skygiants

We recently watched the kdrama Sell Your Haunted House and were hooked from the first episode, which kicks off with the following premise:

- our hero is a scammer fake exorcist
- our heroine is a real estate broker slash real exorcist
- the way exorcism works is she hires virginal young men who are weak to ghost possession to get possessed by the ghosts, so that she can trap them in an ghost array that she SHOOTS OUT OF A MAGICAL STAPLE GUN and then STAB THEM IN THE HEART with a CUSTOM GHOST STABBING NEEDLE, after which the ghost energy dissipates and the virginal young men sag limply in her arms

As the meme goes: to me, that's cinema.

( themes include grief, gangsters, and the housing crisis )

I forced

genarti and

tenillypo to watch Beyond Evil with me despite the fact that none of us particularly like serial killer shows because I'd heard it was extremely good and extremely homoerotic.

I think ... at least one of those things is definitely true!

This is a Prestige Drama about a small town that is still haunted by the disappearance & probable murder of golden-girl high school student Lee Yoo-yeon twenty years ago plus another different high school girl that everybody cares about less; her twin brother, Lee Dong-sik, was accused of the murder, then acquitted, then became a cop in the big city, then got demoted due to some other form of disgrace and is now back working as the Weirdest Cop in this small-town police department while still obsessively trying to Crack his Sister's Cold Case. When the show begins, hotshot-yet-friendless young detective Han Joo-won has just gotten himself assigned to the police department, ostensibly for reasons I don't remember, but secretly because he's following a serial killer case with similarities to the cold case from twenty years ago and is absolutely convinced that Lee Dong-sik has been the killer all along.

At the end of the first episode I turned to Gen and Tenille and said, "ah. You construct intricate rituals to touch the murder walls of other men" and that's it, that's the show. If what you like is guys being incredibly weird about each other, gratuitously grabbing each other by the collar and shoulder in order to accuse each other of murder, holding guns to each other's heads, finding excuses to handcuff each other in public, promising that only the other will be the one who can one day arrest them, crying at each other in the rain while vowing to get vengeance so the other doesn't have to dirty his hands, and so on, and so forth: yeah! absolutely! you're gonna get all of that, all of the time!

I was going to put some images here and then I found this tumblr gifset that has pretty much everything I would have included so, you know, just go look at that and you really will get a full sense of the vibe.

And it is -- let me say it again -- all this vibe, all the time, generally in ways that directly contravene ... basic Earth logic .... to the point that we spent most of the show convinced that the whole town was afflicted with a gas leak that made everybody decide that they had to take the most convoluted method to solve any possible problem. At one point our favorite character, the local butcher, leaves town and gets herself a job somewhere else for a whole episode and has one (1) completely normal conversation with some nice elderly fisherwomen before getting dragged back into the plot; this only reinforced our conviction.

Also, speaking of absurd convolutions, I have got to take a minute here for anyone who is not planning to watch the show to spoil the reveal of what Actually Happened On That Fateful Night to our hero's poor hackey-sack-plot-ball of a sister. Are you ready? ( Bear with me. )

I actually think the show would be a lot stronger, both thematically and in terms of actual plot logic, if it did not have the whole serial killer plot ... I realize I have said this before and I will say it again, and it is, perhaps, particularly absurd to say it about a show that specifically bills itself as being about a serial killer plot, but nonetheless I stand by it. But, to be clear, I have no regrets about watching it; the vibes really are off the charts. In the last episode ( spoilers )

You may remember Tale of the Nine-Tailed, one of the many kdramas about an immortal godlike being in forever love with a plucky mortal, notable mostly for its peak expression of "chaotic evil-to-neutral younger brother with abandonment issues who's obsessed with you and also wants to murder you."

It seems this show was popular enough that a sequel was called for. Unfortunately, they couldn't get the plucky mortal forever love back for Series 2. Fortunately, the could get the entire rest of the cast, including the chaotic younger brother that everyone loved! Unfortunately, at the end of Tale of the Nine-Tailed, the chaotic younger brother is definitively out of the picture --

'Easy way to resolve this,' said [presumably] one producer to the others. 'So easy. We will just send the lead on a time travel adventure back to [throws dart at board]

the year 1938, a time in which the love interest has not been born and the chaotic younger brother is busy being a [throws dart at board]

cowboy in charge of a bandit werewolf pack for some reason, and speed-run their reconciliation while also solving problems related to [throws dart at board]

our hero's never-previously-mentioned mountain god bffs who all had a tragic friend breakup several centuries before."

