This guy is the funniest villain in all the Korean dramas I’ve seen so far. His entire motto in life is basically: “if murder doesn’t solve your problems, you aren’t doing enough of it!”
(I’m rewatching this, with my sister this time. Also, it’s not really a “spoiler” since you find out in the first episode that this guy is a total psychopath.)
I just had a horrendously awful “conversation” with someone I know. Basically, she spent half an hour badmouthing me, accusing me of things I did over ten years ago or haven’t done, seriously misinterpreting and twisting things I’ve said or written, and telling me how everyone we know thinks exactly like her.
Miss Champion Against Bullying, indeed.
You know, she could just ask if she doesn’t understand something instead of building up this weird interpretation of it in her mind and then accusing me of it.
For example, “What do you mean? Could you elaborate?”
Well, why, yes, I can. How about that?
So I figured I might as well incoherently ramble about one of my favourite television shows for a bit of cheer me up before I go to sleep.
I’ve actually written about this show before but I recently rewatched it because I’ve been very slow, lazy and disinterested in things again. Basically, I guess I could call it a modern retelling of Pinocchio? Sort of? Like, really loosely? The show is named after a fictitious syndrome that is named after, well, Pinocchio. When a person who has the syndrome lies, knowing that they’re lying, they start hiccupping.
And I just — I really like how interwoven this syndrome is into the story. Choi In-ha, one of the main characters, is a Pinocchio. She starts hiccuping whenever she lies so she’s very honest and blunt. Choi Dal-po, the other main character and her love interest, finds this fascinating and is regularly saved by this syndrome of hers. You can tell that her inability to lie is one of the reasons why he falls in love with her.
Through another Pinocchio, a sort of witness in Choi Dal-po’s tragedy, the show also tells that just because Pinocchios can’t lie, it doesn’t mean they necessarily tell the truth either. They just tell the truth as they see it.
Choi In-ha wants to become a reporter. However, because of her syndrome and inability to lie, people think she isn’t fit to become a reporter. But it’s precisely because of this syndrome that she can’t do what the other reporters do and publish lies or half-lies, and thus she does in fact report closer to the truth than the other reporters at her corrupt network.
This rambling is indeed incoherent but it’s really getting late, ha ha. Other than a few minor things that personally bothered me, this show is honestly great. Even during a second watch, all the story beats still hit so good.
I felt so happy after finishing it, ha ha.
Too bad that feeling didn’t last.
(But more seriously, I sincerely hope I can write something this good eventually.)
by 4M
I started following this webtoon on a whim. It tells about Yeonsu, a twenty-seven-year-old writer, and Gyeol, an eighteen-year-old high school boy. (At least, I think he’s eighteen in the beginning?)
These two meet in a hospital by chance and by chance they get to know each other. They were supposed to become walking buddies and eventually start playing tennis to improve Yeonsu’s fitness, but honestly there wasn’t a lot of that.
Yeonsu mistook Gyeol for a college student and starts to fall in love with him. But then a sunbae from the past reappears who was, of course, in love with her and Yeonsu finds out Gyeol’s real age and the two separate.
She actually writes a book about this which eventually becomes a drama.
The thing is, I’m kind of confused where this story is going. I mean, I think it’s going towards Yeonsu and Gyeol together? But they didn’t actually have all that much development before they separated and then we got a timeskip of three years, which Yeonsu has spent dating her sunbae and Gyeol has spent pining after her. And that’s the other thing, Yeonsu and the sunbae had even less development; he had one-sided feelings for her in college, she was oblivious and didn’t think about him until they met again, and then it was all “I’m always saved by sunbae uwu”. The rest of their “development” happened off-screen during the timeskip.
Yeonsu and Gyeol are headed for a second meeting, but we’re already at chapter forty-seven and the pacing is so slow.
Don’t get me wrong, the art is good and the characters are nice if a bit bland but it’s just — I’m mostly confused about where it’s headed or how long it’s planning to be?
On the other hand, Hello My Teacher also waited till the last minute before it put its main leads together so… maybe this will do the same?
Also! If your other character is allowed to move on, date and have sex with other people, then have the decency to let the other character do the same. Switching it up from the woman hopelessly and celibately pining after a man to the man hopelessly and celibately pining after a woman is not “clever”. You’re just inverting the sexes.
This irks me, that’s all.
