Review of Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok-joo / 역도요정 김복주

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.

Today’s blog post is dedicated to a drama I once loved when I watched for the first time: Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok-joo. I watched it in 2017, right before I started college, and I remember that period of my life not-so-fondly. I watched a lot of movies and dramas in order to escape my issues. I’m much happier now and have sorted through my problems, almost a decade later, but I feel sad for past self when I think of that time.

Anyways, I thought of that when I pressed play on this drama for the second time. but I didn’t let it cloud my experience rewatching the show. Something I did when I was working as a critic was learning to tune my emotions out when I was doing my job, especially as I had to focus and give each work what it needed at that time.

Let’s get into the review! I don’t want to go on and on throughout the introduction, as I know these can get quite long.

At an athletic college, a young female weightlifter accidentally finds love in a fellow athlete: a swimmer.

The main character in this drama, and the character named in the title, is Kim Bok-joo. She goes to a special athletic college dedicated to fostering the talent of Korea’s next talented generation of sports stars, and it’s a given some of her classmates, maybe even Bok-joo herself, are going to be big.

Bok-joo goes to the school specifically for weightlifting, which is interesting because she’s a Korean woman, nor does she fit the general expectation or stereotype of someone who does weightlifting for a living. However, this is the premise of the show, and she’s more than willing to prove people wrong with her skills.

Anyways, Bok-joo has a crush, which kickstarts the main drive of this show. Her friend, Jung Joon-hyung, is a swimmer, and she likes his older brother Jae-yi. She wants to date his brother, so she requests his help in trying to get his attention. He agrees to help her on her quest for love, and they try their best to get them together.

But somewhere along the way, the more he helps her out, the more he ends up falling in love wit her instead. Which could end up pretty tragic in the world of love triangles, but it helps that he’s the male lead and he’s going to end up with her, no matter how hard in some dramas we root for the second male lead.

That said, this is a show largely about these two getting together, but I find the magic to be in the setting. Sometimes college and school dramas don’t tap into the world they’re set in a way that feels effective to me, especially when it comes to showing how these kids are chasing after a specific dream with sports.

While there’s friction and tension, as well as conflict, caused by the romance elements of the drama, if this was a television show that just focused on the characters and their lives in this school, I would have been totally happy. I wanted to root for them and their platonic relationships as they fought tooth and nail to get where they want to be.

Overall Thoughts

If you couldn’t tell by my more positive tone throughout this review, I enjoyed this drama during my second watch as well. I think it’s such a lovely drama about young people in a difficult world, and there are more complexities to their lives because these are athletes we’re talking about too.

I couldn’t imagine being in such a climate as a young person, especially in South Korea. The pressure to succeed is high there, and expectations are high. If these were real characters, I would be sympathetic to their problems and what might come out of their time there if they fail to achieve those expectations.

Regardless, I think this is a drama you haven’t watched yet and are interested in what the synopsis says, then this probably will be right up your alley. It’s not too serious, and it’s very sweet throughout. I didn’t have a similar college experience, but this gave me both hope and nostalgia, which is sometimes all you need from a show.

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