#bang gu ppong

[susiephone]

extraordinary attorney woo rules because sometimes it'll be like "hey this episode we're defending a client who kidnapped 12 children" and the guy is like "in my defense....i saved those kids from going to school" and you're sitting there watching like "you know maybe he has a point"

#extraordinary attorney woo #no but for real when he was explaining his motive #and how much pressure the school system puts on kids #and then you find out the kids literally just spent a day playing in the woods before going home #you're just kind of like #'go off king! you're mentally unwell!' #bang gu ppong

[fewwordsmanyriddles]

#quotes #quotable quotes #movie quotes #movie #Extraordinary Attorney Woo #woo to the young to the woo #Koo Gyo Hwan #Bang Gu Ppong #pied piper #peter pan #children's liberation army

[lunyrbug]

rewatching attorney woo

bang gu-ppong <3 somebody kidnap me and free me from school and let me run around for crying out loud

#/hj #hehe bang gu-ppong lke fart #haha fart

[lastofthe20thcenturygirls]

bang gu-ppong: i'm kidnapping children bc schools and adults want to keep children anxious

#extraordinary attorney woo #kdrama

[thedramanotes]

My friend pointed out that despite my uncritical love for it, episode 9's case about liberation of children felt far too preachy and that lessened her enjoyment of it.

And I want to respect that perspective (even though I immediately argued with her 🤣) but also say a little bit in explanation of the context.

Her main complaint was that the central figure of Bang Gu-ppong was far too idealistic. Extrapolating from that, I figure his exhortation that children need to "play immediately!" right now and every day felt too simple and impractical an ideology against the parents' desire to push their children to excel so they have comfortable careers as adults. But here's the thing.

We have watched similar plot lines in kdramas for decades. We've watched children be bullied, commit suicide, drop out, do horrible things to their friends, lie and cheat, become desperate and disheartened in drama after drama after drama.

We know it's a real problem. Children in Asian countries (not just South Korea, but China, Japan, India, et al) are treated like job horses by their parents. Only instead of earning money now, they're preparing throughout their childhood to someday earn a lot of money in the future.

There are international policies that try to enforce children's right to a childhood, but for most Asian countries that means little. Parents are far too focused on making sure their children don't grow up to earn less than them. So yeah, I know the treatment of this plot may have felt silly and may not have connected with a lot of viewers. But dramaland has given us this story for decades in every way possible.

Dark, gritty, real, pragmatic, inspiring, hopeful, desperate.

This is one more way. It's far more idealistic and not necessarily what children really need, but it's a good way to bring at least one thing to light. A child's right to consent.

I liked it.

That's all.

#extraordinary attorney woo ep 9 #extraordinary attorney woo #jang ki young #park eun bin #lee joon ho #woo young woo #children's liberation army #hanbada #korean education #children's right to a childhood

[world-smitten]

Extraordinary Attorney Woo 9

Okay, so this episode is slyly brilliant and I want to talk about it.

Episodes 7-8 were about Young-woo dealing with her parents and her connections, and Min-woo being an obnoxious pillock. In episode 9, we suddenly pivot to a story about a somewhat quaint man who kidnaps a bus of children to play games in the woods. He calls them the “Children’s Liberation Army”. He legally changed his name to a poop joke because it made kids laugh. The kids he kidnaps are a bunch of academy students who only know school and sleep. We all know this message - Korea’s academic system is broken and the casualties are the children, whose parents cannot see the hurt they inflict because they are unshakingly convinced that it is for their good (very very relatable). I root for Bang Gu-ppong because I also believe in children’s liberation, and I want him to behave so Young-woo can get him a lighter sentence, even if that means declaring him mentally unwell.

Young-woo, like me, believes in children’s liberation. Unlike me, she goes above and beyond to understand Bang Gu-ppong as an individual whose ideology has merit that should be recognised in the court - even if it means that he can’t get a lighter sentence. Her actions might not “win” the case, but she upholds her integrity towards her client and her own beliefs (a far cry from episode 5, where she ignored her gut feeling and sense of justice to win a case for a lying client). Where I am in the episode (I was so excited by its writing that I hopped on here to post meta while my brain was still firing), Min-woo has just asked Attorney Jung to please, pretty please, penalise Young-woo for her behaviour in court. Watching the scene play out, I was thinking, ‘does this man think he’s in school? you don’t just “penalise” people like that in a professional workplace, wtf...oh. OH’.

And then Attorney Jung says, “Giving rewards and punishments over who’s right and who’s wrong is not how I work”. And the whole thing just clicked.

I remember reading somewhere that children, like women, are oppressed by the patriarchy, and by the systems created and upheld by the patriarchy. The education system is one such system and is therefore punishes any behaviour that might destabilise it. “Play” - to have reckless, aimless fun for the sake of fun - is violently opposed to the patriarchy, which is “work” (boys especially are raised to place their worth in their ability to work, which is part of how the patriarchy perpetuates itself. Bang Gu-ppong is unemployed - he’s got little worth as a man, and little worth to the system).

