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Aug. 2nd, 2020 04:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsOver the course of time when I was doing costume polls, several people politely asked me
a.) what Hotel Del Luna is actually about and
b.) is it good
The answer to b.) is ... yes? I think it's yes! Like I know that I enjoyed it a tremendous about but also I think it is genuinely really very good; I found it not just a visual fashion feast but consistently surprising in really endearing ways.
As for a.) .... yes, I'm sorry, it is time for another picspam.
So the actual plot of Hotel del Luna is roughly as follows: once upon a time, bandit leader Jang Man Wol reached a point of peak murderous despair, killed a whole lot of people, and was sentenced by God to remain in eternal supernatural stasis managing a ghost hotel.
(The woman whose throat she's holding a sword to is God, by the way. She shows up a fair amount.)
Over the next several hundred years, Jang Man Wol changed her fashion sense, became a really ardent foodie, and acquired several loyal ghost employees, but did not make a single jot of emotional progress until a confused man wandered into her hotel and picked a leaf off her magic tree and she promptly pulled a full Beauty and the Beast and got him to promise her the right to his son's labor as ghost hotel manager twenty years later ... an investment plan!
(The money did let little Gu Chan Seong get a full Harvard degree in hotel management, so honestly like ... as indentured servitude goes ... not that different from US public service loans ....)
Anyway, when Jang Man Wol turns up again twenty years later, our hero Gu Chan Seong is not initially thrilled.
However, armed with a new ability to see ghosts and a lot of genuinely extremely good Harvard-trained customer service skills, Gu Chan Seong soon becomes really invested in his mandate to help stressed-out ghosts have a nice and relaxing five-star vacation at Hotel del Luna before proceeding to the afterlife.
Of course, as far as helping people move on to the afterlife goes, the final boss is ruthless, amoral, immensely powerful Jang Man Wol herself ... Gu Chan Seong has a strategy! His strategy is to aggresively damsel himself until she gets distracted from whatever morally bankrupt thing she was planning on doing that day and has to rescue him instead.
To be clear: he never levels up. Jang Man Wol remains an enormously powerful supernatural being and Gu Chan Seong continues to be a sweet dude who's really good at hotel management and giving Jang Man Wol earnest Bambi eyes. I feel the need to specify this because it's such a complete swap of the usual gendered power dynamics in kdrama and it makes me very happy!
I also love the rest of the cast ... my favorite is the murdered teen girl ghost who has possessed the body of her murderer, and is now really motivated to get justice for other murderees. This concept is so good that I honestly might steal it for my next D&D character.
The dude with her here, by the way, is also a ghost -- he's the hotel bellboy, who died tragically during the Korean war. They're very cute!
Here are the other two hotel employees, who are both from different parts of the Joseon era.
You may remember Room Manager Choi from her fabulous black widow outfit and she is also very dearly beloved, by me, and also by Jang Man Wol. They're vengeance buddies!
Meanwhile, among the living, Gu Chan Seong has a very sweet roommate named Sanchez. I love their dynamic ... it is supportive, but also realistic!
Sanchez does his best, but it takes him a little while to get used to the fact that his life is now approximately 1000% more filled with ghosts than it was before his roommate's new job and sometimes they come to crash at his house.
Shout-out to the Grim Reaper, btw. A very chill coworker when he's not destroying errant and unrepentant souls out of the cycle of reincarnation.
Let me be clear, though: the show has many hijinks and is often extremely funny, but it's also very much an exploration of loss, death, and grief. Rough to be a ghost! Rough to be a living human who's deeply attached to a ghost!
One last thing that I truly and deeply love about the premise that is kind of a spoiler: you know I love a reincarnation story, and Hotel del Luna does have some reincarnation in it, but a thing I didn't even know I wanted until I got it was a reincarnation story where romance is very pointedly not the reincarnation? Jang Man Wol had an intense relationship in the past, and it's teased that Gu Chan Seong might be that guy, but in fact that is eventually comprehensively disproven: he is a totally new guy!!! You can move on from your tragic destiny and forge a relationship that's completely new! And as much as I love Chicago Typewriter, which is also about moving on from your tragic past, I deeply love introducing the premise of a past-life love interest and then going 'nah though.' Sometimes when you kill a guy you actually probably shouldn't get back together with him, and that's fine.
a.) what Hotel Del Luna is actually about and
b.) is it good
The answer to b.) is ... yes? I think it's yes! Like I know that I enjoyed it a tremendous about but also I think it is genuinely really very good; I found it not just a visual fashion feast but consistently surprising in really endearing ways.
