Exploring the world of "Marry My Husband"-esque dramas

Marry My Husband is a Korean Drama based off a webtoon, which first aired on tvN and then became available on Amazon Prime in 2024.

The drama is a revenge story with a fantasy twist: Kang Ji-won has terminal cancer and, one day, she finds out that her husband Lee Min-Hwan had been cheating on her with her best friend Jeon Su-Min and the two were anticipating her death in order to cash out insurance money.

When she confronts the two, Min-Hwan gets violent and kills her. Instead of dying, Ji-won gets to go back in time to the year 2013, ten years before her death, and she gets a new chance at life. She will now have to pass on her fate to Su-min and live a happy life with the man that truly loves and values her, namely Yoo Ji-hyuk, her boss.

Needless to say, such a juicy plot instantly captured the public's attention, and the drama went viral on social media, both in South Korea and worldwide, and several critics mentioned it among the best K-Dramas of 2024.

The success of Marry My Husband prompted two remakes, namely the J-drama Marry My Husband: Japan, produced by the same company of its Korean counterpart and officially branded as a remake, and the C-drama Her Trajecting/Souls Lost On The Map, which is extremely similar to Marry My Husband.

However, the plot of Marry My Husband is not something never done before: at the end of 2023, in South Korea aired the drama Perfect Marriage Revenge, which shared similar tropes like time travel, death and rebirth, and marrying (or avoid marrying) someone to escape a grim fate. In 2024, in China also aired Blossom, a historical C-drama sharing the same tropes as the latter, although in a completely difference style.

As a fan of this type of story, I have obviously watched all of them, and they stood out for different reason. Let's see why!

"Perfect Marriage Revenge" came first, but "Marry My Husband" came to stay

After watching Marry My Husband, I watched Perfect Marriage Revenge. I picked this drama after reading some comments online claiming that it made more sense than Marry My Husband.

However, I have to disagree. Despite having aired less than a year before Marry My Husband, Perfect Marriage Revenge feels much much more outdated to me.

The plot is extremely dramatic, with the classic soap opera tropes like the adopted kid that is actually the legitimate heir of the family, the legitimate child that is actually illegitimate, grudges among brothers, the textbook evil adoptive mother, and so on.

Such a convoluted narration makes the drama feel more like a kitsch soap opera than a series with the potential to be iconic, and it reduces its replay value. While I have managed to rewatch Marry My Husband without getting bored, with Perfect Marriage Revenge I could not get past the second episode.

Another element that makes Perfect Marriage Revenge even more kitsch is the social status of the characters. Most of the characters and their families are filthy rich, and the protagonist even gets to manipulate the press in her favour at some points.

While there's nothing inherently wrong in portraying rich families, the authors lost their chances at relatability - the convoluted family intrigues, combined with super rich protagonists make the story feel distant to us "common" watchers.

In Marry My Husband, there are also some rich characters, like the male lead Ji-hyuk, but the majority of the characters, including the protagonist Ji-won, are office workers trying to climb the corporate ladder, so it's easier for the public to relate to their situation.

In the drama, there is also a family intrigue, but it's way less complicated than the one in Perfect Marriage Revenge and it does not involve the textbook soap opera trope of inheritance money, so it does not overshadow the main goal of avoiding death and a shitty marriage.

"Her Trajecting/Souls Lost On A Map": the horny Chinese knockoff

After watching both Marry My Husband and Perfect Marriage Revenge, I found Her Trajecting, which is also known as Souls Lost On A Map, a C-drama which is painfully identical to Marry My Husband.

Out of the dramas mentioned in this article, this is without a doubt the worst one. Not because its plot is bad per se, but because it's frustratingly unoriginal. The main plot points remain the exact same as Marry My Husband and the only big change is the work environment of the characters. Instead of being a food and beverages company, the plot revolves around an entertainment company. Since the two main male leads Wei Zhou (who is also the CEO) and Tian Yu work as idols, the production used this as an excuse to show them in... interesting outfits, sometimes showing a lot of cleavage. Here is an example:

This detail is not necessarily bad, but it feels very forced towards fan-service rather than improving the plot itself.

