I came across a fan-made music video of the leads to Ellie Goulding's Still Falling For You and it convinced me to watch this drama for the longest time. I am sad to say that the FMV was far better than the actual drama.

The first thing I noticed was was the overall tone and style of acting. It was almost parody-like, and it felt like the acting was always dialed to 30% no matter how emotionally heavy the scene was supposed to be. I also had this issue with 2gether so I'm not sure if it's just a sign of the times, but the unconvincing acting made it so that none of the plot really felt emotional or high-stakes.

My biggest issue is probably with the social messaging, which turned out to be very self-contradictory.

So you have a main character who's only temporarily ugly because a procedure went wrong; this is actually a pretty good (and common) set-up for a previously shallow girl to realize there's more to life, but as the drama progressed the theme started getting muddled. There's a female character who's on the heavier side and the drama was filled with comments about her weight, but it was all played for laughs. Additionally, people would tell our FL that she just had to wait a year and then she would be pretty again, and as the drama went on, this did prove to be true and very quickly the drama changed from "women shouldn't let shallow judgements bring them down" to "women should appreciate men who like them when they're ugly, even when they become pretty again."

I felt a similar issue with the way the male lead's plot went — after so much character exploration around why he had to work so much and be so frugal and how it impacted his previous relationship, it would've been extremely interesting to see how his relationship with the FL would be different, considering that once again there would be a wealth gap. Instead, the drama went the easy route and made it so that he was secretly rich and there would be no family disapproval or long-term insecurity.

As a result, it felt like the drama focused instead on how they it was important for everyone to be ugly/poor (or pretend to be) at some point in their lives to test who really cared about them. The drama didn't explore the lives of anyone who actually was unattractive or unwealthy, and would never be able to change it.

I also just have a huge issue with how they destroyed the ML's character in the last few episodes. I liked his playfulness at the start; it was fun, albeit a little over-the-top sometimes, but playful MLs are my favorite archetype and I liked the he was genuinely nice. Once the female lead rejected him, however, he turned into a very typical Nice Guy™, slut-shaming her by saying her clothes were too revealing and she just wanted men's attention like all other shallow women, calling her a gold-digger who didn't like him because he was poor, and being stupid for not appreciating him for liking her when she was at her lowest. It made me not root for him at all and it really is the reason for my dropping my rating so much.

Despite all that, I still really think there is potential here and I wish the writing had taken itself more seriously to really reach that.