(no subject)
Feb. 22nd, 2013 06:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsOkay guys, I guess it's time for me to talk about GAKSITAAAAAAAL!
(You cannot pronounce the name of the show just as Gaksital. You MUST pronounce it with at least six as and a heartfelt scream of despair!)
So Gaksital starts out as a show about a Korean policeman during the Japanese occupation who's trying to catch a costumed nationalist vigilante; for the first few episodes, this made it weirdly like watching a version of Capital Scandal where Lee Kang Gu was the protagonist.innerbrat and I started watching it because we loved Capital Scandal SO MUCH, and this show is set in the 1930s, and there were presumably going to be people in snazzy suits and fedoras and ladies with guns. Priorities: we've got them!
After a few episodes we rapidly came to the conclusion that we couldn't actually . . . recommend it to anyone else . . .
Okay, the thing is, there are many ways in which Gaksital is a very good show! It's super well-crafted in terms of production values and suspense and so on, and it has about six million plotlines and it actually does an amazing job juggling all the side stories and not giving anybody an easy out; all the side characters feel like real and complicated people. This is a full (if very dark) world -- and the scope keeps pulling out, so you start with one angsty individual and end with a movement, in the grand scheme of which one person's kind of silly vigilante revenge quest is not all that important. I really appreciated that.
That being said, the MAIN storyline is SO FULL OF MANPAIN. Our two lead dudes have paid the price SO MANY TIMES. (The show made sure to cast people who were very, very good at ugly crying! My favorite is the tandem bicycle ride of mutual sobbing.) I mean, sometimes it's evil manpain that's called out as evil! The best example went like this:
HEROINE: I'm not going to tell you anything!
DUDE THREATENING HER: Do you not understand how hard it would be for me to have to torture you? WHY DON'T YOU EVER THINK ABOUT MY PAIN?
. . . did I mention there is also a lot of torture?
BUT THERE ARE ALSO A LOT OF AWESOME CHARACTERS, most of whom are played by super attractive people, so . . . I guess at this point I'm just to picspam a bunch of people at you and you can make your own decisions on the rest of it?
This is Lee Kang To. He is our antihero! He is a Korean who works for the Japanese police force and his main job is catching the mysterious vigilante, GAKSITAAAAAAL.
Other hobbies include arresting independence activists, saying "BINGO" whenever an evil plan comes to fruition, going clubbing, and jazz hands.
Other OTHER favorite hobby: hanging out with his bff Shunji, a sweet, dorky kindergarten teacher who has renounced his evil Japanese family and is doing his best to be a pro-Korean ally, albeit including some weird fetishization of Korean culture.
These characterizations are liable to change somewhat as plot and trauma increase. (In case you were curious, by the way, they are in fact both sobbing and riding a tandem bike during this scene. THIS IS THE TANDEM BIKE OF TRAGEDY.)
And now the main ladies!
This is Mok Dan, resistance fighter, devout Catholic, and EVERYBODY'S backstory love interest, except possibly Gaksital's. Mok Dan is awesome when the narrative remembers to let her be, although sometimes the narrative is more interested in having her repeatedly dragged into the police office, threatened with torture, and mired in love triangles in which she has approximately zero interest.
Also, sometimes she cross-dresses! (One of the saddest things to me is that the show forgets about halfway through that she is a MASTER OF DISGUISE.)
The other main female character is Rie, a former Korean geisha (no, I don't mean gisaeng) who was then adopted by her creepy boss as his daughter, also spy. She is one of the most interesting and complex characters in the series.
She also sings, swordfights, wears fabulous clothes, and occasionally gets to disguise herself as a nun.
Rie also has a bodyguard/chauffeur. His name is Katsuyama.
His job is to stand around having ridiculous hair and look judgy at everyone, which is why we spent most of the show calling him Baby Geun Duk.
Mok Dan, meanwhile, works at a circus, which means she has a lot of ladyfriends! Subplots like the time she got to organize all the circus ladies as a secret resistance information unit were the best subplots.
Here she is hanging out with Sun Hwa, the biggest sweetheart on the show.
Sun Hwa has a huge crush on Shunji but an even huger crush on Mok Dan, and their adorable friendship is a large part of the reason the show passes the Bechdel Test.
(As a sidenote, though, while Sun Hwa is a way better option for Mok Dan than any of Mok Dan's canon love interests, Sun Hwa actually gets a super cute romance late in the game with this dude:
We never managed to learn his name but he spends most of the show running around the village being REALLY UNPRODUCTIVELY ANGRY.)
This, on the other hand, is bratty Gye Soon, who thinks Mok Dan is really annoying and is totally willing to take money from the Japanese to tattle on her. Debi and I both really loved Gye Soon (the fact that she's gorgeous may have helped) and were super excited for her redemption arc that did not have anything to do with falling in love with anyone!
