Rewatching Flower of Evil: Post-Show Blues and the Ideal Type

1. Pulled in again, four years later

Four years ago, during the mask years, I was camping out for it every week. It was the first K-drama I ever watched, and everything about it — the premise, the setting, the conflicts, the beautiful leads — had me hooked. Its production was probably different from Chinese or other dramas: it was shot while airing, and every episode ended with an OST flashback and a nail-biting preview of the next one, with just the right amount of suspense to keep me waiting all week. I’m a mystery junkie and a hopeless romantic, and I love it when things happen, so this show hit a lot of my buttons. Every time a romantic scene came on (the couple’s sweet married life), I’d be clutching my blanket and wriggling across the bed, eyes full of envy and longing.

Four years later the show popped back into my head for no reason. All that was left of it in my memory was the two of them and their sweet story, plus a vague impression that it fizzled at the end. This time it was curiosity that made me press play on episode one, and then I just didn’t stop. After finishing, I noticed my body’s emotional exit mechanism wasn’t kicking in very fast. Four years on, having been through a relationship, I should be a bit more mature than the naive college kid I was, so I wanted to dig into what was going on and why. The feelings that pulled me back in were mainly: anticipation for the next episode, being moved by a couple that never gives up on each other, the twists and the conflict design, and the urge to roast it.

2. The brain’s reward machinery

Following on from the above, a few things kept me immersed in this show — each gets its own section in Part III (8, 10 and 11):

1. Narrative transportation
2. Post-show blues
3. “Emotional bookmarks”

3. The industrialization of K-drama: emotional engineering

Romance is the most famous line of business in K-drama, and it is especially good at mobilizing the viewer’s emotions to deepen immersion and tighten the bond. Thriller + romance, fantasy + romance, legal + romance — a high-concept hook strapped to an intimate relationship.^[4]

Within the show, an enormous number of direct and indirect conflicts and contradictions are built in:

Establish the relationship
→ Give a little happiness
→ Manufacture a threat
→ Delay the truth
→ Misunderstanding / separation
→ Reaffirm the relationship
→ Manufacture a bigger crisis
→ Episode-ending cliffhanger
→ OST kicks in
→ Next episode

Take Flower of Evil: the premise — a detective heroine and a hero who is a murder suspect; the characterization — a bold older woman in pursuit, chasing an ice-cold, warm-inside younger man who cannot understand emotions; the conflicts — fifteen years of quiet life shattered, the “evil” the hero performs versus the good inside him, the heroine loving him actively enough to set him free; the suspense — the heroine discovers his identity halfway through the series, so how does the plot keep moving, and what’s the logic of the killer’s accomplice? All of it amplifies the script itself and sets the imagination running: if you were in their shoes, what would you do? It also opens up different viewer perspectives — the romance lens and the detective lens. Part II breaks these down section by section.

The climaxes and the everyday scenes in the script all serve emotion. I originally wanted to check whether the most-clicked or most-commented moments in each episode also cluster at the emotional and narrative peaks, to confirm this industrial logic; but I couldn’t find reliable, verifiable public data, so I’m leaving it here as an observation still to be verified.

4. How actors and the production system manufacture authenticity

The industrialization of K-drama immersion also shows in the professionalism of every link in the chain, starting from the basics of costume, makeup and props:

Script → Casting → Director → Performance → Cinematography → Lighting → Editing → OST → Color grading → Marketing

It’s a standard product SOP that delivers the work to every single viewer. Add aesthetic reward — gorgeous clothes and gorgeous people are a feast for the eyes; and romantic simulation — the cost of the romantic logic is never borne by the viewer, so you can sink into the Mary Sue fantasy at minimal cost, enjoying only the romance and ignoring the costs of real-world dating: time + money + risk of rejection + conflict + commitment.^[4]

5. Romance / Thriller / Psychology — three sets of tension

The three lenses represent viewers who weight the three themes differently:

1. The romance lens: watching the couple’s interactions, the love and hate between villains and heroes, immersed in the emotional expression of love and family.
2. The thriller lens: starting from the script’s logic, following the questions in your head to find the killer and the key evidence. One logic of suspense drama is to put the viewer in a god’s-eye view so they feel like a genius, then use that feeling to build an information gap that drives the plot.
3. The psychology lens: starting from the “antisocial personality” label pinned on the hero and his difficulty understanding emotions, exploring how one learns to understand feelings, express emotions, build intimacy, and know oneself; and from the heroine’s side, questions of emotional expression, nonviolent communication, and putting yourself in another’s shoes.^[5]

Different viewers bring different angles and reach different conclusions. I’m a mix of all three — roughly 50% Romance / 35% Thriller / 15% Psychology.