I thought I’d occasionally do a post on things I actually like and, well, I had a completely horrible day today so I want to cheer myself up a bit too.
This Pinocchio is a Korean drama. I came across it a while back when I binged on dramas. That binge has already ended, and I left an unfinished show behind too. It seems that my limit really is two or three shows before I’m like, yeah, I’m done. *goes back to doing other things*
I was searching older dramas then and I picked this by complete chance. The summary honestly sounded a bit lame and I was like, eeeeh, I guess I’ll give it a try? Then I watched the first episode and I was all, I’m SOLD, ha ha.
Anyway, the story starts in the small island of Hyangri which looked so pretty and I didn’t understand why anyone would want to move from there to Seoul. Ahn Chan Soo, a student at this island’s school, is participating in a televised quiz show while his teacher and classmates are watching it. We’re introduced to In-ha, the main girl, and her non-consanguineous uncle and the worst student in the school, Choi Dal-po, who is mysteriously missing from class. (They’re the same age.)
As it turns out, Choi Dal-po sneaked into Seoul to participate in the quiz show as well. During his first preliminary question, he uses his “Ask a friend” option and picks Ahn Chan Soo, his opponent. Then he tells him “If I win, let me slap your face ten times”. It was at this moment I was like, sold, sold, sold!
Now. The first episode is honestly rather slow. All of the above I mentioned lasted only about ten minutes before we switched to a lengthy flashback about Choi Dal-po’s past and the flashback of the week preceding the quiz show. But other than that, the pacing in this story is so good. Like, each plot beat is resolved quickly instead of being stretched out to tedium.
Also, there’s this fictional syndrome in this story (and from which it gets its name, aside from the story of Pinocchio): there are people, like In-ha, who start hiccuping when they tell lies. Hence they are called Pinocchios.
Choi Dal-po’s dad used to be a firefighter. He went to suppress a fire at a factory which ended in his and his crews’ deaths. The media made his dad into a scapegoat to divert the nation’s attention away from the real conspiracy lurking beneath. Fuel was added to the flames when a witness, a Pinocchio, came out saying he’d seen Choi Dal-po’s dad. And I just — I liked so much what they did with this, that just because someone can’t lie, it doesn’t mean they’re telling the truth either.
It was this moment that made this show one of my favourites.
…..I feel like my review is as lame as the summary. Oh well.
by Bamwoo
This webtoon is a really cute, fluffy BL about two childhood friends, Haebom and Taesung. When Haebom was seven or so his parents died in an accident and Taesung’s mom, Ms Ha, decided to raise him in place of her friend, Junghee. It was during this time that Haebom overhears Taesung tell his mom that he doesn’t want to be brothers with him.
You see, when they were younger Haebom told him that he’d marry him and Taesung, with his two hideous parents and his small broken heart, took him seriously.
But Haebom misunderstood him, and somehow they manage to live eleven years under the same roof without once addressing this misunderstanding or having a single meaningful talk until they are in high school and the events of the webtoon start.
The webtoon has issues such as bullying and stalking. In high school Haebom is briefly bullied by Joonseung and in university he’s briefly stalked by Jaegyun. The webtoon doesn’t really dwell on those topics; rather it introduces the issue and then deals with it in a couple of chapters.
There are no real backgrounds in the panels and the other characters basically exist when they need to if that makes sense. You can tell the author just wanted to write a fluffy romance, and it really is fluffy and cute. I have no complaints there.
But what I wanted to talk about is Taesung’s mom, Ms Ha.
She dumped Taesung on her mother, his grandmother, after giving birth to him and didn’t go to see him once in seven years until she reconnected with her friend, Junghee, and wanted to offer her son as a playmate to Haebom. She didn’t talk to him, or try to get to know him, or offer him any motherly kindness or feeling, and later complains to Junghee that she wanted a girl and maybe she shouldn’t have given birth, basically negating Taesung’s entire existence. Which Taesung accidentally heard, at seven years old or so.
When she catches Taesung and Haebom kissing in university, she confronts Taesung and pretty much calls him a rapist and an abuser without so much as letting her son! explain himself or hearing him out.
It’s not that she’s a bad person. She isn’t. But to put it bluntly, as a mother she’s a complete bitch. If you want to know how to murder a person’s psyche, just look at their parents. And their “village”.