While I'm on the topic of awesome ladies, this is Tasha! She runs the club where Kang To hangs out, and also runs some other stuff. In another kind of fascinating super side plot, she acts as the Cha Song Joo to this dude's knock-off Woo Wan:
Except, for the record, this is Gaksital and everything is tragedy, not farce.
. . . well, sometimes. These are Fake Woo Wan's (step)-parents, the Count and Countess Lee, wealthy and corrupt Koreans who are hand-in-hand with the Japanese. They are also our designated comic relief, and as we were watching we felt reasonably sure that, unlike everybody else, they were not going to die horribly. (In case you think you recognize Count Lee, by the way: you're right, he is also Designated Comic Relief Japanese Official on Capital Scandal. Dude is maybe a little typecast.)
Also comic relief: Abe, the cuddly teddy-bear Japanese police officer. Abe is a HUGE sweetheart and probably the character whose name we ended up shouting the most in tones of sorrow and despair. ABE! You deserved to be on a happier show.
. . . BUT ANYWAY back to awesome ladies! This is Jwa Pa, second-in-command of a revolutionary cell that also includes Mok Dan's hot revolutionary dad. In this screencap she has just finished putting a bomb in her purse.
And this is Mok Dan's hot revolutionary dad. (The moustache is fake. Like daughter, like father.)
Were you wondering if this show was full of hot revolutionaries? THIS SHOW IS FULL OF HOT REVOLUTIONARIES. We kept marveling at the increasingly good-looking parade of cast members; every time someone was killed off, someone even more attractive would be brought in to replace them.
The hottest revolutionaries of all showed up late in the game:
All of a sudden, these two black-clad badasses turned up out of nowhere to be INCREDIBLY COMPETENT and it was like candy for our eyes.
But another late entry challenges them for the title! This is Dong Jin, leader of the secret Korean militia.
HE ALWAYS STANDS THIS WAY.
In his first appearance, he asks Gaksital's help in rescuing the reporter who had been helping him recruit people for the resistance, who then mutated into another hot-black-clad revolutionary and became his right-hand man.
We promptly headcanoned that he and the reporter were boyfriends, mostly so we could write revolutionary leader/reporter fanfic in our heads. And nothing ever contradicted us! :D
. . . but moving on from the hot revolutionaries and back to the actual plot, Shunji and Kang To both have brothers!
This is Shunji's brother, Kenji. As you can tell by his sneer, he is evil.
This is Kang To's brother, Kang San. He got tortured by the Japanese and came back acting like someone with a serious learning disability, which is pretty much played in all the problematic ways you think it is.
This is a mysterious man who acted as a mentor to superhero Gaksital, who I have sort of forgotten to talk about. Anyway, we called this dude Musketeer, because of his glorious hair.
And here is the best character of all: GAKSITAL'S HORSE! Gaksital's horse is amazing, he has the superpower of showing mysteriously whenever a horse is needed -- AND YES, he is wearing a little horse superhero mask.
Oh and Gaksital is there too, I guess.
There are more characters but I've gotten through all the really attractive ones, and I'M SPENT.
(You cannot pronounce the name of the show just as Gaksital. You MUST pronounce it with at least six as and a heartfelt scream of despair!)
So Gaksital starts out as a show about a Korean policeman during the Japanese occupation who's trying to catch a costumed nationalist vigilante; for the first few episodes, this made it weirdly like watching a version of Capital Scandal where Lee Kang Gu was the protagonist.
innerbrat and I started watching it because we loved Capital Scandal SO MUCH, and this show is set in the 1930s, and there were presumably going to be people in snazzy suits and fedoras and ladies with guns. Priorities: we've got them!After a few episodes we rapidly came to the conclusion that we couldn't actually . . . recommend it to anyone else . . .
Okay, the thing is, there are many ways in which Gaksital is a very good show! It's super well-crafted in terms of production values and suspense and so on, and it has about six million plotlines and it actually does an amazing job juggling all the side stories and not giving anybody an easy out; all the side characters feel like real and complicated people. This is a full (if very dark) world -- and the scope keeps pulling out, so you start with one angsty individual and end with a movement, in the grand scheme of which one person's kind of silly vigilante revenge quest is not all that important. I really appreciated that.
That being said, the MAIN storyline is SO FULL OF MANPAIN. Our two lead dudes have paid the price SO MANY TIMES. (The show made sure to cast people who were very, very good at ugly crying! My favorite is the tandem bicycle ride of mutual sobbing.) I mean, sometimes it's evil manpain that's called out as evil! The best example went like this:
HEROINE: I'm not going to tell you anything!
