sarea | Goong, BOF, Answer Me 1997 (Reply)

jade_okelani and I are 4 episodes from the end of Goong, and it's enraging her the same way it apparently enraged me the first time I saw it. :)) I say "apparently," because my long-lasting impression of it is one of fondness, possibly because I really loved the two leads, particularly Yoon Eun-hye as the commoner princess. But in reading old LJ entries about the series, I clearly had a poor immediate reaction to it. It's safe to say that Jade feels exactly the same, but that just makes it even more frustrating when the story turns to the line of succession stuff, and the machinations of Lady Hwa Young. The other thing is that the show is entirely too long -- it's 24 episodes, instead of the typical 16, and you really feel it. Not only do they have to fill the airtime with the stuff no one cares about, they're also getting extremely repetitive with the conflicts that Shin and Chae-kyung have to face -- namely all the misunderstandings, with Yul and Hyo-rin trying to get between them. It's a frustrating watching experience, even as much as you're rooting for that HEA and knowing it will come at some point. The question is just: When it happens, will it actually be satisfying after all that?

Jade has agreed to watch Boys Over Flowers as her next K-drama, but now I'm wondering if that's a bad idea on the heels of Goong. BOF is only worth it for the secondary pairing, and while the main pairing is imminently more watchable than the unwatchable stuff in Goong, the overall show is still a little too wacky and based in manga reality than reality reality. As much as I'd love for her to know the joy of Yi-jeong/Ga-eul, it might be for the best if we went to something a little more modern, first.

On my own, I've been watching Answer Me 1997. It comes highly recced by

akscully, but I avoided it until now, I think, because I knew it would probably be something I'd want to binge watch once I started. And I was RIGHT. >< :)) I'm really loving it, and I'm bummed that the episodes are only 30 minutes long (other than, apparently, the final 2). And yet it's still only 16 episodes! :(

- The show forced me to look up "circumcision in South Korea" on the internet, which I can safely say I never thought I'd be doing. The male lead (played by SIG!) gets one, but he's like in his mid-late teens at this point, and they never actually say the word "circumcision." It turns out that South Korea leads the world in male circumcision, and it's common for it to happen in adolescence rather than as infants. They consider it a rite of passage, when a boy becomes "a man." NOW YOU KNOW. AS DO I.

- SIG has a really terrible haircut, but I guess it's supposed to be the 90s and that style was all the rage? I don't know. He has a similar cut in Master's Sun, but he looks much better with our current-day styles. :D Otherwise, he is still super gorgeous. His body looked incredible in that scene where he kisses Shi Won -- even better than he looked in High School King of Savvy. Clearly, he let his weight-lifting routine lapse a bit in between. Now that he's going to do his military service, perhaps he'll get it back!

- Maybe because the show is only 30 minutes long, sometimes things happen a little fast. For instance, I don't understand why, in the very first episode, he asks Shi-won not to make him date her friend. Why would she make him? Why wouldn't he just say no, when the friend asked him out? It seemed a little early for a quasi-declaration, especially since he doesn't seem to even realize himself that he likes likes Shi-won until episode 5 or so.

- I have to guiltily say that I found it really hot when he derailed Shi-won's attempt to talk to a 20-something-year-old guy she met randomly online by pretending that the phone call was the fried chicken shop owner calling to complain about their taking someone else's order (I saw that coming from a mile away). If it had been any other guy, or perhaps in any other scenario, I would have found that act extremely high-handed, a violation, and just plain annoying. But because he's the lead, he can get away with it. Or maybe because it's SIG, and I already ship them? I don't know. I do find it a little pointless though, because won't the guy just tell Shi-won that he tried to call, and some dude picked up and started apologizing about chicken? Maybe they'll just conveniently gloss that over by having that storyline drop out of the picture, now that it's served its purpose. (The same way they've apparently dropped the whole thing of Shi-won's BFF asking Yoon-jae out. Did he turn her down or what?)

- I know from

adelagia that the second love interest is a teacher -- and from what I can tell, the only likely candidate is Yoon-jae's brother, which makes it double EWWW. Except it's also just been revealed that the brother was in love with Shi-won's dead sister (the reveal of which came out of nowhere -- Shi-won nor her parents behave at ALL like people who have had that kind of loss only 5 years ago), which makes it TRIPLE EWWW. Why you gotta go there, show? Bah.

- I really love that Yoon-jae and Shi-won are childhood friends, though, and the way he just is at her house like a member of the family. <3 It's almost like the stepbrother thing from One Fine Day, only this is already way better than that. It's also believable why Shi-won wouldn't be immediately attracted to SIG, because otherwise that is just TOTAL FANTASY.

- The one big criticism I have is from the pilot episode, in which a full third of the time, it felt like, was dedicated to Shi-won going crazy/dancing her head off at the H.O.T. concert. I reallllly did not need to see that much of it to understand that she's crazy about the band.