Of course Taesung is lucky that he’s fictional and his mother cares about him, but in real life things aren’t as easy or beautiful. Here’s the reality: if you don’t get what you need from your parents when you are a child then chances are high that you won’t get it when you’re an adult. You have two options then: either you get yourself out or you stop expecting anything at all from your parents.
The third season has some implicit sex scenes for those it might bother.
…..or for those it might interest.
Edit: Just reread this recently and I still don’t like Taesung’s mom.
Since it’s almost Yule my sister came over to stay for a couple of days. We watched this film, and it was really depressing.
I wanted to see it because of Gong Yoo who is one of the few actors whose name I have bothered to remember. I like him as an actor and I like his dimples — although his dimples were severely missing in this film — and I know absolutely nothing about him as a person. I’m not one of those people who find out every single minutia of celebrities they like. I’m just not interested in that and I find it a bit creepy.
For example, I once checked out a few real person fics — which are basically fan fiction about real people — because I wanted to know what the deal with those was. I was more or less okay with fics that had nothing to do with them as real people — that they just happened to be characters who coincidentally shared names with these famous persons — but fics that detailed their grannies, siblings, and pets made my skin crawl with how uncomfortable it was. Like, don’t be that attached to people who don’t know you even exist.
Anyhow, the film. It was basically a Korean zombie apocalypse film. I thought it might be funny — because the Resident Evil film franchise is so dumb it’s enjoyable — but the film was more drama than a dumb action flick.
It starts with a man driving through a quarantine. He hits a deer on his way out and drives away. The camera pans and the deer gets up, a film of white over its eyes.
ME: “Bambi: The Revenge. How a single deer brought down humanity.” (We do this with my sister a lot.)
That initial bit of fun later, all the humour in the world was drained away as the film went on.
There was this one character whose name I don’t remember but who ended up being our favourite character in the film. He was a bit stocky and scruffy, and he had this pretty wife who was pregnant. We wondered how he’d managed to snatch himself such a pretty wife but he turned out to be so very manly that eventually we decided he should have had an even prettier wife. Or several.
When he died, because of course it’s always the manliest ones who die, I said to my sister: “And she’s never going to find a man better than him!”
When the film ended my sister said I’m never allowed to pick the films again.
ME: “It wasn’t bad! It was just depressing!”
Oh right, I almost forgot. The film also never explained who was bomb-dropping zombies from helicopters in uninfected areas. Or at least that’s what it looked like in one of the scenes.
by Various Artists
One of my favourite horror stories is a webtoon in an anthology of short stories. Its the first chapter of the collection, and it tells about two friends who are writing a horror story for a summer competition.
One of the friends goes to research an abandoned asylum; on his first night there he calls his friend, back in Seoul, but the call cuts off in the middle. On the following nights, the friend in Seoul starts getting emails from him, photos of the asylum. But there is something wrong with the emails.
It’s just one chapter like I said, but I think it did its job well. You can read it for free here.
The other stories in the collection were a bit lackluster, though.
by Confeito Planet
Over the two week break when I didn’t have my computer, I started this webtoon. It tells about two childhood friends, Yeonduk and Skyler, whose relationship has gone horribly wrong thanks to their demented, abusive mothers.
Yeonduk’s mother basically sold her son off as a personal slave to Skyler and his mother because Skyler’s mother funds her gluttony, vanity, and extravagance. She also more or less brainwashed Yeonduk to be Skyler’s surrogate mother; he has to take care of his food, his clothes, and his school.
Skyler’s mother, on the other hand, is a real piece of work. She’s an alcoholic, manipulative, overbearing. She abuses Skyler every chance she gets; berates him for things he hasn’t done, suspects him of everything, takes his personal things from him and lies that she gave them to Yeonduk because he wanted them.
She also used Yeonduk, Skyler’s friend, to spy on her son and rewarded Yeonduk whenever he “reported on” Skyler. Of course, if Yeonduk said anything positive about her son, she didn’t believe him and berated and punished Skyler anyway.
As is evident, Skyler’s and Yeonduk’s relationship was already skewed before they were old enough to know better but it was really Skyler’s mother who ruined it completely.
From the first chapter the reader is made to overly sympathise with Yeonduk because he’s following Skyler around like a lost, little duckling with a crush while Skyler treats him horribly.
