I stumbled upon the drama Shadow Beauty when all my favorite ongoing dramas ended. Surprisingly, this underrated drama is good. It highlighted stories of students with superiority and inferiority complexes. This web drama is an adaptation of a web novel from the same title and is broadcasted via Kakaotv in 2021.

Here are some of the reasons to watch the drama Shadow Beauty:

Characters

Shim Dal Gi as Goo Ae Jin
Choi Bo Min as Kim Ho In
Lee Na Gyung as Su Mi Jin
Hur Jung Hee as Yang Ha Neul
Yang Hong Seok as Lee Jin Sung

Synopsis

Goo Ae Jin is a high school student who is getting bullied in school because of her looks. The only person she can rely on in school is Lee Jin Sung. Their friendship originated when Lee Jin Sung, a Kpop idol trainee became an outcast in school because of his accent and him being a trainee, went to the rooftop to spend his lunch break. The same spot is where Goo Ae Jin takes her lunch to avoid others.

Goo Ae Jin keeps a wild secret. She is a famous social media influencer named Genie. The character she imposes in social media is different from her true persona. Having 770,000 plus followers, Ae Jin got herself a happy bubble of her own earning from promotions and getting the likes she wanted but she can’t have with her own true self.

Thanks to technology and her photoshop skills, all her pictures were able to fool hundreds of thousands of people but then. However, one day, she got a message of her raw photo from an unknown number and she was told by this anonymous character that he knows she’s Genie.

Faking your identity

Social media influencers are the type of people you’d wish you can be but that’s also the main reason why we get a lot of troll accounts and posers. This drama just highlighted how real-life ‘socialization’ is more important than having hundreds of thousands of followers online when it’s not even a pinch of you.

What exactly do you get from faking your identity? Satisfaction, acceptance, or fame? For Ae-Jin, she felt that her 770,000 followers are people who are her family. It is the only safe space for her where she earns comforting words.

It was her inferiority complex and the environment she got into that provoked her to become a poser and we can’t totally blame her for doing so. It is true that it’s not right but in her darkest moments, she found the light from the online positive comments she received.

The search for true online friends

With a fake identity comes a lot of backlash in terms of getting yourself a true friend. Although you can fake people for a while, it is impossible that you don’t get caught in the end. Ae Jin thought that she finally got a new friend online through her online friend Yang Haneul.

On the contrary, it is the same person who bullies her the most in school. Yang Haneul use to extort a lot of things from Ae Jin until people finally found out that Haneul too is faking her identity. She is not from a well-off family, a persona she portrays in school. It takes courage to speak up — and not everyone can

Not having the chance to stand up for herself, Goo Ae Jin ended up creating a monster inside her without intentionally doing it and the most difficult thing to do is to go out.

The creepy psychopath Kim Ho In

Top students could possibly have creepy sides too. Now, whenever I hear ‘psychopath characters,’ the first thing that’ll pop up in my mind is Choi Bomin’s character Kim Ho In. As the class president, everyone sees him as the perfect and handsome student who has it all. However, outside the four-walled classroom, hides his side that will surely creep you out.

His good and evil characters are totally awesome. There are episodes that you’ll hate him to death yet there are episodes that you just find him cute and adorable.

Choi Bo Min’s superb acting as Kim Ho In

I only heard about Choi Bomin as a part of the Kpop boy group Golden Child but I am clueless about him overall. Watching him in his character Kim Ho In made me curious so I searched about his background in acting. Surprisingly, he is a newbie in the drama industry but he’s already good at portraying difficult roles. I hope he gets a lot of drama opportunities too in the future because he deserves it.

Amidst everything, one true friend is enough

As this blog title says, the beautiful side of ‘Shadow Beauty’ is that we only need just one person to show our true selves. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be yourself with someone without worrying about anything at all?

Teens usually hang out with their friends to have a meal but Goo Ae Jin and Lee Jin Seong having a meal together are like a miracle already. It may be too ideal to say that people shouldn’t be hard on themselves but we can’t stop them from overthinking. 

For some, having a lot of friends can be easy but for others, it is close to impossible. I hope people can easily hang out with others, try a lot of delicious things, laugh, cry and live life together freely without worrying about others’ judgments.