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#my single braincell’s way of saying thanks for 2000+ followers :)
tortoisesshells · 3 years
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insomnia is terrible. here’s thoughts on my recent kdrama binge, under the cut:
Signal (2016): It’s been over a month and I can confidently say I hated the last ~45minutes because they feel like the narrative equivalent of a long loading screen for a program you didn’t mean to boot up in the first place - it’s not the worst ending for a show I’ve ever seen (see Black, down below), but it did both feel like a cop-out and ... hmm. like my faith in the characters was seriously misplaced. Which is a shame! Cop-show/copaganda aside, both the overarching plot (the disappearance of Detective Lee Jae Han fifteen years ago)/plot preoccupations (political corruption, socio-economic stratification and the complicity of the police in reinforcing class barriers/defending the wealthy and powerful at the cost of the poor and powerless) and the individual mysteries that the characters past and present struggle to resolve were interesting and satisfactorily dealt with; the magic plot device of a radio that allowed Lieutenant Park Hae Young in 2015 to communicate with Lee Jae Han in the past (1989-2000) was ultimately far more compelling than it had any right to be. It feels like a long meditation on grief, at times, and how grief both rots and compels. I ugly cried so hard into my cat she sought revenge by dropping a spider in my bed, and I’m still not sure if that’s a recommendation. 
Crash Landing on You (2020): as unlikely and ideologically irresponsible (South Korean heiress accidentally ends up in a North Korean village via paragliding accident, winds up in the middle of convoluted political plots as often as she does small-town hijinx, in no small part because she totally isn’t in love with the emotionally-shut-down-but-kind-Army-Captain; alas, those troubles (but! some of her new friends, too!) follow her when she returns to South Korea and her awful family) as it was ultimately charming. This was billed to me as “a fun romantic comedy” to take my mind off the mindfuck of Signal’s ending, which might have been a mislabeling, considering politics, that the main relationship hinges in small part on the male lead inadvertently preventing the female lead from killing herself seven years before the narrative picks up, and there was no way, short of reunification of North and South, that things would end totally happily for the characters. Serotonin is stored in the abundant found family/true companions scenes, but we can’t have nice things for long. Watch with tissues.
Kingdom (2019-): I spent a significant chunk of this dry-heaving, or biting my nails, or hiding under my quilt. Quality zombie drama that also made me cry my own tears, tightly written, but I’m too squeamish and too worn out by 2020 to enjoy this fully.
Mystic Pop Up Bar (2020): sometimes, a family is a bad-tempered 500 year-old cursed pop-up bar owner, her pun- and grandpa-sweater-loving manager with a long and mysterious supernatural past, their turbo-empath busboy who can’t touch normal people without them spilling their deepest secrets, and the single braincell they have to share between them as they struggle to solve ordinary human’s grudges to satisfy the terms of the curse on the owner. For all that the action is pretty light-hearted, the characters’ backstories are weighted down with trauma, abandonment, betrayal and suicide; the grudges of the episode also deal with heavy stuff (workplace sexual harassment, infertility, the cycle of poverty, to name a few). But this is also a show where there’s a field-day in the afterlife for the dead to compete at ridiculous tasks to win the privilege of appearing to their descendants with the winning lottery numbers, the gods accidentally text the wrong numbers, Steve Jobs apparently digitalized reincarnation records, and threatening deities with baseball bats sometimes works wonders (and if that doesn’t work, annoying the shit out of them might do the trick). It doesn’t explain itself and, frankly, I don’t give a damn. Absurd and absurdly charming. I watched it and then immediately forced my sister to watch it again with me; I have a gallery of out-of-context screenshots of this show that watered my crops, cleared up my acne, and killed my enemies.
Black (2017): Honestly, when I figure out what the fuck just happened in the ending, I’ll let you know. I wanted this show to be better than it was, because the premise hit a lot of my buttons, and I wanted to be swept up in a story about life and death (and whatever comes next), and whether being human is in the ability to laugh or enjoy food or make irrational mistakes, or whether it’s in the bigger things: the wanting to be better and the ability to be so much worse, and what the opposite of human is? A woman with the ability to see the shadow of death on those about to die gets swept up in a sprawling web of corruption and abuse when she encounters a childhood friend by accident in a fast-food restaurant, only to see him killed him a hostage situation a day later. He gets better, thanks to possession by a Grim Reaper with his own agenda, but the Reaper’s involvement (and struggles to act human) reveals hitherto buried secrets in the woman’s past. It’s ... grim. Really grim. The web of mysteries is pretty tightly woven, and the show uses unreliable narrators for everything the trope is worth, but the characters and most of their relationships ultimately feel like they fall short of their potential to me, in a way it’s hard for me to articulate? Generally, the female characters felt underwritten and under-utilized; there’s a posthumous trans woman character who’s especially not handled well (better than some, but still felt transphobic to this cis observer). Honestly can’t recommend, unless you, too, can’t resist narratives about grim-reaper-archetypes, or you enjoy being infuriated by nonsense endings. OST’s pretty great, though.
Currently watching Mr. Sunshine (2018) with friends. pray 4 me.
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