"And also perhaps they will fight the Japanese occupation," said Producer B.

"Oh, obviously they will fight the Japanese occupation," said Producer A. "Actually everyone will be fighting the Japanese occupation. Conveniently most of our cast is immortal demigods, they can all be fighting the Japanese occupation in 1938. Did you hear we got the actress back for Snail Woman Who Runs The Cafe? I think probably in 1938 Snail Woman Who Runs the Cafe is the leader of a revolutionary cell."

"Perfect," said Producer B, "no notes."

( cut for more images )

Is this show good or watchable in isolation? Couldn't tell you in the least, but WE had an incredible time.

Me: The thing IS that I think being a sequel really freed it ... now it's just 50% wild shit and 50% fanservice, and it is the better for it.

genarti: I think actually 70% wild shit and 70% fanservice, because the wild shit and the fanservice overlap so much --

tenillypo: I think it is my favorite thing I've seen this year!

[& though currently it is only officially available on Prime, there are other avenues worth exploring.)

It was a couple months ago now that I watched The King's Affection and I'm still thinking about it -- it came close to being something I really loved, and in the end it wasn't that but I'm still fascinated by the take and by some of the choices they made.

The King's Affection is a classic Identical Male and Female Twins story with a twist: due to a series of wildly unfortunate events, the girl twin (who was supposed to be killed at birth, found her way back to the palace by accident, and had no previous idea that she was a princess of Joseon) ends up trapped in an ongoing impersonation of her royal identical twin. At the time the main plot begins (after a few episodes of child-actor setup which, fair warning, result in several tragically dead children) she's been living as Crown Prince for over a decade, grimly surviving all the usual palace pressures plus the additional burden of a secret identity with the assistance of two trusted servants. She is Responsible! She is Tired! She Misses Her Previous Identity And Community But Nonetheless She Is a Tiny Cold Royal Professional who Will Not Allow Herself To Put A Foot Wrong Lest She Be Exposed And Immediately Executed Or Maybe Just Normal Deposed But It Would Probably Still Be Bad!

This is such a different position than the standard run of hijinks-driven crossdressing girls in kdramas and I found it immediately compelling, except for the small problem that icily competent Dam-yi aka Crown Prince Hwi is handed a significant number of idiot balls by the plot, usually when it relates to the romance.

Don't get me wrong -- I enjoyed the romance! It was cute! As is required by the law of contrasts, her love interest is a bubbly do-gooder who gets hired on as a royal tutor and almost immediately falls head over heels with a pleasantly minimal degree of gay panic, and what there is could just as easily be read as class panic: bad idea to be in love with a prince! This is especially exciting for me because a pattern I have noticed time and again wrt cross-dressing narratives is that the romantic interest for your plucky Mulan or Viola or Alanna is generally always older, or a social superior, or in a position of authority, or all at once! Got to reinscribe those shifting gender power dynamics back in some other way! So the fact that this is a romance in which Hwi/Dam-yi does in fact hold all the social power [except for the fairly major element that her identity can be life-threateningly exposed at any minute] is really interesting to me, and, again, he is very charming and the romance is very cute.

I just also have never watched a drama where we found ourselves shouting "STOP KISSING! PEOPLE CAN SEE YOU!!" at a couple that we generally supported so often at the screen, not just because they were right in public and people could see them, but also because Hwi had been set up as a character who has been coping with a Big Secret for over a decade, and has had time to build plans and should really have made all her rookie mistakes already. And sometimes she did get to be enormously prepared and competent, and it was deeply satisfying, and then other times the romance needed her to wander off into the woods and go bathing in a random pool without taking any basic identity-protecting precautions, and we screamed "WHAT ARE YOU DOING, YOU KNOW BETTER THAN THIS!"

