alexis

In World War 2, America dropped two nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities. Tell me, did the Japanese spend the next several decades trying to make America pay for that? Japan's invasion of mainland China in World War 2 resulted in at least 20 million Chinese deaths. At least. Other estimates put the figures somewhere between that and 35 million. Tell me, did China spend the next several decades trying to make Japan pay for that? Peace is a choice, you see. After World War 2, Japan chose peace, and China chose peace. You know who didn't choose peace? You know who launched war after war after war against Israel? The Palestinians and their Arab neighbors. That's who. This truth is inconvenient for you people, I know. You have been taught to think that "the oppressed" are necessarily innocent. But to quote the Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, "It's not enough to be oppressed, you must also be in the right. Most oppressed people are in the wrong to an almost ridiculous degree." You can call me names, you can say whatever you want. At the end of the day, though, the truth remains what it is, no matter how inconvenient. Peace.

https://www.instagram.com/ahmad_0mar1/ There, an instagram account of an Arab Palestinian Muslim citizen of Israel. Ask him if there's a genocide. I can give you instagram accounts of a bunch of Uyghurs and Tibetans too if you want, but then again I've known by now that Sinophobia is very much real. It is not my motherland's fault that it is now set to become the world's most powerful nation with the largest economy and the most advanced technology by the middle of the century. In many cases, China already is the best:

"The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) finds that China is further ahead in more technologies than has been realized. It’s the leading country in 37 of the 44 technologies evaluated, often producing more than five times as much high-impact research as its closest competitor. This means that only seven of the 44 analysed technologies are currently led by a democratic country, and that country in all instances is the U.S. Of the ten AI and ICT-related technologies examined, China dominates in seven, the study concluded." https://techblog.comsoc.org/2023/03/03/aspis-critical-technology-tracker-finds-china-ahead-in-37-of-44-technologies-evaluated/

It's okay, you can wallow in bitter envy like the Palestinians if you want. Your life, your choice. Peace.

P.S. Stay in school, kid. Your English is atrocious.

Politics IS life. If Hamas prevails, Israel ceases to exist. If Israel ceases to exist, its enemies' friends around the world will become emboldened. If Israel, a US ally, can cease to exist, why not South Korea? If Israel, a state that became a UN member state in 1949 can be wiped off the map, why not Ukraine, a state that only became a UN member state in 1991? Why not Taiwan, a state that is not even a UN member state? Read a world history book or two, honey. You don't want to go back to a world where people can still wage wars of conquest. Tragic though it may be, the fact remains that the Palestinians are only in this mess because they refused to live in peace side by side with a sovereign Jewish state, which the UN itself along with most nations in the world recognized decades ago. You reap the karma you sow. It is what it is.

Chinese here. Nothing wrong with the South Koreans siding with Israel whose enemies in the Middle East, from Hamas to Iran, are all allied with Russia, who, of course, is allied with North Korea. Full circle. Every people and every country puts their own interests first. Not sure why you think the world should revolve around you.

Lol whatever happened to "I wont engage with you anymore"? The audacity to spread calumny and call it "criticism." You can keep your little peninsula, honey. We don't need it, nor do we even want it. :)

Oh yeah, nothing says "unstable" like the oldest, continuous civilization in the world whose descendants can still read the texts and inscriptions written by their ancestors three thousand years ago.

"Even when China was broken in pieces or convulsed by political disorder, its neighbors looked to it as a model of law, governing institutions, literary prowess, and artistic styles. Invaders who overran parts, or even all, of China found the culture of the defeated Chinese so irresistible they adopted it. In that sense, the conquered were actually the conquerors. Chinese classical texts and literature formed the foundation of education in Korea until the nineteenth century. For much of history in East Asia, Chinese civilization was civilization. Indeed, China for most of its existence was the biggest, baddest, richest, most advanced civilization in East Asia. The Chinese were writing exquisite poetry before their neighbors were writing anything at all. (And when the Koreans, Japanese, and others started writing, they borrowed the Chinese script.) The Chinese were pioneers in state formation, technological innovation, philosophy, literature, and economic organization. These features of advanced Chinese civilization spread throughout the region, turning East Asia into a cultural zone distinct from the rest of the world, where people from Japan to Vietnam and beyond read Chinese books, copied Chinese legal codes and education methods, followed Chinese diplomatic norms, and, in elite circles, studied the Chinese language." --Michael Schuman, Superpower Interrupted: The Chinese History of the World

Reality is hard, I know. Easier to pretend your little divided country has ever amounted to anything. Oh well, suit yourself then. Peace.

1. Mandate of Heaven can be lost. Confucianism is explicit that inhumane rulers need not be obeyed.
2. Imagine the oppression of women is due to Confucianism when Confucianism was the first moral philosophy in the history of the world to give women legal rights, which every woman can take to court.
3. Again, wars of conquest were the norm in the premodern period, but even on this subject Confucianism was far more humane than every other ideology. The Israelites, for example, founded their Promised Land through genocide of the Canaanites. The Romans who came from Troy did the same with the Latins. The Christians literally slaughtered everyone who refused to convert once they had control of the Roman Empire. But for almost two thousand years your Korean ancestors paid tributes to the Chinese without so much as a complaint. No doubt it was because the Chinese for most of that period pretty much just left the Koreans alone, just as it left the Japanese and the Vietnamese and every other vassal to tend to their own affairs. Yeah, how oppressive the Chinese were.

