Sometimes the only way to truly find oneself is to get lost first, to become disoriented by all the things that you have trouble facing until what you really want becomes the magnetic north that sets you free.

The Korean BL Boys Be Brave adapted from Seok Young’s webtoon Can’t Confess and starring actors Kim Sung Hyun (Kim Jin Woo), Nam Shi An (Jung Ki Sub), Jung Yeo Joon (Choi Bal Geum), and Ahn Se Min (Ji In Ho) is all about being found inside a lost place.

The synopsis of Boys Be Brave is simple. Four people, all of them opposites, each of them with very different lives and ways of dealing with those lives, coming together in an insightful, romantic way that reveals who each of them truly are beneath layers of insecurity, masked smiles, and pride.

Much like the schedules that Jin Woo makes and the alarms he sets, the four characters in Boys Be Brave remind me a lot of a compass, each of them a different direction. Jin Woo strives for perfection inside a world where the only thing he’s ever truly wanted is to be seen. Ki Sub uses the word ‘yes’ and plastered smiles as a shield to mask the lost, uncertain person he’s become. Bal Geum strives for riches inside a world where being poor and in debt has turned the color being in love could have brought into his life into a faded landscape of shame. In Ho is lost inside feelings he wants to grasp onto inside the hurricane that Bal Geum has become.

It all seems funny at first, with the series starting off on a light note. There’s a lot of running and misdirection and back-and-forth humor that makes it easy to fall for the endearing characters trying so hard to run away from each other. But, as each episode progresses, as more layers are peeled away, the humor fades into the background of a much larger, deeper story. And inside that story, these four boys moving in different directions somehow find themselves on a collision course with each other with the north the magnet keeps pulling them toward being the love they have for each other.

Watching Boys Be Brave was very much like what the title intends. It was watching four different people find the courage within themselves to not only face the love they feel for one another but to face the strangers they’d become in their own lives.

But the most extraordinary thing for me as a viewer was feeling like I’d been handed a Google map to their journey before starting out on a scenic route where the sights along the way were breathtakingly insightful. Sometimes, we took a wrong turn, only to be led down a back road full of other sights and sounds that we wouldn’t have seen or understood or felt on such a deep level if we hadn’t taken the wrong turn to begin with. All while trying to find our way back to a final destination that makes perfect sense for all the characters involved.

Happiness is in the found, in each of them realizing who and what they are and what they truly want from life while on their journey. Detours and all.

And we were lucky enough to take that journey with them.

While Bal Geum and In Ho’s journey doesn’t end as smoothly as Jin Woo and Ki Sub’s, there’s beauty and hope in the new beginning before them, in the new map they’ve been given. I hope we get more of their story, that we’ll get to take another road trip with them in the future.

But even if that doesn’t happen, Boys Be Brave is a magnificent journey about finding oneself inside a lost place, and I found that taking the journey with them made it easier to see myself in all of them.

And that will stay with me for a long, long time.

For a romantic series about self-discovery, check out Boys Be Brave now on Viki and Gagaoolala. It is certainly worth the trip.

Rating- 4 out of 5