Winter Sonata Overview

I finished "Winter Sonata" with a lot of feelings in me, probably even more than I had when I was watching it.

The first time I heard of the drama was when I was watching one of the variety shows. Maybe it was "2 Days 1 Night" or something similar, where they showed the snowman scene and where it was filmed. There were probably some other times when I heard of it or saw something, because when I heard the OST, it felt so familiar.

Here, I'll comment on the plot and how insane it was to watch it in 2025, and I'll compare the drama to what we watch now.

Have you seen the drama? What are your thoughts about it?

The Plot

Let's refresh your memory of the drama! Or if you never saw it, find out what you missed.

It first starts with the characters being in high school. Kang Joon Sang is a new student who soon meets a bubbly girl, Yu Jin. At first, Joon Sang doesn't really care for any of his classmates because he is searching for his father. He also suspects that Sang Hyuk and he have the same dad. So, interacting already comes off as a bit awkward.

Slowly, Joon Sang and Yu Jin get to know each other, and during a trip with their friends, they get really close and even share their first kiss. Both of them are on cloud nine and decide to meet on New Year's Eve in the city.

However, things change when Joon Sang sees Yu Jin's father in the same photo as his mother. He abruptly decides to leave for the USA, but changes his mind at the last second.

While Yu Jin waits for Joon Sang to come, he gets hit by a car and is announced dead to the class.

I haven't put much about Sang Hyuk and others, but basically, the second lead is already in love with Yu Jin, Chae Lin wants Joon Sang, and the other two are just there. This pretty much summarises them for the whole drama.

To my surprise, this has happened in just a few episodes, and this was everything I knew about the drama.

It intrigued me to see where we will be heading from here, how everything will change as we get to see the older versions of Yu Jin, Sang Hyuk and the friends group.

For now, I'm not 100% invested in it. The shots are nice, but it has a lot of montages. As mentioned, because of the fast pacing, it left me curious: first meeting, already friends, already in love, etc.

Moving on to their adulthood, we get to know that Yu Jin is engaged to Sang Hyuk. At first, they seem happy together, but as soon as Yu Jin gets a glimpse of a man similar to Joon Sang, every brain cell vanishes.

A gathering with old friends, Chae Lin brings out Lee Min Hyung, a man who looks exactly like Joon Sang, but she says she met him in France and is a completely different man.

Of course, they all can't believe how similar they are, but the person who suffers the most is Yu Jin. She keeps remembering her past love to the point where she skips her engagement party, and forgets that she even liked Sang Hyuk, even as a friend.

There is also a bit of drama, which Chae Lin creates by saying that Yu Jin wants to take everything that is hers, and that she now wants Min Hyung. He believes what Chae Lin says to him until he gets the whole story of Joon Sang and their relationship changes.

In this part, I couldn't stop thinking about how cheeky Min Hyung is.

He's dating Chae Lin, but also keeps flirting with Yu Jin. He doesn't know why Yu Jin reacts to him the way she does, but he also keeps trying to provoke her in some ways to say something to him.

No wonder she catches feelings for him. It's also funny how Sang Hyuk never stood a chance.

The whole part with Yu Jin being disengaged from everyone else got me pissed. She barely said anything and was in her own world, which I'm trying to understand, but it's bad when someone is talking to you and all you keep thinking is Joon Sang's lookalike.

This is a big problem with Yu Jin. She's a people pleaser and would do anything to make everyone happy, even if it means she will lose herself. In this way, she ends up hurting a lot of people, but she'll just make a sad face, and we'll move on.

Chae Lin definitely saved this portion of the drama with her manipulation and making things more fun (to the viewers). One of those is where she made Yu Jin wear the same dress as her, which showed Joon Sang that Yu Jin is just a copycat.

I feel like the next part is the juiciest and probably the best one. It has a lot of angst, but also is insane in a whole different way that I kind of enjoyed.

Min Hyung knows about Joon Sang and what he means to Yu Jin. She also decides not to go with the marriage because she doesn't love Sang Hyuk and goes to be with Min Hyung against everyone's wishes.

However, the happiness doesn't last long as Sang Hyuk gets admitted to the hospital because he doesn't eat, and doesn't want to live without her.

Yu Jin's mother, her friends, literally everyone around her, goes out to gaslight this woman; what's happening to Sang Hyuk is her fault. They tell her that she should think about marrying him again, and her happiness doesn't matter because look at how bad Sang Hyuk is feeling!

Mum: Is Sang Hyuk doing something bad?

Yu Jin: I don't love him and feel like a bad person, so I'm still with him. I feel empty. Do I really have to stay with him?

Mum: Yes, you have to. It's a precious relationship.

(Yes, this was a true conversation they had, might be a little bit paraphrased)

Also, forgot to mention that just before their breakup, Sang Hyuk pushes Yu Jin into a kiss with him and would have probably raped her if she didn't run away.

But yes, man's mental health is more important.

I hope you can read my snarkiness in here because that's how I felt watching this part of the drama. It was insane to watch her being gaslit, and yes, she did go back to him.

She has never once loved that guy, but everyone wants Yu Jin to be with him because he wants her. Says a lot about a woman's station back in the day.

