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dramallamas · 5 months

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Because you cannot pry British Juwon from my hands here are some Juwon headcanons based on his time in England and a bit about how it affects his life in Korea. Featuring Kwon Hyeok obviously.

Language Headcanons:

He is bilingual and is fully fluent in both English and Korean.

He learnt French in school but has forgotten most of it.

It actually got to a point where he would forget words in Korean and ask Hyeok what they were. So he would write down words he forgot and memorise them.

He still sometimes, tho very very rarely, forgets words. He has a note in his phone of them.

He spoke Korean with Hyeok but whenever either of them went out, they spoke English.

Hyeok was fluent but has not maintained the same level as Juwon since moving back to Korea.

Juwon mumbles in English to himself when thinking hard and believing he’s alone. However, people have caught him do this from time to time.

His English voice is a tiny bit deeper than his Korean one but not many people notice it (DS does tho 👀).

He speaks English pretty articulately, and has more of a southern accent.

He says scone like phone and not like gone.

Dongsik adores when Juwon speaks English and has actually picked up a couple words himself.

Unconsciously swears in English… including in rated E moments.

When he’s stressed/upset and gets the opportunity to just explode (obviously after he’s bottled it) he talks in a mush of both languages.

Other Headcanons:

Juwon went to a private school in England and Hyeok taught him extra at home.

He did not have a lot of friends but had one or two that he liked tolerated.

Definitely got picked on by other kids for being quiet or weird. That was until he full on punched a kid and got in deep shit for it, but nobody picked on him again so Juwon called it a win.

He though british/western food was mostly bland but there was a certain elegance and comfort in its simplicity.

Did not go out often, and flat out refused to go to clubs.

He did apply for UK universities and did a year or two before going to the Korean Police Uni.

Did get into a good uni, like Russell group uni (maybe Oxford?), and yet didn’t get accommodation and simply got his own place instead (his hate of sharing things and richness coming into play). He also learnt to cook there.

His father never visited but did send money to the two of them, though Hyeok also got a job out there.

He does not have the best spice tolerance due to western food being… not that spicy.

He has an English name, but doesn’t like to use it unless he has to. He much prefers Juwon.

Has been asked out by a variety of people but turned everyone down as politely as possible (unless they were pushy then he got annoyed and was very bitchy about it). He has never been interested in anyone.

Has read every single sherlock holmes book in English and still has copies in his Seoul apartment.

The only jobs he had in England were from mandatory work experience.

Despite not really being social, he did get to know a book store worker when he went to purchase something out of the classics section.

Yes he read classics and older literature, you’re gonna tell me he didn’t? But his guilty pleasure was fantasy books. He definitely read mostly in English (more accessible) but did pick up the odd Korean book too.

His notes for cases in korea are a mash of Korean and English, mostly just writing in whatever language flows out first. There’s not a lot of time to get them down and nobody else is gonna see them so he doesn’t care about it.

Feel free to drop your own thoughts and opinions and reminder that these are MY HEADCANONS and may not fully align with yours :)

#beyond evil #괴물 #kdrama #han juwon #jwds #british juwon for the soul #as someone who relates to juwon and is british and is multilingual #i say this is correct information #👍

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welcometothejianghu · 9 months

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Welcome to another round of W2 Tells You What You Should See, where W2 (me) tries to sell you (you) on something you should be watching. Today's choice: 괴물/Beyond Evil.

Beyond Evil is a 2021 Korean drama about two cops that solve a small-town murder that one of them might have committed. Also there's more than one murder to be solved. Also more than one of those murders happened twenty years ago. Also, the cop might have gotten away with at least one of those too.

It got sold to me on the strength of the main pairing, which is absolutely captivating and worth the price of admission. But the entire cast is amazing, the story is great, and it's all just so satisfying. I love everyone in this weird small Korean town. I love having emotions and various Korean foods with them.

I got five reasons why you should watch it! Read 'em!

1. Do You Want To See An Old Man Cry?

In fact, do you want to see every man cry? Do you want to see every man in the cast either cry or pretend to cry or be on the verge of tears at least once? Do you want to see the main characters, who are both men, cry multiple times, often while otherwise wet as well?

Well, buddy, Beyond Evil has got you covered.

2. Absolute Nightmare/Absolute Nightmare

I do not consider it a spoiler to tell you that Han Juwon (the younger one, on the right) is a very mentally unstable superboy. You already know everyone thinks Lee Dongsik (the older one, on the left) is psycho -- it's nearly the first thing you learn about him. But when you're introduced to Han Juwon, you're given the impression that maybe he's just cold, self-possessed, and competent.

No. He is an absolute freak. This is a freak4freak relationship. They are both completely unhinged. They have both been traumatized to nigh-unimaginable degrees, and they have each decided to make it the other's problem. Fortunately (or unfortunately) for both of them, they both get off on that real hard, and they get real mad sometimes about how hard they're getting off on it. It's delicious.

And yet what makes it great is how they're different flavors of freak. They've got the age difference (40 and 27). They've got the height difference (even though the actors are only like 1cm apart, the whole thing is somehow shot like there's a bigger gap). They've got the class difference (small town weirdo and cop royalty). One's a messy bitch, and one's a prissy prince. One has a whole network of people who affectionately endure him, and one has exactly 0.73 friends. One wants to take care of everyone else but not himself, and one has never looked out for anyone else a day in his life. One's a smug little shit, and one's ... also a smug little shit, but differently.

You have perhaps been given the impression that Beyond Evil is like Hannibal, and that Juwon/Dongsik is like Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter. It's not, and yet it scratches a similar itch, if that makes sense.

