netflix review: love alarm

Been following the series since last month but forgot to continue watching it, in pause mode for couple of weeks. Yesterday, I finally went to one of the streaming website to catching up with rest of the episodes. Consist of 2 seasons with 5 episodes each, so it has 10 episodes in total to watch. Well, I patiently watch till the very last episode that turned out to be not the last episode, seems like the series will have its third season in the future, don’t know when, but today I am going to be talking about this beautiful short Netflix series.

The first season set in high school vibes where our three main characters of the story went to. For your information, the first lead female is my celebrity crush, Kim So-Hyun, wadidaw. But, as always she played the character of sad and fulnerable and never felt happiness in all her life with childhood trauma. She was in a relationship with one of her high school friend, as well as secretly loved by her another high school friend who never confessed his feelings to her-aka our second lead male character, and everything changed until our first lead male character, the perfect rich-perfect visual entered the school. No, I don’t have any idea about those two actors, they are probably the new comers or I probably I just don’t know them.

Something unique from this series is that, there is an application called Love Alarm that can tell if someone in the 10 meters distance loves you, the same thing goes to when you are near with someone that you love in 10 meters away. Kim Jo-Jo played by Kim So-Hyun doesn't ring the first lead male character, Hwang Sun-O's Love Alarm app, while literally every girls in the school loudly ring his love alarm app like all the time. And yes, you can probably guess it, he found it weird and becomes curious with Jo-Jo, blah blah blah and they become a couple. And the second lead male, Lee Hye-Young keeps his feelings inside, tortured everyday, I can relate bro, I really do huhuhu.

Jo-Jo always got yelled and always made her down in her aunt’s home with her antagonistic causin. But, it is too sad that I don’t want to talk about it really, let’s move to season 2.

In the season 2, they are all grown up, just graduate from high school, the only difference is that Jo-Jo is not dating Sun-O anymore, actually since they were last year of high school, I guess. Right after the accident they had in Jeju island, it was a bike crash, they fell and hurt and bleed, something like that, Jo-Jo felt bad, they were still in love, but they broke up because Jo-Jo switched on the special feature from the app founder to not letting Jo-Jo rings other people’s Love Alarm, that way Sun-O would get the very wrong idea, Jo-Jo did not like him anymore, when she was actually still did. The season 2 basically contained depressed always work Jo-Jo and Sun-O who dated famous girl without even like her at all.

Hey hey hey, but you know what, our abandoned second lead male character finally got a little bit of happiness here. He has finally found the courage to tell his feeling to Jo-Jo and actually date with her even though she admitted it beforehand that she’s probably not gonna like any other guy anymore so he might endure the pain of loving someone who doesn’t love him back, but Hye-Young is totally okay with that. Rings her love alarm app and makes her smile and happy again.

Other than the bitter-sweet love story, I appreciate the idea that the creator (it is a webtoon adaptation fyi) to actually deliver such important topic nowadays, where everyone is so into the concept of being loved by so many people, perfectly covered in romantically setting of a typical korean drama romantic stories with strong characters.

I also secretly wish that the app does exist, some said it is actually available in Korea, but of course it’s not functioning the way it works in the drama, I don’t really know the details. Why I wish the app exist? Because that way, it can help us to tell our feelings to someone special, or at least be sure whether we actually have romantic feelings or is it just some sort of random out of nowhere sudden attraction to someone. Like what happen with me now, I don’t even know what I feel, have no clue of what to do, I’m questioning is she really interested in me or just being nice to let me took her to two dates we had the past two weeks. I don’t know, maybe it was really a coincidental that we got to know each other that day.

Okay, let’s back to the review, shall we? The ideas that we can take out from the series is that, its brave social critics towards the global phenomenon of social media and everything around it. I would also eager to discuss about it into stories, but I need to do some more digging before writing out the stories. Everybody around the world, without any exception, or at least probably there is one or two individuals who do not share the wish to be someone famous or powerful or big. Almost all, if not everyone, wanted to be one of those people on the internet with millions followers dying to be loved.

Now, let’s drag it into smaller scale, as human being, we desire to be loved, at the very least, by one person that later will become our so called soulmate or partner in life or whatever. And the mass suicide scene in the season 2 by people who use the Love Alarm application but not getting any notification of anyone near 10 meters that indicated they are being loved is super tragic dan real problems. I salute the creator for this. Can we actually die caused by not getting likes or not given love is very much likely to be happen, love is that powerful. You can as alive as well as dying, just because of those four different alphabetical into small one syllable word, l-o-v-e.

A little spoiler, for my next writing for tomorrow or the day after tomorrow or I don’t know when, I am gonna be talking about the suicide, but probably just gonna write them down in Indonesian, see you on the next post tomorrow. Don’t forget to say something on the comment section down below, ehe.