I was very happy when I heard the news that Strong Woman Do Bong Soon, one of my favorite Korean dramas, was getting a spin-off. While this wasn’t the second season I wanted, I relished every second of waiting and anticipation as the promotion began.

And even better when I heard that this spin-off still relied on the template laid down and instead of a rando with superpowers, it was still a girl who hailed from a family where the women all have super strength.

Just like SWDBS, SGNS is a romantic thriller through and through as it follows multiple romantic plotlines and an overarching premise of combating the distribution of drugs.

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The first episodes were Kdrama gold, you guys, and every minute was simply shining so much so I definitely thought this was going to be a new favorite drama.

And if you were anywhere on the internet in the past 10 weeks or so, you might have seen the many beautiful edits of our female lead and the villain, Ryu Shi Oh (Byun Woo Seok). There was even an entire fanbase dedicated to shipping the two of them, even though the male lead (Kang Hee Shik) was in the picture.

What Is Strong Girl Nam Soon About?

The plot of this drama is fairly simple: the female lead goes missing as a child while on holiday in Mongolia and is trained by a nomadic Mongolian family until she becomes an adult and decides to come back to Korea to find her parents. When she returns to South Korea, she gets tossed from here to there, but she eventually reunites with her parents, who have long divorced and have blamed each other for her disappearance many years ago.

Everything is blissful for a while until she finds herself in the middle of a mystery surrounding the distribution of hard drugs. She decides to make herself useful by infiltrating the suspect’s office and staying by his side.

All this happens while a romance between her and a loyal, dedicated police officer is underway, and her mother also does what she can as a self-appointed vigilante.

While I did not actively ship the two of them because he was a villain in every sense of the word, I definitely felt that they had more chemistry, and I really hope a casting director somewhere picks up on this and gives them their own drama (and hopefully he gets a HEA for once). 

And if you adored our bad boy in this drama, you’re going to absolutely flip once you’ve watched Lovely Runner (which is still airing).

I also need to mention that Nam Soon did have chemistry with the Hee Shik, and I adored their funny, chaotic, and silly moments together, but it couldn’t beat the raw electricity that flowed whenever she was with Shi Oh. 

And just as I said earlier, there were indeed lots of cringey moments. With everything from our female lead who was very ignorant of the way the world works, and even the way other side characters would pull off some very awkward acts – all of that contributed to making the drama a little cringey.

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But perhaps one thing that really made this drama lose its flavor and favor in my eyes was how we spent an unnecessary amount of time with the side characters, so the development of the romance between the leads sort of suffered.

I know I have mentioned before that I don’t like it when a drama only focuses on the primary leads and then the side characters just exist without anything interesting going on in their life, but then again, it doesn’t really make sense to focus too much on them.

In this drama, we got:

— The female lead who gets roped into an investigation of drug distribution;

— A male lead who tries all he can to dig deeper into a chain of narcotic sellers;

—A justice-dishing mother who’s keen on taking down bad guys;

— A father who’s always exasperated with his ex-wife and continually harbors guilt at having lost their daughter;

—A son who, while struggling with weight loss, takes some pills and soon starts his journey to loving himself;

— A grandmother who finds new love just as her not-so-ex-husband comes back into the picture;

— Two former poor people who strike gold when they help a rich woman’s daughter;

— A villain who was trained and grew up in the mafia and now runs the biggest undercover drug distribution channel;

— and A secretary and her boss’s weak brother who have an odd will-they-won’t-they relationship.

If this sounds like a lot, that’s because it very well is, and I feel they could have condensed some of the plotlines or totally scrapped them to make the story feel more seamless.

All of these different side characters got enough screen time, and it genuinely was a little hard to keep up with everything that was happening.

And if I’m keeping it a buck, the attempts at injecting comedy and some hilarity into the scenes sometimes came across as forced and I don’t think I ever truly smiled at the character’s antics. 

One of my fave highlights was definitely the cameo by Park Bo Young and Park Hyung Sik. Their chemistry was still as stunning years after and I think they actually broke the internet that day. 

So my feelings about this drama are very much mixed because I could have loved it more than I did if it had been a little more streamlined.

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What do you think? Have you watched this drama? Do you think my review is fair, and if you could, how would you rate this drama?

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