Aw, what a lovely watch that was. God, I cried A LOT in that final episode 😭 Shin Min Ah and Lee Seung-gi played it so beautifully – acting “swallowing back tears” must be incredibly difficult but I never doubted that the tears were real. Oh, it really was epically sad. But, phew and very, very, very relieved by the ending! I needed a happy ending and it didn’t disappoint – even the random fur tail rather than CGI made it perfect! And who knew Noona could look pretty as a picture shooting her eye-gun ‘I like you very, very, very much’? Or Gumiho Hunter could be so witty in the makjang scenarios?! I think the actor should overact all the time because he really came alive for me then – instead of that otherwise overly glazed slick he did the whole way through. And, eee, Jeremy! And, ooh, Aunt with an Egg and Director Ban likening her to coffee 😂
I agree with your rating as there were definite flaws but if it was a score based solely on our gumiho, Shin Min Ah gets an A++++++ She is a delight every which way you look at it. I’ve taken to mimicking her Dae Woongeeeeeeee to the annoyance of literally everyone I know 😊
Ah, so much to love. Thank you so much kfangurl and everyone for a very, very, very enjoyable group watch. Eye-gun winks to you all! 😉

For such a breezy show, episode 15 brought such sorrowful feels. Mi Ho and Dae Woong sold their pain at being separated, and even though I knew we’d have a happy ending, in the moment I felt their sadness full force. Well done Director-nim. I especially appreciated how Mi Ho transformed from a bubbly innocent into an emotionally flat woman. She greyed in front of our eyes. So, again, light show, great acting. I’m just gonna come out and say it. I crush on Shin Min Ah!! 😍

Episode 16 stuck the landing! It hit the right emotional notes – everyone gets their match (I grinned widely at Noona’s attempts to imitate the sparky wink – for the first time she looked almost nice), Egg is born, Grandfather is happy, and, of course, our Mi Ho and Dae Woongie come together as more mature, dedicated, and equal partners. And still as charmingly cute as ever. Ok, Samshin grandmother was a bit of a weak addition, but as you say, KFG, she made it possible for us to get where We All wanted to go, so no harm. It was great that we could end on the rooftop scene, fox tail embracing, story complete. We’ve already had a preview of what their future will be like, and Grandfather will be neomu neomu happier, neomu neomu soon. 😉

MGIAG is so well executed for its time and genre. It brought smiles, laughs, winces, and feels. An occasional eye roll. 🙄 It was a really fun romp with this group. Thanks Fangurl for, as always, bringing us together and guiding us through the fun.

Ah! We’ve finally come to an end. The ending we’re all waiting for. I think Show is the first to highlight Gumihos? Yes? Or if there’s other Gumiho themed dramas before this? Hence, I think My Gf is a Gumiho is the ancestor of all other gumiho kdramas.

I really laugh out loud at Byung Soo’s wild imagination! And our Gumiho Hunter is looking fine eh. Loved that facial expressions.

The next thing that gets me is when Miho mistakenly handed cosmetic coupon instead of wedding invitation to Dae Wong! BWAHAHAHAHA! imagine all that dramatic speech only ending up with a wrong ones or confused reply from the other end.

I’m really glad and relieved that Show served us the perfect happy ending both Miho and Dae Wong deserved. It makes sense Miho is left with one tail, I wonder if there would be a My Wife is a Gumiho?

I would give Show A+ sorry for too biased here but this Show is my all-time favourite Kdrama! I love Shin Min Ah, and obviously she’s the star here. Can’t wait to more group watch Kfangurl! Thank you for this!

