monstersnroses

you could go ahead and boycott and apologize til your blue in the face, and try to cancel whoever you want but the fact is that gen z, who now pretty much dictates the direction of culture and marketing in current year, has complete fatigue for ww2 stuff. Everyone screeching about jews and nazis for so long, comparing everything and everyone to jews and nazis, countries making it illegal to ask questions about what happened because the ww2 official narrative is so sacred and revered, no one allowed to criticize jews about ANYthing, no one allowed to praise old germany about ANYthing, in such extreme black and white terms, with such official rancor and zeal, a zero tolerance policy for stepping even an inch off the approved moral line, germany today in a weirdly similar situation = one of the primary culprits in pushing russia into a ww3 situation / making freedom of expression illegal / disenfranchising AfD / participating in ethnic replacement strategies for europe / kissing klaus schwabs ass.... and yet they claim they take the moral high ground all the time. Gen Z is not buying it.

gen z no longer cares. they only care abt whether this show is good or not. if it is, they will watch it no matter who's in it, as long as they're not in the epstein files. Your boycott efforts won't matter to the bottom line, all that will matter is whether the drama is entertaining.

welp. I've seen vote manipulation happen for sure, and it proly happens on every drama basically, but I gotta say... the last 30% or so of the drama really put a damper on it, that might be affecting it as well.

I come here every time something seems like it might come close and post about it. So far nothing has panned out, but as far as "Distraction-Worthy", I think When Destiny Brings the Demon, Speed and Love (kinda) and Learning To Love.


If I ever find anything as good as SOKP again, I'll post it in comments but so far nothing.

The last time I felt this way about a cdrama was never.

Welcome to the Xie Wei Intensive Care Burn Unit. We are all family here. And no, there is no cure.

This one is like for 30 episodes you think you might be seeing a tiny little flame flickering in the distance, and then suddenly you're standing in the middle of a raging forest fire like "well that escalated quickly".

You can only watch it for the first time ONCE, so enjoy it. Get as immersed as possible, take days off of work, turn all the lights out and hide under your covers and BINGE THIS, do not 2x! do not skip! Let it wash over you and through you.

And your dedication and patience WILL be rewarded.

You guys never fully understand the jealousy the rest of us experience when someone new comes in and watches this for the first time. IF ONLY I could bash my head with a cast iron frypan in exactly the right spot to give myself selective amnesia and forget I ever saw this so I can watch it for the first time all over again.....

But anyways. What you're watching pre-episode 30 (or so), is a man OBSESSED. Mkay. He is the lion in the tall grass. And she is the unsuspecting little bunny rabbit.

sigh

this was such a good watch, there are just no words

VERY. I remember on my first watch getting to like ep 22... 23.... 24.... like 'this IS a romance, right?' and I almost dropped.

So glad I didn't. This is literally one of the top ten best things I've ever seen come out of ANY country, ever.

i want to jump in on this conv, because I think you two both have similar tastes to mine in many ways. I can see your perspective, agree with both of your points, and just want to elaborate on WHY to me this is a masterpiece.

Before I do tho, I want to say that I rated Lesson In Love and My Fated Boy VERY high. I only rated this one *slightly* higher. Why would I do this when production values and spice are lacking compared to some of the other ones I've enjoyed....

It's the artistic merit this has. I'll give you a few examples:

Example one

In the first episode, the opening scenes, you have FL and 2ML sitting in a diner, calmly talking. The colors of the scene are plain and unassuming, like the inside of a Denny's restaurant. Their clothes and hair are equally plain, they are sitting calmly with arms at their sides, there's nothing that special or interesting happening. The scene is composed of balance and lines.... you have the two seated in a booth in profile, framed by the backdrop of a window with wood venetian blinds. Everything is symmetrical. You have all these lines, the blinds, the table, the booth with vertical-seam padded back.

This is then juxtaposed to another scene, the flashback of her on the pier. The colors of the scene are even more drab, if that's possible. The sky is gray, the sea is dark rough and choppy, the pier is nondescript, her clothes are nondescript and plain, her hair is plain. All is quiet. Then suddenly she screams and takes a running leap into the water. Her arms and legs are splayed as she jumps in a way that looks like an anime scene.

The explosiveness of her feelings is ALL that jump out at you in those scenes, it's highlighted by the seeming normalcy and colorlessness of the shots. The effect is to make you feel like this FL could do anything at any moment, it adds *implied* feelings of rage, frustration, being lost, being unhinged, juuuust under the surface, like this calm control is hiding deep emotions and psychology. Everything in the diner that at first seemed innocuous and drab, starts to scream "controlled".

