Flower Boy Next Door

Alas! What Light Through Yonder Window Breaks? It Is The East, And Enrique Is The ☀.

This charming little romance brings together the 🌞 and the 🌚, the dark bitter coffee and some silky white cream, the earthy tea and bright lively 🍋, and the girl with social anxiety meets a boy who hates to be alone.

Duk-mi (Park Shin-hye) is a book editor and hermit. Since she works from home, she rarely goes out. She can go weeks, 📆 months even, without leaving her building. She brings the outside world in through her binoculars.

Her apartment is special. Miserly Duk-mi is able to afford it as no security deposit is required, but if she is late even 1 day with the rent, she'll be evicted. That's the rules. Given it's a very good deal, she mostly has happy neighbors. Every day there's a note with a drawing and a warm hello stuck to her delivered milk. She doesn't know it, but her next door neighbor. Jin-rok, a cartoonist (more specifically, a web-toonist) by trade, is stuck on her, and leaves her notes daily.

Duk-mi is stuck in a variety of ways. One of them is that she's stuck on the handsome doctor in the bldg across the street. She even enjoys peeping at his dog, so she peeks over at him more than she should. The doc really is handsome, but he seems dull. Spying is all that interests Duk-mi. As a recluse, she avoids all interaction.

The doctor's younger brother, game designer Enrique, comes to stay with his brother in SK indefinitely, from Spain, where he's been living for years. Enrique catches Duk-mi doin her thing one morning and runs across the street to confront her. That /terrorizes/ her. Neighbor, Jin-rok comes to her defense. Thus, 🌺BND leaves the building and starts chuggin down the street.

16 episodes allows Duk-mi a long time to come around, and that's how they play it. She can be a little frustrating. Isn't that like true life, though? We almost always expect others to change on a dime, while at the same time, we give ourselves all the time in the 🌏. We'll find out more about what caused Duk-mi's trauma. She's a metaphor for how bullies can crush the weak.

My niece told me once that we should never judge someone else's pain. I had just been complaining about a family member that's been wearing-hurt-on-sleeve for decades. It makes the person difficult to be around. I was wrong. Niecie was absolutely right. We expect everyone to handle things as well as we do, often even better. Why would we?

What do we /really/ know about someone's:

🌩Past, when sometimes that person can't even remember it because they've suppressed it?

🤰Genetics? Perhaps it's near impossible for someone to lose enough weight to make the 'mob' happy because it's just not in their genetics. We are not born with the same capabilities.

🎈/😭 Raw material. Some people can blow off everything and just keep going forward, and some people cannot. Sensitive, smart, intelligent, and caring people, like Duk-mi, can be hurt more easily and more deeply.

🌺BND is a cute & warm little series. There's nothing going on but a bit of escapism. It's actually appropriate for younger teens, which could be the group that appreciates 🌺BND the most, though it's fine for every age.

As the show progresses, Duk-mi's next door neighbor (Oh Jin-rok is played by Kim Ji-hoon) finally works up the courage to pursue her. He's been holding back out of deference to her anxieties. Along comes Enrique, who is joy in a jacket. He'll bring joy to the girl. He doesn't know the word "no." He's SO happy🎉 and charming, though, who would want to tell him "no?" Jin-rok will now have to scramble to catch up.

Jin-rok also begins a new webtoon about unrequited love, and it's a hit. However, everytime he and his partner go to their editor & manager, she's frazzled and yells at them. Her eyes wide over deep dark circles from a stressful job and lack of sleep, she can be erratic. It's not her best part, but Kim Seul-gi is always awesome. She shines in Oh My Ghost-10, which is a masterpiece in the romcom genre.

The soundtrack🎶 is terrific. The acoustic number: talkin bout love, by J Rabbit, is my favorite. The acting is solid, none of it detracts from the show. Park Shin-hye is wonderful, as always. Duk-mi is not an easy role. (PSH is her most amazing, imo, in Sisyphus as an eye-rolling kicka$$). The plot is simple and there are no substandard elements that impede significantly on the whole, which is why it remains a pleasant escape. That's all they're going for, and they aptly succeeded.

That's not to say it could not be improved upon. There should be more looking through their windows. They look out every now and then, but it seems it should have been a much stronger ongoing theme. They utilized an ending technique with comics/hand drawing over the business fronts and background. It is so good that I'm wondering why they didn't do more of it along the way. They certainly leave us wanting more. We don't get much info on Ji-rok's background, which is hinted at, but never resolved. We don't see his webtoon, and we never get to see any of the games that Enrique designs - We don't even get info on their storylines. It would have been fun to insert those details here and there: Lost opportunities mostly comprise the improvements list, along with its weak, substandard side plots.

If you are wondering about 🌺BND, it's light, pleasant, fragrant, and vibrant. It will make you smile, it won't challenge your brain much, (though it's good for emotional intelligence) yet, it's warmth cheers the ❤. Give it a peep👀, my Peeps!

🌼QUOTES🌼

🌹There are too many people who are rude about others' scars.

💐 I thought love was giving up half of yourself and filling it up with her half. She was afraid of love because she was afraid of her dark and gloomy half. She finally realized that love is two incomplete halves coming together. {Enrique}

🌺 Love is a wind-up clock. When it is new it'll give you the exact time. When the time passes, and you forget to wind the springs, the clock will break and stop. He started winding up the springs, so the clock wouldn't stop for a long time.{Duk-mi}

🌻 One person cannot change the world but you can become the w🌏rld for one pers☀n. {Enrique}

〰🖍 IMHO

🎬7 🎭 8 💓7 🦋5 🤔6 🎨6 😅4.5 ☀8 🎵8 🔚9

🌸Age 11+ 🗣topics: The lasting effects/damage that bullying can inflict. Practice kindness and patience with people that seem odd, as odd, annoying or strange behavior is often due to pain. Respect others.

