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Mar. 22nd, 2020 10:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsMore kdrama posting, this time a bit less wacky!
A few years agoinnerbrat and I watched the 2008 kdrama Hong Gil Dong, and then I read a translation of The Story of Hong Gildong, and at this point I was invested enough in Hong Gil Dong adaptations that I eventually talked innerbrat into watching the latest Hong Gil Dong kdrama variant with me, Rebel: Thief Who Stole the People.
Traditionally, the story of Hong Gil Dong focuses on the illegitimate younger son of a nobleman, who has super-strength and is upset that illegitimate sons aren't allowed to socially advance. Rebel blows that up completely: this Hong Gil Dong is a slave from a slave family with no noble lineage whatsoever, and though he does indeed have super-strength, the first four or five episodes are entirely focused on the horrors of slavery and how Hong Gil Dong's father struggles to maneuver his family into freedom, semi-accidentally building himself a criminal empire along the way.
Unfortunately, criminal empires are still vulnerable to the whims of the aristocracy; tragedy strikes when the family runs afoul of an extremely evil minor prince and is promptly scattered to the four winds. Little sister Uhrini gets picked up and spirited away by mysterious forces; eldest brother Gil Hyun lies about his identity to pass the civil service exam, where he has an opportunity to witness the corruption of the court from within; and Gil Dong focuses on rebuilding his father's criminal empire in order to get revenge, occasionally interrupted by a judgmental oracle who pops up every few episodes to inform him that with great power comes great responsibility and he should probably cool it with the criminal empire and get on with starting a people's revolution already. Which, eventually, he indeed does! But not until approximately the back third of the show. (The politics are very sound but the pacing is sometimes questionable.)
(Sidenote: we have a lot of questions about that judgmental oracle, not least the fact that there's at least one other kid with super-strength running around the show, working for the villains a majority of the time and she never bothers him! Eventually it turns out that she has a whole underground base ready and waiting for the rest of the cast to catch up with her revolutionary agenda, at which point we changed our entire line of questioning and decided that she had never actually been an oracle at all, just a savvy visionary who saw the opportunity to mold the perfect figurehead for her movement and jumped on it. The oracle is the true heroine of this show and we applaud her for it.
Meanwhile, a historically terrible king is rising to power and getting increasingly terrible in historically documented ways, backed up by a secret society of ardent Confucianists who are dedicated to making sure the upper-crust stay crusty and the poor know their place. All the villains in this show are royalty and aristocrats and people who abuse their structural power; all the heroes are peasants, servants, and former slaves; all the sympathetic antiheroes are people who fall into the latter category and struggle to gain security and stability within the establishment rather than outside of it, such as Hong Gil Dong's ex-girlfriend, a gisaeng who ends up in the royal harem, and Hong Gil Dong's rival, the adopted son of another gangster who is failed by father figure after father figure until he ends up with the worst father figures of all.
There are a lot of plotlines whereinnerbrat and I looked at each other and said "well, if we were writing it, we would have done it this way" -- the most annoying one is probably the recurring joke about Hong Gil Dong's love interest, a budding novelist, and how she sends everyone to sleep with her stories; let her be good at the thing she loves please! -- but overall the bones of the show are really good and solid, and! very surprisingly! it doesn't end with complete soul-crushing tragedy!! WE WERE PLEASED BUT SHOCKED.
My two favorite things about the ending are a.) in the last two episodes we leverage the power of the people to replace the bad king with a new king, but the new king is someone we have BARELY ever met before and spend pretty much no time with before or after, because WHO CARES ABOUT KINGS? CERTAINLY NOT THIS NARRATIVE! Keep the focus on the revolution where it belongs! and b.) how we spent the whole show hoping for Hong Gil Dong's sad Mighty Child rival to get a redemption arc and a better dad and possibly an OT3 with the romantic leads on very little evidence, and then like a solid 50% of the last episode is dedicated to him getting comprehensively adopted into the family; fanservice for me, specifically! Thank you, Rebel!
(Admittedly I didn't remember until I read my old post that the original Hong Gil Dong novel doesn't end with heartbreaking tragedy either. The Hong Sisters and 2008 kdrama tropes thoroughly misled me!)
Also, and completely unrelatedly, I was shocked and delighted by this unexpected pop? culture reference:
Would love to know the full story behind how the heroine time traveled to the future to read "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas"!
