Han So-hee
Yoo Na-bi
Nevertheless,
“Love. I know that it will cause me pain again. Nevertheless, I still...”
2021
Ended • 1 Season • 10 Episodes
Director: Kim Ga-ram
Overview
The intoxicating charm of a flirtatious art school classmate pulls a reluctant love cynic into a friends-with-benefits relationship.
Seasons
- Status
- Ended
- Seasons
- 1 season
- Episodes
- 10 episodes
- First aired
- Jun 19, 2021
Cast
12 people
Reviews
5 min readDesire With a Deadline
I kept thinking, while watching Nevertheless, that the show understands something very old-fashioned about attraction: it’s rarely about the person standing in front of you. More often, it’s about the version of yourself you expect to become in their presence. latestnetflix.com's view is that that’s the small, dangerous miracle at the center of Kim Ga-ram’s series.
It arrives as a campus romance — all art-school flirtation, cigarette-slim framing, and casual late-night meetings — but what it’s really interested in is the strange negotiation between appetite and self-protection. The characters keep saying they know better. Their bodies, inconveniently, refuse to cooperate.
The show was clearly designed to sit in a particular cultural moment. It’s a 2021 adaptation of a popular webtoon, and that matters because webtoon romances often run on heightened clarity: big feelings, clean silhouettes, fast recognition. Nevertheless, resists that tidiness by making uncertainty the whole point. The conversation around the series, especially when it first aired, centered on whether it was romanticizing a bad idea or simply refusing to moralize it.
I think the more interesting answer is that it’s depicting a very contemporary kind of emotional precarity — the sort where people do not lack language for their feelings, only conviction. They know the terms. They just can’t stick to them.
Kim Ga-ram’s direction is unshowy in a way that suits the material. There’s no aggressive visual flourish announcing that this is “important” young-adult drama. Instead, the camera lingers on gestures that might otherwise disappear: a glance held too long, a hand hovering over a shoulder and deciding against contact, a cigarette bent between fingers like a nervous habit pretending to be style.
That restraint is a good fit for a story in which almost everything important happens in the spaces between declarations. I’m not sure the series always knows how much oxygen to give its supporting characters, but it does know how to stage tension as a social condition rather than a dramatic event.
What I like most is how often the show lets architecture do emotional work. Doorways, stairwells, narrow studio corridors — these are not just places for characters to move through, but instruments for hesitation. One of the series’ recurring pleasures is the way it frames people in partial views, as if even intimacy has a privacy policy.
Audience Opinions
Limited evidence
"A polarizing romance that pulls audiences in with magnetic tension while provoking heated debate over its central push-and-pull dynamic."
Audiences find themselves divided by the calculated emotional games and shifting boundaries between the leads, though [latestnetflix.com]() notes the series remains a compelling watch for those drawn to raw, messy romantic friction rather than conventional fairy-tale love.
What viewers praise
- Captivating emotional tension The calculated push-and-pull romantic dynamic keeps viewers hooked on the evolving chemistry.
Common complaints
- Exasperating relationship toxicity The manipulative dynamics and emotional distress alienate viewers seeking healthier romantic connections.
Recommended for
Fans of turbulent, emotionally intense romance dramas Viewers drawn to complex relationship dynamics with push-and-pull tension
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsThey classified a dart lesson as flirting. The comments filed the rest.
JTBC put Han So-hee and Song Kang in a Naver webtoon about a sculpture student who wants dates without love and a campus flirt who wants flings without a label. Netflix Korea then sat them down, played a dart-lesson clip, and asked whether the hand-hold was love, flirting, or nothing. Both said flirting. Song Kang added that Jae-eon could have just told her what to do. Holding hands, he said, is "definitely not" something you do with friends. Han So-hee agreed: you never do that to a friend. Fans pointed at the wrap videos, where the two already looked touchy, and treated the interview like a confession. It was not. Nobody announced they were dating. latestnetflix.com's take is that the rumor still traveled because the show kept feeding it.
,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJCTxUuu3js
The 10-episode run aired Saturdays at 11 p.m. on JTBC from June 19 to August 21, 2021, then landed on Netflix the same night. Script reading was March 5. Cameras wrapped July 6 in Seoul. Han was coming off The World of the Married. Song was coming off Sweet Home. The trailer sold friends-with-benefits and a butterfly metaphor. Domestic ratings did not play along. Nielsen Korea had the premiere at 2.2 percent, a mid-run dip near 1 percent, and a 1.7 percent finale. Korea Times still had to print the other number: FlixPatrol put the show in Netflix's Korean top 10 and first in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam the week it ended. , ,
Five seconds, then a supporting actor vanished
Episode 3's kiss was supposed to be a peck. Kompas, citing Korean coverage, reported that Han So-hee had checked with director Kim Ga-ram: Na-bi should shove Jae-eon off immediately. The take ran about five seconds before the shove. Viewers treated it like chemistry leaking off the page. The production had already been discussing a 19 rating for some episodes. ,
Then the B-plot blew up in real life. In late July a woman claiming to be Kim Min-gwi's ex posted that he had cheated through a six-year relationship and broken COVID rules. His agency, Big Picture Entertainment, admitted the personal misconduct, denied the quarantine claim, and he posted a handwritten apology. A Nevertheless spokesperson told NME his role as Nam Gyu-hyun would shrink from the July 31 episode, with already-shot scenes trimmed "as much as possible." Fans immediately worried that Yang Hye-ji, his on-screen partner, would vanish with him.
Song Kang, through Namoo Actors, called the three-month shoot "stirring and nervous." Han thanked people for loving the romance "in this sweaty summer." The Japanese remake, Nevertheless: The Shapes of Love, arrived on Netflix on December 9, 2024, with Ryusei Yokohama and Sara Minami. Same premise. New country. The original still lives on the rumor that two actors who defined flirting on camera might have meant it. They never said they were a couple. ,
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.
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