Nevertheless,

Our honest read on why this drama is worth your time — and who it’s for.

The reason Nevertheless, divides people so cleanly is also the reason it works. Most K-dramas about a difficult love interest eventually soften him — give him a tragic backstory, a redemption arc, a moment where he becomes the man he should have been all along. Nevertheless, does not do this. Park Jae-eon is charming and evasive and emotionally manipulative, and by the finale he is still essentially that person. What changes is not him — it is Na-bi’s relationship to that knowledge. Han So-hee plays this with a kind of aching precision: the confusion is real, the desire is real, and crucially, the self-awareness is real too. She knows what he is. She wants him anyway. The drama trusts the audience to sit with that discomfort without resolving it into something cleaner. For viewers who want a love story that validates the feeling — as opposed to one that corrects it — this is quietly exceptional work. For those who find Doctor Slump‘s warmer, more reciprocal dynamic more their speed, Nevertheless, will be a difficult watch.

Song Kang does something genuinely difficult here. Jae-eon is written to be attractive and difficult in equal measure — the kind of role that can easily tip into cartoon villainy or, worse, unearned sympathy. Song Kang holds the line. He is warm in the moments that make Na-bi stay and cold in the moments that remind you why she should go, and crucially, he never signals which of those is the real him. That ambiguity is the engine of the whole drama. The supporting romance between Lee Ho-jung’s Yoon Sol and Yoon Seo-ah’s Ji-wan is, by contrast, one of the most genuinely tender queer storylines K-drama had produced up to that point — quieter than the main plot, less complicated, and ultimately more satisfying. The two stories exist in deliberate contrast: one couple who communicate openly and reach each other, one who cannot, and the drama never loses track of that difference even when it refuses to editorialize about it.

The adaptation is faithful to Jung Seo’s webtoon in ways that will frustrate viewers who came expecting narrative resolution, and reward those who came expecting emotional accuracy. The art school setting — clay studios, life drawing sessions, exhibition deadlines — is used with more intelligence than most dramas bring to their settings. Na-bi’s sculpture is not background texture; it is the thesis statement of the finale. Nevertheless, is a drama about people who are fluent in desire and illiterate in communication, and it is drawn with enough honesty that the ending feels less like a choice the writer made and more like one the characters were always going to arrive at, because knowing all the reasons not to has never, in the entire history of wanting someone, been quite enough to make you stop.