The Great Queen Seondeok: WATCH THIS.
Jun. 21st, 2012 08:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccatoriaSome of you may have been reading my twitter feed and may therefore be aware that over the past three weeks I have become completely obsessed with a Korean Sageuk (Historical) Drama. IT'S THIS ONE AND IT IS GLORIOUS.
Streaming within the US on Hulu - subtitled
Streaming outside the US with fansubs
Okay, I will level with you. This show is 62 hours long. And I found some of the early episodes kinda campy, which I think was mostly just me acclimating to a certain amount of culture clash in terms of visual storytelling and acting styles as well as requiring slightly more attention than usual due to subtitles. But you know what? It just kept getting better and better and now that I've seen it all, I can say with absolute sincerity that this is one of the best fucking TV shows I have ever seen.
It's enormous in scope - it tells the tale of Queen Seondeok of Silla, the first female monarch in Korean history, and, I believe, in recorded East Asian history. It was, at the time, forbidden for a woman to govern a country. Information on the historical figure can be found here. The TV show tells a fictionalised version of her life; with 62 hours to work with, it's unsurprisingly detailed in its account of more than forty years of history with a huge number of subplots and minor characters, but the centrepiece is the remarkable, glorious power struggle between its two female protagonists.
Deokman (the name of Queen Seondeok before her coronation) and Mishil (a noblewoman and consort to several kings who has been not-so-secretly controlling the court for decades) take on the roles of Mulan-as-Luke-Skywalker and the Catherine De Medici of Ancient Korea respectively as they brawl across every arena from the personal to the political, on the battlefield and in temples, they fight each other with the economy and with science and with the people they love. It’s about individuals versus institutions. It’s about power and love and ambition and dreams.
It made me cry. Nearly nothing on telly makes me cry. It pulled my soul out through my chest, broke it, and then pushed it back into my throat.
I wanted to keep this relatively short, so consider the above my recommendation. But for the interested, and those not averse to some spoilers, there's...just so much more I want to babble about, I will do so after the cut.
So, okay, first can we talk about the obvious thing that I'm gonna want to talk about? It's an epic TV show where the two main characters are women, and one of them is supposed to be over 40! How am I not gonna love that?
(Additional layer of meta awesomeness? The actress playing Mishil - Ko Hyun Jung - successfully kicked both sexism and ageism in the teeth by defying critics and staging a return to acting after a 10 year break and after a messy divorce, which is still kind of a hugely stigmatising thing in South Korea if you're a public figure. Due in part of her enormously popular role in this show, she's now one of the highest paid actresses in the country, and, at 41, is about to star in the lead role in a big-budget action-comedy film.)
But seriously, the relationship between these two is fascinating and so well done. One of the things that impresses me most is the way the heroine is allowed to be unambiguously ambitious and the villain's obvious use of sexuality as a weapon is never upheld as the chief reason to find her morally suspect.
To clarify, Mishil, consort to two kings, wife of the head of the Council of Nobles, lover of the Chief General, who bore three sons to three different fathers, is clearly playing power games with all of them. They know it, she knows it, she has these wonderfully awkward family conferences with her husband and their son on one side of the table, and her lover and their son on the other side, where she tells everyone what they're up to this week and what their jobs are, and then we cut to scenes with each of the dads explaining to each of the sons why, actually, your mother is very smart, but don't worry, she'll always need us more than that other half of our family. And her ruthless manipulation of people is very much held up as a reason to fear her, but no one ever yells WHORE in her face, no one ever points out her sexual conduct as specifically improper.
On the other point, Deokman, the princess, is not the reluctant heir to the throne. She resolves, when she's on the run, in a cave with nothing but the clothes on her back and an army trying to kill her, having been crushed under the absurd heel of dynastic politics, deprived of everything she thought was true about her life, and with absolutely no legitimate claim to it, that she will have that throne. It's not mindless greed or hunger for power. As she puts it, there are things that happen in that country that are incomprehensible to her, and she will do something about them. But there is, in my mind, a huge, and important distinction between the narrative of the leader who is noble because she is reluctant and hesitant to take power, and the leader who is noble because she goes after power with the intention of using it to improve lives. The latter is a narrative women nearly never get. But Deokman does.
I love how angry the character is allowed to be. It is, essentially, rage that fuels her original decision to make a play for the crown. It's revolutionary fury. And it's enormously powerful for the fact it happens more than twenty episodes in, after we've seen the same incomprehensible things as she has. After we've seen her sharp intellect and indiscriminate curiosity get her into as much trouble as it gets her out of. After we've seen her previously rock solid sense of self and pride and identity swept away to the point she realises that there are situations where everyone around her would benefit from her death more than her life (and she's right is the awful thing of it), and resigned herself to that. After all that, they add one more straw to her backbreaking load, and she just snaps. "I will have the throne," she says. "This nation is absurd," she says, "and I will devour it."
Ladies and gentlemen, our heroine.
The best bit is, she never does give herself over to vengeance. Never, not even when everyone around her is telling her that she is legally and morally justified in doing so. She tears down corrupt institutions and power structures, but never individuals unless she is forced to do so.
She gets challenged on this at one point. The wandering Swordsmaster we have spent half the series waiting to appear, the one we have been cued to expect to herald a major victory for our heroine, the one we think will be on her side, finally shows up and tells her, bluntly, that he does not support her desire to become the monarch because she's a woman and she's too angry. So Deokman thinks about that for a while, then tells him why he's wrong, why being a woman and being angry are perfectly acceptable traits, and then goes ahead without him. She listens to everyone, especially the people she doesn't agree with.
