Review of Strong Girl Nam-soon / 힘쎈여자 강남순

I will admit, when I first heard that this Korean drama was going to be a thing, I was so lit for it to come out.

I loved Strong Girl Do Bong-soon, and although I don’t have an official review of that show up on my blog, as I originally watched it when it came out (before I had ever even entertained the idea of creating a blog to log my thoughts about what I was watching). I knew I was going to watch this show weekly, as the episodes dropped on Netflix, and I did just that throughout.

Now, I don’t want to get too deep into what I think about the show in just the introduction, but an initial thought is that I think I expected something else in the long run.

Sure, I watched every single episode of the show and didn’t skip anything, but this was a series that was missing some heart at its core. Granted, I probably entered this with high expectations from the beginning, but still.

Let’s get into the review!

Raised in Mongolia, Gang Nam-soon/Tsetseg reunites with her birth parents in Korea, finding love and destruction along the way.

The lore behind this show is this: strong powers are passed down in the maternal line of this family. If you seen Do Bong-soon, you’ll be thrilled to see there’s a cameo of the female and male lead from that show, as apparently they’re all distantly related.

But at the beginning of the series, Gang Nam-soon is lost in Mongolia, picked up by some local people, and raised to be their kid. Her Korean family never truly forgot her, and her parents are still thinking about the child they lost after all these years.

Now known as Tsetseg in Mongolia, Nam-soon decides to learn Korean once she’s a bit older again and venture back to her home country. Her adoptive parents support her, and she gets on the plane to South Korea, but is immediately scammed for a place and loses all of her money.

She makes a yurt in the middle of a park with two other self-declared wanderers, which is where Nam-soon keeps crossing paths with the police officer Hee-sik.

Eventually, Nam-soon uses her powers to help the cops out when needed, but she also ends up meeting her birth parents and brother again.

Their reunion is cut short, though, by the introduction of a new drug into the Korean system. Nam-soon starts working for the guy who’s running all of these drug operations, along with Hee-sik, in order to gain more information. The stakes keep increasing throughout the show as people close to them are inflicted with the drug, with some even watching near-fatal or fatal circumstances.

In a race against time before the drug fully becomes introduced into the Korean market, Nam-soon, her mother, and her grandmother all are going to use their powers with the police, like Hee-sik, in order to take down the drug lynchpin. In a weird twist of fate, Nam-soon works as his assistant, under her Mongolian name, and he falls in love with her somewhere along the way.

That’s the story of the show in a nutshell. Obviously, there’s more to all of this, but I think it’s important noting there are subplots all over this show. From the random wanderers Nam-soon befriended at the beginning, or a girl who pretended to be Nam-soon for a while and lived with her mother, there’s plenty to go around in this drama.

Overall Thoughts

Strong Girl Nam-soon asks for a lot of suspension of disbelief, as the storyline is an absolute mess. It feels like a bunch of different things are crammed together to make a single drama, and I wasn’t impressed by the end of the show.

The romance even between Nam-soon and Hee-sik felt so weirdly forced by the end, and I could not get on board with it. The love triangle is also weirdly forced, making this a series that is one and done for more.

I don’t know how I made it through all of this series, but I did it. I gave myself a pat on the back after that one, as some of the concluding plot points also had me shaking my head in confusion.

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