So, this is a show I would have never watched if not for the group watch set up. If I were to go back the the guilty pleasure post, I would call this a guilty pleasure watch. I mean show is cheesy; it just is, and the serious elements of this light and breezy romantic comedy with the darker elements in every fairy tale were not executed with nearly the same panache or enthusiasm.
On that level, ie The Great Gumiho Hunter menace and the cameo of the not really very interesting and straightlaced fairy grandmother tended to remind me of the one two punch of long years of paint drying immediately followed by watching for water in a pot to reach its boiling point in slow motion. I had a hard time keeping my eyes open through the better part of episode 15, except for the comedic stretches, especially the one you picked out K concerning the triple fantasy of Byeong Soo trying to imagine, the you can’t even imagine Noona left them with about the proposed Count Dracula in serious 500 year long blood fast and the Gumball of every young man’s dreams’ impending nuptuals, the best of which being that they are all siblings.
The only other part of episode 25 I cared for was the “you are the mokha java of my blood stream, darling” call to the “I’ll be the cream swirling around in your coffee big daddy” response.
Ban’s unfailing sweet nothings ought to be collected and purveyed as a guide book for gullible, lovelorn young men all over the world.
I did not understand why it did not occur to Woong-ah or Mi Ho, Mi-ho-Mi Ho, Mi Ho, given that the key to breaking the spell was getting a fellow to marry her, that, I don’t know, maybe they ought to try that. But I suppose it was better to drag out the ending with a bitter sweet feeling of loss, and it is true the scene on the gym floor was probably the most effective dramatic scene in the whole show. But the whole eclipse business struck me as a contrivance not really related to the concept of the fairy tale planting a psychological truth into young minds; i.e. a woman cannot be fully human in a relationship until the other both accepts the woman’s bestial nature, and truly loves her enough to put a ring on it, allowing him (or her if such is the case) self to be eaten as it were, into something shared between the two of them.
And it is true, in the end, that tale of hers, something while exotic certainly a deal breaker when coming to the mating element of a love relationship up till then, was so sexy as she grabs him up. Seriously sexy.
Shin Min Ah and Lee Seung Gi are just so charming and delectable. They really deliver from beginning to end. And while their power faded a little bit, Sung Dong Il and Yoon Yoo Sun are so loveable as everyone’s inner neurotic paramours. Corny, wonderful, loveable.
We all hope their kid turns out to be a good egg as opposed to the demon spawn likely arising from the mating of Noona, the Witch from the Fashion Industry and Professor Eternally Gummed Up Hunter (who else would have either one of them?); that is, if he can finally cut loose of the thousand year torch for a while. As a former professor, I would have preferred Ol GH went into the trash collecting business, but that is me. One does wonder what kind of subject matter he will be teaching at the university, maybe a course on the nature of time, he calls Sands in an Hourglass, an especially snooze inducing classroom taught between 1 and 3 pm, the witching hours as it is known to faculty who must face students lost to metabolizing their lunches and sitting as far back in the room as possible so the professor won’t hear them snore.
Sappy, fizzy at its best, albeit more like grape soda than champagne, when it hasn’t sat too long open in the GH or Noona refrigerator; might have been a bit more fun if it had been only 12 episodes, but delightful for its otp. It shows its age mostly in its videography and set design. I, notoriously hard grader, would give it a B grade; a good show and something you will not likely find outside of K drama land. Gosh in a season of serial killers and death by seven hundred cuts of the sword, the rot and corruption of every aspect of South Korean life past, present, and future, throw in a coupla old folk shows determined to make you cry, and an unrelenting tragedy of South Korean history, a guilty pleasure indeed.

The imaginary wedding scenes with the three of them were fantastic and so funny! Gumiho hunter was surprisingly awesome!

Thanks once again to kfangurl for selecting this show as her Editor’s Choice and for the community for commenting along. This was my first re-watch of any complete TV show, K-drama or otherwise, ever and I found it very enjoyable.

Although the handful of episodes preceding these faltered a bit, I thought that the show regained its composure with these last two shows and that the finale, in particular, was tightly written. Consider everything that happened: one last attempt by Vet Boy-thing to mislead Dae-woong before finally coming to grips with reality and doing the right thing (or as close to the right thing as he could do after all of this), our young couple Kübler-Rossing their way through Mi Ho’s looming departure, a wacky wedding complete with tuxedo and egg reveals, Samshin Grandmother’s appearance, a truly affecting departure scene, a time skip (of course), and finally the fairy tale ending we all wanted whether we admitted it or not. Cue Fox Rain one last time* and we’re out.

I did feel that I got enough of a dose of Noble Idiocy to last me, approximately, forever. Fortunately, despite the overall sad vibe of most of these episodes, there was enough humor to keep us going.  The wedding invitation/cosmetics coupon bit was hilarious and the wedding nicely tied up things for our secondary couple (and the “fake” weddings were pretty good, too).

But for me the most compelling part of this episode and to a great degree the entire show was the way that Mi Ho and Doe-woong handled their last days together, beginning from her stalking/pervert/mooching times in China all the way though her losing her last tail. This felt so emotionally true and, second time around, it still got to me. Consider what our couple went through: Dae-woong heroically and without hesitation deciding to give his life up for Mi Ho, even though it was yet another misdirection from Gumiho Hunter (who finally got a lesson in real love). Mi Ho imploring Dae-woong to remember her as a happy dream and to move on with his life. And, best of all, learning that all too literally Tomorrow Never Comes. Even though they didn’t get to do some of the things that they thought would make them happy on that day, they managed to spend that last day in each other’s company, which was just about perfect. And after Mi Ho’s departure, Dae-goong’s realization that she still lived on inside of him. Although the show used the mechanism of the bead to make this point, it still resonated in a way relevant to real life in how we remember our loved ones even when they are no longer with us (nicely encapsulated in the aphorism that “you never really die so long as someone speaks your name”). 