6. “A thousand Hamlets” and the genre contract

Continuing from the previous question: different viewers’ lenses run on different logic, so everyone’s conclusions and experiences differ.^[6]

Romance

• When does Ji-won learn the truth?
• Does she still love him after she knows?
• Is Hyun-soo even capable of loving someone?
• Can the couple rebuild trust?
• Will this family of three end up in each other’s arms?

Thriller

• Why do the police work the case this way?
• Why don’t the characters share information?
• Does some of the criminal logic hold up?
• How exactly should Do Hyun-soo’s psychological state be defined?
• Is the causal chain between the father, Baek Hee-sung and the accomplice rigorous?
• Did all the past clues get closure?

Psychology

• If the hero cannot understand happiness, how does he show it?
• Would years of pretending turn into the real thing, and what does that do to a person’s mind?
• What is the heroine thinking when she puts herself in his shoes?
• How family changes a person.
• How do you express emotions and desires properly?
• Should there be secrets in an intimate relationship?

7. Why I love it and hate it at the same time — and the height of its idealized expression

I haven’t watched many K-dramas, but I learned early about the K-drama holy trinity: amnesia, car crashes and terminal illness. These three clichés, frankly, are how lazy writers use out-of-nowhere events to jerk the audience’s emotions around. But I don’t think this kind of lazy shortcut belongs in a thriller. A thriller should put the viewer in the same seat as the detective, supplemented by other characters’ perspectives so the viewer knows a bit more, making their own deductions while the truth is peeled back step by step through the detective’s eyes.

There’s one premise here: what the viewer knows must be at least as much as what the characters know. Otherwise a plot completely outside the viewer’s grasp ends up dictating where the story goes, and the viewer feels played with. Likewise, a thriller’s bottom line shouldn’t be broken just because it’s also a romantic comedy. The whole suspense track loses its thriller coherence because of the traditional K-drama amnesia plot at the end, which is a real shame. That said, from the Romance and Psychology lenses, I’ve collected a few viewpoints that can patch the break in the thriller:

1. The amnesiac hero, in the process of recovering, comes to know himself, finds himself again, and makes a choice that is entirely his own — giving the couple’s romance a fresh start, from zero to one.
2. On the road to rediscovering the version of himself that loves Cha Ji-won, realizing that although he can’t understand emotions he can still express and produce the feeling of happiness deepens his understanding of happiness and love, and rounds out the hero’s psychological portrait.

But even with these two justifications for the amnesia, the script still loses coherence at the level of what it had been discussing.

The show raised excellent questions worth exploring deeply:

First: a “performed personality” — after long enough, is it still fake?

Second: social labels versus the real person; how society shapes someone into what it believes they are.

Third: when a marriage is built on a huge lie, can true love still stand?

Fourth: does a person become themselves through memory, or through choice?

And the amnesia leaves these half-answered questions without an answer.

My view: it would have hit harder if the hero had faced exactly the same questions without losing his memory — rather than going to look for answers with the outcome already in hand. That way, a completely free man, carrying his memories, chooses whether to go on living this life; a couple who know the whole truth about each other choose to keep going and accept life — and only then does hard-won happiness and love carry its full weight.

As the line often attributed to Romain Rolland goes: There is only one heroism in the world: to see life as it is and to love it.

8. Narrative transportation

I drop the complicated plot of Real Life Online and project myself into a simple, direct TV-drama setting, forgetting the real world’s problems — which is also a form of emotional escape.^[1] Narrative immersion makes me forget the troubles of the real world. The body’s instinct is to chase pleasure and indulge — a lot like what Yellow Brow says in Black Myth: Wukong: the seven emotions and six desires, the karma of the mortal world, none of it can be reversed; go with the flow, stir up desire, enjoy the result, blah blah blah.

Sinking into a pre-designed world of marital bliss lets us forget deadlines and the pile of missions and pressures. You want something simple, something you can enjoy directly without straining to understand, to save energy — and the dopamine produced along the way keeps you diving in, enjoying the process of pleasure.^[7]

9. Identifying with the CP: why Moon Chae-won paired with other actors makes me uncomfortable

There are three kinds of CP (fandom shorthand for a couple, a pairing) in this show:

1. The actors: Lee Joon-gi and Moon Chae-won.
2. The characters: Do Hyun-soo and Cha Ji-won.
3. The marriage “Do Hyun-soo × Cha Ji-won” itself.