Nobody is saying that Confucianism is a perfect ideology. There is no such thing as a perfect ideology. But don't go around blaming it for the bad things your ancestors did when Heaven only knows they would have been even worse without the civilizing effects of Confucianism. Everyone who knows anything about the history of East Asia knows that before the arrival of Confucianism, your Korean ancestors literally followed whatever some illiterate shamans told them to do. If they said "Kill your eldest child" then that's exactly what your ancestors did. Barbarians.

Please, you weren't demonstrating nuance. You literally singled out Confucianism for no apparent reason. We get it. You Koreans are very touchy about borrowing everything from the Chinese. Get over it.

Nobody writing a PhD thesis on anything has ever said "probably" about their field of expertise but sure, dummy.

Blame Confucianism for what? Concubinage? Which was the universal norm in the premodern period? Please, the Sinophobia is showing. The Turks were still selling and buying enslaved Eastern European girls in Ottoman slave markets well into the early 20th century, and some Muslim countries still practice it to this very day:

"A journalist asked whether slavery existed in Mauritania, and the imam said no. Then why, the journalist asked, had the imam recently given the journalist’s boss a slave girl as a gift? The imam simply smiled." https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/08/freedom-fighter

That's in the 21st century. But yes by all means let's blame Confucianism because you Koreans can't get your act together even now. A failed coup? Lol. Can't do anything right.

It is extremely rare for Korean series and indeed for Asian series in general to have second seasons, yet they do occasionally happen, usually when the feedback, both critical and financial, exceeds expectations. You seem to have forgotten that Time of Fever itself is a second season, the first season being Unintentional Love Story. In any case, I don't "have very strong feelings about Time of Fever." What I do have is very strong feelings about reviewers injecting their own flimsy conjecture and facile psychobabble straining for profundity into their reviews to explain things that can be more readily and reasonably and indeed charitably explained with good faith and common sense and indeed basic human sympathy for the characters. "Simplex sigillum veri," after all: "Simplicity is the sign of truth." As such, to impute internalized self-hatred to a character when a simpler and more sympathetic explanation is simply more plausible is nothing less than to commit character assassination. And I'm not the only one who thinks so. It is my Gen-Z teenage sister who watches the series with her Gen-Z teenage friends who points me to your review in the first place, and it is she who asks me, her gay millennial big brother, whether I agree with her and her friends that your invoking "internalized homophobia" is way off. I tell her that she and her friends are right, and I commend them for their uncynical, unvarnished insight. What does it say about you that even a bunch of teenagers can see the truth so simply and so clearly but you seem unable to do so? I am sure that it is unintentional on your part (this is me charitably extending my good faith and basic human sympathy for you, by the way), but it is still uncalled for all the same. Do better next time. Peace.

Ho Tae is so clearly frustrated that Dong Hee would rather run away than face his feelings for Ho Tae honestly and be true to his promises to Ho Tae that they would always be by each other's side. So it's really just teenage angst and frustration, not "internalized homophobia." Also, not sure why you think that "we'll likely never get" a follow-up considering that nobody really saw this prequel coming either. So my "room for improvement" advice for you is maybe just stay away from wild speculations next time and simply take things as they are. Peace.

It's 2024 and South Korea is still doing "Censored Adaptation Of Same-sex Original Work" as if it were an illiberal, undemocratic, communist autocracy like the People's Republic of China. Get a grip, or if that is too high a bar just stop appropriating and censoring stories originally written about a marginalized community. Happy Pride, everybody.

Please, if it had been "marketed as a drama denouncing the dark sides of arab society" you people would have denounced it as Islamophobic, never mind that polygamy until very recently is only one part of Muslim sexual life which includes slave concubinage. Indeed, well into the 20th century there were many places in the Muslim world where Muslim men could buy slave girls and women and rape them with impunity. In some places today (Mauritania, for example), that still happens. So not sure how you can be "respectful" to the religion that sanctions such a thing but hey you do you and just leave the rest of us be.

I worked in Dubai for five years and traveled widely across the Arab world during that time, so my observation isn't based on some limited encounters with "a few spoiled kids." There's a whole genre of comedic Arab parody out there about the stereotypes and no Arab has ever complained about it. What the people complaining now are really upset about is not that their culture is misrepresented (Netflix's Cleopatra documentary, for example, is a misrepresentation; Cleopatra wasn't black any more than South Africa's Charlize Theron is black) , but it's that a widely watched international show actually dares to represent it as it is to an international audience, essentially calling it out and embarrassing them, to which I say, well, polygamy is an oppressive patriarchal practice (and it's not even the most oppressive one that's widely practiced by Arabs; female genital mutilation, for example, is much more pervasive in the Arab world, affecting the rice and poor alike), so if they're not going to change their ways then maybe they should feel embarrassed, to say the least.

Most Arab royals are polygamous. Many wealthy and upper-middle-class Arabs are polygamous. Most Arab friends I have are in fact children of Arab fathers with more than one spouse. I know most of them from attending Imperial College London, and yes many of them fit the stereotypes: they love spending their money, they flirt and sleep around, they drink, they do just about all the things non-Arab rich people do. The only people who would complain about this supposed misrepresentation are clueless middle-class or low-income Arabs who not-so-secretly resent that they are missing out. Honestly, get a life, people!

Are there any substantial/significant added scenes?

Click on the "misunderstanding" tag, and tell me which of the dramas doesn't have their two leads end up together? Honestly, get a grip.

The ending is what happens when a screenwriter/director tries to be overly clever. They could have come up with a happy ending where the vampire drinks the human blood but doesn't kill the human *this* time because he just loves *this* human *that* much that he's able to control himself but alas some people just think happy endings are too cliche. It is what it is.