Dear M: Episodes 1-12 (Series Review) » Dramabeans

Dear M: Episodes 1-12 (Series Review)

by starrygazer

With two love triangles in the mix and a mean girl trope, Dear M is a story exploring first loves. When we first meet them, the photography class where our characters converge is a bubbling pot with the Dear M mystery. Who is behind these anonymous “Dear M” confession posts? Who are they written to? Everyone has their own suspicions, but bigger than who is how the Dear M posts affect our protagonists.

Editor’s note: Beware of spoilers below.
 
SERIES REVIEW

Our campus romance Dear M is finally airing in Korea, and with it we have the story of six students, who we follow through their lives and relationships at Seoyeon University. In the girls dorm we have MA JOO-AH (Park Hye-soo) who is a tad too “cutesy” for my taste. SEO JI-MIN (Noh Jung-eui) is one half of the “magnet couple” and very popular on campus, and HWANG BO-YOUNG (Woo Da-bi) she is type 1 diabetic and won’t put up with nonsense from anyone. The girls form a sweet friendship over the show that I enjoyed.

In the boys dorm, we have CHA MIN-HO (Jae-hyun) who is secretly in love with his childhood best friend of 12 years, Joo-ah. PARK HANEUL (Bae Hyun-sung) is the other half of the magnet couple and a “typical” boy in the sense that he has a hard time talking about how he feels, and GIL MOK-JIN (Lee Jin-hyuk), a neat freak psychology student who is desperate to be in a relationship.

At the crux of our story are the “Dear M” posts — the anonymous posts made on the university bulletin board Seorab that start appearing. They are confessions of love to a student in the photography class, and the goal on the posts is for the author (known as “Maple Latte”) to confess in person. This has the whole class in a buzz wondering who Maple Latte is and trying to figure out who the Dear M posts are aimed at. And incidentally, all six of our characters are in the photography class in question, taking it as an elective, and they get super invested in the mystery.

Let’s start with Joo-ah. She’s chipper, naive, and has a massive crush on MOON-JOON (Lee Jung-shik), who leads her on and even kisses her, leading her to think he may be Maple Latte. Joo-ah learns baseball lingo to get closer to Moon-joon, and when he suggests she become a sports announcer after watching a game together, that becomes Joo-ah’s dream. When Joo-ah finds out Moon-joon has a girlfriend, not only is she disappointed, but she wants to give up her dream, too. I really loved that her roommates talked her out of this pointing out it’s her dream, and you become a mix of the people you meet in your life. So there’s no reason to give up on anything.

What Joo-ah doesn’t quite realize is that while she’s been crushing on Moon-joon, her best friend Min-ho has been crushing on her, but he’s been trying not to get in her way. Min-ho is a very talented computer science student who lost his parents young and was raised by his older sister, who in his eyes made a lot of sacrifices for him. When Min-ho is scammed out of the money he was diligently saving up for his sister’s upcoming wedding, he is heartbroken. Poor Min-ho also ends up closing his current popular app down (which matches new people to eat lunch together), when it leads to a dangerous stalking incident involving Joo-ah.

Min-ho is not having much luck with anything right now, so when Moon-joon suggests they enter an app contest together, he reluctantly agrees. And after Min-ho has tirelessly built a new app from scratch, Moon-joon tries to buy it from him to impress his rich father and pass it off as his own. Is this why Moon-joon kept Joo-ah around in the first place? To get closer to Min-ho? With a little interference from Joo-ah — and Min-ho’s sister telling him she didn’t give up anything for him so he had better succeed (aww) — he decides not to sell his new app. *Phew*

Min-ho finally confesses to Joo-ah and they share a kiss, but Joo-ah doesn’t want to pursue a relationship as she thinks this will ruin their friendship forever if they break up. But when Min-ho sends a confession letter to the broadcasting station whilst Joo-ah is on air, and she realizes that it references her favorite karaoke song that only Min-ho knows. Naturally, she starts to think that Min-ho is Maple Latte. Joo-ah starts to accept that she loves Min-ho too — just when he agrees to follow Joo-ah’s wishes and forget about her romantically by going on a date with someone else. This finally pushes Joo-ah to confess to him, and we have our first couple. Yey!

Our second couple is the magnet couple Ji-min and Haneul, who start out the show as a couple only for Ji-min’s jealous and malicious old friend ROSA (Hwang Boreumbyeol) to throw a spanner in the works and break them up. This love triangle/toxic friend trope was done pretty well, even if poor Haneul did nothing wrong but still suffered the consequences. I genuinely disliked Rosa from the get go, but Ji-min is the type of person who sees the best in people and ignored all of her doubts, and she ultimately ends her otherwise happy relationship with Haneul.

