I wouldn't recommend this drama to anyone, but for me personally, it was highly watchable. I can forgive a lot when I love the OTP, and I LOVED the OTP. They were the cutest and one of my favorite OTPs of the year.

The mom's story was mostly terrible and grandmother's mostly offensive, but Nam-soon's story was the heart of the show, and I loved all the characters around her. The drug investigation team was so cute and funny together, and there's a hilarious Parasite parody in Episode 14. The villain -- both of them -- was sympathetic and redeemable, and he had electric chemistry with our heroine. If you're sick of the serial killer trend in dramaland, we get drugs instead, and drugs > serial killers. Nam-soon's relationship with her family was very heartwarming, and I think I cried more in this drama than other dramas even though it's a comedy. The scenes between her and her dad, brother, adopted parents, and horse (Ppappa!) all made me cry.

Again, I don't recommend watching this, but if you do, keep your expectations on the floor, and you may enjoy it as long as you're in the right mood.

I not only would not recommend this drama, I will probably avoid any future dramas from this writer. The drug storyline was ridiculous and nonsensical. There were some very dark scenes interspersed with slapstick humor and think overall it's tonally jarring. The main couple was cute but not worth 16 episodes, imo

@leetennant has written an absolutely wonderful article on the writer Baek Mi-kyung. This is a great analysis of the writing intent, style and the gap between them where Strong Girl Nam-soon takes a well-aimed fall right into the cracks. 🤣

leetennant

https://www.dramabeans.com/members/leetennant/activity/1481713/

I might recommend it, but only to people I want to hurt. This is the epitome of a show that started high and proceeded to burry itself in a pile of pointless and infuriating garbage.

I disliked the first one in this series because the fl was turned into someone who was made to work hard to stay ultra feminine and silly despite having all the strength in the world, but I thought this one started off much better bcs Nam Soon was strong, reveled in her strength, and people around her acknowledged it and respected it.

I also liked the family angle and the mother daughter relationship and the lead couple's romance, the personal stuff were all quite touching honestly, but the actual plot was so nonsensical, I got bored and didn't finish. I did enjoy the character stuff so I might go in and at least browse through parts of it.

I also hate to make this point bcs I feel too many kdrama watchers allow attractive male actors to be ridiculous or mediocre but are harder on the women, but this went too far for me...for goodness sake, why was the fl made to speak so childish. She was genuinely cute already and I liked her personality on a general level, why was she basically doing baby speak to make her seem even more childish. It was kind of crazy because there were moments I felt like the pairing was almost inappropriate with how young the direction for her seemed to be, even though obviously there were no real issues. The lead couple were very sweet, I just wish the direction/writing for the leading lady's personality was less gratingly babyish and I think it would have let me enjoy the already quite pleasant lead couple even more.

Its a good way to waste your time and get frustrated by the end, if you have time to waste that is. Ong Seong-Wu and Byeon Woo Seok are the two that kept me watching til the end and I don't usually cheer for the bad guys.

This drama did not deliver at all, such a great start but it fell apart halfway. There was no plot, the FL acted like a baby, the ml was annoying, the villain was surprisingly the only one worth rooting for. It's light and easy to watch as long, as you don't put your heart in it, you'll be fine.

A hot mess.

A FL whose acting was abysmal and grated on the nerves, a ML who was blander than dust and overshadowed for the entire series by the villain, overacting everywhere, annoying cringey supporting characters, a plot that was all over the place so yeah hot mess. Do not recommend.

This show has excellent dinner/meal scenes. It's too bad there were so many scenes that were not those. 😔

Just finished and I cannot say I would ever rewatch this except the 3 min cameo of bong bong and min min while awaiting their reunion in some other show.

I would say on paper this has a lot of the right ingredients including a family of strong women who defy societal expectations including the mom who is so amazingly business savvy despite not being good at school or going to college. However the writer chose to add some new elements to the original strong saga that didn’t add the suspense/thrill risk needed to make the story pop. It’s like forgetting the salt.

A good hero villain story needs either an incredibly strong villain that the band of good guys look like they could never beat but somehow find a way (think Thanos) or scrappy unlikely heroes who find a way to beat the bad guys like Frodo. Here the good guys have everything- power, money, strength and good looks. It’s hard to even root for them since they always seem to be on high horses. Instead I found myself wishing we could have a serious redemption story where the strong girl actually sympathizes with the broken infatuated bad boy. Maybe they team up with him to take down their common enemy Pavel and during that process give RSO the family/friends/love he so desperately needs to turn his life around.

It’s ok for heroes to have flaws. It makes them more human and likable. Maybe the strong girl is too mesmerized by the bad boy and despite having a very nice vanilla cop boyfriend ends up choosing to save/redeem the bad boy.

I too thought the grandma and FL acted too cutesy and detracted from their strong image especially the grandmother. Why would she need to do all that aiego for her boyfriend who was already in awe of her strength from the beginning?

