By: Katerina Badoova
For all the lovers of cute romantic comedies; this one’s for you!
She Was Pretty (2015) is a Korean drama full of extreme humour and adorable moments between the main characters.
It follows the story of Kim Hye-Jin (Hwang Jung-Eum) and Ji Sung-Joon (Park Seo-Joon) who were childhood friends. While Hye-Jin was very pretty as a teenager and everyone loved her at school, Ji-Sung was the opposite. If anything, he was considered the "ugly duckling" who nobody wanted to be friends with.
Despite that, Hye-Jin befriended him and they both comforted each other in difficult moments, and soon even became each other's first love.
Not long after they become friends, Sung-Joon moves to America because of his parents and leaves poor Hye-Jin.
Years pass and they are now both adults but things aren’t as they were before. Sung-Joon is back in Korea and contacts Hye-Jin to meet up because he, of course, misses her and wants to see her again after all those years.
Hye-Jin agrees to meet up, but then she sees him from a distance and realises that the "ugly duckling" Sung-Joon has changed!
Instead he’s a fine looking man that lost weight, grew much taller and now looks like a model straight out of a magazine.
Under normal circumstances, Hye-Jin would go and meet up with her childhood friend. They would catch up, tell each other about how they spent all those years apart and most likely realise they still like each other…or something cliché like that.
However that’s not how fate works in this K-drama...
Over the time they spent apart, Hye-Jin lost all her beauty and isn’t exactly "pretty" any more. And when she saw Sung-Joon looking like a Greek God a couple metres away from her, she did exactly what any other panicked woman would do. She hid!
Devastated, Hye-Jin tells everything to her best friend and housemate, and in the midst of pouring her heart out she comes up with a plan – a plan that will eventually become a problem.
She convinces her best friend to meet up with Sung-Joon, posing as her, and to tell him that it was nice seeing him but that she’s actually moving to London.
At first it seems like the plan has worked: Hye-Jin’s best friend and Sung-Joon meet and he immediately falls for the lie. She even manages to convince him that she is in fact leaving to London but that they should keep in touch.
Hye-Jin is satisfied that the plan worked, but also sad that she’s too embarrassed to meet her childhood friend. Nevertheless, they both go about their life.
That is until Hye-Jin scores a new job at a magazine production company and there she meets someone. Yes, you guessed it! That "someone" is Sung-Joon and he has no idea that she is the real Hye-Jin. So, you must imagine the chaos that is about to take place.
What I enjoyed most about She Was Pretty was the hilarious friendship between Hye-Jin and the secondary male lead Kim Shin-Hyuk (Choi Si-Won).
From constantly teasing each other to becoming drinking buddies and always being there for each other — their relationship was probably the most entertaining aspect of the show! Especially when Shin-Hyuk kept calling Hye-Jin ‘Jackson’ instead of her actual name and Hye-Jin always shouted at him to stop teasing her.
I recommend this K-drama to those that like silly, romantic comedies with a dash of drama and a pinch of sappiness!
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