There's a lot of other stuff I could talk about wrt this drama -- there are a number of really interesting dynamics that are set up, though many of them end up underused -- but this post is already going long so instead of talking about the second lead (charming!), the villains (some more narratively effective than others!), the family dynamics (fascinating and occasionally really moving!), the other female characters (all sympathetic but deeply underutilized for a show that makes such an interesting and deliberate point of how Dam-yi's role isolates her from female community in a way that she regrets!) I am INSTEAD going to talk about the two old kdrama men that

genarti identified with unerring precision as exes back in episode two or three and was so richly rewarded for her keen eye:

One of these men is Dam-yi's most loyal retainer and the other one has been tasked with killing her since she was an infant. They have been nemeses for twenty years and their love is perhaps the most compelling relationship on the show.

Over the summer we've been watching Vincenzo, the Netflix kdrama starring Song Joong-ki (of Sungkyunkwan Scandal and Space Sweepers fame, among others) as an Italian-Korean mafia consigliere who's moved back to Korea after a falling-out with his adopted Italian mob boss brother, where he plans to extract a secret stash of gold from under a rundown shopping center and then use it to set up a new life in Malta.

( Who doesn't want to see a dazzlingly hot mafia consigliere reluctantly accept responsibility for an Animal Crossing island? )

We've been watching the kdrama Mr. Queen, the premise of which is "fuckboy chef transmigrates into the body of historical Queen Cheorin", in large part (at least for me) out of a sense of intellectual fascination to see just how the showrunners were going to attempt to contort the premise to make it Technically Arguably Not Queer.

As it turns out ... well, I mean, I can't tell if they actually earnestly tried or if they were winking the whole time, but either way it was extremely funny to watch the show constantly walk the line to assure the producers it was straight whatever they did in a way that actually meant it was gay whatever they did. ( Small spoilers )

It is also a very funny show in general -- I mean you won't be shocked to hear that there is no understanding of the nuances of gender identity which means that it absolutely hits the dysphoria-for-humor beat a few times without in any way being aware of what it's doing, so caveat emptor (& I'm happy to give spoilers in this regard). But the majority of the comedy does primarily derive from the fact that "everyone expects the queen to act like a gently-bred noblewoman in a palace intrigue drama whose main priority is supporting her clan in maintaining the status quo against the revolutionary reforms of the king, and as a result everyone is consistently stymied and bewildered by the fact that the queen absolutely refuses to act like anything other than a fuckboy chef whose main priority is reinventing the perfect ramen from first principles" is simply a very screwball premise!

Also, big kudos to the actress playing Mr. Queen, who does an incredible job capturing the spirit of That Guy. This promo image is actually a big part of the reason I put this drama on the list:

One simply likes to see an actress in gorgeous historical hanbok project "how you doing?" for all she's worth.

( Cut for images )

Given the givens, are you curious about how all this ends? WE WERE TOO. ( Series ending spoilers )

I think it will be quite hard for any "powerful ageless being falls for plucky mortal" kdrama to ever eclipse Hotel del Luna in my heart, but Tale of the Nine-Tailed is a perfectly enjoyable and fun expression of the form if powerful ageless beings falling for plucky mortals is the trope you're here for.

If, on the other hand, the trope you're here for is "semidivine being has complex relationship with chaotic neutral-to-evil younger brother whom he loves but wishes would stop acting out his abandonment issues via elaborate vengeance plots," Tale of the Nine-Tailed is a fantastic example of the form. I'm so angry this show made me care deeply about a murderous eternal enfant terrible who has spent six hundred years acting out over the tragic death of his puppy!

( cut for images )

The last kdrama we finished was Mystic Pop-Up Bar, which I initially described to

genarti and

tenillypo after we'd finished the first few episodes as 'like Hotel Del Luna, but everyone is 3x ditzier.'

In fact Mystic Pop-Up Bar turned out to be really thematically distinct from Hotel del Luna in a number of ways, but the starting premise is similar: after some extremely dramatic historical backstory tragedy, Our Antisocial Heroine Weol-ju is cursed to spend her afterlife in the supernatural hospitality industry until an earnest and bright-eyed new employee helps her come to terms with her long-term trauma!

