Review of Friendly Rivalry / 선의의 경쟁

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

A lot of my blog posts for the past year or so have been starting with discussing the state of my employment, as I one of the many people looking for a full-time job when it seemed impossible to find one. This blog post (although it’s coming out months later from when I’m typing this due to the sheer nature of my publishing schedule) is one of the last blog posts to come out of the period where I was lazing about and doing content creation/freelancing full time.

It was a fruitful time, but I was just ready to work a corporate job and see what that was like. In the days leading up to when I was starting my job, I was reading, writing, and consuming as much as possible because I had this fear that I was going to not have time once I was starting this 8-5 job. I was really sitting down watching a lot of the movies that have been on my backlog out of sheer fear of what my life would look like.

Friendly Rivalry was one of the shows I got to during this time. I watched it because I saw Hye-ri on the poster, and also because once I saw her and read the synopsis, I knew this was something that I would be interested in. Running a blog and constantly ruminating over what you like or not tends to make you realize pretty quickly if something might be for you—although I am being very deliberate in trying to diversify the kinds of shows I watch.

I ended up finishing this show fairly quickly because the episodes aren’t that long. With that said, I don’t want to make this introduction too long in itself—I know I have a tendency to do that at times, which is why I’m trying to jump straight into it this time. Let’s start the review portion!

A poor and rich girl become tangled up with each other at an elite school, showing how toxic these environments can be.

One of our two female leads in this show is Woo Seul-gi, who, if we’re adhering to the description I put in the heading above, is the poor girl in this scenario. She grew up in an orphanage, but there’s some lore leading to why exactly she ended up there. Her father, who was involved with organizing one of Korea’s biggest tests for high schoolers, ended up mysteriously dying a few years back—that’s something that comes up again and again throughout the course of the show, as we’re going to dig deeper into that later.

Anyways, Seul-gi is now a high schooler herself and ends up at one of the elite high schools in South Korea; Chaehwa. Here, she’s surrounded by the cream of the crop when it comes to Korea’s richest, and she stands out like a sore thumb from her appearance and clothes.

Her past at the orphanage is going to consistently come back and haunt her, as one of her old buddies (if we can call him that; it was also very fascinating to see GOT7’s Young-jae in this role) comes to find her and rope her into his illegal operations. But it’s at Chaehwa she crosses paths with rich girl Jae-yi.

Jae-yi is someone who has it all, and it’s odd that she’s giving Seul-gi so much attention. We see later on that her intentions might not be as innocent as she makes them out to be at first, adding further to the mystery and drama of this show. A lot of what’s central to the conflict tends to be the CSAT exam, which is what high schoolers take to determine their futures.

We’re really going to see how far people are willing to take things in order to get a good score on the exam. There are other side characters we see this happening to throughout the course of the show, too, and how their parents and families put so much pressure onto them to do well. That leads people to resorting to drugs and cheating to get what they want, which is a dishonest way to do it.

What’s extremely interesting to me though is how this show incorporates LGBTQ+ elements. I came into this show completely blind about that, and I will say my mouth opened in shock when I saw those scenes. I had no idea that such a mainstream drama was going to incorporate such topics, and I was impressed by it!

Overall Thoughts

I will say: I really enjoyed watching this series, and I think that it was such a good watch. There’s a perfect amount of chemistry between both of the leads, the tension keeps you wondering what’s going to happen next, and there’s just enough episodes to keep it going at a good pace. If it were longer then I don’t think it would have worked as well.

Hye-ri and Su-bin are such good actors, and I’ll be watching them in whatever I see them next in. I will say that I was literally on a flight back from Istanbul, Turkey, and I saw Hye-ri was in a movie on the airlines’ selection, I remembered how much I liked her performance in this show, and then I watched that.

That’s how influenced I was. I don’t know if I would rewatch this show in the near future though. I liked it a lot, but I didn’t love it so much that I would go through every episode again and again probably in the next three years. Maybe when I’m older and can’t remember it as much—then I’ll rewatch it.

All of this is to say: if you’re interested in this show and haven’t watched it already, go ahead and give it a chance!

Follow me below on Instagram, Goodreads, and Letterboxd for more.