A boatload of emotions and information are imparted to the viewer in just the first maybe 5 mins of the show, without ever explicitly laying it out for you. The director leaves it for you to infer on your own.

Example two:

Nighttime, and ML goes to visit FL at the school. ML is in an all-red suit, trying to climb the fence to get onto school property and see her. She is all buttoned up and proper looking, having been in in-session school that day. They talk through the fence, with her looking up at him, and the camera frames them beneath a light shining down, and a statue of mother Mary praying (or some shit, idk some statue of a figure of spiritual grace), and the camera looking down onto the scene.

It looks like the devil trying to get into heaven to visit an angel, but unable to pass into her realm.

This is gorgeous cinematography and symbolism, the director is capable of creating these really fascinating and richly layered cinematic compositions and sequences that blew me away.

Example three:

Like when the father's life is threatening to crash down around him, and he is being very calm, while whittling sticks into points with an exacto knife, over and over again. And you can then feel his tension, his rage, his instability. It makes you wonder what he's gonna do with that knife. He does nothing with the knife except whittle sticks, but somehow this innocent and mundane task becomes ominous and makes the viewer nervous like "something might happen". And later, something *does* happen, he goes to her apartment and has a meltdown.

He used to make ship-in-a-bottles. He carefully, painstakingly constructed every little piece into his ship. Such an item is impressive, yet incredibly delicate. Which is a perfect parallel of his own family and how he views them in his life. The ship is in a carefully bottled and controlled environment, and for all the work he's put in, just one major fall or jolt to the bottle will wreck the whole thing. But now his life is ruined, and so is his ship-in-a-bottle. So he doesn't care anymore, and now he sits and, unable to figure out what to do with his emotions, whittles sticks into sharp points... useless weapons, crude and simplistic renderings of hostility. And this is what he later becomes at Monami's apartment, someone who expresses his crude and simplistic rage over not being able to control his ship-in-a-bottle of a family.

This director is layering meaning beneath meaning beneath meaning all over the place, and doing all this *without* any pretentious bougeois attitude, no fancy clothes, no fancy production values, no fancy vocabulary. Everything is stripped down to its most basic elements, and yet retains its essence. For example the scene where he cuts off his mother. We don't see the mother that much, just enough to know who she is. The scene takes place in his apartment, just a bare room with a few essentials. And yet the emotions of the scene are raw, powerful, and care was obviously taken to get it exactly right.

Lesson In Love was spicier, more toned down with a sense of realism, had a softer and more sumptuous aesthetic, and more ML/FL chemistry. But it was imo more entertainment than art, whereas this one is more art than entertainment. Hence my slightly higher score, though both shows were enjoyable in their own way.

My Fated Boy does touch on deep layers of emotions, and the scene where the kids are throwing toys to eachother from over the fence is GENIUS level good. But that's interspersed with the dog statue with sunglasses going "Ohhh Yeah", and a bubblegum plot about an ML making his way into the world of entertainment industry and idols and making it big in a way that is just so "wrapped in a pink bow" perfect. So it does have artistic merit, the spice levels are totally off the hook, the chemistry is there, but to me it doesn't fully fully transcend like this drama does, into the world of deep implied psychology and emotional content, and cinematic composition.

This show is, imo, so tightly balanced, so carefully crafted, so intricately intertwined as far as the intersections of characters, and their interaction with their environment. The layering of feelings with symbolism is all around you at every turn in this show. There is no lazy storytelling. Even the ending, that people call rushed, is simply clean and neat. Once the characters overcome, the Hero's Journey is over. The bigger mistake by many storytellers is continuing the story past the ending of the Hero's Arc which is unnecessary in storytelling. Knowing where and when to end a show is also an art form. For a J-drama to give a story an ending *at all* is not the usual j-drama route, and to me this is what j-dramas are often missing. I wouldn't call it rushed, I'd call it 'minimalist', which is in keeping with the story itself as it is told.

And this is why I would go so far as to call it a 'masterpiece'.

---> Assault is about someone sustaining emotional harm from a broken promise, therefore every broken promise in which one party experiences hurt feelings is assault.

--->It's only assault within the confines of an actual marriage, therefore it is not about emotional harm, but legal contracts.

Pick one.

> Also i wasn't minimizing rape at all I was pointing out they are both form of ASSAULT and should also be a crime

If your spouse wants you to cheat, is it still assault?

someone pls let me know if this ever gets eng subbed anywhere by anyone

Youre trying to guess my age to belittle my points? Wow keepin it classy, nice.