Here's our main cast:

( cut for more images )

I don't think this quite is as luminous or indeed thematically coherent a show as Hotel del Luna but it was an extremely fun twelve episodes and I would absolutely recommend (although warning for the fact that the cases-of-the-week generally involve people grappling with quite serious topics like sexual harassment, infertility, death of a partner, dementia, etc. -- happy to provide any specific warnings if requested.)

Over 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.

( The short version is it's a Beauty and the Beast story where the Beast is a glamorous ghost hotel owner )

One last thing that I truly and deeply love about the premise that is ( kind of a spoiler )

Last night

tenillypo and I finished watching Crash Landing On You, a Netflix kdrama featuring a hard-boiled South Korean businesswoman who accidentally paraglides into the demilitarized zone while testing out a new line of designer sportswear and drops down in front of a dreamy North Korean military officer.

Obviously, they fall in love! Excitingly, Yoon Se-ri is an actually competent and adult kdrama heroine with confidence and resources, who navigates the extremely plausible premise with aplomb and has a great time once back in South Korea throwing her money around to get results. Meanwhile, Captain Ri Jyeong-heok is an unexpectedly top tier kdrama boyfriend with a truly astonishing dearth of asshole behavior. In one episode, he restocks her completely empty kitchen because he's very concerned that she only has water bottles in her fridge, and then he realizes -- by himself! without being told! -- that he's put everything on shelves convenient for his height and carefully rearranges everything to make sure the kitchen organization is useful for someone who's six inches shorter. Never was he more attractive to me than in that moment.

It's also the sort of romance where the protagonists have resolved all their interpersonal feelings by like halfway through the show, but the obstacles that keep them apart are extremely logistically legitimate ('I'll be killed if I stay in your country and your family will be killed if you stay in mine' is pretty difficult to get round) and both of them are constantly doing their level best to be responsible and kind to each other about it. Lots of flinging themselves in front of bullets for the other, both emotional and literal.

All that said, a lot of the charm of the show is also in the supporting cast. ( Cut for picspam )

A North Korean defector was apparently involved in the writer's room, and there have been several articles interviewing North Koreans living in South Korea to get their opinions on the show; the attitude as reported appears to be "the details about daily life: surprisingly well-depicted and nuanced! the dreamy and chivalrous North Korean military officer: haha not in a million years."

So, you know, there's that. Warnings also for mental health stuff ( details ), at least one more major character death than we were strictly expecting from this work of gripping not-exactly-realism, and extremely long episodes.

Very recently I learned that Capital Scandal aka Scandal in Old Seoul, one of my favorite television shows of all time, is now available to watch legally on YouTube.

'This is great,' thought I, to myself, 'but I'm so behind on booklogging, I can't take a whole post just to announce this and make everyone listen to my Capital Scandal feelings again ...'

But then I checked back on my DW and realized I had not substantively posted about Capital Scandal since like 2012! Many of you weren't here then!

.. and for everyone else, who has heard this story many times before, I will let the meme speak for me.

( This story is going to be told through a collection of Texts From Last Night memes from 2012 because it's what I have )

More kdrama posting, this time a bit less wacky!

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, ( which include minor spoilers )

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.

( Ending spoilers )

(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 ( unexpected pop? culture reference under the cut )

genarti and

tenillypo and I have been watching Goblin (or Guardian: The Great and Lonely God, but given how many people are into another show called Guardian it feels unhelpful to sow confusion) for the past couple months. For obvious reasons, we are now Skype-watching rather than in-person for the time being, but nonetheless we finished the show on Thursday!

Goblin falls into (and indeed may have kicked off?) the vibrant subgenre of high-budget kdramas about powerful immortal beings! having hijinks and doomed romance! with young woman of Destiny who see Ghosts!

... ok yes the only other show of this subgenre I've actually seen is Hwayugi, but

tenillypo assures me that there's at least one more.