As for a.) .... yes, I'm sorry, it is time for another picspam.
So the actual plot of Hotel del Luna is roughly as follows: once upon a time, bandit leader Jang Man Wol reached a point of peak murderous despair, killed a whole lot of people, and was sentenced by God to remain in eternal supernatural stasis managing a ghost hotel.
(The woman whose throat she's holding a sword to is God, by the way. She shows up a fair amount.)
Over the next several hundred years, Jang Man Wol changed her fashion sense, became a really ardent foodie, and acquired several loyal ghost employees, but did not make a single jot of emotional progress until a confused man wandered into her hotel and picked a leaf off her magic tree and she promptly pulled a full Beauty and the Beast and got him to promise her the right to his son's labor as ghost hotel manager twenty years later ... an investment plan!
(The money did let little Gu Chan Seong get a full Harvard degree in hotel management, so honestly like ... as indentured servitude goes ... not that different from US public service loans ....)
Anyway, when Jang Man Wol turns up again twenty years later, our hero Gu Chan Seong is not initially thrilled.
However, armed with a new ability to see ghosts and a lot of genuinely extremely good Harvard-trained customer service skills, Gu Chan Seong soon becomes really invested in his mandate to help stressed-out ghosts have a nice and relaxing five-star vacation at Hotel del Luna before proceeding to the afterlife.
Of course, as far as helping people move on to the afterlife goes, the final boss is ruthless, amoral, immensely powerful Jang Man Wol herself ... Gu Chan Seong has a strategy! His strategy is to aggresively damsel himself until she gets distracted from whatever morally bankrupt thing she was planning on doing that day and has to rescue him instead.
To be clear: he never levels up. Jang Man Wol remains an enormously powerful supernatural being and Gu Chan Seong continues to be a sweet dude who's really good at hotel management and giving Jang Man Wol earnest Bambi eyes. I feel the need to specify this because it's such a complete swap of the usual gendered power dynamics in kdrama and it makes me very happy!
I also love the rest of the cast ... my favorite is the murdered teen girl ghost who has possessed the body of her murderer, and is now really motivated to get justice for other murderees. This concept is so good that I honestly might steal it for my next D&D character.
The dude with her here, by the way, is also a ghost -- he's the hotel bellboy, who died tragically during the Korean war. They're very cute!
Here are the other two hotel employees, who are both from different parts of the Joseon era.
You may remember Room Manager Choi from her fabulous black widow outfit and she is also very dearly beloved, by me, and also by Jang Man Wol. They're vengeance buddies!
Meanwhile, among the living, Gu Chan Seong has a very sweet roommate named Sanchez. I love their dynamic ... it is supportive, but also realistic!
Sanchez does his best, but it takes him a little while to get used to the fact that his life is now approximately 1000% more filled with ghosts than it was before his roommate's new job and sometimes they come to crash at his house.
Shout-out to the Grim Reaper, btw. A very chill coworker when he's not destroying errant and unrepentant souls out of the cycle of reincarnation.
Let me be clear, though: the show has many hijinks and is often extremely funny, but it's also very much an exploration of loss, death, and grief. Rough to be a ghost! Rough to be a living human who's deeply attached to a ghost!
