Cheese in the Trap is one heck of a controversial drama. Adapted from a super popular webtoon of the same name, the manhwa had already been in circulation for a good six years when the drama aired, which meant a dedicated fanbase with mountain-high expectations. So, it goes without saying, that there was an immense buzz (good and bad) when the drama was on air. Everything from the casting, to the plot, to the ending (the webtoon was ongoing when the drama finished airing and plus there was a controversy about actor Park Hae Jin’s reduced screen time towards the latter part of the show), was nitpicked, discussed and argued upon. Now, a good four years later, with a sizable comprehension of dramas and their varying genres, and sometimes unchanging tropes, I decided to revisit Cheese in the Trap. I was curious to see how the drama holds up now, and if my understanding and stance on the drama had changed. I rewatched this drama without any prior knowledge of the contents of the webtoon (like I did the first time around), so this review will be solely based on the drama adaptation only. To quench my curiosity, I did read the comparisons between the webtoon and the drama and the extended issue of the controversy, but that won’t factor into my review.
So, let me get it right off the bat — I loved it! More so on this second viewing actually. Yes, the ending was frighteningly inadequate for a show that for all its runtime was exhaustively about its characters, yet the mood and tone of the show, the character-driven storyline, the costumes, styling, the clear absence of drama tropes (until the very end that is, which I will touch upon later) and blaring OSTs, make this drama exclusive. The intermix of the two jarring genres of a romantic comedy and a subtle psychological thriller goes undetectable as the drama shapeshifts from one into another smoothly. This is formidable considering that the dramas that have followed suit like Strong Woman Do Bong Soo, Suspicious Partner, and When the Cameilla Blooms haven’t achieved Cheese in the Trap’s level of sophistication in fusing these opposing genres. The reason for this chiefly can be credited to having one of the most dubious male leads in K-drama history.
Park Hae Jin’s Yoo Jung would be a damn good villain in a crime centric drama, but in a rom-com setting, he is someone to avoid at all costs. Hong Seol (an exceptional Kim Go Eun) does exactly that. The year Yoo Jung returns to university, upon completing his military conscription, he starts paying a little too much attention to Seol. When this unwarranted attention turns malicious, Seol takes a year off school. This may seem like an overreaction, but Seol just isn’t someone who stands up and confronts her problems (you see this in the way Jang Bo Ra — played by Park Min Jin — screams and yells at the students who bully Seol, while Seol always just walks away). Hong Seol is the type of person who just wants to get through her day without any attention or unnecessary drama. She would rather avoid Jung for an entire year than stand up to him and ask him what his problem is. That’s why when she returns to college after a year, she is baffled by how nice Jung suddenly is to her. He keeps asking her out, helps her with work, meets her at her part-time job, while Seol actively (and comically) tries to avoid him. Kim Go Eun nails Seol’s introverted personality, especially in her constant bewilderment whenever Jung asks her to have lunch with him.
I consider Yoo Jung as an antithesis to the tsundere persona, wherein he maintains a facade of all goodness and sweetness but underneath is a sociopath. We keep hearing from various characters, how similar Jung and Seol are. Both are hardworking, top of their class, who always end up doing all the work in a group project. Both don’t receive any appreciation from their families for this hard work and both don’t open up to others unless prodded. But they are different, in that, their motivations are different. Seol ends up doing all the work because she isn’t assertive enough to get others to work, while Jung looks down on his friends and hence volunteers to do their share of the work too. He is also a calculative person. His actions are never spontaneous and from the heart. It’s like when playing chess, he makes a move and simultaneously is thinking of the next ten moves to play. Any favour he does for you, he is most likely to use it as leverage later on. This is what makes Jung more dangerous than the other characters who wreck Seol’s life. Their actions stem from basic human emotions like jealousy, a moment of helplessness, or a need to just fit in, while Jung plans these instances, without any regard for the amount of damage or trauma it can cause a person. And as much as Jung is wary of his tag of being wealthy, he is more than willing to use that power and influence, to get what he wants, without ever getting his hands dirty.
You notice this in his relationship with Seol too. We never get the reason why Jung is suddenly wearing his heart on the sleeve for a girl he detested until last year, except as their relationship progresses, you discover that his love wasn’t a sudden flutter of the heart. Jung uses a series of chance happenings to get Seol a scholarship so that she could return to university. In that way, Seol’s relationship with Yoo Jung comes off as more concocted than her relationship to Baek In Ho (a charming Seo Kang Joon; his casting with Lee Sung Kyung as siblings was casting gold!). In a nice change of pace, the meet-cute, the coincidental meetings, the staying in the same neighourhood, working together (the English language academy and Seol’s family noodle shop) was regulated to the second male lead. In that, it felt like two sets of rom-com occurring side by side — one where a girl falls in love with her college senior and in another, a brash yet loving boy who brings the shy girl out of her shell. The latter is especially true as Seol starts standing up to bullies and confronting her problems head-on only after In Ho keeps prodding her to do so.