( Cut for images )

A month or so ago

tenillypo and I watched the first two parts (twelve episodes) of Arthdal Chronicles, a Netflix kdrama -- the final six episodes are coming out later this year, I think, an unusual model for kdrama production in my experience but I guess a thing that's becoming more common with Netflix models -- and I don't know that it was good, per se, but I'm fascinated by it for a number of reasons.

It's helpful that

shati also watched the show and has recently read a lot of books about anthropology, so she was able to explain to me that, for example, when the leader of Our Heroine's utopian neolithic settlement explained its ban on Growing Things, Domesticating Things, and Climbing The Big Cliff Up To Visit The Evil Empire That Grows And Domesticates Things, the show was in fact wading enthusiastically into a long-running debate on Agriculture: Was It A Mistake? Arthdal Chronicles is ready to declare that yes, it was! I don't know whether they're presenting the world's most nuanced viewpoint here but I've never watched a television show that had such vehement anthropological opinions before and I'm very honestly charmed.

I'm also charmed by the fact that the costumers were clearly so enthused by the opportunity to design for a time period well outside of the Joseon era that they threw all sense of continuity to the winds and followed their hearts in every sense of the word.

( Some costume picspam, under the cut )

The plot, you ask? The plot! Song Joon-ki stars as a secret half-Neanderthal lad who grows up in an idyllic Neolithic village after the evil empire genocides the Neanderthals so as to take their land for more agriculture. Alas! soon the evil empire comes down the cliff to conquer more slaves to tend to their agriculture, and Song Joon-ki's whole village, including his best friend -- who is destined to be the next Great Mother of the clan and as such is supposed to have special magic powers -- are captured and brought to the big evil city where everyone soon gets wrapped up in labyrinthine Game of Throne-esque interclan politics involving control of religious iconography and bronze technology.

It was quite interesting for me as an American watching this; like, if I saw an American-made fantasy TV show that grounded itself so much in the imagery of a technologically superior but morally suspect society marching on an idyllic hunter-gatherer society to commit conquest and genocide, I'd feel pretty sure I was looking at a very specific metaphor. But this isn't an American show, so I kept having to pull myself back from jumping to what would, in other contexts, be for me obvious conclusions. And I'm sure that there are quite obvious conclusions to be drawn, I just don't have the correct cultural referents for them.

We've just finished watching The Greatest Love, a Hong Sisters kdrama about a vastly famous action-hero actor who falls in tumultuous love with a once-famous, now washed-up pop singer struggling to climb her way back into the industry by featuring on a Bachelor-style TV show.

Midway through the first episode, my roommate

attractivegkry wandered in, had the plot explained to her, and remarked, "Can't wait for the US remake starring Jason Statham and Britney Spears!"

This comparison is not totally exact -- hero Dokko Jin is definitely more of an equivalent to one of the Ubiquitous Marvel Chrises, fame- and popularity-wise, while Gu Ae-yeong is really more like a Spice Girl than a solo singer -- but all the same it had a profound impact on the way we experienced various plot points in the show.

ME: Okay, so you're a personal assistant, and it turns out your boss, Jason Statham, has somehow never heard of Britney Spears and it's your job to explain her entire career to him --

tenillypo: Okay, so you're an elementary school student, and Jason Statham is on the playground, ripping open his shirt to display his nipples to a confused Britney Spears --
ME: And you don't know who any of those people are, because you're in elementary school --

ME: Okay, so you're in a movie theater, and you walk into the lobby, and Britney Spears and Jason Statham are sitting there cuddling on a bench, and she's whisper-singing 'Toxic' in his ear --

tenillypo: I'm not sure I understand why they want Dokko Jin to star in Ae-jeong's comeback music video -- I mean, he's an action hero? What does that look like in an MV?
ME: WE KNOW EXACTLY WHAT THAT LOOKS LIKE

(link resolves to Jason Statham's early career as a backup dancer; click at your own peril. We were deeply disappointed that the plot point about Dokko Jin potentially starring in Gu Ae-jeong's music video never resolved.)

