-ju as well. They walk and talk for a bit, and then they return to the apartment—where we see both Doona and Jin-ju have put on their flouncy fringe-y pants, as well. It was a quiet gag, but I looooooved it. 

16. One Spring Night connection #1: The subtitles tried to convince me that, early on in their friendship, Won-jun was calling Doona “Ms. Lee”—but I could tell that he was referring to her as…whatever the term for “teacher” is, because it was the same thing that the little boy called Han Ji-min’s character because she worked at the library. (World’s greatest detective!)

17. Speaking of Korean words, though: we get a flashback of Won-jun and Not-Quite-Brazilian Girl when they’re kids and her constant struggle to make him call her noona. I thought this was a brilliant detail to add on top of her even-more-childhood-friend-than-Jin-ju status as she entered the harem for Won-jun’s heart—because noona sounds so much like Doona, so it’s like she’s going to be in a fight with one rival for her “role” (childhood friend) and one for her “name” (noona/Doona). HOWEVER…this detail goes absolutely nowhere—because, while noona and Doona sound roughly the same to Daryl, they absolutely do not sound the same to anyone who actually speaks Korean. I looked it up, and asking that question gets you a lot of “git gud, scrub” responses from non-beginner Korean speakers. So, I was disappointed with a missed payoff that wasn’t at all missed because it couldn’t ever have been a payoff to begin with. 

18. At one point, Doona goes to a nightclub called Noise Basement. Which is just…such a clever name for it. Feels a little more punk than slick dance hall, but

19. One Spring Night connection #2: The soundtrack was emotionally manipulative—and it was kinda great. Not in small part because IT ONLY SHOWED UP WHEN IT MADE SENSE.

20. Credit where it’s due: this show takes great pains to keep the sexytime stuff hinted at rather than overtly indulging in it. Which, as someone who prefers to keep the heavy petting out of my non-sexytime content, I appreciate. 

21. That said, the big kissing scene has some of the worst sound design I’ve ever heard, letting Won-jun and Doona’s needlessly loud lip smacking sounds not only stay in the scene but be clearly audible OVER THE SOUNDTRACK FOR THE SCENE. I know everyone was going gaga over the scene because the girl is the one pulling the “countertop move” on the dude (which has apparently never happened in the history of ever), but all I could think about was that someone was pranking me with that noise. Like, there’s kissing noises, and then there’s dogs trying to eat peanut butter. 

22. I feel bad for Doona’s former bandmate, when they meet up, because they do the absolute worst makeup job ever on her. Like, she’s either got a birthmark or some acne on her face, and they just put a glob of foundation over both. Didn’t smooth anything out or try to blend it or anything. Come on. If even I can spot it…

23. One Spring Night connection #3: I’d like to say this connection is thematic, revolving once again around the issue of timing when it comes to love—but, no, it’s the f***ing male lead from One Spring Night being plastered over a bunch of subway station billboards in the finale. As if I wasn’t already desperate to punch the homestretch of this series in the face. 

24. We get another example of characters getting jobs at (what I imagine is supposed to be) an American food-and-drink franchise, here, and they are yet again given English names to use while working. I…don’t understand why this is a thing. Or is this even a thing? Wait, let’s ask the google machine if there’s a reason for…well sonuvagun, this is a real thing—and not just for American overseas businesses! It’s a way to get around the hierarchical nuances around addressing one another inherent to the Korean language. If employees use English names, it takes care of the need to consider (and this word is going to do a lot of lifting, here) status when addressing people who are functionally your equals at work. Wow, that was really interesting. And now I know. Good job, everyone!

25. Daryl, circa Episode 4: “Hey, Won-jun’s little sister is kinda cute. Let’s see what else she’s been in and maybe add them to the ol’ watch lisWHAT DO YOU MEAN SHE’S 14?!”

26. One of my favorite moments in the series is when Doona and Won-jun come back from a walk, and Jin-ju sees that Doona is now wearing Won-jun’s sweatshirt. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen…I’m going to call it “girl-to-girl anger”...but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a better portrayal of that perfectly pleasant, absolutely upbeat girl-to-girl anger that is dripping with knife-fight subtext below all the obvious niceties. It got the real meaning of the moment across to the audience without having to rely on doing the more typical “TV” version of the scene, where the conflict is over-performed by the actors for our sake but the characters in the scene are oblivious to the whole thing. I thought it was brilliant. 

27. Apropos of nothing, it looks like Lee Hye-ri is newly single. [shrug] I didn’t know she was dating someone, but…sorry to hear about the breakup, I guess. Or happy for them, if they weren’t feeling it anymore. Whichever. 