Meanwhile, Rosa changes all of her classes to match Haneul’s so she can spend a lot of time with him and help him — because after Haneul’s father passed away unexpectedly he changed his major to computer science and has been struggling with the workload. Rosa follows Haneul around and causes misunderstandings anyway she can — she jumps into Haneul’s arms in the escape room, for example – just one of the many red flags Ji-min initially ignored.

Rosa even goes so far as to tell Ji-min she likes someone a lot, and misleading her as to who that was. When Ji-min finds out that she lied and realizes Rosa likes Haneul, she confronts her. Ji-min suspects Ro-sa could be Maple Latte too, and this unfortunately fed into her insecurities.

Ji-min tries to test Haneul by breaking up with him, but he doesn’t “hold on” to her as she had hoped — he’s more like a lost puppy. Ji-min tells the dorm girlies that she was testing her own insecurities too when she broke up with Haneul. This is because she always thought she liked him more than he liked her. For me, I didn’t see the point in this breakup, as Haneul wasn’t the problem here and Ji-min knew that. An honest conversation with him could have helped ease her insecurities instead of Ji-min hiding the snake’s Rosa’s agenda and doing what Rosa wanted in the end.

After the breakup, Ji-min started meeting BAN YI-DAM (Jo Joon-young) — coincidentally, but he kind of gives me stalker vibes. This new relationship/friendship gives Haneul the kick he needs to start trying to win Ji-min back, and he makes his very first game for Ji-min, hoping he can illustrate his sincerity in coding better than he can in words. And after a lot of ups and downs, they finally get back together because of the game and Ji-min gently lets Yi-dam down which goes surprisingly well. We now have our second couple back together.

Our final couple is Bo-young and Mok-jin, and when they first met they didn’t like each other. Bo-young is an experienced dater and when she dates someone she has rules: never do what the other person dislikes, and no overlapping relationships. They sound like good rules to me.

These two are seriously cute together. Mok-jin helps Bo-young out a couple of times giving her some orange juice when her blood sugar was too low, and letting Bo-young take a blood reading from him to send her mum so she wouldn’t worry about her. When the whole group goes to visit Mok-jin’s parents for a photography project, Bo-young is the only one that brings them a gift, and Mok-jin seems to be touched by this.

Back on campus, when Bo-young suffers from hyperglycemic shock, Mok-jin administers early care and gets her to the hospital. When Bo-young wakes up, the nurse tells her that her boyfriend knew a lot about early care – awww. When Mok-jin re-enters the room, he hugs Bo-young and he’s all concerned. He’s actually shedding a few tears because he’s relieved she’s okay. Mok-jin has been to the shop to get her some essentials and this made me want to squeeze his cheeks for being so cute. He had spent time learning about type 1 diabetes so he could help her if she ever fell ill and he was there – aaaaand I think Mok-jin may be a keeper for Bo-young.

When Mok-jin later realizes that he likes Bo-young, I love that there’s no overthinking — he just blurts it out and runs away. It’s refreshing to see a couple being straightforward with each other instead of beating around the bush.

Bo-young, being the direct girl she is, runs a SWOT test (strength, weakness, opportunity, and threat) on Mok-jin — a business analysis method that can be used in all walks of life. When Bo-young sees Mok-jin, she asks him to list five things he likes about her and gives him ten seconds to list them. He has passes both tests and we have our third couple, who are way more cutesy together in front of the others than I thought they would be.

As for Maple Latte — the author of the Dear M post – I left a little clue at the beginning. Did anyone notice? The psychology student Mok-jin had started the Dear M posts as a social experiment on societal groups for his thesis in an effort to push a group of people to confirm their feelings and follow their hearts. Joo-ah found out at the end that Min-ho was not Maple Latte as she had suspected, because he admits that the only confession he sent was to the broadcasting station. The mystery was still alive at the end, but no one seemed to care anymore about who Maple Latte was, with their happily ever afters.

I do wonder… if they all found out Dear M was Mok-jin doing a social experiment, how would they feel about that? As an uncontrolled social experiment, Dear M could have backfired and affected our characters’ lives in a more negative way – just look at Ji-min’s insecurities that lead to her breakup with Haneul. I’m not sure I’m on board with that.

In the spirit of a cheeky SWOT analysis of my own, here’s one for Dear M. Its strengths were the relationships that were built – I really enjoy this aspect of a campus drama. Its weakness, though, was that some characters were well-rounded while others were two-dimensional (for instance, I found Joo-ah and Haneul a little flat through the whole show). For me, the missed opportunity is that they could have given more of a backstory to our final couple Bo-young and Mok-jin who were my favorite couple. And as for threat — well, it’s enjoyable show for a lazy weekend, but I don’t think it’s going to supplant better shows in the genre.

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