It’s been about a year since I watched it, but I’ve always felt the need to talk up Shut Up! Flower Boy Band.
In short, the show is just plain GOOD. There is almost nothing else you can say, words don’t even do it justice. If you haven’t seen it, you need to, because though I’ve seen a lot of Kdramas this one stands out to me almost as much as Playful Kiss does (I’m biased toward Playful Kiss, don’t judge me.) But this drama doesn’t only stand out in my mind because it is my favorite because it’s not. In fact, it wouldn’t even be fair if this drama was my favorite. It can’t even be compared with the other ones I’ve seen, it’s on a completely different level.
I have a love/hate relationship with generic Kdramas. I love them obviously, but they are so angsty, and while I don’t necessarily mind angst, what I do mind is angst caused by miscommunication between characters. This is the typical Kdrama way. Like when one character yells at another character for doing something they didn’t do and the other character stands their crying and doesn’t even try to defend them self even when what the other character is saying about them is, ya know, WRONG. So finally when the character is done yelling, the other character will just say “I’m sorry.” …Sorry for what!? You didn’t even do what they are accusing you of! God it frustrates me. It’s called communication people.
This kind of scene is like a qualification for a show to even be considered a Korean drama, which I’ve come to accept, though I hate it. It is intentional because it’s usually the only way a drama can, well, be dramatic, but it just makes the drama unrealistic and frustrating and it makes the characters seem so unintelligent, which brings me to my next point.
Shut Up! Flower Boy Band doesn’t do this. It doesn’t have to do sacrifice their characters and make them look stupid. What they do is something I’m going to call intentional miscommunication which I just made up and am not sure is an actual thing.
Since apparently that element of miscommunication always has to be present in a Kdrama, Shut Up! FBB decided to take a different approach. This is one of the many things that makes this drama stand out from the rest. Rather than making the characters stupid and submissive, like most (female) characters are, they make the main character intentionally tell another character the wrong thing.
And no, I don’t mean the whole “being noble” thing that all the male characters do when they think the female will be better off without them and they decide to pretend they don’t love them anymore and blablabla because we all know, A. it never works and B. they’ll end up together in the end anyway and C. it’s stupid.
However, what Jihyuk (main character played by Sung Joon) does is noble in a completely different way which instead develops his character even further and makes us love them even more. He chooses to mislead his best friend for a necessary reason, not just because he thinks he will be “better off without him,” because that’s not what this drama is even about.
This way we still feel the angst because we want Hyunsoo (best friend of Jihyuk played by Kim Myung-soo of Infinite) to realize what Jihyuk did for him. But we get it. We get why Jihyuk had to mislead him and we accept it. We want them to figure it out and be friends again, but we know it’ll be resolved somehow we just have to wait and watch how. And I’m not going to lie. Even the fact that this drama is about a bromance rather than a romance makes it even more understandable. The way this and essentially the entire drama are executed makes it all the more realistic.
After all, this show isn’t about finding love; it’s about friendship and finding yourself. Its message is seriously beautiful and I recommend it to anyone, especially if you want a drama that does everything right. It’s so inexplicably right too. I have a hard time explaining why it’s so good because I have a hard time understanding how something this good can exist.
Oh, and I wonder if anyone can guess how I became a Myungsoo fan…
From the POV of an American Fangirl 
Oh my gosh, I loved how no one was really a “noble idiot” — Ji-hyuk was just being himself, dealing with stuff the best way he knew how. Yeah, it wasn’t the most mature way to handle things — but the boy was never a good talker. So it was perfectly in character. Which makes all the difference in the world.
Same here, I really hate when characters try to be noble. Ji-hyuk wasn’t trying to be noble he just acted the way he knew he had to act because he knew the way Hyun-soo was. Everything made perfect sense and every character reacted exactly the way their character would (which is pretty much a miracle for kdramas sometimes). I really can’t find flaws with this show, watching it was like a breath of fresh air from what I was used to watching.