28. Speaking of breaking up—or, rather, of getting together, which is a thing you can do once you are broken up and newly single (...nailed that segue): I totally called the Roommate #1/Not-Quite-Brazilian Girl romance. I don’t know if that was something anyone didn’t think was coming, but I twigged it immediately. 

29. That they so quickly brush past the harem rooming together was bad enough, but the moment Jin-ju swings and misses with Won-jun, she’s out of the story for pretty much the entire rest of the show. It’s like they designed the sixth/seventh episode to specifically put me off. 

30. The pacing on this show is kind of a mess. It’s not a total disaster or anything—at first—but it very much has the feel of the too-faithful manga adaptations we often get in anime, where the studio pretty much uses the storytelling pace of the comic and fills each episode’s 20-minute runtime with however much of the source material will fit when it’s animated. That is, the episodes are not conceived or structured as single entities with their own arcs or purposes but as containers for whatever comes next in the sequence. I can’t say for certain that this is what happened here, but given that this is an adaptation of a webcomic, and given how familiar this feels to my oft-burned anime fan heart…I’m just saying, there were parts that felt very awkward, and maybe this is part of why.

31. …and—goodness me—I hope that has something to do with the last three episodes being the absolute shark-jumpingest sprint to the finish I’ve seen in a long, long while. 

31A. I know a lot of people have an issue with the very end of the series, specifically because our leads seem not to have found a way to be together despite their love for each other. And, yes, this is frustrating—or at least as frustrating as how it seems like this really isn’t the case at all, and, in fact, all those seemingly meaningless opening-title shots of Doona and Won-jun standing across from each other at different locales were not not meaningless metaphorical shots to set the tone but actually real, future moments when the two of them are together and keeping their relationship a secret from the public…which, y’know what, f*** you, show, I was already checked out on how bad the storytelling had gotten, but now you want me to play detective to get the true ending?

31B. No, seriously, the last two or three episodes are such a turn in storytelling—to say nothing of just how uninteresting Doona and Won-jun are as a couple (like, once they get together)—that I was more concerned with the whole thing finally ending than I was with the exact nature of the ending. We go from a steadily-paced development of the plot to a sudden series of progressively more truncated scenes that jump forward unspecified amounts of time and increasingly rely on storytelling by implication rather than the much more typical and upfront way the previous six or seven episodes have been told. This new way of unfolding the story assumes you’re mentally prepared to start reading into what you see rather than more or less accepting it at face value—which is not at all how the story has been told to that point—and relies on the audience being not just invested in the story but thoroughly bought in on everything that’s happened to that point. (Which, as someone who was checked out more and more with each new scene, I certainly was not.) Anything shy of that level of dedication to the show would make the more surface-level ending (that they couldn’t overcome the realities of their situations) appear to be the reality of the ending—which, regardless of anything else, made the last couple of episodes seem like a total waste of time, because the poignant, tragic end to their relationship is not the natural conclusion to the jumble of scenes that proceed it. Which means that anyone who was already losing interest was only ever going to be dissatisfied (and potentially confused) by the ending. And which means maybe half of the people who were still very much invested weren’t going to feel like they had any need to look for clues that what they were being presented with was just a cover for the happy ending they hoped the main couple would get. 

31D. All of which is to say that the ending—at a writing level—isn’t good, no matter which way you took it, with the “did they end up together???” point being mostly irrelevant to how well (or, really poorly) it functioned as an ending. Things were going wrong pretty much from the moment Won-jun and Doona hooked up, and the last couple of episodes seemed more concerned with getting through the list of details they needed to than with pulling the overall story together. Which is a shame, because the last couple of episodes really mar an otherwise entertaining trip and turn something safely above average into something notably below it. 

31E. …unless you’re really into Suzy’s feet, in which case this show is a triumph. 

And that was Doona! 

Fun fact: I wrote all my notes for this show on the front and back of a single, pink piece of paper. I happened to have a lone piece of pink paper (which had served as a dividing point between stacks of letterhead, I think), and I just felt like this was the show that it would best serve. And, helpfully, there wasn’t all that much to take notes on, which you’d never know from how long I managed to talk about it, but that’s besides the point, so it ended up being all I needed. And hooray for that. 

Three more shows in the bank and waiting for me to get my act together. But I’m hoping at least a couple of them will be pretty quick letters to wriSTOP EVERYTHING THEY’VE FINALLY ANNOUNCED THE RELEASE DATE FOR SINGLE’S INFERNO 3 YEEEEEEEEEEEESSS!!!

…er, I mean, that’s nice to hear. I’m sure people will be excited. 

More soon. Or, more accurately, more from my blindly hoping I’m not the worst at making decisions but then being reminded that I am in fact the worst at making decisions soon. 

—Daryl