It's Okay to Fall: Overcoming the Lies We Believe About Ourselves in A Shoulder To Cry On

 

 From left to right, Shin Ye-chan plays Jo Tae-hyun and Kim Jae-han plays Lee Da-yeol in A Shoulder To Cry On. The actors are also part of the idol group Omega X, who participated in the production of the drama’s OST. Photo from the drama’s production website (Picturesque), reproduced under Fair Dealing for educational purposes.

Every good story needs some conflict to engage the audience and keep them rooting for the characters to overcome challenges and reach their goal. This is why romance dramas come up with a series of obstacles designed to keep the lovers apart. Sometimes, these obstacles are external, like workplace circumstances, family feuds, physical distance, illness, scheming secondary characters, or even, in the case of fantasy/sci-fi genres, supernatural rules complicating the lovers’ relationship. Other times, internal factors are stopping the characters from being together, and they need to achieve character growth in order to make the relationship work and earn their happy ending. Recent Korean BL series A Shoulder To Cry On (소년을 위로해줘, Picturesque / MODT Studio, 2023), based on a webtoon by Dongmul, is an example of a love story with internal conflict, where the characters are stuck by lies they believe about themselves. Meeting and becoming friends helps each of them see more clearly, which ultimately makes it possible for them to take a chance on love with each other.

 

Getting to know a new friend and being exposed to their point of view makes the characters change their thinking about themselves, helping them overcome false beliefs that were blocking them from being happy. Photo from MODT Studio, reproduced under Fair Dealing for educational purposes.

A Shoulder To Cry On is the story of high school seniors Lee Da-yeol and Jo Tae-hyun, who meet when Tae-hyun falsely accuses Da-yeol of inappropriate behaviour to avoid taking the blame for a situation he created, so Da-yeol gets in trouble instead. After the incident, Tae-hyun continues to hang around and pester Da-yeol, who just wants to be left alone so he can focus on sports and his goal of earning a spot on the Korean national archery team. I almost gave up on A Shoulder To Cry On after the first episode, because Tae-hyun’s character was such an annoying little brat that I wanted to punch him. But the preview for episode 2 hinted that there was a reason why the character behaves the way he does, so I continued watching, and I became intrigued by Tae-hyun just like Da-yeol did. Soon I found myself really liking both characters and hoping that their unlikely friendship would lead to romance and a happy ending.

 

Da-yeol doesn’t realize that he wants to try new things until he meets Tae-hyun. Photo from IMDb, reproduced under Fair Dealing for educational purposes.

At the beginning of the show, Da-yeol’s life is totally devoted to his sport. He doesn’t love it, and he sometimes feels like a hamster stuck on a wheel, but he’s achieved so much through archery already and he’s so close to making it big that he can’t imagine ever finding and starting down another path. After he meets Tae-hyun, his orderly life becomes disrupted. He finds himself constantly thinking about Tae-hyun, which unnerves him, but which also opens him up to the idea that there might be some other future for him than the one that has been planned out. A friend from the archery team who quits the sport due to injury, but who isn’t worried about having to switch career paths after high school, also helps Da-yeol come to an important realization. The things he firmly believed about himself–that archery was all he had, and that he wasn’t interested in dating anyone of any gender–were not true. He can find another passion, and he has romantic feelings for Tae-hyun.

 

Tae-hyun was acting as though everything was fine, but when Da-yeol started paying attention to him, he started paying attention to himself and realized that things weren’t all right. Photo from IMDb, reproduced under Fair Dealing for educational purposes.

Tae-hyun also starts the show believing untrue things about himself. His aunt blames him for his mother’s death ten years earlier, which has caused him to be estranged from her and his father (his only remaining family) and to internalize the view that he’s a bad and worthless person that no one could love. Eventually, he opens up to Da-yeol about this past, and Da-yeol tells him that his aunt was wrong to blame him, and he is wrong to blame himself, for what was a tragic accident (this is the 위로 part of the series’ title). Though Tae-hyun now sees more clearly that he wasn’t to blame for his mother’s death and that he deserved to be comforted as he grieved instead of treated like a murderer, he still feels unable to love anyone anymore. Deep down, he’s afraid that whoever he loves will end up hating him and leave him because he really is a bad person. So even though he thinks he has romantic feelings for Da-yeol, he’s not sure about starting a relationship with him. This conflict cannot be overcome in the short term, and Da-yeol decides to switch schools and pursue his new passion: training to become a police officer.

 

Although Tae-hyun feels something for Da-yeol, he is scared to let himself love anyone because of the false beliefs he has about himself. Photo from MODT Studio, reproduced under Fair Dealing for educational purposes.

The series jumps forward to two years later, when a mutual friend realizes that Da-yeol and Tae-hyun still have feelings for each other and puts them back in touch with each other. Tae-hyun tells Da-yeol that he has been working on his issues, and although he still has a lot to work on, he wants to try so that they can eventually be together. Da-yeol says he will wait until Tae-hyun is ready. I found this realistic, because the lie that Tae-hyun believed about himself was so deeply internalized and damaging that it makes sense that he would need time to heal and rebuild his sense of self before being ready for a relationship. I would have been satisfied if the series had concluded there, with both characters sure of their feelings and looking forward to starting a romantic relationship soon.


It doesn’t end there, though, because original author Dongmul wrote an epilogue to the webtoon, which the webseries loosely adapted into an episode that takes place after another two-year time jump. Both versions of the epilogue show that Da-yeol and Tae-hyun have begun a romantic but not sexual relationship. In the webtoon, they are both interested in sex, but they both misunderstand what the other wants, and their inability to communicate about what they want threatens to revive Tae-hyun’s false belief that he is an unlovable person. Luckily, they finally manage to overcome this obstacle through communication. On the other hand, the webseries epilogue gives us no insight into what kind of relationship each character wants and why they avoid expressing their affection physically even though, at times, they both seem to want to. The episode feels incoherent and does nothing to develop the characters or move the story forward the way the webtoon’s epilogue does. Including this epilogue in the webseries was a strange and ineffective storytelling decision in an otherwise well-written story.

The connection that Da-yeol and Tae-hyun felt in high school is still there years later when they are finally ready to be in a romantic relationship. Photo from MODT Studio, reproduced under Fair Dealing for educational purposes.

A Shoulder To Cry On is worth watching for its intriguing and complex characters, who start the story believing untrue things about themselves, but whose influence on each other helps each one overcome these false beliefs and find happiness.