I didn’t much care since for one, I’m not really interested in utter doormats in fiction and secondly, you don’t follow around people who expressively don’t want you there, and thirdly, it was obvious that things weren’t as simple as they looked.
The theme of this webtoon is basically, I guess, how people sharing the same memories can see them so differently, and how those memories can become distorted and skewed. So I already figured out that from Skyler’s point of view, Yeonduk isn’t going to come out as a pure little duckling who just selflessly liked him, followed him, and took care of him.
From Skyler’s point of view, he got his heart broken first. Skyler thought Yeonduk was his friend just for his mother’s money — which isn’t exactly untrue — that he followed him around just to report everything he did to his mother — which again, isn’t exactly untrue — that he betrayed him first.
So before cussing out Skyler because you’re overidentifying with Yeonduk, please keep in mind that he’s basically a good kid. It’s just that he believed the fragmented moments in his memories, believed his abusive mother over his best friend, but unfortunately children often are completely blind to their parents.
Also, do notice that Doogie — a character who used to hang around Skyler in middle school and saw Skyler’s… friend? Park Jung-goo punch Yeonduk in the face — sweats buckets when Skyler catches him bullying Yeonduk in high school. I’m sure there is a good reason for that.
I do wish that Skyler and Yeonduk could talk things out and mend their broken friendship, and then preferably go their separate ways and grow as separate people. But, well, My Starry Sky is BL and BL is so very predictable as to be almost comforting.
by Haribo
At the End of the Road tells about Yoon Taemin who finds himself in the body of Han Siwon after a car accident. While he is trying to adjust to this new life and find out what happened, it’s then he meets Min Woojin, his childhood friend, who quite quickly realises that this new Han Siwon is, in fact, Yoon Taemin. There is a bit of mystery involving Han Siwon’s bullying and suicide, and your regular BL shenanigans thrown in.
I read the last chapter today and I was left with this mild feeling of surprise and with this sense that it… didn’t actually tell about anything.
You see, the premise of body swap by death is really interesting. There is so much you can do with it and explore how it affects all the people involved; Yoon Taemin himself, Han Siwon’s parents, the people who knew Han Siwon and the people who knew Yoon Taemin.
But instead the parents are fridged after the first episode, none of the side characters are really explored, and aside from a mild identity crisis of being essentially dead, Yoon Taemin adjusts in his life as “Han Siwon” pretty well I’d say. And Min Woojin’s feelings about this don’t really go beyond obsession with Yoon Taemin and being relieved that he is alive even if he isn’t alive in his own body.
I guess I’d say it’s the regular fantasy of “I love your soul, not what you physically are” à la The 1st Shop of Coffee Prince and Bromance. Except that Yoon Taemin switches bodies instead of being a girl pretending to be a boy for very flimsy reasons.
I just had this feeling that At the End of the Road introduced all these topics — body swap by death, suicide, bullying, identity crisis, gang rape — without actually delving into any of the aforementioned topics.
The mystery of Han Siwon’s bullying and gang rape had a kind of incomplete closure but overall it just felt so unfinished. It never even touched the topic of Min Woojin’s abusive father and him being trapped as the heir of said father’s conglomerate and what this would mean for Yoon Taemin and Min Woojin in the future.
Also, I just really hate how the gang rape was handled. Basically the characters who orchestrated it and the characters who committed the crime all, more or less, got away with it. Because Yoon Taemin didn’t want to “stoop on” the same level as the character who caused it.
This makes me cringe because no, it’s not about “stooping on their level”. It’s about potentially stopping anyone else from being victimised by these assholes. If they are fine causing, watching and gang raping someone at seventeen then just imagine what they are fine doing in the future.
I’d be fine with this if the point was that oftentimes people get away with atrocious crimes for various reasons. The more wealthy, influential and powerful someone is (or the more corrupt a country is) then the more likely it is that they can do pretty much anything and no one will know or care. But instead, we get this completely warped ‘holier than thou’ attitude (from the victim!) which is also utterly stupid.
Overall, the story was kind of like playing Dragon Quest but instead of going through the three or four different versions of the boss, the game abruptly ends after the first boss.
All this aside, it was quite good for a first work and a lot better than most of the BL stories that get published. The art work, as well, was very pretty.
I guess I’m just disappointed as I always am when a story introduces an interesting idea and either does nothing with it or completely screws it up.
Hiraeth 