“Extraordinary You” (어쩌다 발견한 하루)  

By Jae-Ha Kim
jaehakim.com
January 30, 2020

☆☆☆☆
Eun Dan-Oh (played by Kim Hye-Yoon)
Ha-Ru (played by Rowoon)
Baek Kyung (played by Lee Jae-Wook)

↑Note: Korean names denote the surname followed by the given name.

Set in a prestigious high school, “Extraordinary You” is a thoroughly enjoyable K-Drama that centers around a popular girl and her fiancé. He’s as ambivalent about her as she is head over heels for him.

But wait. Dan-Oh realizes soon enough that they are all characters in a manhwa and that she doesn’t have the perfect life she had assumed she had. Still, she’s happy thinking that she’s the epicenter of the comic book.

Plot twist: That’s not in the cards for her, either. She is just a secondary character who was created to be the best friend of the real female lead.

Saddled with a plot line that includes pining for her coldfish fiance, Kyung (Lee Jae-Wook from “Memories of the Alhambra” and “Search: WWW“), and a heart disease that surely will lead to her early death, Dan-Oh makes it her life’s mission to change her storyline and find true love.

This is the part of the series that I really liked. No one is going to mistake their own lives for a comic book character’s. But I found the message of creating your own destiny — or at least attempting to, rather than settling for what you’re told you’re supposed to be — to be inspirational. As Dan-Oh grows more self aware each day, she speaks out about how ridiculous the manhwa writer is to rehash plotlines that may have been appropriate in a previous century (teenagers being engaged to marry), but certainly not in 2019 (when this series originally aired).

As Dan-Oh, Kim Hye-Yoon hit all the right notes. Unlike many actresses who have perfected crying pretty tears, Kim shows how gut wrenching it can be when you think you’ve lost a loved one. Grief isn’t pretty and it was refreshing to see it presented in a realistic manner.

The fact that they cast Kim, who was outstanding in “SKY Castle,” was astute. She is a talented actress whose work in “SKY Castle” is fresh on viewers’ minds. They will remember her from her role as the diehard student who stopped at nothing to get into the top medical school in Korea. That series dealt with the pressures families place on their children to get into the best schools, regardless of the kids’ own desires.

As for Dan-Oh’s romance with No. 13 (played by SF9’s Rowoon), it is slow and sweet. She learns that he’s a mere extra in the manhwa, until she gives him a name (Ha-Ru) and helps transform him into a more important character in the plot.

The overall message of “Extraordinary You” is that we are all extraordinary in our own way. At first, Dan-Oh simply wanted to be the star of the series. But she grew to realize that what she really wanted was to have ownership of her life, rather than following others’ expectations of who she should be.

There was some irony that her best friend was also one of the school’s biggest bullies. Though she was a great and supportive friend to Dan-Oh, she was cruel and petty to the pretty and poor scholarship student who her crush liked.

On the surface, this series shares similarities to Lee Jong-Suk’s “W,” which is also set within a manhwa. But while that series was more of a thriller, “Extraordinary You” takes an everyday setting (school) and turns it into an extraordinary experience.

Airdates: MBC aired 32 episodes, each about 35-minutes long, from October 2 to November 21, 2019.

Spoiler Alert:

There’s a manhwa within a manhwa. The comic book writer regurgitated much of his material, putting the same characters in different settings and eras, but with the same basic plotline. Some of the characters were able to forget the duplicity of their past lives, while others were cursed to remember it in their modern-day incarnations.

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