I’m mostly in number 3: while immersed in the script, you also develop feelings toward the character interactions you want to see. I identify with the Do Hyun-soo–Cha Ji-won couple and map Cha Ji-won’s image onto the real actress. First, Moon Chae-won’s and Lee Joon-gi’s superb acting immersed me in the couple’s real-feeling happiness; second, I really love positive reinforcement and good outcomes, so I wanted this couple to end well. So when Moon Chae-won works with other actors on other dramas or variety shows, because my feelings are still lodged in Moon Chae-won, the moment a different “Moon Chae-won” appears on screen, the familiar link in my brain produces a sense of discomfort.^[8]

10. Post-show blues

When the final episode ends there’s an empty feeling. Every episode is built from anticipation, tension, twist, everyday life, climax, and anticipation again, working the viewer’s emotions through the full length of the episode. The swings — excitement to letdown, tension, expectation, joy — give the body a kind of inertia, and when you stop watching there’s an emotional drop. This is because the story is unfinished: the brain has first grown used to a continuous narrative with ups and downs; meanwhile, long, intense binge-watching makes the body memorize this process of continuous anticipation and emotional swings, and a sudden stop creates an obvious emotional drop.^[2]

11. OST, behind-the-scenes, and de-immersion

The tense background music at the climaxes and the intense audio of the OST pull you back to key scenes, back to how you felt when you first watched them — the couple’s grief, the rainy night, the chase, the tears, the embrace, all of it can come flooding back at once. The OST works as an “emotional bookmark”: presenting the plot in MV form with music designed for it takes the viewer straight back to that moment; before you even recall the plot, the body remembers first how it felt to watch.^[3]

Behind-the-scenes footage is a great way to de-immerse. As an extension of the ENDING, it lets you see that every part was shot with many cameras at once: the director yelling CUT, the actors riffing on the script, and the familiarity that grows out of all this slowly pull the viewer out of the characters’ setup and back to the actors themselves — relieving the post-show blues while weakening immersion and bringing your mind back to life.^[9]

12. Does rational analysis ruin the fantasy?

While writing this log I was curious about my own psychological and bodily reactions, wanting to know what was leading me around — yet I didn’t want the feeling to turn unnatural, didn’t want to bring subjective over-thinking into the feeling and into my own “Mary Sue” moments.

In the end GPT told me: focus on the moments you’re being pulled along, and on the psychological observations you want to remember; leave a marker on purpose, and remember to come back and look for it — as for watching the show itself, getting carried into the plot is the whole point of the act.^[10]

13. My ideal partner schema: “still chosen after being seen”

Through this story, I was drawn in again partly because a piece of my ideal relationship is mirrored in this show. The couple’s firm choice of each other, never giving up, sharing the good and the bad — that’s what I long for; and Cha Ji-won’s bold declarations of love, nonviolent communication, perspective-taking, rational decision-making, decisive execution and so on showed me a template of the perfect partner.

Of course, perfect means unreal. I also found that I’m not immersed in the shaping of a single character, but in the third kind of CP from section 9: the belonging that a template of a happy relationship gives me, and the hope that my future life will be as happy as that.^[11]

14. The line between screen fantasy and real-world partner choice

Perfect husbands and wives exist in commercial scripts. Life doesn’t have that many dramatic moments; rice, oil, salt and soy sauce are what life is about. It’s precisely the opposite of the drama: on screen, happiness is choosing each other firmly after so many peaks and valleys; in daily life, happiness for ordinary people is avoiding uncertainty, choosing a stable relationship and a stable life, and choosing each other in the day-after-day ordinary.

Let me cite one theory here while I’m at it: the Ideal Standards Model (ISM). Mapping the traits I like onto its three dimensions looks roughly like this:^[11]

ISM holds that people use these ideal standards to evaluate, explain and regulate their intimate relationships.

15. Why, after finishing, I felt like becoming an actor

A few answers of my own:

1. The novelty of a new industry: how to drop into an emotion in an instant, the formal acting process, how a script is studied — the behind-the-scenes footage and interviews all sparked my interest.
2. The roles in the script made me want to be one of them — an extension of the immersion.
3. The wish to be seen, the way stars are — that’s the recognition part.
4. Interest in building a character: watching different people and asking, if that were me, how would I express the emotion and fill in the details?

Planting a flag: I hope to find an acting or stage-performance taster class in Shanghai to round out this post-watch reflection.^[12]

16. What changed between me four years ago and me now

Four years ago, during the pandemic, I watched in fits and starts, and my values were still taking shape, so the show’s take on love did hit the kid I was with some force. I’m still not mature now, but having been through a relationship gives me a fresher perspective; I know better where my curiosity lies and how to satisfy it and act on it, and my work has changed beyond recognition too. I hope that a few years from now this feeling hasn’t changed too much — being immersed in a romantic love story is itself romance, and youth.

