Record of Youth (Initial Thoughts)

Record of Youth is another Netflix Original K-drama released this year to massive success, especially with big names Park So-dam (Cinderella with Four Knights, Parasite) as female lead AHN JEONG-HA and Park Bo-gum (Reply 1988, Encounter) as male lead SA HYE-JUN. This romance drama revolves around young adults trying to make it big in the fashion industry and the struggles that they meet along the way. How apt that I'm starting this drama exactly a month after it finished airing so I guess it's finally time to get to it. 

INITIAL THOUGHTS AND COMMENTS (SPOILER ALERT)

This isn't heavy spoilers because it's part of the drama's synopsis but Hye-jun is facing military conscription (as is the case for most South Korean males), which probably explains why episode 1 begins in 2018, just as he gets his draft notice. Hye-jun is a male supermodel who comes form humble backgrounds, his father being a renovation worker while his mother is a housemaid, and with quite a massive social media following due to his insane good looks. Unfortunately, his career isn't going very well as he gets scammed by his boss, who continuously withholds payment, resulting in Hye-jun leaving the company, now without an agency or manager. Although he enjoys modeling, his dream is to break into the acting industry, unsuccessfully auditioning for various roles. Without a stable source of income, Hye-jun has had no choice but to take on part-time jobs, whether it's working behind a Subway counter (usual K-drama product placement) or being a waiter in a BBQ restaurant. 

Regrettably, his family is quite divided on their opinions of his career. While his mother and grandfather are more supportive and give him the freedom to make his own decisions, his father and older brother take a far more negative stance, seeing his ventures as a waste of time. This all comes to a head when Hye-jun gets his draft notice, with his father and brother strongly suggesting that he enlist as quickly as possible. Naturally, he wants to delay his enlistment one last time as he takes what he considers his final shot at getting into acting, having just auditioned for another role. A big argument breaks out and we find out that there's a lot of underlying familial tension as his grandfather is scorned by his father for his past attempts at acting which ultimately ended in failure, landing the family in debt. It's also pretty obvious that Hye-jun is the less favoured child, as his brother gets praise heaped on him for getting a job and his father even makes a new door for his room, while Hye-jun is stuck with a door that's slowly breaking down. 

For our female lead Jeong-ha, she's currently employed at a beauty salon as a makeup artist after quitting her office job. While makeup is her passion (and also something she's skilled at), with her even creating a YouTube channel for it, she gets a lot of flak from her senior at work, who's jealous that Jeong-ha is supposedly "stealing" her clients when in actual fact, she's just helping her senior out. As it turns out, Jeong-ha is Hye-jun's fan. Absolutely awed by his handsomeness, she even has a photo album on her phone titled "My Bias" just for pictures of him (now if that ain't the most relatable thing to do when you have a bias). She ends up being selected as a backstage makeup artist at a modeling show that Hye-jun is part of and as luck would have it, he's her client while his good friend and fellow model WON HAE-HYO [Byeon Woo-seok (Search: WWW, Flower Crew: Joseon Marriage Agency)] is under her senior's charge. Jeong-ha's visibly nervous to take care of her bias but finishes her job perfectly and even steps in to finish Hae-hyo's makeup when her senior leaves for a while. Jeong-ha gets caught by her senior and is humiliated in front of the two models, with our heroine quickly leaving and we see Hye-jun visibly worried. As she sobs in a corridor away from everyone, she laments about how being honest and hardworking in life hasn't benefitted her, and she resolves to be more self-centered. She lets slip that she's Hye-jun's fan and as K-drama law dictates, he overhears her, having followed her from backstage, with the episode ending like that. 

I don't want to start comparing too soon but I'm getting slight Itaewon Class vibes just from episode 1,  mostly because of the "youths achieving their goals regardless of the struggles" aspects. It's interesting to see the friendship between Hye-jun, who had to work his way to the top from scratch, and Hae-hyo, who comes from an affluent family. They're both working towards the same goals, both being models who want to get into acting and even audition for the same role (although neither have gotten replies yet). While it seems that their friendship is still holding strong now, I do wonder if along the line as more strife and drama gets thrown into the mix, will their relationship get torn apart. While he didn't have too much impact in this episode, they are also close friends with KIM JIN-WOO [Kwon Soo-hyun (Run, Jang-mi, Abyss)], a modeling photographer. Seeing as how he's in a secret relationship with Hae-hyo's sister, I wonder if that'll affect their dynamic also. 

So far, I would say that Jeong-ha is the standard K-drama female lead. Lives alone and good at what she does but yet gets criticised by her seniors. We haven't gotten too much on her backstory yet but we do get hints because she mentions "stability" a lot (in fact her name is a pun on the Korean word for "stability"). She sort of implies that she comes from a lower income family and she's finally found some stability in her life, having her own house and whatnot. I don't have much of an impression of her as a character yet but we shall see. 

I was getting a little worked up at some of the scenes in the drama, specifically when Hye-jun's father and brother were putting him down for his different career path, when he was getting beat up by a stuck-up actor who he was a bodyguard for, and when his shitty manager wasn't apologetic at all about scamming him. I was getting so frustrated and I firmly believe that's a mark of getting invested in a drama. I think this drama has lots of potential, especially since the first episode takes place in 2018, so fast-forward 2 years after Hye-jun's military service and we get to the present in 2020, where we'll probably see most of the drama's events unfold. A little early to judge but so far, I'm relating to our leads a little bit. The title of this drama is actually something that Hye-jun uses as a hashtag on his social media posts and at its core, I guess Record of Youth is just that, a record of how youths find their place in life regardless of the struggles they have to face along the way.