For just the drama viewers, there was (and still continues to this date) a lot of discussion on why Seol didn’t end up with In Ho. It’s completely to the actors' credit that the chemistry between the characters oozes ease and warmth, but when you look at the complete picture, it makes sense that she ends up with Jung, as In Ho was never on her radar as a potential love interest. He starts liking her well after she starts dating Jung, and nor did Seol do anything from her side to indicate any interest in him. From how I see it, In Ho’s story is of one alone. One where he has to figure out what he would like to do. His inclusion in the drama serves as proof of what Jung is capable of, and how he hasn’t changed one bit in the past few years.
The third act is which the drama starts falling apart and by the last two episodes, it’s a trainwreck. The whole Oh Young Gon (Ji Yoon Ho) stalker subplot dragged for way too long and by then the show enters typical K-drama territory with a sudden accident, a last-minute breakup, a mental asylum, and chaebols. We also get a flashback for Jung, which lends a root from where his ‘strangeness’ stems, which I felt was not required. There had been enough scenes that proved to us the immense pressure Jung is always under to act perfect, because of his father and the company. I understood him as someone who knew the power and influence his background holds, and the types of people that it attracts. But as he can’t act out, he is manipulative enough to screw over people who mess with him, without ever directly getting involved. Whenever he is with Seol, we witness the sensitive side to him as well, like when he opens up about his father or when he asks Seol if she also approached him with some favour in mind. This is why the ending is such a downer. We have spent the whole show with Seol and Jung together as they navigate their relationship, their similar yet dissimilar personalities, Jung’s sociopathic tendencies, and his controversial past of harassing Seol, that the ending felt like a cop-out, especially for a drama that so far had been anything but ordinary. It wouldn’t have mattered if Jung didn’t change at all, as we watch many times, that whenever his love for Seol and his true self collided, the latter won almost always. Jung isn’t an In Ho, who with a little bit of love, support, and confidence started changing his life around.
Adaptations of long-format stories (novels, webtoons) are always a win-lose situation. Things are going to be edited out or changed. Characters may be removed, or altered according to the actors playing them, and as I am not familiar with the webtoon, I don’t know where the drama started deviating from the source material or what changes were made. But what I do know is that Cheese in the Trap is definitely a stand-out drama, especially in terms of the acting, the cinematography, and screenplay. Take the scene after the group project disaster, where Seol walks back home alone while Jung follows her silently. Earlier in the episode, we see that In ho and Seol have met and have realised that they live in the same neighborhood. And Jung is also aware of Seol meeting up with In Ho over her lost phone. But he hasn’t seen them together. Yet we as an audience already know and anticipate it happening sometime soon. And it does! When In Ho meets Seol, we don’t immediately cut to Jung’s reaction. We watch them walking together with Jung standing blurred in the background. We and Jung both watch as In Ho successfully cheers up Seol, playfully teases her, and walks home with her. It is then, that we cut to Jung’s reaction. It a type of scene we always anticipate in rom-coms but it is so beautifully shot here that it is unfair to call the drama lazily made.
What happened at the ending of cheese in the trap?
We see how the first email suddenly is marked as read and that last bit of them running towards each other looks like a dream sequence of a flashback from years earlier. So basically the drama ends with him reading her email after 3 years.
What happened between Jung and Inho?
However, their relationship fell off after a misunderstanding in high school, where Inho would lose his ability to play the piano impeccably with his left hand and ultimately, his once unfaltering confidence.
What happens in cheese in the trap webtoon?
Having returned to college after a year long break, Hong Sul, a hard-working over-achiever, inadvertently got on the wrong side of a suspiciously perfect senior named Yoo Jung. From then on her life took a turn for the worse and Sul was almost certain it was all Yoo Jung's doing.
What is the plot of cheese in the trap?
Synopsis. The drama focuses on the life and relationships of a group of university students, particularly the difficult relationship between hard-working scholarship student Hong Seol (Kim Go-eun) and a deceptive senior, Yoo Jung (Park Hae-jin). Jung is rich, popular, and he is heir to Taerang Group.