skygiants: the main cast of Capital Scandal smiling in a black-and-white photo (children of the revolution)
[personal profile] skygiants
A couple weeks ago [personal profile] innerbrat and I finished watching through Hong Gil Dong, frequently sold as 'Korean Robin Hood.'

Hong Gil Dong is one of those kdramas that kicks off at 100% candy-colored slapstick and ends -- fair warning -- at about 100% tragedy, with several unexpected zooms up and down along the scale in the middle.

Hong Gil Dong is the illegitimate son of a nobleman and a slave, who bops around being an asshole to everyone until he a.) gets mixed up in a conspiracy and thus b.) in trying to clear his name accidentally becomes a folk hero and prince of thieves and as a result c.) decides his only choice is to revolutionize the world.



The conspiracy also involves two more angles of the inevitable love polygon: our plucky heroine, a cheerfully clueless snake-charmer/tiger-wrestler/martial arts expert/on-call comic relief who was adopted as a child by a wandering medicine peddler/con artist after a MYSTERIOUS TRAGEDY befell her family...



... and secret long-lost prince, who is busy waging a morally ambiguous war to gain his rightful place on the throne in between rounds of brooding under various large hats.



The mastermind of the prince's morally ambiguous campaign, by the way, is his adoptive mom, who is of course the most interesting to me as morally ambiguous middle-aged women generally are. She always wears a tiny black widow veil! She was tragically scarred in a murder accident! She tries to kill several of the leads numerous times! She does feel a little sheepish when she has to talk to her adopted son about it later! Also, she survives the narrative and she's TOTALLY FINE, which is extra shocking given basically nobody else does!



This is generally a good show for interesting middle-aged women; my favorite episode involves Hong Gil Dong Vs. Five Disapproving Vigilante Grannies.

Of course there are also some merry men (and women.) The show wants us to believe that these two non-Hong-Gil-Dong thieves are destined to end up together, which is somewhat absurd, because Mal Nyeo is obviously a lesbian? ANYWAY.



I hope you are by now admiring how much all the Merry Men outfits in the show consist of five million moderately inexplicable layers of neon knits, by the way.



The last primary cast member I should mention is the fourth love polygon angle, a deeply bored nobleman's daughter who keeps trying to convince Hong Gil Dong he should let her be his Maid Marian, except unfortunately he's just not that into her. We kept wanting her to apprentice to Madame Noh but instead it turned out she had been secretly apprenticed to Drosselmeyer, which is also OK, I guess.




My biggest problem with the show is probably its pacing. The primary narrative arc -- after the first few episodes of 'How Hong Gil Dong Accidentally Becomes A Hero!' -- involves the slow build of Hong Gil Dong's partnership with the prince for the purpose of installing a less oppressive regime, followed by the very heavily foreshadowed and VERY RAPID dissolution of that partnership due to fundamentally incompatible goals and worldviews.

I actually really appreciate how the show sets up the incompatible goals and worldviews, and how it complicates the mythic narrative of the 'rightful' prince, and the fact that it does deal with the political aftermath of dynastic struggle and revolution, instead of ending when the crown goes on the correct head, but I wish it did it ... better ... or, you know, with ten episodes devoted to it rather than two.

...my other biggest problem with the show's pacing is that Hong Gil Dong has FOUR Most Important Merry Men and only TWO of them get backstory episodes, which is a.) offensive to my sense of narrative symmetry and b.) offensive to me personally because neither of those two is Mal Nyeo the Obvious Lesbian.

But that said, we enjoyed this weird and wild ride, and now that I have made this entry I can go read the English translation of the 19th-century Korean novel that the show is based on, which I am very excited to do! Both because it looks cool in its own right and because I'm SO CURIOUS about which choices in the show came out of the book, and which were invented by the creators; there's a fair bit of metanarrative in the show about the legend of Hong Gil Dong and who's telling it and how people react to it, which obviously I was into, because I am me.

Date: 2016-08-31 02:47 am (UTC)
china_shop: Eun Chan holding Han Gyul's face, both turned towards camera - cuteness! (Kdrama - Coffee Prince)
From: [personal profile] china_shop
one of those kdramas that kicks off at 100% candy-colored slapstick and ends -- fair warning -- at about 100% tragedy

Aha, yes. This was the first Kdrama I watched that ended at 100% tragedy, and I was Quite Indignant About It. :-)

And oooh, I didn't know there was a book. *pootles off to investigate*

(Btw, my friend and I are currently halfway through Queen In-Hyun's Man, which we started largely on the basis of your festivids sign-up last year, and we're enjoying it tremendously. (No spoilers, please! I think I only read the first paragraph of your description, and then went YES! so I'm entirely unspoiled. \o/)))

Date: 2016-08-31 10:32 pm (UTC)
china_shop: Eun Chan holding Han Gyul's face, both turned towards camera - cuteness! (Kdrama - Coffee Prince)
From: [personal profile] china_shop
My friend was full of dire predictions, but I was relentlessly optimistic (as I tend to be)... until there was no more room for optimism. And aha, yeah, watching week-by-week, that would just be MEAN! Though I imagine most Kdrama veterans would be more or less expecting it.

Date: 2016-08-31 03:12 am (UTC)
sovay: (I Claudius)
From: [personal profile] sovay
We kept wanting her to apprentice to Madame Noh but instead it turned out she had been secretly apprenticed to Drosselmeyer, which is also OK, I guess.

. . . Which version of Drosselmeyer?

Date: 2016-08-31 03:49 am (UTC)
thistleingrey: (Default)
From: [personal profile] thistleingrey
Vexed authorship and thus dating, IIRC--mid-C19 if anonymous, or possibly by Heo Gyun near turn of C17.

I like Heo Gyun (even if he didn't write it, he's a good guy to remember) because he facilitated what little general recollection there is of his sister's poems.

Date: 2016-08-31 01:17 pm (UTC)
thistleingrey: (Default)
From: [personal profile] thistleingrey
Ah, glad to know of a new translation!

Date: 2016-09-01 12:18 pm (UTC)
troisroyaumes: Painting of a duck, with the hanzi for "summer" in the top left (Default)
From: [personal profile] troisroyaumes
I liked this drama, though I agree with you on uneven pacing. Most of this style of Robin Hood show don't go so far as to critique the monarchy (K-dramas really are royalist in their tendencies). They mixed in some elements of Gwanghae-gun and Yeonsan-gun in there (the former had Heo Gyun executed incidentally), as well as quite a bit of satirical commentary on present day Korean society, which is true to the tradition of retelling Hong Gildong. I'm reading the translation of the novel too; looking forward to hearing your thoughts on it.

Date: 2020-05-16 11:21 am (UTC)
innerbrat: (Capital Scandal)
From: [personal profile] innerbrat
I like how there is exactly 1 melodramatic and tragic Hong Gil Dong adaptation and exactly 1 fun and happy and cheerful comedy one.

On average.

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