Anyway. Statham and Spears aside, the Hong Sisters enjoy nonsense and there is a LOT of absolute nonsense in this show, but there's also a solid attempt at a critique of their own industry and its pervasive toxicity and double standards around behavior for male and female celebrities. Ae-Jeong's other love interest, a mild-mannered doctor who performs such thrilling reality-TV activities in his role as the Korean Bachelor as "putting together a puzzle in complete silence," appears to exist in the story entirely so that he can make confused and judgmental faces whenever anyone tries to explain the workings of the industry to him. ( Some spoilery thoughts )

I have never yet watched a kdrama where I shipped everyone so nearly indiscriminately as I did in Mr. Sunshine. Part of this is the overall Les Mis doomed revolutionaries vibe, part of it is the extremely attractive cast, and part of it is just the fact that everyone is just constantly flirting at each other over deadly weapons? I don't know what to tell you.

The show is set around the time period that ends with the occupation of Korea, so you know from the start that in the broad scheme things aren't going to end well; however, the show does the thing that I most love in resistance shows, where you have a HUGE cast and literally every single minor character gets a small arc of their own in which the show is like 'I see you and respect you, French bakery owner! YOU, TOO, ARE A HERO TODAY.' Also, I don't think there's a woman in the cast who hasn't murdered somebody by the end of the show? Good job on the murder, women of Mr. Sunshine.

(I mention this not because I believe All Women Should Murder but because I've never encountered a kdrama in which even the most heroically murderous women were not narratively required to die by the end, and astoundingly, despite Mr. Sunshine's incredibly high body count, here that is just not true! AT LEAST TWO MURDEROUS WOMEN LIVE TO FIGHT ANOTHER DAY.)

Also, everyone's journey towards tragic heroism is really impeccably styled with UST radiating wildly out in twelve directions? LET'S MEET THE CAST ( under the cut, with many, many screencaps )

Man, bless the Hong Sisters and their constant dedication to terrible fashion, weird haircuts, and the wildly unlikely lives of the rich and famous. This was enjoyable in You're Beautiful, a farce about a crossdressing nun and a bunch of kpop idols, and possibly even more enjoyable in Hwayugi: A Korean Odyssey, an epic piece of tragic Journey to the West fanfiction that is also sort of a farce about a bunch of (demonic) kpop idols.

The cast of Hwayugi is as follows:

Our Heroine Jin Seon Mi, aka the reincarnation of Tripitaka: once a small child who saw ghosts and made an unwise bargain with the Monkey King; now a wealthy real estate executive who's made a fortune flipping haunted houses
The Bull Demon King: a demon attempting to become a deity to save his long-lost love; also has a day job hosting the Korean version of American Idol, so from now on we can just call him Simon Cow-ell
The Monkey King: chaos god with terrible fashion sense, currently crashing on Simon Cow-ell's couch, refuses to move out because his apartment has such great parking

plus assorted side characters:
P.K.: a pig demon who is also one of Korea's most beloved pop stars; played by Jeremy from You're Beautiful, has the same hair and fashion sense as Jeremy in You're Beautiful, will therefore only be referred to as Jeremy going forward
Bu Ja: an adorable but tragically rotting zombie accidentally brought to life by Jin Seon Mi's blood
Secretary Ma: Simon Cow-ell's loyal dog demon secretary; constantly asking if she can murder people on his behalf and constantly, tragically denied
CEO Jang Gwang: the elderly and dignified CEO of a cell phone company, also a supernatural entity whose only joy in life comes from cooking and cleaning for the Monkey King for some reason
Octopus Prince: an octopus prince
Alice: another one of Korea's most beloved pop stars whose destiny unfortunately includes getting possessed by an octopus prince
The Winter General and the Summer Fairy: polite sibling demons who take turns sharing a body (the Summer Fairy runs a classy demon bar and the Winter General operates an Emack and Bolio's)

All of these demons are GREAT and on friendly terms with the heroine and also all of them attempt to kill her at some point or other during the show, because one thing Hwayugi does do extremely well is remembering that demons do not operate by human morality.

Anyway! The plot kicks off when Jin Seon Mi and the Monkey King meet again after twenty years, and the Monkey King promptly tries to eat Jin Seon Mi because one of her Tripitaka powers is that her blood is delicious, and Jin Seon Mi (aided by Simon Cow-ell) promptly turns around and puts Tripitaka's magical control circlet on him, except because this is a kdrama this version also compels the Monkey King to fall immediately in love with her! And he's really mad about it!