DUDE THREATENING HER: Do you not understand how hard it would be for me to have to torture you? WHY DON'T YOU EVER THINK ABOUT MY PAIN?
. . . did I mention there is also a lot of torture?
BUT THERE ARE ALSO A LOT OF AWESOME CHARACTERS, most of whom are played by super attractive people, so . . . I guess at this point I'm just to picspam a bunch of people at you and you can make your own decisions on the rest of it?
This is Lee Kang To. He is our antihero! He is a Korean who works for the Japanese police force and his main job is catching the mysterious vigilante, GAKSITAAAAAAL.
Other hobbies include arresting independence activists, saying "BINGO" whenever an evil plan comes to fruition, going clubbing, and jazz hands.
Other OTHER favorite hobby: hanging out with his bff Shunji, a sweet, dorky kindergarten teacher who has renounced his evil Japanese family and is doing his best to be a pro-Korean ally, albeit including some weird fetishization of Korean culture.
These characterizations are liable to change somewhat as plot and trauma increase. (In case you were curious, by the way, they are in fact both sobbing and riding a tandem bike during this scene. THIS IS THE TANDEM BIKE OF TRAGEDY.)
And now the main ladies!
This is Mok Dan, resistance fighter, devout Catholic, and EVERYBODY'S backstory love interest, except possibly Gaksital's. Mok Dan is awesome when the narrative remembers to let her be, although sometimes the narrative is more interested in having her repeatedly dragged into the police office, threatened with torture, and mired in love triangles in which she has approximately zero interest.
Also, sometimes she cross-dresses! (One of the saddest things to me is that the show forgets about halfway through that she is a MASTER OF DISGUISE.)
The other main female character is Rie, a former Korean geisha (no, I don't mean gisaeng) who was then adopted by her creepy boss as his daughter, also spy. She is one of the most interesting and complex characters in the series.
She also sings, swordfights, wears fabulous clothes, and occasionally gets to disguise herself as a nun.
Rie also has a bodyguard/chauffeur. His name is Katsuyama.
His job is to stand around having ridiculous hair and look judgy at everyone, which is why we spent most of the show calling him Baby Geun Duk.
Mok Dan, meanwhile, works at a circus, which means she has a lot of ladyfriends! Subplots like the time she got to organize all the circus ladies as a secret resistance information unit were the best subplots.
Here she is hanging out with Sun Hwa, the biggest sweetheart on the show.
Sun Hwa has a huge crush on Shunji but an even huger crush on Mok Dan, and their adorable friendship is a large part of the reason the show passes the Bechdel Test.
(As a sidenote, though, while Sun Hwa is a way better option for Mok Dan than any of Mok Dan's canon love interests, Sun Hwa actually gets a super cute romance late in the game with this dude:
We never managed to learn his name but he spends most of the show running around the village being REALLY UNPRODUCTIVELY ANGRY.)
This, on the other hand, is bratty Gye Soon, who thinks Mok Dan is really annoying and is totally willing to take money from the Japanese to tattle on her. Debi and I both really loved Gye Soon (the fact that she's gorgeous may have helped) and were super excited for her redemption arc that did not have anything to do with falling in love with anyone!
While I'm on the topic of awesome ladies, this is Tasha! She runs the club where Kang To hangs out, and also runs some other stuff. In another kind of fascinating super side plot, she acts as the Cha Song Joo to this dude's knock-off Woo Wan:
Except, for the record, this is Gaksital and everything is tragedy, not farce.
. . . well, sometimes. These are Fake Woo Wan's (step)-parents, the Count and Countess Lee, wealthy and corrupt Koreans who are hand-in-hand with the Japanese. They are also our designated comic relief, and as we were watching we felt reasonably sure that, unlike everybody else, they were not going to die horribly. (In case you think you recognize Count Lee, by the way: you're right, he is also Designated Comic Relief Japanese Official on Capital Scandal. Dude is maybe a little typecast.)
Also comic relief: Abe, the cuddly teddy-bear Japanese police officer. Abe is a HUGE sweetheart and probably the character whose name we ended up shouting the most in tones of sorrow and despair. ABE! You deserved to be on a happier show.
. . . BUT ANYWAY back to awesome ladies! This is Jwa Pa, second-in-command of a revolutionary cell that also includes Mok Dan's hot revolutionary dad. In this screencap she has just finished putting a bomb in her purse.
And this is Mok Dan's hot revolutionary dad. (The moustache is fake. Like daughter, like father.)
Were you wondering if this show was full of hot revolutionaries? THIS SHOW IS FULL OF HOT REVOLUTIONARIES. We kept marveling at the increasingly good-looking parade of cast members; every time someone was killed off, someone even more attractive would be brought in to replace them.