While Marry My Husband is a good drama, there are some parts that offer a wide room for improvement. One is the attempt to seduce Min-hwan again after getting rid of him, resulting in Ji-won almost getting killed again, and the other is Oh Yu-ra, Ji-hyuk's former fiance, plotting against Ji-won. Both these parts were completely unnecessary to me: the former was straight-up one of the stupidest ideas ever, and the second one seemed more like a way to add more episodes.

So, if I'm watching a remake, I'm expecting these parts to be removed or changed. Did the producers of Her Trajecting do it? No, they stayed there!

Another part that bothers me about Her Trajecting is its pace. The drama has 31 episodes, and each one is only 15-minutes long, including the opening and the ending song. With such a premise, the plot unravels at a much faster pace, which creates further issues.

Not only does the narration feel rushed, this fast pace messed up the entire moral compass of the protagonists. While in the other versions of Marry My Husband the male lead always waits until the protagonist has publicly dumped her "husband" before making his move, in Her Trajecting Wei Zhou and Shu Yan do not wait for this moment, and share their first kiss once Shu Yan is sure that Tian Yu has hooked up with her best friend Ye Wei, without making the break-up official.

Shu Yan and Wei Zhou also have another make-out session at her own birthday, which was also the event where Tian Yu proposed to her.

Now, we all know that Tian Yu is a terrible person and he was the one who cheated first, but it is risky to share kisses like that without officially ending the preexisting relationship. The two leads know that they came back from the future and all the events that led to their deaths, but the people around them do not, so if they found them making out while she's still in a relationship, they would be the cheating couple instead of Ye Wei and Tian Yu.

The drama is also way more sexually explicit than its Japanese and Korean counterpart, despite not blatantly showing characters having sex. In Her Trajecting, we even get Shu Yan and Wei Zhou having sex... right after Tian Yu and Ye Wei's wedding. On a staircase in Shu Yan's new apartment.

Now, it's not a particularly scandalous scene per se, the most you'll see is Wei Zhou's abs and some neck kisses, but my very first reaction was: calm down! Where's the buildup to the romance?

Indeed, the fast pace of the drama did not allow a good buildup of the relationship between Shu Yan and Wei Zhou. Sure, he was head over heels for her from the very beginning, but Shu Yan does not seem to experience the trust issues that Ji-won had, she was sad when Tian Yu first cheated on her, but that was it. This lack of inner work that she had to have made it seem like she was jumping from one man to the next, without even asking herself if this second man was just as bad as the first.

With that said, Her Trajecting is a bad knockoff of Marry My Husband and does not live up to the standard set by its Korean counterpart. Instead of fixing some key plot points that could be improved and trying to be original, it seems like the production only focused on attracting horny fans with a low attention span.

However, this does not mean that all C-dramas are too short and bad, so keep reading because at the end of the article I will recommend you a C-drama that works much better as a Marry My Husband-esque series.

"Marry My Husband: Japan" the cozy, nuanced, anti-work version of "Marry My Husband" that ACTUALLY makes more sense

After Her Trajecting, I watched Marry My Husband: Japan. Before giving my opinion, I want to make a premise: I regularly watch C-dramas and K-dramas, but this was the first J-drama that I've watched in more than ten years, so I cannot really make any comparison with other J-dramas and common J-drama tropes.

With that said, I really appreciated this Japanese version, because the production was not afraid of making it original, despite being transparent that it was a remake of Marry My Husband.

Since the production did not seem afraid of making some changes, we got an entirely new perspective on the plot, something that Her Trajecting did not deliver at all.

The first major shift was the importance given to the hobbies and passions that the two protagonists had outside of work. The female lead Misa is passionate about Japanese pastries, she annotates the characteristics of the pastries that she tries in a notebook and, in her free time, she is often seen in a traditional tea room, pairing her tea with a specific pastry.