Also Jin Seon Mi has visions of a terrible apocalypse that she's destined to prevent, and gets recruited to fight demons to help Simon Cow-ell get into heaven.

All this happens by like episode three. The next twelve episodes or so go approximately as follows:

THE A-PLOT:

HEROINE: Time to go on another demon-defeating mission!
MONKEY: Hey, guess what: I love you!
HEROINE: That's nice, but I'm aware that it's a really bad idea to date a chaos god who would want to murder me if he hadn't been magically compelled into loving me.
THE REST OF THE CAST: YES
MONKEY: Okay, but, counterpoint, here's a nice wrap-up of the episodic demon plot combined with a demonstration that my love for you is slightly less tinged with an equivalent desire to murder you than it was yesterday.
HEROINE: ....ok so guys hear me out, would it really be a bad idea to date a chaos god who would want to murder me if he hadn't been magically compelled into loving me -
THE REST OF THE CAST: YES

MEANWHILE, THE B-PLOT

SIMON COW-ELL, IN FRONT OF A PORTRAIT OF A SERENE AND BEAUTIFUL WOMAN: I must become a deity to bring a conclusion to the endless suffering of my lost, tragic love!
MURDER SECRETARY MA: boss you're so noble
SIMON COW-ELL, IN FRONT OF A PORTRAIT OF A SERENE AND BEAUTIFUL WOMAN: if only she hadn't eaten all those babies that one time
MURDER SECRETARY MA: yes if only

FURTHER MEANWHILE, THE C-PLOT

SUMMER FAIRY: hey guys who wants a fancy cocktail?
ADORABLE ZOMBIE: I'm adorable!
JEREMY THE DEMON PIG POP STAR: You're so adorable.
OCTOPUS-POSSESSED POP STAR: Am I also adorable?
JEREMY THE DEMON PIG POP STAR: no
DEMONIC CELL PHONE CEO: hey guys who wants some delicious homemade kimchi?
JEREMY THE DEMON PIG POP STAR: best zombie friend, I promise we will solve the mystery of your identity before you turn into a mindless brain-eating monster
ADORABLE ZOMBIE: so who do you think murdered me? was it that dashing but sinister presidential candidate who might be destined to bring about the apocalypse?
WINTER GENERAL: hey guys who wants some Emack and Bolio's?
ADORABLE ZOMBIE: I do! it helps keep me from rotting! :D

THE DISTANT D-PLOT THAT WILL EVENTUALLY BECOME THE A-PLOT IN THE LAST FOUR OR FIVE EPISODES OF THE SHOW

A DASHING BUT SINISTER PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE WHO MIGHT BE DESTINED TO BRING ABOUT THE APOCALYPSE: [enters stage right, exits stage left, collects paycheck for the episode]

Every so often we would forget that everyone in the show was meant to be enormously famous in-universe (with the exception of Our Heroine) and have to be reminded again, so as we watched we frequently found ourselves saying things like 'Okay, so imagine you're Ted Cruz and Justin Bieber just burst into your office to accuse you of murder -'

SO FAR SO ENJOYABLE, some caveats with ending spoilers under the cut

( spoilers under the cut )

While on the topic of ghost-related kdramas, last week

tenillypo and I finished watching The Master's Sun, about a woman whose life has fallen apart because she's constantly accosted by ghosts with a sense of entitlement, and the wealthy mall owner with PTSD-induced dyslexia (no, I don't know either) who has the mysterious ability to stop her from seeing ghosts when she touches him.

While at first Our Hero is deeply irritated by having a wild-eyed woman following him around screaming and grabbing his arms, it soon turns out that not only does he have a tragic past that a ghost hunter might be able to help him out with, he ALSO owns the most haunted mall in Korea. Hijinks and personal growth ensue!

I liked but did not love this drama overall -- the romance is pretty decent, but the whole thing falls apart a little at the end. However, I did wholeheartedly love MANY of the ghosts; there are lots and they are good. Top five ghosts in the series, ranked:

( Minor one-episode spoilers )

OK, it's time to talk about the show that

tenillypo and I have agreed is the trashiest thing we've yet watched together - Nine: Nine Time Travels.