After the whole drama of Yu Jin going back to Sang Hyuk. Everything seems to go back to its place, but now Min Hyung ends up in a hospital.

Yu Jin decides to stay by his side, and Sang Hyuk stays in the background.

When Min Hyung wakes up, he remembers his past a little bit, and Yu Jin shows him around where they spent their time together.

Everyone seems somehow more settled now that there is not much drama anymore with Sang Hyuk until he finds out that Yu Jin and Min Hyung are half-siblings.

I found this part a bit weird, too, because Min Hyung knew about their sibling relationship and still wanted to marry her. I know they're in love and all that, but this part gave me the ick.

Of course, nobody straightforwardly talks about them being siblings; they find a different reason why they need to break up, and Yu Jin is the last one to know.

This whole storyline is unnecessary because they are not actual siblings, and it's a red herring. Min Hyung's half-sibling is Sang Hyuk, as we thought from the very beginning.

The drama doesn't end here with a happy ending and Min Hyung and Yu Jin being together.

They still go their separate ways because Min Hyung finds out he's going blind!

This is like the last episode....

A lot of going back and forth until the very end (2 minutes), where Yu Jin finds Min Hyung and they kiss.

THE END

When I saw the ending, I thought my laptop lagged or something. They didn't even say one word to each other, and they kissed??

Technically, it is the conclusions and 'they lived happily ever after' scene, but I felt so dumbfounded when I finished the drama.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN I WATCHED THEM SUFFER FOR 20 EPISODES JUST FOR THIS ENDING?????

Similarities and Differences

• This feels like a very early drama, even if you don't consider the camera quality; the acting, especially in the first episodes, was just too funny. At some points, they would just say they line and stand there awkwardly for a second without any more emotion. I also feel like we're used to yearning. Yes, this drama has a lot of it, but in dramas I see now, it's more satisfactory.

  They will have a lot of angst in the beginning, and hold hands in episode 15 and still have their happy times. Here they fell in love so quickly that I needed some time to accept it. I'm still not sure why they're so attracted to each other.

• The OST kept bothering me a lot, maybe because it sounds so similar to one another, but it felt like there was only one song (or I only noticed one). It also kept playing even at times when it was not needed. I don't really notice the OSTs in dramas, only at times when I love them or because I absolutely hate them, and it was the latter.

  The use of English songs was also fascinating. At times, you could hear Abba, Simon & Garfunkel and lots more. It had more appropriate timings than OST, at times...

• It was fun to see all of the very popular tropes. I can see where the blueprint was: the female lead getting injured, the male lead saving her, a love triangle, an amnesia trope, miscommunication, etc.

• Another thing I was surprised to see was how everything got a montage. The drama would be so much shorter if we stopped remembering the same 3 scenes from the previous episode.

  It doesn't stop either, that's why I think some scenes are so ingrained in people's memories. You get lucky if the scene gets shown from a different angle, but it was definitely too much.

  I'm happy there isn't much of that in recent dramas. I mostly just skipped those memory parts. The recent drama would be similar to that is "The Nice Guy", but it's also created by the directors who haven't done a project in a long time. After watching "Winter Sonata" and that drama, I could see a lot of similarities.

  Though it makes me wonder why they had so many. Do you not trust the viewer to remember what happened in the last episode?

• If they do a second male lead nowadays, he somehow ends up becoming the puppy who follows the female lead whenever she goes.

  Here, I was quite surprised by the ambition of the second-male-lead. As I wrote in 'the plot' part, he tried to kiss her while she pushed him away, and he manipulates her whenever he has a chance. (He gets a lot of those because there is no communication.)

  The male leads nowadays are puppies, but the only toxic second-male-lead I could name would be Baek Kyung from "Extraordinary You".

• What will always stay funny is how this drama is a mini-series. It has 20 episodes around 1 hour long. Not even an 8-episode drama would be called a mini-series nowadays.

Similar Dramas

Another thing I found after the drama is that there are whole seasonal dramas similar to this one.

"Autumn Tales" (2000) was the first one to air and reached a great popularity that not even "Winter Sonata" did.

I was surprised to see Song Seung Heon and Seong Hye Kyo as the leads there, but this was their big hit. Also, Won Bin is here, an actor I heard so much about but never saw on screen.

Jung Do Hwan was here as a professor, and Kim Hae Sook also had an appearance.

After "Winter Sonata", there is "Summer Scent" (2003). Song Seung Heon came back as the lead, and Son Ye Jin was the female lead.

The drama didn't reach as much popularity as its predecessors.

The last "Spring Waltz" (2006) came out. It didn't do well with the ratings, but what I found funny is that Jung Dong Hwan was the male lead's father and Kim Hae Sook was the female lead's mother (just like in Winter Sonata).

Maybe the drama didn't garner as much attention, but I always find these details interesting.

To be honest, as soon as I saw that this drama had other parts with famous actors, I questioned myself: maybe I would like to suffer a bit more?

The drama also has an anime adaptation (same name). Reading more about the background of "Winter Sonata", it makes sense. It had reached great popularity in Japan, so why not make an anime of it?