HIGH SOCIETY - EPISODE 3

At that moment, Gyung Joon realized that his sister might not be human after all...

So now this series is finally heating up. Sort of. The meanness has tapered off some:

Yoon Ha and Chang Soo make sure a drunken Ji Yi is home, safe, and tucked into bed. Later, Yoon Ha is summoned by Joon Ki because the customer that got her fired has been threatened and wants to apologize. After some wrangling, Joon Ki agrees to rehire her. The next day, Chang Soo and Ji Yi start hanging out more. He can't figure out why. In his mind, she "is uncultivated, poor and dumb," but for some reason, he wants to be with her. Ye Won plots to try and keep her position as head of Taejin Group, but her brother Gyung Joon and Won Sik (her dad) won't take her seriously. Later, after a company dinner, Ji Yi gives up on Joon Ki, telling Yoon Ha that the handsome chaebol likes our leading lady. The evidence: He told Yoon Ha about his life of poverty, he showed deference to Yoon Ha at dinner, and Yoon Ha also dined with Joon Ki's mother. Ji Yi heads to her house after dinner, and Chang Soo catches up to her. She admits to him that he's actually kind of cool, and that she could fall for him. Late that night, Joon Ki stares out the window and thinks of Yoon Ha, and contemplates love and fate...


"Hey! I could take you out with just my pinky!"

Let the shipping begin! Not that I'm all for the pairings, but I think in large part, that's what the show is about, and it's taken 3 episodes to give us just that. The whole different worlds thing -- chaebol v. commoner -- is likely a smokescreen. Especially since Yoon Ha is a chaebol, that's not such a stretch to ship her with Joon Ki. There are some dramas where the plot takes a backseat to the romance, and I think this is one of them. Chang Soo and Ji Yi are actually really cute together, and I find myself rooting for them more than the main couple. The more eccentric she gets, the more he falls for her.

Speaking of Ji Yi, I don't find her character's attitudes all that realistic, at least when it comes to the upper crust. Based on what I've seen, drama writers typically write their chaebol characters as mean, self-centered people. I'm not sure that I'd have my head in the clouds about how wonderful life would be with one or how moral or beautiful or romantic one of them might be. I dunno, there's a lot of people who've built their own reality bubbles for better or for worse, so I just need to accept it and chalk it up to her just being herself.


Sometimes blind dates don't turn out exactly as planned...

And Joon Ki pointed directly to one of the K-Drama tropes in the last scene. There were three encounters with Yoon Ha before they even really met. And it's a well-worn trope that if an eligible man bumps into an eligible girl more than once in a K-Drama, they'll fall in love or at least have some kind of relationship, whether or not they're OTP material or not. I find it funny that, rather than ignore the trope and pretend that it didn't happen, they trained floodlights on it and said "Here it is!"

It's gotten a lot better, for all of that. Before it was watchable, but because I was bored by stuff like this in the U.S., this didn't immediately grab me either. 'Heirs' was a serious tease, and I only tuned into that to see the star-studded cast (and oddly enough, Hyungsik played a chaebol in that show, too). The actors seem more relaxed, and there's some humor in it, too. The longer it goes on, the less like 'Heirs' it becomes. This is a good thing. I'm bumping the score on this one: they played some songs I like in the noraebang.


So if you press his back will it pause the show?

So, are you guys enjoying it? What do you think about the pairings? Obvious? Not so much? And where do you think the drama is heading from here? Let me read your take on it.
 

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