PS.

They have recycled Kdrama tr♻pes, or plot devices. At this point it's almost a laughable lack of originality (Yet I'm still helplessly hooked on Asian programming, sigh).

♻MSS: Mandatory Separation Syndrome. The onset is after a couple comes together "forever." Kdramas often insist on separating them for weeks, months, or even years before they're afforded a Happily Ever After. It's usually awful. Once Duk-mi starts healing, MSS provides needed time for her to grow on her own. That's what is best for her, so there's no "foul" here.

♻♥🔺 It's near ubiquitous, just edging out CEOs. In fairness, many romances have ♥🔺. Even the queen of them all: Pride And Prejudice. But enough already! Beside any of that, the brilliance of Kdrama scriptwriters shines through frequently. They can often easily do better. FBND seems to want to be a little goofy. They just tikted it a little far, but romantics will like it, and e'erbody will love Enrique.

Nice drama and also a funny drama must watch it.story was good and acting was also good.

It started off good but I think it was okay It was enjoyable series but could have been better

Comedy drama and also good drama must watch it,acting was also good.

Flower Boy Next Door is a 2013 Korean comedy-romance-drama series. It's the 3rd installment in the Flower Boy series and, like the other shows before it, it is extremely light in tone. You'd be hard pressed to think of too many other K-dramas that are "softer" than this one is.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

First off, this show has nothing to do with flowers; "flower boy" is a Korean idiomatic expression that essentially means "pretty boy". Our story begins by introducing the titular "flower boy" to the primary character (Go Dok Mi); Dok Mi is the shy shut-in type girl who has a crush on the handsome young doctor she watches in the building across from hers. Dok Mi is perfectly content living alone in her apartment and interacting with no one; unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, as the case may eventually be), Dok Mi's neighbors are an odd collection of outgoing personalities that become increasingly harder for her to avoid. The most prominent of these neighbors is the character named Enrique. He's the "flower boy" that catches Dok Mi spying on his doctor cousin, soon realizes she's a lost & lonely soul, and takes it upon himself to bring Dok Mi out of her shell and into the world around her. Actually, all the male neighbors are "flower boys" to some degree, but Enrique is the most "flowery".

Dok Mi is the way she is because of something that happened to her back in high school that made her not trust people and withdraw from society. Having a crappy high school experience doesn't really rank all that high on the life problem scale in the long run; when you're in high school though, or not far removed, there is nothing of greater importance than NOT having a crappy experience at that stage of your life, and, that's what we have here; a young woman who just can't get over her past and move on with her adult life.

Park Shin Hye plays Dok Mi. She's pretty effective at portraying the perpetually weary/sad eyed introvert who slowly begins to overcome her fears/wounds as the series progresses. She gets the job done about as well as can be expected of what's asked of her. Yoon Si Yoon plays Enrique; the young and playful expatriate who has nothing better to do than dote on Dok Mi while he's back in Korea; he gives a nice enough performance as the relentlessly positive and energetic pretty boy who simply wants to help Dok Mi, but soon finds himself falling in love with her instead.

The two secondary M/F parts involve the guy that lives next to Dok Mi, and Dok Mi's former high school girlfriend. He's had a crush on Dok Mi for some time, but he's never been able to approach her in order to get close to her. It's an indication of how light this show is that neither he nor Enrique really even compete for Dok Mi via expected methods. Dok Mi's former schoolmate is the only antagonist here, but she barely even qualifies as one, as she and her gaggle of cohorts are about as bothersome as a litter of hungry kittens. She's a scheming spoiled brat of course, and she was rotten to Dok Mi back in school, but she's mostly pretty harmless overall. There are a number of small side stories as well (involving the kooky webtoon editor, the security guard, neighbors, etc). These side stories are mostly played for comedic &/or romantic effect, and, they work well enough to serve as a compliment to the main story line.

This show skews VERY young; the cast is packed full of attractive young people dealing with young people problems. This show is also frequently silly and sickeningly sweet, and the melodrama is so inconsequential in the scheme of things; nobody's dying, nobody will lose everything, nobody's family is at stake, etc. It's more of the "I'm sorry your feelings were hurt, so here's some ice cream" type melodrama. It's an effective series though that's fairly well written, performances are solid throughout, and it's well paced and nicely scored with an appropriately cutesy soundtrack, etc. There's not a whole lot of meat on its bones, and, it may contain the least amount of masculinity in any K-drama I've ever seen (and that's saying something), but otherwise, there's really not much to dislike here.

On the down side, there were two minor sub plots that didn't work very well; one involves the guy living next door having a secret rich family, and the other involves Enrique's troublemaking fan club. The former story was pointless and unnecessary, and the latter had too much importance placed on it. I also wasn't really fond of the way Dok Mi's suitors came across as borderline stalkers on occasion, who were blindly insistent that Dok Mi was in need of their help, when in fact, they had just as much "growing up" to do as she did; that was really the whole point of the show though (i.e. these guys help Dok Mi heal over time while she serves as the impetus for everybody to find out more about themselves, move forward in life, discover love, etc).

Through it all, this show is consistently funny and charming, and, its biggest attribute is that it never loses sight of the fact that this is where its heart lies. The other thing going for this series is that it's sixteen 40 minute episodes, and I love this format because it results in very little time for filler or dragging things out, and everything's usually pretty snappy as a result. Get in, get out, move on to the next scene, episode, series, etc. I wish more K-dramas utilized this format actually.

Bottom Line: This is an adorable little show with a simple and approachable story, and, it's often quite good!...As a bonus, it's also easy to watch/ignore while pretending you don't like it (in case you're too manly or mature to admit as much).

Nicely done overall!...8 out of 10 stars!