There were more holes than Swiss cheese. I mean why would the bad guy keep his precious antidote (which he thinks only he has access to and is the power he holds over Pavel which is supposed to be this worldwide major criminal organization) in an unlocked freezer? Also so many weird plot drops at the end to hint at a season 3 like Bread Song’s revelation and Binbin whose first assignment after 20 years of training is to kill his childhood friend and maybe got a 2nd one to kill “golden”. No thank you. I will not be tuning in. Although if you do another original OTP cameo I will only watch that and nothing else. Fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me.

I loved the first season of this drama and was excited about the new season with the same writer but with a different cast. I am so disappointed in this drama. One of the highlights of the whole drama was when the first-season couple made a cameo. The story seems like it was written by a new person who didn't even look at the first season. The story wasn't cohesive and the couple didn't have chemistry. The fl girl had more chemistry with the villain. If a third season is in the works, please get a new cast, and chemistry test for the couple, and study your first season to try to capture the magic of it.

I really enjoy when someone takes a new road to tell an important story, and this drama started out with a charming girl brought up on a horse back in Mongolia by wonderful adoptive parents, and there were a lot of promising storylines, if you imagined they would be brought together and make for a premeditated point, or maybe two.
Something about privilege, love, and purity of heart and intension.
All wrapped in slapstick and superpowers.
I loved the way this could turn out, if it had really been a story told with a purpose. Like Brecht says: "If there is a thought, that you haven't thought, and you want to think it: THINK IT. You May!"
(WHich sounds better in German, where these words have more edges).
But someone who has a blog about K-dramas (one of you readers will know who it is and you are *welcome* to provide a link in the comments) had looked through the history of the writer and could tell you that the absurdness are not there with a purpose: It is just one absurd thing, and then another. The story does not use it's strange way of telling to actually go somewhere new or think new thoughts.
All the promising storylines just popped up rolled on to the shore and went back into the sea without leaving a trace.
The previous drama, Bong-soon, more obviously from the start didn't have anything important to say about society, and so just the sizzling energy between the main characters was enough to make it hard not to come back for seconds and thirds.
In this drama, *one* person was sizzling, and we got an intricate background story ... that he simply took to his grave, too, end of story.
Furthermore, the OTP whose praise are sung by some in this comments' section, was a polivce officer who broke the bones of inmates, or of someone he had just arrested and was lying on the ground with an already damaged leg. He trod on that man's broken leg and told him to be thankful it was not Russia. I guess I can just find a list of terrible people and for the rest of my life, everybody should be thankful for whatever I do, because I am not Hitler or Henry the 8th or whomever killed their family and people around them in large numbers.
If someone had taken on the absurdity and freshness of the first one to four episodes and written a drama that actually went into those problems seriously, although with cartoon logic, this drama could have been a better competition to Lars Von Trier.
(Actually, he does the same: He uses splendid new telling techniques to come up with NO NEW INTERESTING POINTS AT ALL. Only difference is he makes the main characters suffer humiliation, torture, heartbreak and death. And then he wins prizes).
But really, if someone wanted to tell a story about abuse contra good use of power and privilege, and about how how easy it is to judge others when you don't know their lives, it could have been done. But it didn't.
But it can be done - look at how Castaway Diva had such important things to tell amidst all...

6/10.

Not worth watching. I only enjoyed the main couple moments + there were some funny scenes here and there that made me laugh. Other than that, Byeon Wooseok's character was bland and boring, the resolution for some conflicts were super rushed and illogical, and some plotlines were left open and completely unanswered (might be because there's another sequel). I get that the drama is supposed to be happy and lighthearted, but then again they spent way too much time forcing in "deep" dialogues about the cost of saving the world or whatever, so what is their direction really? Anyway, only watched this for the 2 main leads. Wouldn't recommend.

So after watching this, Netflix recommended Moment of Eighteen to me, as the lead in that one is Ong Seung Wu, the same guy who plays cute, happy-go-lucky detective in Strong Girl. After after watching Eighteen, I am now twice as annoyed at Strong Girl. This guy...can ACT. I am well aware that they are two very different kinds of characters. What we needed in Strong Girl was Cute Detective, not the Sad Boy of Eighteen. But you know...what we really needed in Strong Girl was the male lead on screen in the second half! WHAT the writer was thinking turning the villain who was a heartless serial killer into someone who just about replaced the ML, I will never understand.

Look, in basic storytelling terms, the people who DO things are the main characters. The ones who no longer have purpose...disappear. (You can ask Kang Chul from W about that.) So it's just very, very weird when you have a ML who falls out of the script midway through, and instead the whole story is about the ML's girlfriend dating the main villain. And when that's not going on, then it's all about grandma's makjang love story.

I'm also not a fan of how all the women in this story treat the people they are supposedly in relationships with. Just...distain. Nam Soon was raised by someone else, thank goodness, so there's more hope for her (she doesn't seem to distain Kan-i-shik; when they have screen time together, they are all kinds of cuteness). But still, they don't really interact much.

I am NOT saying that I can only watch dramas if there is LUUUUUURV. But as part of basic storytelling, it's just jarring to remove your lead characters midway through and replace them with psycho villains and try to them get your audience to love them, instead?