This is the same patriarchy that Min-woo represents in this story, and that he’s been desperately trying to uphold since Young-woo, a disabled woman, barged in to completely disrupt order. When Attorney Jung asks Min-woo why he simply can’t talk things out with her, it’s because Min-woo, like a lot of people in the story including Young-woo’s father, sees her as a child. He doesn’t see her as his equal. And when she proves herself repeatedly in ways that upset his own perceptions of the world, he mentally defaults to “school”, to “penalties and rewards”, because this is the only environment he can imagine Young-woo in and this is the only environment that would certainly punish her for her disability (and we know that’s true, since she was bullied all through school). What he doesn’t realise is how much of a fool he looks by doing all that, since Young-woo sees herself as an adult (which she is, duh) and doesn’t stoop to his level of clownery. Maturity is something much deeper than parroting the “right” language and presenting yourself in the “right” way. Bang Gu-ppong seems immature, but he refuses to lie about who he is and what he’s done, and why he did it. That, for me, is “adult”.

That’s not to say that I agree with him kidnapping a bus of kids lol. He says they consented to being spirited away, to which I say, ‘meh’. When it comes to kids and consent, that is always a hairy discussion because kids genuinely don’t have the perspective to know what is good for them. But, work and study is always assumed to be good for kids without question, whilst it’s play that has to be constantly treated with suspicion, always moderated, always surveilled. And discussions around kids and consent lacks a ton of nuance - it’s almost always an either/or scenario. Either kids don’t know anything, so let’s micromanage the life out of them - or, kids can definitely consent, all the time, so their “yes” is always “yes” even when it’s said in ignorance. There has to be a better way to give kids some agency in their lives. I think the saddest thing in this episode is the implicit child abuse - if Mujin Academy is famously harsh on its students, then imagine what kind of treatment the director must have inflicted on her own kids (and having Gu-ppong’s mother be the director ties the whole thing together perfectly). But even the director herself, like all women, is only trying to navigate the patriarchy - a single mother, in a system that loathes single mothers, who goes above and beyond to mould her sons into the perfect future patriarchs. They excel in education and gain the high societal marker by making it to the best universities in the country. And she capitalises on this “success”, showing other mothers how they too can make their own potential patriarchs. In doing this, she proves her worth to the system.

After Gu-ppong tells the attorney of the playground games he had with the kids in the woods, Min-woo (who can never do anything right lol) says, “I guess you didn’t do anything incredibly original.”  To which Gu-ppong responds, “The thought that playing has to be original is what creates gimmicky children’s camp field trips without the field part. Taking the children from here to there, making them do this and that, so that they can experience something novel and educational. That’s not playing. Even if all they’re doing is looking up at the sky and snickering at the clouds floating by, as long as the child is smiling and is happy in that moment, that’s what playing really is.” When he said that, the scales fell out of my eyes. It was like, of course, of course. All those school trips and summer camps I did as a kid that were heavily monitored, expensive, stressful -  even the kind of play that we think is acceptable for kids, is still work. That makes sense. This was the moment I realised that this show is being written by someone who truly cares about children. And it’s so radical! It dropped something so novel (to me, at least) on the sly, and with such humility too. 

Man, I love this show.

#extraordinary attorney woo #word vomit meta #but srsly when gu-ppong said that that i was like ohhh #wow the writer really cares! #this episode was full of ohhh moments #just thematic puzzle pieces slotting together wonderfully #koo kyo hwan #park eun bin #joo jong hyuk #kdrama

[standard-muse]

Bang Gu-Ppong in a nutshell

#extraordinary attorney woo #honestly was i the only one creeped out the entire time #great motive but major heebee jeebee vibes

[juliemolinaz]

I can’t begin to imagine how fucked up Bang Gu-ppong’s childhood/young adulthood was that he felt like kidnapping children to give them the freedom to play was the only option.

#extraordinary attorney woo

[luckycheesefoodie321]

THE ABSOLUTE JEALOUSY SEETHING OUTTA HIS PORES

WYW: Bang Gu-ppong

LJH: (-᷅_-᷄๑)

WYW: (*^▽^*)

LJH:(*´꒳`*)

LJH: (O_O)

LJH: (-᷅_-᷄๑)

#he really couldn’t help himself when he saw her smile like that huh #extraordinary attorney woo #Kdrama #Korean drama #Asian drama #spoilers

[quotestrove]

Children have to play right now. Later is too late. It’s too late after getting into university, after getting a job, and after getting married. Playing with marbles, tag, Red Rover, double dutch. Later is too late. In a life full of anxiety, it’ll be too late to find the only way to happiness.

Bang Gu-ppong, Extraordinary Attorney Woo

#Extraordinary Attorney Woo #K-drama quotes

[dk-thrive]

Children have to play right now. Later is too late. It's too late after getting into university, after getting a job, and after getting married. Playing with marbles, tag, Red Rover, double dutch. Later is too late. In a life full of anxiety, it'll be too late to find the only way to happiness.

