Drama vs. Webtoon: Nevertheless,

NOTE: Spoilers of both drama and webtoon will be present in this post.

Dear Nevertheless,,

What was even the point?

My advice to anyone considering watching Nevertheless, would be to stop now because all it will make you feel is gross, tired, and confused.

I’m honestly so sick of webtoon adaptations. 90% of the time when I compare the show to the source material, it just makes me… angry. What do these studios get out of taking something and bastardizing it so thoroughly that it becomes painfully clear they either didn’t understand the appeal of the original in the first place or they just don’t care?

To give you all a little background, the webtoon Nevertheless, was created by writer Jeongseo in 2018. The series concluded the following year (two years before the drama began airing on JTBC). It follows an art student, Na-bi, who has just come out of a traumatic breakup with her longterm boyfriend when she meets an infamous playboy on campus named Jae-eon and becomes infatuated.

Much of the webtoon’s success stems from the way the drama follows the internal struggles of a girl whose fears and hesitations about entering a new relationship end up being true. In the webtoon, we only receive Na-bi’s thoughts, not Jae-eon’s, but that’s more than enough. Na-bi sees the warning signs every time she’s with him, but Jae-eon insists on his sincerity to her, even falling to his knees in front of her to try and prove his feelings.

But in the end, she was right: Jae-eon was playing with her, and the already vulnerable Na-bi becomes thoroughly traumatized by the betrayal. The last chapter of the webtoon chronicles Na-bi’s attempt to start a relationship with the sweet and honest Do-hyeok, but she can’t even trust him anymore. As Do-hyeok is approached by two fans of his YouTube channel, Na-bi’s thoughts become frantic as she goes back and forth between paranoia that Do-hyeok will cheat on her just like her ex and trying to comfort herself by insisting that people can change and that Do-hyeok isn’t that type of person. The story closes with Na-bi encountering Jae-eon again at a bar–with a new girl. The scene perfectly mirrors their first meeting, with Jae-eon explaining to the girl, “Butterflies look free, but actually they travel on the same paths forever.” The girl tells him that she feels sorry for them, and he replies, “Really? I think they should just enjoy it.”

The Nevertheless, webtoon, while short with underdeveloped supporting characters, boasts a fully formed heroine and fairly tight, concise writing with a clear theme. It takes the trope of the kind, warm heroine changing the philandering hero’s ways and turns it completely on its head. Most bad boys are just that: bad boys. They’re not hiding a heart of gold, and one girl can’t change them. Considering how omnipresent this trope is in dramaland, I was so excited to see a story like this adapted for television. Finally, something different in the romance drama landscape!

…Sigh.

I found the first few episodes of the drama adaptation to be promising. While a bit slow and meandering, I was so happy to see how the directing played into and amplified Na-bi’s thoughts and feelings. I hadn’t read the webtoon at this point, but I’d heard plenty about it and was aware of how it ended. In my mind, the slow-mo and the swelling of romantic music when the leads were together reflected how Na-bi was able to so easily fall for Jae-eon’s trap. I was so confident at the beginning that the show wasn’t saying this relationship was something good, something to aspire to, but was instead trying to demonstrate how someone can fall so hard despite the blaring warning signs in their head. I even went on rants about how people weren’t understanding the show on multiple platforms to multiple people. Yes, I feel like an idiot now.

As the drama went on, my opinion fluctuated nearly every episode because I wasn’t sure where it was headed. The drama had to add a lot to fill out the 10-episode runtime, and it did little except lose the threads of the plot and the characters. If the drama had ended the same way as the webtoon, I think I wouldn’t have judged it too harshly because it might have been interpreted that that’s how toxic relationships are: everything gets so tangled up, and you end up being burned in the end.

But, of course, that’s not how it ends.

The Nevertheless, drama decided that instead of having the story be about the victim of a manipulative jerk, it would be about a toxic relationship where the girl plays into the boy’s game, and maybe the boy isn’t so terrible after all? As a basic concept, I have no problem with this. Making the story a little less black-and-white creates potential for something more complex and interesting. The problem is, the drama never actually says anything meaningful about toxic relationships… or, if anything, it’s saying that love will triumph in the end even between two people who seem to be able to do nothing but hurt each other over and over again.