One last thing that I truly and deeply love about the premise that is kind of a spoiler: you know I love a reincarnation story, and Hotel del Luna does have some reincarnation in it, but a thing I didn't even know I wanted until I got it was a reincarnation story where romance is very pointedly not the reincarnation? Jang Man Wol had an intense relationship in the past, and it's teased that Gu Chan Seong might be that guy, but in fact that is eventually comprehensively disproven: he is a totally new guy!!! You can move on from your tragic destiny and forge a relationship that's completely new! And as much as I love Chicago Typewriter, which is also about moving on from your tragic past, I deeply love introducing the premise of a past-life love interest and then going 'nah though.' Sometimes when you kill a guy you actually probably shouldn't get back together with him, and that's fine.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-02 11:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-03 10:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-04 02:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-04 06:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-03 12:29 am (UTC)To be clear: he never levels up. Jang Man Wol remains an enormously powerful supernatural being and Gu Chan Seong continues to be a sweet dude who's really good at hotel management and giving Jang Man Wol earnest Bambi eyes. I feel the need to specify this because it's such a complete swap of the usual gendered power dynamics in kdrama and it makes me very happy! yess this. I kept on expecting Gu Chan-seong to "become stronger" via some sort of magical power and it just never happened!
... my favorite is the murdered teen girl ghost who has possessed the body of her murderer, and is now really motivated to get justice for other murderees.
I would watch a whole sequel show about her!
I've mentioned this to you before, but I really liked what this show did with its past life and reincarnation storylines. The past life stuff were interesting enough to be its own separate sageuk drama, but Man-wol's platonic love for Yeon-woo is shown to be just as important as her tragic romance with Chung-myung. And this is one of the incredibly rare asian dramas I've seen that went "heady intense tragic first love is great but you know what's better? a mature second love based on communication and mutual respect."
On a less happy note, it looks like they're going to make a US remake of this show: https://www.tor.com/2020/06/24/fantasy-k-drama-series-hotel-del-luna-is-getting-a-remake-from-altered-carbon-showrunner-alison-schapker/ ...I'm honestly not very hopeful about this.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-03 02:46 am (UTC)I haven't even seen the first show and me too.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-03 11:12 pm (UTC)Yeah, I loved Jang Man Wol and Yeon Woo! And I honestly think that her relationship with Gu Chan Seong is one of the best-developed romances I've seen in a kdrama ... they actually look like they're having so much fun on their foodie dates! Like, the relationship felt real and lived-in and like something that made them happy, which is startlingly rare.
... US ..... remake??? This is NOT something I expected to hear and I feel like I need help reacting to it.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-04 06:50 am (UTC)My reaction was: on one hand, too early to judge, otoh, all the things I love about this show are also all the things I absolutely do *not* trust an American remake to retain. And how are they going to keep certain very important reincarnation related portions of the plot if they take out all the Korean mythology-relevant bits?
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Date: 2020-08-03 01:28 am (UTC)(also a small part of me is going, why did he go to HARVARD to learn hotel management when everybody knows CORNELL is where it's at, but somehow I don't think that's the problem here.)
no subject
Date: 2020-08-03 11:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-03 02:45 am (UTC)Did we get to vote for the outfit she's wearing while holding a sword to God's throat? I like it.
Jang Man Wol remains an enormously powerful supernatural being and Gu Chan Seong continues to be a sweet dude who's really good at hotel management and giving Jang Man Wol earnest Bambi eyes.
That's really nice.
Rough to be a ghost! Rough to be a living human who's deeply attached to a ghost!
GOD DAMN IT YOU REMEMBER WHAT HAPPENED WITH CRASH LANDING ON YOU.
You can move on from your tragic destiny and forge a relationship that's completely new!
I like this moral also!
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Date: 2020-08-03 11:47 pm (UTC)I do remember what happened with Crash Landing on You, and it was, honestly, extremely great for me, so ..... :D?
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Date: 2020-08-04 12:09 am (UTC)Right! I voted for one of the early Chrestomanci dressing gowns.
I do remember what happened with Crash Landing on You, and it was, honestly, extremely great for me, so ..... :D?
I'M TRYING TO SLEEP THESE DAYS.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-03 12:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-03 11:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-03 01:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-03 11:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-04 01:29 pm (UTC)THIS IS THE BEST NEWS! I'm so relieved!
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Date: 2020-08-04 12:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-06 11:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-07 02:53 pm (UTC)Plus, the costumes are glorious but you had me at it is a show about hotel management.
(I should perhaps say that I came here via being referred to your book reviews, which are excellent.)
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Date: 2022-07-30 09:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-07-31 04:28 am (UTC)