He makes enough money for people besides her to help him out. Shes a gf not a P.A. besides, all he had to do was just tell her exactly what u just said from the outset. And let her be a part of that decision.

she showed all through this drama, that she never deserved for the most important person in her life to give her "tough love". She deserved to be treated like a partner, a confidant, a refuge and solace, and she should have been leveled with and consulted, and deserved to have some input over her own life. She was powerless from the beginning to the end of this drama, because nobody trusted that her EQ or inner strength was enough for her to handle being told the truth. Which is ironic, because what he did to her forced her to tap into FAR more of her strength and EQ than it would have to just include her in her own life.

Since you brought up how disappointing the last part of the show was, I'm just gonna vent my issues with it for a min also:

It was so risky and irresponsible for him to break up with her the way he did. Knowing how she felt about him, and how critical he was to her life, for him to not just break up with her but ghost her like that could have caused her to unalive herself.

That's how it is in romeo and juliet, which is why it was such a tragedy. He made a major decision about the relationship without telling her (faking his own death) and she believed it because she wasn't in on the decision, thought he was dead, and -being in such an unstable state- unalived herself due to extreme grief.

when someone feels powerful emotions like that, they should be dealt with honestly and not toyed with. Grief is the most painful emotion of all. He put her through that without telling her why.

Then to get back at him, she puts him through his own kind of grief. This is how true love gets poisoned, by being tainted with resentment and pain, being toyed with.

All this is so uncool, and the fact that "everybody was in on it" against her, is so uncool. He actually made his/their family and friends choose a loyalty, and they all decided to be loyal to him and not her. Is she ever supposed to feel okay about that later? What an insane amount of forgiveness she would have to have for him for the rest of her life not to bring that up in a domestic dispute later and hold a grudge. He has muddied up and besmirched the love they had when it was pure.

And another totally hot take, it's like well now she has seen the world and has gotten a career lined up.... well she's fated to breed with that man. What good will a career be for her once they get together? The second she gets pregnant she's gonna leave whatever job she had so she can be a conscientious mother to a child. If he hadn'tve done all that crap keeping her away, they would have gotten started earlier, she'd be younger by the time her kids were out of the house and would have some of her middle age for herself. She saw the world, so what. She was MISERABLE the entire time.

No one ever asked HER opinion. If mumu had been asked "would you rather see the world alone, or would you rather never leave your zip code but be with your man the whole time" what do you think she would have picked? So she was robbed of any agency over the relationship or her life, once again.

Honestly all that happened is he chose her future without her input, and the continual sadness and loneliness and stress just caused her body to flood with cortisol every day, causing inflammation and probably taking years of her lifespan. Good job, you bastard.

And everybody's clothes and hair took a nosedive too, what's up with that? This was a bait-and-switch.

End of rant.

I'm old enough that I no longer say how old I am, and also for me I'm completely in love w this drama.

Yes. Water because to metabolize alcohol, the body uses a lot of water (alcohol is dehydrating, think about what it does on your skin...). Food because it acts as a buffer on the stomach lining so the alcohol doesn't absorb as quickly. This is why bars often have wasabi peas, peanuts, boiled eggs, rice crackers or chips out on the bar for people, and why in many american states it's a law that food must be served in a bar until a certain time of night.

...and then their "strong independent FL" is like way way too strong, it's very all-or-nothing with the c-drama FL's. A rare few FL's are moderate.... My Fated Boy, Falling Into You, Kunning Palace, Fake It Till You Make It, Blossom....

also, sometimes the performance of the actors can be encouraged or worsened by the director and the vibe on-set. If she has a cry scene, they could try pre-filming coaching, changing the lighting, minimizing the number of people on-set, giving her more time to get those scenes in the can by modifying the filming schedule.

I just watched Learning to Love, which has incredibly epic perfomances by the whole cast, but especially the ML (Raul Maito), and they all said the director took LOTS of time to work with them and help them access the emotions they'd need for the scenes they shot. The ML is basically a novice actor, and he completely credits his performance to the director's patience with him and dedication.

I'm not saying it's on the director that she's not the best cryer out there, but you never know what it is that actually held her back, or if she just doesn't have it in her to access those emotions onscreen, or what.

I agree. People look to reviews and comments sections to find out if they are going to like a drama or not, so of course you want to hear from everybody so you have the best chances of actually picking a drama that you'd vibe with by hearing both sides, from people who liked it AND didn't like it.