Actually a 5/10

So I thought I would give this a 6.5/10, but I thought harder and the more I was typing the ending review Inwas like fuck that this ending is so ass I’m making this a 5/10.

I just like realized that the main conflict of the story never actually got resolved. So these two little magical creatures are beefing and they get Chiwoo and Hwan to basically be their fighters, but even in the ending of the story they’re still beefing. A new magical boy is shown in the ending, which means… That the conflict was just thrown under the rug. The cycle of these creatures preying on desperate people wanting to make a wish for their lives to be better continues… And innocent casualties will continue to die or be traumatized again and again for the sake of this petty beef between these dumbasses… Great.

Anyways, ending is dog shit. This is the template I would use in a writing seminar on how NOT to write your endings. Chiwoo basically reverts everything. He basically causes a change in the timeline they live in, the main difference now is that he is able to save his parents, causing Hwan and Chiwoo to never being magical boys, and thus the main story events never existed. Chiwoo now also doesn’t know Hwan, and lived a completely different life. He is now happy. And of course they meet again and fall in love.

THIS FUCKING SUCKS. So basically you’re spitting on the love story you crafted, the entire plot of your story by putting them in a reimagined timeline. Why?? This is basically saying that if life gives you shitty circumstances, you can’t move on from them. Rather than your characters attempting to recover from their mistakes and move on from their trauma, they need divine intervention itself to come in and give them their happy ending. Basically, your characters don’t get to make their own happy ending, they have to be given it. It’s so unearned.

Your main protagonist doesn’t even know his own story. The last half of the season switches to Hwan’s pov, kept even in the final chapter. our protagonist doesn’t even get his own monologue, reflection, or literally anything in the last chapter. It’s literally his own story and the man is now a side character in the final season. I especially think this sucks because Chiwoo is a man who was depressed and dying in the inside from his lack of agency and stuck in his position of not being able to save everyone and thinking he is the cause of everyone suffering. If you were going to stick with this ending, fine. But I think it would’ve been more emotional if Chiwoo ends up remembering everything and sees how everybody in his life is happy, purely because of what he had done. But nope, we live in a dystopia of those events. Let’s be honest, Chiwoo is a diff person now, he has a support system, and plenty of friends. He doesn’t live with the insecurity of being an orphan, nor did he have to be groomed to completely relying on Hwan to be his rock. So for me, the Chiwoo that gets to have a happy ending is not the same Chiwoo that I grew attached to. If you really want to be technical about it, it feels like Chiwoo died for Hwan to be happy, and that just doesn’t sit right with me. It’s not simply that Chiwoo lost his memories. It’s not a Pearl Boy situation. It’s that Chiwoo lived a different life, and thus is a different person. You could’ve had the ending be that Hwan be transported to an alternate dimension and I would’ve had the same exact opinion. Bc that’s basically what this is.