While watching the finale, I was reminded of the film Very Ordinary Couple. Starring Kim Min-hee and Lee Min-ki, Very Ordinary Couple chronicles the very toxic on again/off again relationship between two coworkers. The movie was well-received by critics and a box office hit, but I have never really been able to get into it. Despite great performances and chemistry, the ending message of the film left me a bit cold. Kim Min-hee’s character makes a documentary about their relationship after their climactic breakup, and a bunch of her coworkers show up to the premiere at a movie theater. She glances around the theater as the movie starts, looking for Lee Min-ki’s character, and when she doesn’t see him she gets out of her seat and walks out to the lobby. Of course, he’s standing right there, and the two begin talking again, smiling, laughing, and leave the cinema together. The camera follows the two as the walk down the street, joking around with each other, and Fin. The movie ends.

With Very Ordinary Couple, I took the ending to suggest that a couple like this is never going to change. They’ll get together, they’ll fight, they’ll break up, and they’ll do it all over again. The film doesn’t really paint that as a good or bad thing, just something that happens with these types of people. It’s not about a whirlwind romance. It’s not about destiny. It’s just about two people with terrible judgement who can’t seem to stay away from one another. Yeah, not super uplifting.

But Nevertheless, is a kdrama, and it seems a kdrama just can’t help but kdrama. Like so many shows, of course the finale depicts Na-bi and Jae-eon as a thing of fate. Not only that, but of course Jae-eon is painted as Na-bi’s savior, helping her finish her art project after it gets destroyed. Of course Na-bi realizes that Jae-eon saw her and fell in love at first sight on the day her ex completely humiliated her. Of course they reconcile at an art exhibition with her saying, “I hate you and how you toy with other peoples’ feelings but I love you and please stay by my side forever”.

And of course, there goes that happy, cutesy romantic music. And they kiss.

(Also, as they’re kissing, she’s like “Do you have a fever?” and he says “I don’t feel sick when I’m with YOU” and I just think it’s hilarious that they thought this line was cute in the middle of a global pandemic.)

My god, what is the POINT of this? What is the point of the writers completely twisting the entire meaning of the source material? If you’re going to go out of your way to change it, why even base it off of a webtoon in the first place? I just can’t understand it. I have seen people say that they’re making it into “just another kdrama”, but I can’t think of any other kdrama relationship that has made me grimace and gag the entire way through their “happy ending”.

This show takes everything that people complain about with romance dramas and just dials it to 100. It erases everything that made the webtoon worth reading in the first place. The scene at the art exhibition is just baffling. Who watches this in the context of the whole show and thinks it’s romantic? It almost feels like a parody to me, to be honest. If I didn’t know better, I would think the writer was making fun of Na-bi and Jae-eon.

The weirdest, most inexplicable scene, though, is the very last one. Na-bi and Jae-eon are walking and holding hands when she sees Do-hyeok in a window and slides her hand out of Jae-eon’s grasp. Jae-eon asks what’s wrong and she just smiles and grabs his hand again and says, “Nothing. Let’s go!” and they walk off into the metaphorical sunset. As they walk, they pass a kitten on the street, and Jae-eon asks, “Should we raise a cat?” and Na-bi says, “Haha, no more pets for YOU!” “Not even butterflies?” “Nope”.

Hahaha, isn’t it hilarious how they’ll never be able to trust one another? Hahaha!

Until the very end, I genuinely have no idea what the drama is trying to say. Are they saying that Do-hyeok was the cause of all of Na-bi’s insecurities regarding her relationship with Jae-eon? But that was very clearly not the case at all throughout the whole drama! If anything, she was just using Do-hyeok to figure out her feelings for Jae-eon. But if that’s not what the scene means, then what on earth DOES it mean? Is it trying to do the webtoon thing where it shows that Na-bi is going to struggle to trust anyone again, even though that makes no sense with the way the drama chose to take the story? And for some reason they’re trying to make it comical? Is it all just a big joke?

Honestly, by the time the credits rolled, I just didn’t care anymore. Why would I care? What reason did the drama give me to care? I don’t care about Na-bi anymore. I never cared about Jae-eon. Do-hyeok is better off without Na-bi anyway. I don’t even care about any of the side charac–

Just kidding my babies Sol and Ji-wan are the only good thing to come out of this mess. We got a happy, canon lesbian couple in a kdrama. And when happy lesbians can’t even make me care about the drama, you know something went wrong.

But whatever. It’s over. It’s done. It was only 10 episodes, and now I’m free.

I just never want to see that stupid tramp stamp on the back of Song Kang’s neck ever again.