The male lead Wataru, instead, was studying at university and dreamt of being a scientist, following his passion for plants, but had to interrupt his studies to become the CEO of his family company. The two get to bond over their love for pastries and turtles and, when they were at university, they took care of a turtle called Kamekichi, yet without ever meeting each other.

In the end, after getting married, they both quit their office jobs to pursue their passions: Misa becomes the manager of her favourite tea room and Wataru resumes his studies and becomes a researcher.

That differs massively to the glamourous world of Marry My Husband, where long shifts and working after hours in the office were completely normalized.

These details also help build intimacy between the two protagonists, which ends up substituting any physical form of affection: we only see two, very meek, kisses in the whole series, but we also see Misa and Wataru bond over their passions, cook together, go on vacation together, and so on. Despite the few physical interaction, you can feel their chemistry very well.

Another character that was massively upgraded was the character of Reina, Misa's best friend who hooked up with her husband Tomoya and plotted to kill her.

Reina is an amazing villain, not only because she is genuinely scarier than Su-min, but also because she makes some decisions that, realistically, an opportunistic character would make. In Marry My Husband, Su-min is hyperfocused on Min-hwan, and never really notices Ji-Hyuk, a much wealthier man, before she gets married.

Reina, instead, sets her eyes on Wataru from the very beginning, even before hooking up with Tomoya. She is much cleverer than Su-min, and acknowledges Misa's interest for Wataru very early on.

Reina is also way more determined to kill in order to get what she wants: while Su-min ends up killing Min-hwan to avoid being killed by him for insurance money, Reina deliberately kills Tomoya after a harsh fight with him, without any real threat to her safety.

However, both Reina and Tomoya are not treated like absolute villains, they remain very nuanced until their deaths, which are not depicted as satisfying but as rather sad.

Tomoya dies in a car accident after Reina sabotaged the breaks. Once he realized that the breaks do not work anymore, he calls Misa to say goodbye before crashing his car. In that moment, Misa tears up in shock, and it's easy to see why: his words did not seem to be grudgy, but rather wistful, making the viewer feel sympathetic towards him for the first time in the whole series.

Reina dies jumping from the higher cabin of an old ferris wheel. Initially, she kidnapped Misa in order to kill her, but Misa manages to tearfully talk her out of it and, just when there seems to be a glimpse of change in their relationship, Reina jumps to her death.

The depiction of these two deaths helped humanize both Tomoya and Reina, and it leaves us and Misa with a sense of defeat, asking ourselves "what if there had been another way?", which Marry My Husband did not explore.

Needless to say, I have loved this new version of Marry My Husband. I tend to be drawn to more revenge-focused stories, but this new perspective felt really refreshing, and I have appreciated the detailed work that they made to build up the chemistry and the intimacy between the two protagonists.

Moreover, this time they actually cut out the two moments I didn't like from Marry My Husband, which made me appreciate the drama even more.

"Blossom": the unrelated (but also related) historical drama that dethroned the others

Last but not least, I watched the C-Drama Blossom, following the recommendation of the youtuber Angie (check out her channel, she's amazing).

As soon as she mentioned that the protagonist was a badass woman who was terminally ill and dealing with a cheating husband, and eventually died and came back to the past, I immediately thought of Marry My Husband, even if the two dramas never get compared with one another at all.

This is probably due to the different subgenres of the two. Since Blossom is a historical drama, the protagonist's personal goals, as a noblewoman, are intertwined with the politics of imperial China, which makes the plot a bit more complicated than Marry My Husband.

Like Angie also mentioned in her video, Blossom's protagonist Dou Zhao is not concerned with revenge, but rather with ensuring justice in the reign, building a happier, more stable life for herself, avoiding her marriage with Wei Ting Yu, her husband in her "previous" life.

The importance of happiness over revenge also gets highlighted through several plots, like the story of Song Mo, the male lead. In his previous life, Song Mo was a rebel general who, in an attempt to avenge the killing of his uncle, pledged allegiance to Lord Qing, a nobleman who was plotting to overthrow the emperor.

