How XO, Kitty mastered the art of slow-burn romance before Season 3: The 'Mooncovey' spell

Last year, I had bronchitis and I switched on XO, Kitty. Normally, a name like that itself would tune me out, but I was wheezing and sitting with an inhaler, I was ready for any 30-minute comfort watch that I could find. And well, I loved the original films To All The Boys, despite all the glitching in storytelling in the second and third films, it’s still one of my favourites.

 XO, Kitty did not disappoint. It got me through bronchitis.

Now, I’m not saying XO, Kitty is profound storytelling, and to its credit, it never pretends to be. It’s entertaining, silly, and somehow becomes a comfort watch without irony. You can breeze through two seasons in a week and still end up, like everyone else, anxiously waiting for Season 3.

The premise is disarmingly simple. Lara Jean Covey’s younger sister Kitty — yes, the same Kitty who once mailed her sister’s secret love letters to every boy she’d ever loved, heads to Seoul to reunite with her long-distance boyfriend, only to discover that he appears to be dating someone else. Or… is he?

He isn’t, of course. Dae has his reasons for pretending to date the wealthy and perfectly poised Yuri (a fantastic Gia Kim), the daughter of the school principal, Jina. He’s best friends with the golden-hearted athlete Q and the perpetually snarky Minho (watch the enemies-to-lovers arc quietly set itself up), both of whom slowly warm to Kitty. Season 1 tracks Kitty’s growing realisation that her feelings for Dae have cooled, and just as she begins to make sense of that emotional shift, Minho(Cheers, Sangheon Lee) confesses his love for her — mid-flight, on the plane ride back home.

In Season 2, the tension between Kitty and Minho is teased with surprising finesse. While the rest of the show can feel stilted at times, occasionally veering into cringe with forced plot turns and the liberal use of words like “sus” — what it gets absolutely right, and why fans can’t let go, is the slow-burn romance between these two.

It’s the only storyline that genuinely holds your attention. From the very first episode of Season 2, things are awkward in the aftermath of Minho’s Season 1 confession. His pride won’t let him admit just how bruised he is by the rejection, so he does what wounded teenage boys in TV shows inevitably do: He jumps into a rebound relationship. And that's Stella, a fellow student who later reveals (conveniently) herself to be on a quiet mission to take down Minho’s father, a celebrity talent manager who once humiliated her during an audition — a moment that spiralled into a full-blown middle-school bullying wildfire.

 Yet as the series slowly builds, despite Stella lurking evilly in the corner, the two form a closer friendship than before, with Minho helping her tracking down details about her mother and then even coming with her to see her long-lost relatives.

  The emotions break free here, as Kitty, overwhelmed with emotion that she ‘has created such a mess’ at school and now even her family doesn’t want her, finds unusual comfort in Minho.

It’s the rain scene that has spawned a million TikTok edits. It’s ironic: Nothing quite happens in this scene, and yet everything happens. As she sobs, Minho says these words, “I know quite a bit about Kitty Song Covey. She’s relentless and determined. She helped her sister find love in her own chaotic way, and travelled around the world so that she could find it for herself. That’s how I know that she would never give up on family.”

It’s a genuinely sweet scene because it captures an intensity that belongs only to the two of them, quiet, restrained, and unexpectedly mature. Kitty’s early crush on Dae was cute and fluffy, no doubt, but with Minho, this feels like the beginning of something more grounded and grown-up, the kind of romance Season 3 has been quietly promising all along.

Almost immediately after, Kitty impulsively tries to expose Stella’s truth to Minho, and it backfires spectacularly. In the fallout, another truth finally surfaces when Minho snaps, “It’s bad enough that you broke my heart, and now you want to break up my relationship?”

For the first time, Kitty fully grasps the depth of his feelings, that this was never just a casual crush, no matter how lightly he once framed it. The season wraps with Stella’s true colours revealed in a conveniently Disney Channel–esque manner, and Kitty joining Minho on his summer tour. And that, presumably, is where Season 3 begins — right in the emotional lane the show handles best for these two characters.

And, somehow Xo Kitty is just a lot more re-watchable just for these two, as compared to Jenny Han’s other creations, The Summer I turned Pretty, the supposedly more serious sister but ended up spiralling. The distressing part about TSIP is that it wasn’t meant to be a love triangle conversation; it was evident that main protagonist Belly (Lola Tung) was going to end up with Conrad and not Jeremiah, his brother with a deep inferiority complex.

Yet, the show missed out on something much deeper: It was how a cloud of grief and loss changed people and relationships forever. Loss is incomprehensible, and no one knows how to quite heal from it—not Conrad, who actually suffered panic attacks and moody spells for good reason, least of all Belle, who chases after the wrong brother out of sheer guilt that she might have betrayed his feelings earlier, to the point of almost rewriting her personality. But TSIP, while showing the grief and weight of expectations, can never quite sink into clearly, and so, it is interpreted as a love triangle.

Xo Kitty, for now, isn’t trying to be so deep, and yet the intensity between Kitty and Minho feels a lot more earned.  It’s the breezy romcom, with love triangles, silliness  that cheers you up when you’re sick, and you find yourself cheering for a couple who aren’t even a couple.

 And sometimes, that’s better than trying too hard to be serious.