Review of Woman Girl Do Bong-soon / 힘쎈여자 도봉순

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 watching.

For three years I worked professionally as a film critic, and while going to all of the film festivals and interviewing directors and actors was cool for a while, but I wanted to reclaim my time and watch movies I wanted to watch. Sometimes watching all of the new releases is great, and behind ahead of the curve, but I feel like I was falling so behind on movies I was genuinely excited about.

So I quit and decided to focus on this blog. I also randomly fell into a period of unemployment because of unexpected circumstances, and I took a long and hard look at my finances and realized I had enough to take time off. I did end up doing that, traveled for a bit, applied to jobs, and found myself working on the blog now more than ever.

I’ve been running a little series for a while now where I revisit old television shows and movies I’ve watched throughout the years. Even in the past, before I started this blog and began taking it more seriously, I was always jotting down what I wrote about XYZ show or movie.

It’s fascinating now, especially as an adult revisiting some of these shows, how my feelings and sentiments have changed throughout the years. Today’s blog post is dedicated to Strong Woman Do Bong-soon, which, before revisiting it, I hadn’t watched in over seven years. That’s a long time!

I don’t want to ramble too much in the introduction, as I know I have a tendency to do that, so let’s get right into the review! I don’t want to bore you before we get into the main event.

A girl with extraordinary strength decides to use it for good, and somewhere along the way, she falls in love.

The main character in this series is Do Bong-soon, and because she’s portrayed by the actress Park Bo-young, she looks pretty small and cute. She seems completely and utterly harmless, but as we quickly learn in the show’s first episode, the women in her family are blessed with a superpower: they’re all incredibly strong.

This does lead into a side series called Strong Girl Nam-soon, which came out many years after this show did. My take on that show is that it’s pretty bad and don’t waste your time with it unless you want to/are extremely dedicated, but Park Bo-young and Park Hyung-sik do make a cameo.

Anyways, in the world of this show, Bong-soon is struggling with that fact she has this strength. She just wants to be a normal woman and to be more squishy than she actually is, which makes her predicament always lingering at the back of her mind. She wants to be a regular person, and it doesn’t help that she has a crush on her childhood friend slash cop Guk-doo.

But it’s her strength that lands her in a position that will change her life. She’s hired to be the bodyguard for the rich CEO Ahn Min-hyuk, and although people doubt her strength because of the way she looks at first, she proves to be very competent as a bodyguard.

As she sets out to protect her new boss, who she happens to have some romantic chemistry with from the beginning, there are also a series of kidnappings happening across the neighborhood Bong-soon lives in. This activates her sense of justice, and it helps that she has this incredible strength now because she’s well suited to take out whoever comes her way. And she’s going to do just that.

It’s Min-hyuk though her becomes her sidekick, despite her literally being hired to protect him. The two of them start falling in love with each other as he helps her try to figure out how to control her power, as at the beginning of the series she just kind of has it and is unable to truly harness its full capabilities.

The kidnapper is also closing in them, creating some wonderful tension and friction in their relationship, and also some much-needed relief from the more drama-like elements of the series.

Overall Thoughts

Something I thought about this show when I first watched it was that it was refreshing, and now that I’ve returned it almost a decade later, I still think this way. That is something fascinating about running a blog and tracking your thoughts—you can see how exactly you stay the same in some ways, but have different thinking in others.

I liked this show then because Bong-soon is the one with the power in the relationship, although the trope of the rich man being someone she falls for is there. She’s able to take control with her power and be a source of good for the world when she learns to harness it, which is so admirable.

We love main female characters who are able to do such things. And in 2017, it wasn’t exactly common, and that’s why I still like this show to this day. It’s such a refreshing take on Korean dramas, and I’m glad more dramas have shifted towards this strong (not in a literal sense most of the time) main female character.

All of this is to say that I’m glad I revisited this show, and maybe I’ll come back to it in the near future again. Go watch it if you haven’t already!

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