During his quest for revenge, he meets the terminally ill Dou Zhao, who had left her mansion after finding out that Ting Yu was cheating on her, and gives shelter to her and her nanny in his hideout. Once Ting Yu and the crown prince find out the two, Dou Zhao and Song Mo end up in a devastating battle and get killed by getting struck by the same arrow.

While Dou Zhao comes back to when she was a child, remembering her past life and carrying a book called "Tales from the enlightened age" as a sort of guide, Song Mo seems more clueless and, while the two develop feelings for each other, Dou Zhao has to help him transform his quest for revenge in a quest for justice. Song Mo will eventually lead the imperial army against Lord Qing and survive being poisoned by his own father, thanks to the sacrifice of the emperor.

Song Mo's character arc proves that the priority of peace (both inner and collective) and justice over revenge is the ultimate key to avoiding a terrible fate. Song Mo manages to survive the poisoning because he stays loyal to the emperor, who gives him his own life-saving remedy that would have otherwise cured him from his illness. Since Song Mo was his enemy in his past life, he could not get the antidote and ended up being terminally ill, coughing blood just like Dou Zhao.

In the meantime, Ting Yu ends up marrying the woman he actually loves, Dou Zhao's half sister Ming (the woman he cheated on Dou Zhao with in her previous life). Since he seems to be deeply in love with her, Dou Zhao wonders whether he could actually be a good husband if paired with the right person.

This question does not get explored a lot in the official versions of Marry My Husband and, even in the Japanese one, it is still very implicit and does not get much space.

In the end, Ting Yu will prove unreliable again, being unable to keep his strict sister at bay, thus causing Ming to have a miscarriage and, later on, her will spend the night out drinking while Ming gets killed by the loan sharks, who were after her mother, while trying to find him.

However, Dou Zhao recognizes that, in that new life, Ming did nothing wrong to her. Instead, she saved her from getting married to Ting Yu again and, once the two are married, Dou Zhao is always concerned with their marriage. When Ming gets killed, Dou Zhao is actually the one finding her agonizing body outside the pavillon where Ting Yu was feasting, and she is the one calling out Ting Yu for his irresponsible behaviour. Besides spending the night drinking, Ting Yu had also lost his official badge, and this accident caused a series of pillages and fires in their city as well as the death of Ming.

While Ting Yu proved to be ultimately irredeemable, Ming proved to be redeemable: by changing the course of events, she changed, too. Marry My Husband greatly overlooks this possibility, which one of the reasons why I personally find Blossom to be superior.

Final thoughts: which one is the best?

With that said, let's do a quick recap and a ranking of those dramas. Mind you, this is based on my opinion only.

My personal favourite out of all of them is Blossom. Here, the mind games and strategies to change the course of fate reach a whole other level, bringing up high-level politics and even involving the imperial family. Having a very complicated family myself, I also appreciate how the protagonists approach and reflect on their relationships with each relative, while trying to fight back against the bad ones.

While strategic and thoughtful, the two protagonists are also very driven and fiery, which is not a super prevalent aspect in Marry My Husband: Japan. That's why I'm putting it second. It feels deeper and more meaningful in comparison to Marry My Husband, and some of my key pet peeves from the Korean version have been adjusted.

The original Marry My Husband gets third place: as I mentioned earlier on, it's still an amazing drama, and it inspired me to watch other K-dramas and C-dramas as well, but there are a few aspects that make it frustrating to watch, especially towards the end, although they do not ruin it completely.

The worst ones of the batch are Perfect Marriage Revenge and Her Trajecting. Both have no replay value whatsoever. I am a chronic re-watcher, so trust me when I say that watching them once will be more than enough. Perfect Marriage Revenge is, however, a bit better, because at least it's not a blatant copy of a preexisting drama, and the plot does not feel as rushed as Her Trajecting, so we actually have time to see the two leads slowly fall in love with each other. The chemistry between the two characters Han Yi-joo and Seo Do-guk is really enjoyable, although it cannot save the whole drama from being very soap opera-ish.

Have you watched some of these dramas? Would you recommend them? Tell me in the comments below!