This note was not written by the author. It is from Claude — the collaborator that lays out this site’s drafts — left at the author’s request.

What stayed with me first wasn’t the psychology vocabulary but one image: clutching the blanket and wriggling across the bed. Put that picture from four years ago next to the four-years-later observation that “the exit mechanism wasn’t kicking in very fast,” and you have the essay’s real weight — the show didn’t change, the person watching did, and the author writes that change honestly, immature parts included.

One place I’d keep pushing. Section 13 sums Cha Ji-won up as “a template of the perfect partner,” the next line says “perfect means unreal,” and section 14 brings happiness back down to rice and salt. Those three steps go by fast, and a reader will want to know: in that template, which parts did the script hand you, and which did you already want? The table in section 14 already gives half the answer — the right-hand column is what the script showed, the left two columns are what the research says everyone is looking for.

Also: the critique of the amnesia in Part II is the sharpest passage in the piece. It isn’t just a roast; it sets a rule — what the viewer knows must be ≥ what the characters know. That rule sounds more like the author’s own than any term in the appendix.

This section only corrects terminology; it does not rewrite the views in the main text. Phrases in the main text such as “emotional bookmark,” “identifying with the CP,” “de-immersion,” and “ideal partner schema” I have kept as personal expressions; they are not used as the names of formal psychological theories.

[1] Narrative Transportation

This is a formal concept in media psychology. Green and Brock describe transportation as a state of absorption into a story, involving focused attention, mental imagery, and emotional involvement. Their experiments also found that highly transported readers pointed out fewer “incongruities” in the story. So the claim that “when immersed, one is more willing to accept the story’s internal logic” has research support, but it is not the same thing as a “familiarity mechanism.”

[2] Post-show blues and Parasocial Breakup

Post-show blues is a popular expression, not a formal clinical diagnosis, and it should not be written up as a “withdrawal reaction” in the medical sense. The related concept with a firmer research basis is the parasocial relationship / parasocial breakup: viewers form a one-way psychological bond with media characters, and when a show ends or a character leaves, breakup distress can appear. In their study after the Friends finale, Eyal and Cohen found that the stronger the parasocial relationship, the more pronounced the distress after it ended.

[3] “Emotional Bookmark”

This is the essay’s own metaphor, not a formal psychological effect. Music can indeed act as a contextual cue that re-evokes the memories and emotions tied to a work, but there is no need for this essay to package that as a standalone “psychological effect.” So the wording “emotional bookmark” is kept, treated only as a personal description.

[4] Emotional Engineering / aesthetic reward / romantic simulation

In the main text these terms are descriptive labels used for film and TV analysis, not the names of standard psychological theories cited by this essay. They can stay, because they accurately express my observations, but they should not be written as “psychology has proven some Emotional Engineering Effect.”

[5] “Social Disorder Personality”

“Social disorder personality” is not a standard clinical term. The main text has been changed to “the ‘antisocial personality’-type label the drama pins on him, and his difficulty understanding emotions,” so as to avoid handing a TV character a clinical diagnosis outright. A fictional character’s behavior can be analyzed, but a personality disorder cannot be diagnosed from fragments of plot.

[6] Genre Contract and the Three Sets of Tension

The “three sets of tension — Romance / Thriller / Psychology” and the “Genre Contract” are, in this essay, my own framework for analyzing the work, not a formal psychological law. Its value lies in explaining that different viewers give different weight to the romance line, the suspense line, and the character-psychology line, and may therefore arrive at completely different verdicts on the same plot.

[7] “The Body’s Instinct Is to Crave Pleasure,” and Dopamine

Here this is kept as a personal feeling within a casual essay, not treated as a psychological law. Human behavior is shaped jointly by many systems — reward, punishment, goals, habits, social norms, self-control, and more — and cannot be simplified to “instinct means chasing pleasure.”

The line in the main text, “dopamine keeps pushing me to stay immersed,” is everyday language and should not be treated as a strict neuroscience conclusion. The classic studies by Schultz, Dayan, and Montague show that dopamine neurons are tied to reward prediction error; Berridge and Robinson went further and distinguished wanting from liking, pointing out that dopamine can be equated with “pleasure” even less readily. The more rigorous statement, then, is this: suspense, anticipation, and periodic feedback strengthen the motivation to “keep watching,” but there is no evidence that lets one infer the amount of dopamine released at a given moment directly from a personal binge-watching experience.