A few years ago
innerbrat and I watched the 2008 kdrama Hong Gil Dong, and then I read a translation of The Story of Hong Gildong, and at this point I was invested enough in Hong Gil Dong adaptations that I eventually talked innerbrat into watching the latest Hong Gil Dong kdrama variant with me, Rebel: Thief Who Stole the People.Traditionally, the story of Hong Gil Dong focuses on the illegitimate younger son of a nobleman, who has super-strength and is upset that illegitimate sons aren't allowed to socially advance. Rebel blows that up completely: this Hong Gil Dong is a slave from a slave family with no noble lineage whatsoever, and though he does indeed have super-strength, the first four or five episodes are entirely focused on the horrors of slavery and how Hong Gil Dong's father struggles to maneuver his family into freedom, semi-accidentally building himself a criminal empire along the way.
Unfortunately, criminal empires are still vulnerable to the whims of the aristocracy; tragedy strikes when the family runs afoul of an extremely evil minor prince and is promptly scattered to the four winds. Little sister Uhrini gets picked up and spirited away by mysterious forces; eldest brother Gil Hyun lies about his identity to pass the civil service exam, where he has an opportunity to witness the corruption of the court from within; and Gil Dong focuses on rebuilding his father's criminal empire in order to get revenge, occasionally interrupted by a judgmental oracle who pops up every few episodes to inform him that with great power comes great responsibility and he should probably cool it with the criminal empire and get on with starting a people's revolution already. Which, eventually, he indeed does! But not until approximately the back third of the show. (The politics are very sound but the pacing is sometimes questionable.)
(Sidenote: we have a lot of questions about that judgmental oracle, not least the fact that there's at least one other kid with super-strength running around the show, working for the villains a majority of the time and she never bothers him! Eventually it turns out that she has a whole underground base ready and waiting for the rest of the cast to catch up with her revolutionary agenda, at which point we changed our entire line of questioning and decided that she had never actually been an oracle at all, just a savvy visionary who saw the opportunity to mold the perfect figurehead for her movement and jumped on it. The oracle is the true heroine of this show and we applaud her for it.
Meanwhile, a historically terrible king is rising to power and getting increasingly terrible in historically documented ways, backed up by a secret society of ardent Confucianists who are dedicated to making sure the upper-crust stay crusty and the poor know their place. All the villains in this show are royalty and aristocrats and people who abuse their structural power; all the heroes are peasants, servants, and former slaves; all the sympathetic antiheroes are people who fall into the latter category and struggle to gain security and stability within the establishment rather than outside of it, such as Hong Gil Dong's ex-girlfriend, a gisaeng who ends up in the royal harem, and Hong Gil Dong's rival, the adopted son of another gangster who is failed by father figure after father figure until he ends up with the worst father figures of all.
There are a lot of plotlines where
innerbrat and I looked at each other and said "well, if we were writing it, we would have done it this way" -- the most annoying one is probably the recurring joke about Hong Gil Dong's love interest, a budding novelist, and how she sends everyone to sleep with her stories; let her be good at the thing she loves please! -- but overall the bones of the show are really good and solid, and! very surprisingly! it doesn't end with complete soul-crushing tragedy!! WE WERE PLEASED BUT SHOCKED.My two favorite things about the ending are a.) in the last two episodes we leverage the power of the people to replace the bad king with a new king, but the new king is someone we have BARELY ever met before and spend pretty much no time with before or after, because WHO CARES ABOUT KINGS? CERTAINLY NOT THIS NARRATIVE! Keep the focus on the revolution where it belongs! and b.) how we spent the whole show hoping for Hong Gil Dong's sad Mighty Child rival to get a redemption arc and a better dad and possibly an OT3 with the romantic leads on very little evidence, and then like a solid 50% of the last episode is dedicated to him getting comprehensively adopted into the family; fanservice for me, specifically! Thank you, Rebel!
(Admittedly I didn't remember until I read my old post that the original Hong Gil Dong novel doesn't end with heartbreaking tragedy either. The Hong Sisters and 2008 kdrama tropes thoroughly misled me!)
Also, and completely unrelatedly, I was shocked and delighted by this unexpected pop? culture reference:
Would love to know the full story behind how the heroine time traveled to the future to read "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas"!
no subject
Date: 2020-03-22 06:17 pm (UTC)I am delighted, honestly, that Le Guin has become a timeless parable.
no subject
Date: 2020-03-22 06:21 pm (UTC)Now to re-read "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas", I just pulled The Wind's Twelve Quarters off the shelf to read the introduction and if there was a particular as to age in the story. ("This is usually explained to children when they are between eight and twelve, whenever they seem capable of understanding; and most of those who come to see the child are young people, though often enough an adult comes, or comes back, to see the child.")
no subject
Date: 2020-03-22 07:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-22 07:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-22 08:50 pm (UTC)What?!! I now feel extremely cheated by the Hong sisters' version, which could have -- and should have! -- ended in OT3 happily ever after, after all!
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Date: 2020-03-22 09:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-23 01:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-27 12:51 pm (UTC)