Don't let me give you the impression that this is textually gay. They do not smooch or anything, so don't be waiting for that. But holy cow, is it homoromantic -- and the leads know it is, and they roll around in it, and everyone else in the production supports their doing it. They have the kind of chemistry stars are jealous of. (It helps that the younger actor is a muffin who has a such crush on the older one.)

And that's even before the part where they get married live on national television. Is that a joke? You'll have to watch to find out.

3. Lee Changjin (and the other antagonists)

I'll talk in a second about excellent and despicable all the bad guys are. But I need a special moment for this motherfucker right here.

Lee Changjin is a wretched, scummy piece of shit who damn near walks away with every scene he's in. He's not the worst like a little meow meow -- he is the actual worst, and it's so good. He's sleazy. He's pathetic. He's hot as fuck. You meet his ex-wife, and you're like, no, honey, sure it was a bad decision, but I totally get it.

Clearly he has a special place in my heart, but all the bad guys in this series are done so damn well. Their realism makes them even scarier. They're not incomprehensible ghouls out there being bad just to be bad. They're (mostly) making calculated decisions based on keeping their own heads above water, and to hell with everyone else.

I'm not going to spoil the identity of the murderer for you -- but it kind of doesn't matter, because you find out who it is less than halfway through the show (and because there are multiple people in this show who've killed someone). There's something bigger and more awful at work here, perpetrated by people that you knew were bad news from the moment you met them.

Beyond Evil is a cop show that is not copaganda, because one of the biggest villains in the series is misuse of police power. The show stresses accountability for police misconduct -- to the point where that accountability hurts characters we want to see get away with stuff because, come on, their bad behavior was totally justified! But it wasn't! The ends do not justify the means here. The world is not better when powerful people use their power to get out of the consequences of their shitty, selfish actions, even when those shitty, selfish actions were objectively kind of cool.

Fair warning, a lot of this show is about complicated relationships with abusive, absent, deceased, and otherwise difficult parents. Those parents are not always (or even mostly) the bad guys -- but the bad guys are all shitty parents. And yet, their adult children are tied to them in complicated ways that do said children no favors. Some of the most heartbreaking pieces of the show are about how these kids break free from those parents -- or, more tragically, don't.

4. Just plain good television

This is a series that can be handled by Your Average American Television Enjoyer Who Can Handle Subtitles. Its quality is on par with a lot of well-thought-of English-language shows I've seen. It's a tight, well-plotted story that's clear enough to be easy to follow, which is sometimes a high bar for a multi-tendriled murder mystery. The small-town setting even gives it a good source of levity to break up the otherwise tight tension.

It's only sixteen episodes long, but there are enough reveals to make a rewatch more than worth your while. The first half in particular improves exponentially on the second viewing, because once you have all the information, events and decisions that you initially read one way, you can see meant something else entirely.

I was initially going to say that if this were in English, all those fans of things like the Wire and True Detective would be super-horny for it -- except that's not true, is it? No, shows like that (which I have seen, for the record) glorify cops who can't be held down by your damn system, so they have to say screw the rules to get things done, because they're too cool and manly for things like paperwork! While Beyond Evil acknowledges that there are some places where the Korean law system is janky and might let a guilty person go free, but that doesn't mean cops get to do whatever they want about it.

My declaration of the show's quality isn't just me judging by my own tastes. This show won the Korean equivalent of Emmys for Best Drama, Best Screenplay, and a well-deserved Best Actor for Shin Hakyun, who plays that incredibly handsome horrible old man. This is a show that actual people who hand out actual awards for good television thought deserved awards.

So I guess if you always wanted to get into those shows a certain kind of dude can't stop talking about, but you had reservations about how authoritarian/libertarian/misogynistic/homophobic/boring they are, Beyond Evil is here for you!

5. Written and directed by women

This one I think is important as hell, because this is a Dead Girl Show (i.e., a show where men kill multiple women as a major part of the plot), and I know a lot of people are justifiably wary about those. However, there are no hints of sexual assault. The violence is gendered, but it's not sexualized. The murders and postmortem mutiliations are handled with the appropriate horror, but it's not torture porn. And the dead girls are treated like -- and grieved like -- actual humans who matter.

I think a whole lot of this can be chalked up to the fact that both the writer and the director of Beyond Evil are women.

In fact, not only are they both women, they're women who don't do this kind of story all the time. Shim Nayeon has directed five things, four of which are comedy/slice-of-life series. Kim Sujin has written a few dramas about mystery-solving teams, but even more comedy and adaptations of webtoons. I have no idea how the two of them got put on this drama together, but it was a perfect match.

This is not to say that men would be incapable of pulling off a story like this. It is, however, a commentary on violence, and how different it looks if you've grown up seeing yourself everywhere as its object rather than its subject. Sure, you could just flip the script and make a story about a lady punchkicker! A lot of people have, and I've enjoyed many of them! But you could also choose to tell a story about gendered violence in a way that isn't just needlessly retraumatizing the people who have to live their entire lives under its shadow. Moreover, you could tell a story about how even good-guy cops can wind up unintentionally buying into paradigms where some women are valuable and some are disposible.

...And if it winds up being teensy bit of a fantasy story about a world in which so many cops give a shit about this violence, well, that's what fiction is for, right?

In short, you love a team of powerful ladies power-drunk on an Arnold Palmer of Respect Women Juice and Sad Man Tears.

Bonus: BANGER SOUNDTRACK

Oh, it's so, so good. (Spotify link)

Have I convinced you to watch it yet?

It's on Netflix, which may be easiest for most people! However, it's also on Viki, and I much prefer the subtitles over there, because a) they keep the flavor of the Korean terms of address, and b) they actually translate the damn episode titles (wtf Netflix?).

There's no bad way to watch it, though!

(ack, they're so cute~)

#beyond evil #괴물 #rec post #honorary danmei #i made this #seriously though it's so good #watch beyond evi

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