'Was it Love' Episode 13: Ae-jeong tells Dae-o she doesn't want to be Cinderella but Wonder Woman of her life
If you think about it, the way that Ae-jeong (Song Ji-hyo) and Ha-nee treat Dae-o (Son Ho-jun) in episode 13 of 'Was it Love' is really unfair. After Dae-o announced during a PTA meeting that he was Ha-nee's father, she refused to believe him. She imagined that he did it to help her out because her friends made fun of her not knowing who her father really was. However, Ae-jeong finally reveals the truth to her daughter and this only further alienates his daughter from Dae-o.
Ha-nee believes that her father abandoned both her and her mother. According to Ha-nee, if you love someone, you shouldn't leave them but stay and sort out whatever issues one has before making a decision as huge as separation. According to her logic, since Dae-o was capable of abandoning them once, she believes that he will be capable of leaving them again. While initially, she is completely against the idea of accepting Dae-o, Ryu Jin tries his best to cheer her up and even tell her about how her parents had fallen in love.
Ryu Jin wants Ha-nee to know that she was not abandoned by her father, and neither was she a child who was a mistake. He tells Ha-nee about how Dae-o had proposed to her mother, how her mother was one of the popular students in the department and Dae-o and Ae-jeong had even become a popular on-campus couple. She walks around the university that her mother had studied at and can see the life that her mother and father had led in the past. However, she is still unsure of what Dae-o's presence would mean to her life.
So she decides to speak about it with her mother and that's when she tells her mother that she doesn't want Dae-o to be a part of their life. Now, you may wonder why it feels like Dae-o was treated unfairly. The reason is that Ae-jeong doesn't clarify at any point that Dae-o was not the one who left, but it was herself. She also doesn't tell Ha-nee that she kept the birth of their child a secret from Dae-o. When Dae-o attempts to support Ae-jeong now that he knows the truth, she tells him willfully that she is not someone to be rescued and doesn't appreciate the sentiment either. She tells him that she doesn't want to be a Cinderella, but Wonder Woman of her life.
While we appreciate her tenacity and her self-belief in being a single mother, is it really okay for her to let Dae-o take the blame entirely for breaking up in the past. She is essentially ruining a relationship that could have otherwise been repaired over time. Before one could contemplate this though, Dong-chan, Ha-nee and Ae-jeong, who end up meeting outside the school on a sports day event end up getting kidnapped by the men who have been blackmailing Koo Pa-do.
The three of them getting kidnapped throws a wrench in Dae-o's plan of attempting to somehow form a bond with Ha-nee. Instead, he sees Ae-jeong's mobile dropped on the street and he also sees Pa-do running around with tension clearly visible on his face and that's when he realizes that something is very wrong with Ha-nee and Ae-jeong.
In the meantime, Joo Ah-rin realizes that a rumor about her faking her name, age and even her personality has been going around. She is also worried about the possibility of Dae-o being the father of Ha-nee and all of this leads to her belief that Ae-jeong has again managed to ruin her life. Not only does she want to lash out at Ae-jeong, but she plans on doing much worse and even seeks permission from her Agency's CEO who happens to be none other than Yeon-woo's mother.
When she tries to confirm if Dae-o is really the father of Ae-jeong's daughter, she ends up using his real name instead of Cheon Eok-man, his pen name that everyone has come to know him by. At this point, Ryu Jin picks on it easily and even asks Ah-rin if she really did fake her background information. Otherwise, Ryu Jin feels that there is no way Ah-rin would have known him or continue to obsess over. At this point, we realize that there are still many knots in Ae-jeong, and Dae-o's life that needs to be untied before the finale week.
New episodes of 'Was it Love?' will air on JTBC at 9.30 pm on Wednesdays and Thursdays and will be available to stream on Netflix.