Was this show good? No, probably not. Was it interesting? I mean YES. Did we laugh uproariously every time the hero's life got ever more tormented? YOU BET!

Our hero is famous news broadcaster Lee Jin-wook, currently facing the normal run of kdrama woes plus a little extra:
- his father was murdered when he was a teenager
- the murderer went on to steal his family's hospital and achieve fame and fortune by coercing his female coworkers into donating their eggs to unethical reproductive science (a plot point, for the record, that will never be mentioned after the first episode)
- the stress sent his mother catatonic for the last twenty years
- his older brother's just died in the Himalayas trying to find time travel magic to reverse all the bad things that have happened
- and also, unrelated to the murder or any subsequent events, he's dying of brain cancer

In the first episode, our hero jaunts off to the Himalayas to bang his coworker, recover his dead brother's body, and also discover the time travel magic that his brother was looking for: nine incense sticks that send you twenty years back in time, to the exact date. Each incense stick gets you half an hour of time travel shenanigans, and if you miss the date of the thing you want to change, you're out of luck.

Fortunately, the twenty-year anniversary of his father's murder is in just a couple weeks! So for the first three episodes Jin-wook kills time by taking care of such important business as:

- flailing into his childhood bedroom and getting attacked by his entire family, who mistake him for a home intruder
- prying into his older brother's love life
- interrupting his mother before she can find out that his teen self skipped out on family Christmas dinner to go on a date

Meanwhile, his doctor bff is like "buddy you have ONE TIME TRAVEL JOB! tell yourself to get early screenings for brain cancer! that's it! ONE JOB!" and Jin-wook is like "yeah yeah I'll get around to it eventually."

Meanwhile meanwhile, the romance with his coworker, Jo Yoon-hee, is proceeding approximately as well as can be expected when the entire premise of the relationship is "idk, I just thought it would be nice if we had sex before I died of brain cancer."

About three-quarters of the way through episode four, I remarked to

tenillypo, "Does it seem weird to you how disconnected this romance plot feels from the time travel revenge plot?"

( MID-SERIES SPOILERS ENSUE )

( FINALE SPOILERS ENSUE )

tenillypo and I enjoyed the first nine episodes of the kdrama Strong Girl Do Bong Soon, and then spent the subsequent seven watching in increasingly bewildered horror.

The initial plot: Our Heroine, Do Bong-Soon has hereditary mystical super-strength passed down from mother to daughter, which will disappear if she abuses it to hurt an innocent person! Our Hero, a video-game CEO who's been receiving mysterious death threats, sees her beat up an entire collection of gangsters and immediately a.) falls madly in love b.) hires her as his new bodyguard. Also there's a love triangle involving Our Heroine's childhood friend, a handsome cop who could probably be out-thought by a box of rocks; also Do Bong-soon's neighborhood is being threatened by gangster-run redevelopment; also there's a serial killer on the loose!

The first nine episodes are nonsensical but mostly entertaining hijinks! We enjoyed:

- Bong-soon casually sending gangsters flying every episode
- Bong-soon accidentally recruiting an entire gang of delinquents who follow her around adoringly
- Our Hero's refreshing openness about the fact that he just wants his superpowered bodyguard to completely wreck him
- the handsome cop going undercover as a beautiful woman for reasons that are wildly unclear, but enjoyable!
- a visit from Bong-soon's superpowered grandma
- Bong-soon's stressed-out doctor brother, who just CANNOT KEEP UP with all the destroyed patients his sister keeps sending his way

We had conflicted feelings about:
- the subplot in which Bong-soon mistakenly believes Our Hero is gay and planning to steal the handsome cop away from her; we liked the subsequent strong threesome vibes but did not like the related casual homophobia

We did not enjoy:
- frequent cutaways to the serial killer's dungeon basement of despair
- frequent cutaways to the world's most frustratingly incompetent cops failing to do anything useful to catch the serial killer, ever

Then we hit the midway point. ( The rest is cut for spoilers and confused anger )

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