Koo Kyo-hwan (Bang Gu-ppong), Extraordinary Attorney Woo: “The Pied Piper” (S1:E9 - 2022)

#parent #children #school #play #son #daughter #free time #play time

[susiephone]

a lesser show would've been like "the criminal wants to reform the school system and protect children's rights.....BY KIDNAPPING CHILDREN AND TRAUMATIZING THEM AND BEING EVIL AND OH IT TURNS OUT HE DOESN'T CARE ABOUT KIDS AT ALL SO DON'T QUESTION THE SYSTEM ACTUALLY"

but extraordinary attorney woo was like "the criminal wants to reform the school system and protect children's rights.....BY KIDNAPPING CHILDREN for a single afternoon, by commandeering the bus that was about to take them to a school where they were abused and overworked, and offered them all multiple chances to get off the bus and go home if they didn't want to go with him, and when they all elected to stay, took them to a mountain where they played outside and ate snacks together for a few hours before bringing them home without a single scratch, and it was the most fun any of these kids got to have, and he cares deeply for each and every child he meets and wants to disrupt and dismantle the system that abuses them and steals their childhoods, and his lawyer is like 'well i can't LEGALLY condone my client's methods of protest but the man makes some points!' and he's also completely willing to go to jail for his cause as long as he gets to keep speaking out about how children are mistreated in society. and his name is mr. fart."

#extraordinary attorney woo #bang gu ppong

[imlearningtudraw]

aMtEpisode 9 of Extraordinary Attorney Woo!

I really liked that they talked about how hard and stressful and abusive forcing children to study constantly, from dawn to dusk, is!!!

Kids need to have fun and chill and just play!

Like obviously children being forced to study, study, study is just a symptom and consequence of how hard it is to get a job and live a comfortable life and also how society treats people who aren’t educated or making a lot of money etc. etc.

How we express the importance of education to children - not a something that we all need, that is good for us and others and something that can and should be fun but instead a symbol of one’s worth and status in society - heavily effects them and it manifests into many horrible ways. Now they are an adult with a mountain of issues which isn’t nice for them and isn’t nice for the everybody else to has to interact with me.

Bottom line is we as a society aren’t as nice to kids as we should be and it becomes incredibly obvious when you interact as an adult with other adults or when you see and listen to how adults talk and behave around children.

Someone on twitter said that children are some of the most badly treated minority groups in the world and i totally agree.

Anyways long story short (again) let’s all do better for the kids!

As Whitney Houston said “I believe the children are our future” ssksksksksks I’m so unserious.

Now onto Junho and Young Woo, my babies!!!

Loooool Young Woo said chivalry is dead in this episode!

I loved how Junho was weirded out by her being nice to him. I get it because Junho is clearly used to doing traditionally gentlemanly things just out of his nature and he and Young Woo have a very clear dynamic so I get why he was confused.

Also I loved that after she said that she’s doing it because she likes him, she ran away again. Same, Young Woo, Same!

Also Junho RUNNING to tell Youngwoo that he likes her was just perfect!

Did anyone notice how his button up shirts were buttoned up like maximum 3 buttons? And he had a white or skin coloured top t-shirt underneath? I felt like the costume designer did that on purpose, to kind of simulate him being almost shirtless and maybe tell us that Junho is subconsciously trying to look sexy for Youngwoo. I say this because he’s usually buttoned up! The semi buttoned up outfits send me a different message.

Also Junho and Youngwoo were wearing the same colours when he confessed. Light green and beige! Which I think symbolises that they now on the same page!

(Later on I’ll do a post about the costuming on the show because it’s a very clear example of a costume designer telling us what we don’t know about the characters. I love costuming so I’m having a lot of fun with this show.)

Also I completely understand why he was hesitating to tell her he likes her back but I’m glad that he got over his fear and went for it! Lol also not Minwoo unknowingly helping Youngwoo get her man!

Also him smiling and being happy at Young Woo’s smile and joy when she was talking about Bang Gu-ppong even while feeling jealous was so cute!

Su-yeon and Min-Sik aka Restaurant Oppa being a potential couple has me excited! We really know nothing about him and we like her so i think their storyline would be cute!

Lol also one thing about Dad’s shop? A mysterious guest will visit him at night! sksksksksks. I’m excited to see where Mom and Dad’s story goes. I think they lowkey still have feelings for each other. They’d never get back together though. Sidenote but I’d love to see them act in something else as a couple because they’re both extraordinary (badum tss) actors!

Anyways yeah great episode as usual!!

#extraordinary attorney woo

[kdyism]

special place in my heart for bang gu-ppong. he is a weirdo but he is our weirdo </3

#yunn watches #extraordinary attorney woo #also the locked class stuff sounds like a nightmare #and like are there actually academies like that???

[uriquotes]

"The children laugh at just the name Bang Gu-ppong. They understand the meaning of liberation he's claiming. The only people who do not understand Mr. Bang... are adults."

#extraordinary attorney woo

[burnmyh4nd]

My comfort characters up to today:

Callie and Stef from The Fosters; King, Gus and Hunter from The Owl House; Peridot and Steven from Steven Universe; Rafa from Vai na Fé; Courtney and Norma from Dead End Paranormal Park; Woo Young-woo and Bang Gu-ppong from Extraordinary Attorney Woo; Vi from Arcane; Lake from Infinity Train; Chandler, Joey and Phoebe from Friends; etc

#hunter toh