I'm so emotional after the last episode 😭😭

What I liked:
- IU's performance. I love love love Ji An's story. It's basically similar to Ash from Banana Fish - someone good growing up in a horrible situation, having to do soul-crushing things to survive, becoming ground down and hardened, but coming to life when someone is kind and warm to them and seeing that life can have good things too and finally learning what it means to be alive and human. What a great analogy for childhood trauma. So many moving and scenes lines from Ji An/IU 😭😭 I really loved her arc
- Male lead, played by Lee Sun Kyun, was great too
- I love the theme of community and family, I loved the music, I loved the directing - very stylish - and I really liked all the side characters
- Lee Ji Ah's character is someone I didn't think I would like but her arc was really 😭
- refreshing that a life drama doesn't have romance as its center point

What I didn't like:
- pace was very slow for someone like me who is easily bored and imaptient. I had to put this show on fast forward and skip scenes sometimes. The last episode had so many emotional punches; I wish the writer had kind of paced them throughout the entire series, coz most of the series is REALLY slow
- some of the sideplots were kind of uninteresting, I didn't really care about them and their inclusion felt abrupt (especially the monk)
- there were some themes that I felt like the drama didn't portray so well, the biggest of which was Lee Ji Ah's character, Kang Yoon Hee. I did not like how marriage was portrayed, I did not like the way they treated her character when it came to the affair