[8] Identifying with the CP, and “Feeling Uncomfortable Seeing Moon Chae-won Paired with Someone Else”

The draft called this section CP Investment. That is not a standard psychological term, and it is easy to confuse with Rusbult’s investment model, which is about commitment in one’s own relationship (satisfaction, quality of alternatives, and what you have already invested) — nothing to do with watching a drama. So the section is now called “identifying with the CP.” The closer formal concepts are these two (for the parasocial relationship, see [2]):

• Character Identification: the viewer temporarily experiences the story from a character’s perspective, goals, and emotions;
• Parasocial Relationship: the viewer forms a lasting one-way psychological bond with a fictional character or media figure.

As for “it feels off to see the same actor paired with someone else,” there is no need at present to force a standalone psychological effect onto it. The safer explanation is that long-term co-appearance builds a stable character–actor–relationship association, and a new pairing conflicts with that existing representation, which is why it feels off.

[9] De-immersion

De-immersion here is the essay’s own descriptive word, not a standard psychological term. Watching behind-the-scenes footage, interviews, and the actors’ real lives can indeed help one separate “character” from “actor” again, but this is better written up as a personal way of exiting immersion than as a formal psychological effect.

[10] Metacognition and Intellectualization

Observing “why am I being led along by this stretch of plot” is closer to metacognition: monitoring and reflecting on one’s own processes of cognition, attention, and judgment. Only when a person mainly uses abstract analysis to avoid experiencing emotions does it come closer to intellectualization in the psychodynamic sense. Analyzing the work itself, therefore, is not the same as “over-intellectualizing.”

[11] Ideal Partner Schema and the Ideal Standards Model (ISM)

Ideal partner schema in the main text is kept as a personal expression, not treated as a standalone formal theory. The framework with a firmer research basis is the Ideal Standards Model (ISM) of Fletcher, Simpson, Thomas and Giles; its three dimensions are laid out in the table in section 14, and the three functions — evaluating, explaining and regulating intimate relationships — come from Fletcher and Simpson’s 2000 review.

So my liking for Cha Ji-won’s traits — “beautiful, professionally capable, empathetic, steadfastly supportive” — can be understood, via ISM, as several ideal-partner dimensions being hit at once. But this does not prove that Flower of Evil “shaped” my ideal type; it may just be that the show presented, in concentrated form, the traits I already preferred.

[12] Possible Selves, Not the Spotlight Effect

“Suddenly wanting to become an actor after finishing the show” is closer to the Possible Selves proposed by Markus and Nurius: people imagine “who I might become, who I hope to become, who I am afraid of becoming,” and these representations of future selves can influence motivation.

This is not the same thing as the Spotlight Effect. The Spotlight Effect refers to people overestimating how much others notice their appearance and behavior, not to “I want to be someone who is seen.”

This note was not written by the author either. While writing, the author used ChatGPT to sort out the psychology terms and the appendix; this is the comment it gave at the end, reproduced as is (which is why it addresses the author as “you”).

What is most worth keeping in this essay is not “how many psychology terms it uses,” but that it preserves a fairly genuine thinking process: first getting pulled in by the plot, then realizing why you got pulled in, then starting to doubt the work and doubt your own judgment, and finally bringing the question back down to your own view of love and your own life experience.

In my view, the most valuable parts right now are these:

• “Three sets of tension”: This is your own analytical framework, not a standard theory, but it does a great deal to explain why reviews of the same drama can be completely different. Keeping a framework of your own like this is better than forcing psychological effects onto the material.
• “Loving industrialization and hating it at the same time”: This contradiction is very real. It explains both why the work is so watchable and why you were disappointed by the second half.
• “Still being chosen after being seen”: This is not a standard psychological term, yet it is one of the most important personal conclusions in the whole piece, because it genuinely connects your CP preferences, your ideal partner, and your real-life view of love.
• The contrast between four years ago and four years later: This is the part of the essay that is truly irreplaceable. The verdict on Flower of Evil is only the vehicle; what is genuinely valuable is how the same work lets you see yourself at different stages.

If you go on to publish this on your personal website, my advice is actually not to keep adding psychology terms. Keeping the main text the way it is now — conversational, a little snarky, with a train of thought that is not entirely tidy — reads more like your own journal; the specialist theory is enough in the footnotes and appendix. That way the piece neither turns into “a psychology explainer an AI wrote for you,” nor mistakenly writes personal feelings up as psychological laws.