The hottest revolutionaries of all showed up late in the game:
All of a sudden, these two black-clad badasses turned up out of nowhere to be INCREDIBLY COMPETENT and it was like candy for our eyes.
But another late entry challenges them for the title! This is Dong Jin, leader of the secret Korean militia.
HE ALWAYS STANDS THIS WAY.
In his first appearance, he asks Gaksital's help in rescuing the reporter who had been helping him recruit people for the resistance, who then mutated into another hot-black-clad revolutionary and became his right-hand man.
We promptly headcanoned that he and the reporter were boyfriends, mostly so we could write revolutionary leader/reporter fanfic in our heads. And nothing ever contradicted us! :D
. . . but moving on from the hot revolutionaries and back to the actual plot, Shunji and Kang To both have brothers!
This is Shunji's brother, Kenji. As you can tell by his sneer, he is evil.
This is Kang To's brother, Kang San. He got tortured by the Japanese and came back acting like someone with a serious learning disability, which is pretty much played in all the problematic ways you think it is.
This is a mysterious man who acted as a mentor to superhero Gaksital, who I have sort of forgotten to talk about. Anyway, we called this dude Musketeer, because of his glorious hair.
And here is the best character of all: GAKSITAL'S HORSE! Gaksital's horse is amazing, he has the superpower of showing mysteriously whenever a horse is needed -- AND YES, he is wearing a little horse superhero mask.
Oh and Gaksital is there too, I guess.
There are more characters but I've gotten through all the really attractive ones, and I'M SPENT.
no subject
Date: 2013-02-23 02:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-23 05:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-23 03:01 am (UTC)I also find it interesting that when I was vidding Capital Scandal recently I was sort of rooting for Lee Kang Gu's police skillz to triumph. I mean. He's a terrible human being and I hate him, but I was just so annoyed that everyone else in the police department was incompetent at solving crimes and being, you know, a policeman, even when they were being purposefully incompetent to protect people. SO. Potentially I would like this because of that? Since I am assuming that the main character's police skillz get highlighted? Except that I would also be angry because I would want the revolutionaries to be better at not being caught? (I say knowing only what you have described about the plot of the show.)
I have to admit I am sort of confused about who Gaksital is, though? I mean, clearly his horse is awesome. (But where does he keep the horse when he is not being a masked dude?) Maybe I am confused because I only paid attention to the pretty pictures? My guess is that Gaksital is played by one of the two main characters you describe. (The school teacher? That is my guess.)
ANYWAY. Off to find this show. Because I am easily influenced and I miss not having a show break my heart in thousands of peices.
no subject
Date: 2013-02-23 03:24 am (UTC)But but but I need to tell you that Lee Kang To is REALLY GOOD at being a policeman, and aside from the guilt at doing bad things, he clearly enjoys being super competent at something. His delight in every triumphant "Bingo" is a pleasure to behold.
Don't worry, though. Revolutionaries get caught, but they also get rescued. Like, a lot.
no subject
Date: 2013-02-23 05:56 am (UTC)(The question of where he keeps the horse -- and how the horse knows to show up! -- is ALSO an enigma, but this one is never solved. @__@ THE HORSE IS MAGIC.)
And as Debi said, the fact that Lee Kang To really REVELS in being an evil police officer -- and is really good at it! -- was one of the most weirdly enjoyable things about the show early on. He just enjoys being competent so much!
I will be super curious about your reactions. :D
no subject
Date: 2013-02-23 03:34 am (UTC)The mind boggles ... !
no subject
Date: 2013-02-23 05:57 am (UTC)so much
manly
sobbing
(also schoolteacher is played by Love Interest #2 from The Musical, which was sort of surreal!)
no subject
Date: 2013-02-23 05:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-23 05:58 am (UTC). . . and so doomed.
. . . . but so attractive.
no subject
Date: 2013-02-23 06:24 am (UTC)Wait so is Kang San's behavior an act? Because that would make me feel a lot better about mentally comparing him to Ralphie's little brother from A Christmas Story.
no subject
Date: 2013-02-23 03:21 pm (UTC)SPOILER but not much of one because it's totally guessable: yeah, Kang San's behavior is totally an act. I don't know if that makes it more or less problematic!
no subject
Date: 2013-02-23 07:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-23 03:24 pm (UTC)(Like, I love the club in Capital Scandal. But they had no budget, and it really is . . . basically just a basement.)
no subject
Date: 2013-02-23 07:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-23 03:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-24 01:25 am (UTC)Most amazing phrase ever written. I didn't know tandem bikes were still a thing!
Also dang, kdramas always seem to put up the most attractive people EVER. Why is that?
no subject
Date: 2013-02-25 12:36 am (UTC)I DON'T KNOW but I am never, ever going to complain. >:D