cityhunter

the problem in this drama isnt with the portrayal of everyday north Koreans, it's with the portrayal of the government and it's activities. the heinous nature of the regime is hinted at, but when it comes time to actually say the word "concentration camp" the person being sent away to be worked to death is the bad guy. when the government officials show up in town to take away the wife and child of a suspected traitor, it turns out not to be the government, but more bad guys. so in this world the awful stuff is reserved for people who deserve it and is carried out by rouge elements, not the actual government. at the same time several high ranking NK officials are shown to be kindly, decent people who you are not supposed to think too hard about b/c if you did you'd realize that, IRL, people in their positions would have had to - at bare minimum- been complicit in the murder and torture of dozens if not hundreds of people. yes there are house searches and boat searches but amazingly instead of showing what actually happens when a person is found to be in violation during one of those searches, the characters are able to talk their way out of trouble. the Hogwarts comparison my not have been an elegant one, but i get what Knave was trying to say. While some elements of daily life might have been accurate, as a whole the North Korea depicted by this drama doesnt exist.

you'e welcome.

this show is so bad.

this is a hard question b/c if i hadnt seen the drama 1st i feel like i would have had a harder time following the book but it was not until i had finished the novel that i was fully able to appreciate the subtlety Wang Yibo brought to his portrayal of Wang Ji, (which is stunning)


also i think you need to be aware that there is graphic sexual content in the novel. it gets extremely specific and doesnt shy away from details.

unpopular opinion: The Untamed (both the drama and the novel it was based upon) is a beautiful rendering of the human condition weighed down by the writers' failure to realize what made the story special and a pathological love of minutia.

but i love it any way.

you're welcome :)

if you arent interested in the linguistics of it please feel free to skip, but i do have an explanation for this.

the difference b/w The (thuh)_ and Juh is only a very small change in tongue position . the "th" sound in english is made with the tip of your tongue against your teeth and may migrate b/w your front teeth as you talk especially if the th sound is soft or at the end of a word, but we're interested in the initial tip of the tongue against the teeth position. if you say "the" and then "juh" you will notice your mouth stays in exactly the same position but your tongue tip curls back just a bit. do that a few times real fast and you'll see what i'm talking about .

now try to imagine that when you made this "thuh" sound instead of tip of your tongue making contact with your top teeth right about the gum line it made contact just a few millimetres further back. this position isnt very far off that "juh" sound that is being transliterated as "Jo" . neither "th" or "j" captures this in between sound just right and there's going to be variance depending on the position of the sound in the sentence and the unique patterns of the speaker

you will most often see Thai romanzied using The Roayl Thai General System of Transciption. like most other transliteration systems it is imperfect b/c eastern languages have sounds and tones that the Latin alphabet struggles- and fails to represent.

to see just how bad romanization is at representing thai i recommend watching a music video with romanized thai subtitles and just know that it's worse with spoken thai.

it's not quiet as bad as pinyin though. in pinyin the latin pronunciation of a letter has almost no relation to how it's pronounced in pin yin XD

it isnt the masterpiece public sentiment might lead one to expect, but i was certainly entertained.

when people really love something it can be hard for them to see the places where it fell short.

no matter how old the article is i get a notification when there are comments so i try to respond :)

if you scroll through the comments there's several where people ask me pretty much that same question and i answer it.

TLDR: healer was entertaining enough to over come bad editing, pacing pitfalls and it's own tendency toward histrionics. i loved it too

i've met many women that i might not have very nice things to say about but i can't say i've ever met one that was as weak and formless as is often see in dramas.

the only thing that comes close are some of the women i met in the religion i was raised in. i feel it's a cult so it's hard to decide if those women are actually weak or if they are just projecting what they have to to survive.

once i left the religion i moved to a high poverty high crime area. in a place like that weakness is not really an option.

it might be that my specific experiences have kept me from having a typical level of exposure to weak women and therefore i assume a strength in all women that they may not actually possess. .....

and i wrote an essay. thanks for coming to my ted talk.

i get where you are coming from.

i think my aversion might be stem from the fact that i see very little reality reflected in many of the female characters that might be called weak.

do these personality deficient, spineless, opinionless, brainless women really exist? not in my experience.

the improvement toward "strong" female leads is just a movement toward reality.

IMO the only thing it really conveys is the mindset of the person who used it. and even that is a dicey proposition b/c one person could look at two women who are polar opposites and find both of them to be "strong".

the term "strong female lead" is used so broadly it is functionally useless.

at least part of the hatred for the FL was that she was fairly fresh off of a bad performance/character with Inspiring Generation and only two years earlier her character/performance came dangerously close to ruining parts of Bridal Mask.

the way she was portrayed made me so angry. often in dramas you see characters who are misunderstood by those around them. we are supposed to sympathize with them and be upset at how they were treated. not here. it's very obvious you are supposed to think she's a cunning gold digger who learns her lesson in the end and the ML is a good hearted, driven genius who was taken advantage of. (◔_◔)

it's her, but it's been a while so you never know she might have gotten better by now :)

indeed.

i think the romance arc was thrown in b/c as a matter of ratings they just could not have Lee Jong Suk in a show with no romance. it was his 1st staring role as an adult and most of his fans were young women and this poorly conceived love triangle was the only way you were going to get them to watch.