This has the twin benefits of being the most true and the most feminist statement I’ve seen on Korean television .These women are so driven to live through their children because that’s all they’re allowed to have. All their own dreams, all their own aspirations are squashed, all their own desires discounted. And that’s what makes Sky Castle such an amazing show because it’s ultimately about fairness and equality – not just for bright student who can’t afford tutors and favours but also for brilliant woman forced to sacrifice themselves on the altar of their families. Forget female martyrdom – everything would be better if these women had their own lives. And that is the show’s ultimate – and ultimately uplifting – message. There is hope in this show. Real hope. For all its brutality and catalogue of banal cruelty and myopic selfishness. It’s a show about hope. And that’s what makes it so good.
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    The thing that gets meL this is one of the few shows I’ve watched where the message is that things can be better if you just choose for them to be better. It’s not about grand societal change or overthrowing the status quo. Their lives were better because they just chose for them to be better. I love that. It’s the most hopeful thing I’ve heard in a long time.

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    Yes! That fact that women cease to exist as themself after becoming mothers (they are called “mom” or “name’s mom” even by their peers), and are expected to leave everything behind and pour it all for the kids “future” (the scene where coach dismissed and shamed successful working mom for not being devoted enough).

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    I laughed so hard when she told her grandmother that.

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    The message is hope and I liked how they got there even if I didn’t love the show. I don’t think it had much to do with feminism though? That grandma could easily have been a grandpa and she was the only one who was from a generation when women could not do what they wanted. The 3 original men in the place were as oppressed by society’s rules as their wives. Nobody forced these women to choose that path, Sue Lim was an orphan and she chose not to live by other people’s expectations while being from the same generation as the other three women.

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      Sue Lim wasn’t orphan, her parents run orphanage, and she was looked down for not devoting herself to WooJoo studies, same in earlier episodes, Coach Kim didn’t choose one of the mother who was the owner of successful business, because she wasn’t devoted mother, choosing work over spending 100% of her time on her kid studies, there was a shot of SuJin reading book with title to the effect that college admission depend on the mothers in 95%. Basically we were shown this educated, intelligent women who are expected by society to focus only on children educational success at all cost. It wasn’t main message of the show, but it was part of the message nonetheless.

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        Thanks @shach, I forgot about Sue Lim’s parents. I know it was part of the message but it was for me, a small part of the larger story. We knew almost nothing about the past lives of the 3 main women who were there before SL and none of them had any personal interest in anything but their children.

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          Yes, it wasn’t main part of the message, but we got snippets of info on each of them throughout the series to learn about them.

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      The grandma would never have been a grandpa. That was part of the drama’s point.

      As @shach says, it wasn’t the main point but it was a big one.

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        Why not? We had countless controlling grandpas in kdramas always trying to decide what was best for everyone in his family.

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