I’ve been thinking about My Mister for a few days now. It won’t leave.
The writer is brilliant. That’s the first thing. Not clever-brilliant — deep-brilliant. The kind of writing that makes you forget someone constructed every scene.
It’s gut-wrenching because it feels so real yet so not real. It makes you wish you had something that doesn’t exist in the real world. Humans don’t function this way. There are no people who are this noble and pure-hearted. You sob because you wish this was possible. And you sob because you know it isn’t.
But I’m just letting it go through me. It’s been good — helped me cleanse my soul for a few days.
It’s on Netflix, by the way. If you have time, watch it. The directing is great and the writing is amazing. Never seen a show where every character is a real person. You feel them. You ache with them. You cry for them. They all carry a burden of just existing. A burden of being.
Spoiler ahead.
It’s even sadder because the actor who played Dong-hoon — Lee Sun-kyun — actually killed himself in 2023. In the show, he plays a man who overcomes all that weight and sadness. In real life, he couldn’t handle it. So he took his own life.
That sits heavy.
Also made me wonder — will AI ever be able to write a script like this one? There are so many nuances and subtleties that I’m a hundred percent sure non-Koreans missed. For example, the final scene of episode ten. Ji-an switches to banmal with Dong-hoon in the middle of an argument. That alone means her yearning to be treated as an equal — as a lover — and it’s her attempt to claim that. One word choice, and it says everything about where she’s arrived emotionally.
I don’t know if a machine catches that. I don’t know if a machine knows what it means to switch speech registers in a language because your heart made the decision before your mouth did.