Not bad for a fluffy fantasy rom com.

First time around, I recall being unhappy with the deux ex machina aspects of the ending. As a rule, I hatehatehate anyone coming back to life in stories, which is one reason I am not a fan of most superhero sagas, and that’s how it felt the first time around. This time, though, I was more forgiving, for a couple of reasons. First, there was a certain level of internal consistency in the show on this point, such as the ladies in the shrine commenting in the presence of Samshin Grandmother that “a promise is a promise”. And even though it was called a “death” in terms of the tails, it played more like a departure than an actual demise.  Second, the way our characters dealt with the coming departure felt legit and earned. There was nothing going into the final half an hour that would have guaranteed that everything was going to end up fine and it wouldn’t have been too unexpected to get a tragic ending. Finally, I dunno, maybe I’ve just lightened up. 

Minor points and questions:

• I’ve been dying to ask about this since I first watched the show. Is the final line of the drama, “after all, my girlfriend is still a fox” the double entendre in Korean as it is in English (old-fashioned now, but still)?

• I also liked where our secondary characters all ended up after the time jump too and especially enjoyed Hye-in trying to put Mi Ho’s shooting guns to the test.

• I found myself wondering enough about the Shamshin Grandmother to look up the character, to find what I’m sure that most of you already knew, which is that she is an actual goddess (of childbirth and fate) in Korean mythology. The same character appeared in Mystic Pop-up Bar, although shown considerably younger there than played in Gumiho by Kim Ji-young. Ms. Kim passed away in 2017, leaving behind a very long list of credits that ended with a cameo in Bring It On, Ghost.

• Speaking of SG, I like that she took the time to catch up with Gumiho Vet Hunter Professor Dong to see how he was doing and that she obviously knew his history. Although probably the most unrealistic thing in the whole drama was when the three young ladies passed by GVHP Dong and Dae-woong, they squeed hi to the professor instead of the hot up-and-coming young actor.

• I think the Mi Ho’s single most charming gesture was her emphatic thumbs up.

• I’ll keep an eye out for other dramas with Shin Min-ah, starting with Arang and the Magistrate at some point. While Lee Seung-gi’s career seems to be blooming, I do see that Ms. Shin works a lot less. Hopefully the notorious showbiz aversion to even slightly seasoned (>30 years old) female actors won’t mean that she will not be able to find parts. (In that regard, I just checked and it looks as though she is starring in a new drama to come out next month, Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha, so there’s hope.)

• Anyone else think that Dae-goong, once he recovered from his accident, would have made a beeline to the shrine to check on what was going on in that painting? I know that I would have.

Overall? I’d give the show an A-. It’s an excellent example of its genre – has there been a fantasy rom com that’s been better? If so, I want to watch it. It was an original story, well plotted for the most part, and cleverly written with wit and heart. It had plenty of memorable scenes that were brought to life by great performances top to bottom, not only our two leads – who killed it – but all of the principals. I think that My Girlfriend is a Gumiho deserves its place as a beloved classic in the annals of K-drama and very much enjoyed revisiting this drama world.

All made more enjoyable by the company of this community. See you in Nirvana and Kill Me Heal Me.
             

*OK, OK – I’ve had Fox Rain on repeat for the last week.

Yeah, I’ll be honest, although I’m totally glad that it ended up in a happy ending sort of place–which was pretty much inevitable, I think, given the general tone and trajectory of Show–I didn’t really love how it got there.

It felt like show did a lot of wheel-spinning, a lot of obstacles and setbacks that didn’t feel too meaningful, but were more for the sake of checking off boxes. I did appreciate Dae-woong’s unhesitating willingness to give up his life if it could be exchanged for Mi-ho’s, that definitely showed his 180 deg. turnaround from the callow lad of the early episodes. But for the most part, that aside, it was kind of meh.

I also felt like the final resolution was a bit rushed and perfunctory, after all the angsty wandering around leading up to it. Like you, I’m not going quibble overmuch about Granny Samshin’s deus ex pictura appearance, since that was telegraphed from the beginning, even though in the event I felt like she was a bit underwhelming once she was on stage…

But now that I’ve complained a bit, to end on a positive note: even though this is only a decade or so old, it does have a definite retro vibe, I thought. But viewed through a retro/light-fluffy lens, it does have a good handful of things to recommend it and make it fun viewing overall. The cast does a good job making their characters and the narrative work.

In the end, though, I have to say that the MVP of this whole show is Shin Min-ah and her 너무너무너무너무너무 adorable dimples and sunny, optimistic, ingenuous persona. Her charisma was irresistible.