Auditioning for her comeback film in Episode 8, Yu Ra has to deliver lines that surprisingly portray Ji An’s situation: “It’s a terrible pity that I’m younger than you, [Department Head]. I want to bite off your arms and legs, curse at you, and quit. But I have a loan to pay off. So I’m going to love you starting today.”
Much later, we get a treat when Ki Hoon goes to the movies and we see a snippet of the final film. It turns out Yu Ra’s character represents Ji An in more ways than one.
@actionscript at Soompi Forum writes:
The short movie clip of Yu Ra that is shown in Episode 16 was a metaphor for Ji An’s life.
The first scene shows Yu Ra’s character gulping down a shot of soju. We saw Ji An drink soju in various scenes such as:
– The company dinner in Episode 5
– Dinner with Dong Hoon in Episode 7
Yu Ra is styled with her hair tied back as Ji An usually had hers.
Yu Ra is also eating in a company dinner reminiscent of Saman E and C’s company dinner in Episode 5:
Yu Ra’s character then proceeds with the following monologue:
“Do you know why I’m always sick?
Because there are so many people I hate.
I thought about when I wasn’t sick.
When I was in love.”
For Ji An, sickness exemplified her life prior to getting to know Dong Hoon. Her world was full of hate, not only for the likes of Kwang Il, but more so with herself. It embodied her feelings of guilt and her avoidance of building human connections. But all that changed when Dong Hoon entered her life and showed her kindness and empathy, allowing her to heal.
Then Yu Ra says, “So I decided to love you starting today. You bastard.”
The finger-pointing and the use of the word bastard are an allusion to this scene:
The Department Head becomes exasperated with her:
“Acting out when she’s drunk, that’s all she can do.
Who hired her?
She can’t do anything right.
Until when will you act like that?”
These lines are a synopsis of everything Dong Hoon has experienced with Ji An and all his bewilderment that came with it: the stealing of the bribe money, the out-of-nowhere kiss, the unexpected love confession, and the wiretapping. Questioning “Who hired her?” is also a callback to Episode 9 when Team Three asks Dong Hoon on the rooftop, “What made you hire her?”
The scene above is interspersed with Yu Ra’s character saying:
“Let’s love. Let’s love him.
Let’s love that bastard.
I’ll try to put up with him.
I will try to love you more passionately.”
These lines signified Ji An still loving Dong Hoon throughout much of the latter episodes despite the distance and boundaries that Dong Hoon had constantly kept.
Yu Ra’s pounding on the copier is again a callback to how Ji An would do the same when she worked at Saman.
The change in the color of her wardrobe is significant, too. In the dinner scene, when Yu Ra was still in her world of hate, she was wearing black. But that changed to a lighter-toned top in the latter scene, reflective of Ji An’s improving circumstances in the latter episodes. It’s the same color tone that Ji An would wear as well in the final coffee shop scene, providing a connection between the two scenes.
Then she broke the 4th wall and addressed the audience:
That is the last scene in the movie clip, and it’s a foreshadowing of the show’s last scene itself with what’s to come between Dong Hoon and Ji An once they reunite.
How witty that the show encapsulated the entire journey of the main protagonist, Ji An, through a parody and presented it through a movie within the show. The key idea that really stood out for me was, while Ji An always used the word “like” in a number of occasions in describing how she felt for Dong Hoon, her meta representation in the movie only used the word “love,” over and over! In fact, she uttered “love” 6 times in the 65-second skit. I believe it is the show’s way to categorically confirm how we are to interpret the more subtle “like” that Ji An used.
And then there’s how the meta Ji An broke the 4th wall to lay out what exactly is to come in her final reunion scene with Dong Hoon – of love surging up between them.
My Ahjussi / My Mister Fan Site 
Indeed. Her movie scripts became very obvious when I rewatched.
And yes, “like” is simply a different way to say “love” (apparently in Korean too). …More a teenager way of saying it? At an earlier stage of a relationship?
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In other romance K dramas, I noticed they used “like” a lot, too. I guess you’re right, it seemed to be used when the persons involved are either not yet in a relationship, are still in the courtship stage, or are in the early stages of a relationship.
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Good point, UC70s and actionscript, in general they don’t use the word “love” early on, do they? Unless they are Ko Moon Young from It’s Okay to Not be Okay. 😄
In Chinese dramas I’ve noticed they use “我喜歡你” (wo xihuan ni = I like you) instead of “我愛你” (wo ai ni = I love you) as well.
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I follow everything you write here, but at the time of first watching, (and second and third!!), as a viewer this scene never reached me. I didn’t really understand why it was there at the levels you discuss. I didn’t understand why the audience in the movie theater laughed. To me Yura was reading lines that did not make much sense in the movie-within-a-movie, though the overall scene shows Yura’s emerging success as an actress due to Gi-Hoon’s support, and his continued love for her. As for Ji An at the company dinner, I thought she was quite composed and self controlled during the company dinner, except when she gave the Team-3 guy a much-deserved slap. Ji An’s agressiveness to the woman co-worker earlier at the company dinner was responding to being insulted. Otherwise, Ji An was quietly drinking to herself at the dinner while the whole other Sh**-show was going on around her. I don’t see how this is quite reflected in the Yura movie scene. Am I still missing something?
signed, :~) a spellbound Fan of this show, if still a little confused. :~)
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Other than the settings that you both have mentioned (YR a mouthpiece of LJA), YR the character remains largely herself, a wealthy and immature kid, despite her age. In a sharp contrast to LJA to remind audiences that maturity not necessarily correlated with age (and LJA an old soul, not a kid).
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@davidms I understand where you’re coming from, as this realization of how Yu Ra’s movie was actually a metaphor for Ji An didn’t come to me all at once despite several dozen re-watches of the entire post-time skip sequence. In fact, the realization came in bits and pieces, as you can see in the Epilogue of the post on “Yu Ra: Spokesperson for Ji An,” I only touched on the specific scene where Yu Ra is pounding on the copier, still oblivious to the fact that her entire movie was actually a metaphor for Ji An.
The movie was presented as a parody, as can be seen in the comical acting of Yu Ra’s character and consequently in the audience’s laughter. And as a metaphor, each scene in the movie was not meant to exactly duplicate its counterpart in the show, but was instead meant to encapsulate multiple layers of symbols, and to depict call backs and allusions to various disparate moments in the show. So the dinner scene in Yu Ra’s movie was not meant to reproduce the entire dinner scene of Saman, but was presented to establish the context that the character Yu Ra is playing was alluding to Ji An. And they did capture several of Ji An’s situation from various parts of the show in that dinner scene as well – the character’s monologue about feeling sick, and most telling was her decision to love her department head, which alluded to Ji An’s confession scenes in Ep 10 and 12.
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