Some of the most interesting parts of her conflict with Mishil revolve around the ideas of individuals vs institutions. It's probably not surprising that the narrative sees Deokman learning political strategy from her rival. I mean, it's great to watch, but it's also unavoidable for this type of story. What I absolutely was not expecting was the way that Mishil would learn from Deokman. And what she learns isn't ~the power of love~ or ~how to be a better person~, it's a shift in perspective. A heartbreaking, empowering, dangerous shift in perspective that causes her to re-evaluate everything in her life.
Mishil is unparalleled when it comes to manipulating the power structures and institutions of her nation. But those self-same structures are the ones that will ultimately never allow her to achieve her goal. Seeing Deokman, whose foreign upbringing and disassociation from the traditional class system, simply attack those structures is horrifying to her, because without them, how would one wield power? Until the day she realises that without them...without them, there's nothing stopping her from doing whatever the fuck she wants either.
In most narratives about a manipulative older woman and her younger rival, youth comes into it. The older woman wants the youth of the younger. So yes, that happens here too. But as to why she's jealous. Oh, god, why. It's because she suddenly realises how much of her life she's spent desperately clawing towards a throne that is already within Deokman's reach. And if she'd been younger, or born into a nobler family, maybe she would have had a chance to work out what she wanted to do next. Maybe she'd have her own grand vision, her own illusive dream for the future of the nation, instead of dragging it down into the mud as she constricts everything in an effort to retain control of the nation in practice even if not in name. She's jealous of Deokman's whole life because it let her see what she never could - the world outside the power systems that left her with such towering resentment and ambition in the first place. And once she realises that, how dangerous she becomes...
The whole thing is just staggeringly, beautifully complicated. There's even more I want to say, but this is long and spoileriffic enough already.
So I'll move on to the other two characters I wanted to talk about: Yushin and Bidam. A simplistic way of explaining them would be to say that they form a good guy/bad boy love triangle around our heroine. You can probably all guess, however, that I think the situation is a good deal more complex than that. For Bidam, certainly, romantic love is an overriding concern, but in the scheme of the show, and even their relationships with each other, perhaps part of the tragedy is that it can never be about only that. It's not even mostly about that, honestly, with the exception of the very end of Bidam's tale.
As you can imagine, I expected to hate Bidam. He was an asshole angsty floppy-haired assassin swordmaster with ~issues~ and ~emotional problems~ who was too ruthless for his own good but violently loyal to the ~right person~. Similarly, while Yushin was kind of a prissy jerk at first, the way he exhaustively and without question stuck by and fought for Deokman when basically everyone in the country was out to kill her - his quiet, determined devotion to her, really won me over.
So, again as you can imagine, I was fairly surprised when about twenty episodes later, I found myself fervently wanting to punch Yushin in the mouth until all his teeth fell out and feeling an overpowering need to hug Bidam.
To permit myself a Star Wars reference for a moment, I'm still not convinced that Anakin Skywalker ever needed to be the kind of character George Lucas clearly intended him to be, but if he had to be, I wish I could travel back in time, kidnap him, and force him to watch Bidam's arc before insisting he rewrite the entire prequel trilogy with that in mind. Bidam is a wounded child, possessed of enormous skill and bravery, fierce, irrational, immoral loyalty, and a violent fear of being discovered to be a monster and abandoned that nothing and no one can assuage. I think it's the honesty of the show I find refreshing. He has wonderful points and awful ones, and ultimately he causes his own downfall, and everyone tells him so. At the end, someone asks Deokman, isn't it better? Knowing he was tricked? That he didn't really mean those awful, hurtful things he said? And she asks why it would be better to know that a lifetime of trust is such a fragile thing, so easily destroyed by one lie that plays to his insecurities, no matter how awful or clever the lie might have been? For Bidam, the question was never, "do I trust her?" but "when will she stop trusting me?" I feel so much more for him, and for the reasons he ended up this way, because I never felt the show demanded it of me. Because I was supposed to hate him at the same time he was supposed to be breaking my damn heart.
On the other hand we have my changing reaction to Yushin. When Deokman was a soldier under his command, or a fugitive, she was the recipient of the immovable, inflexible morality of protecting those for whom he was responsible. He was brave, and sincere and loyal and it made me love him. And once she became his leader, that sincere loyalty never, ever wavered. But their relationship changed irrevocably because now he was responsible to her but not for her, and she became the one who had to deal with his inflexibility and insistence on self-sacrifice.
"If you do this," he tells her, when she tells him that she will claim the throne, "if you do this, I will support you every step of the way, but things will never be the same between us again, because I will have to think of you as my ruler, and you will have to think of me as a pawn." And I scoffed and thought to myself, yes, yes, that old chestnut to rack up the romantic tension. And then the series proceeded to fucking demonstrate to me why that was true. Not with some cheap, "oh no, I must send him into danger and not play favourites!" plotline, but rather with the way he will not ever put himself first. That he won't take the pragmatic choice that won't force Deokman, as a human, to lose Yushin, her friend, because it's more important that Yushin, as a commander, not lose the support of his followers, even when they're being dicks, because if he does, he can't serve Deokman, his Queen, nor can he, in future, protect those who follow him, having set the precedent of giving them up for political expedience.
The worst part is that he's often partially right, but it dumps the problem further up the line, because Deokman, the Queen, can't afford to lose Yushin, the commander, and the support of the political factions who are loyal to him. He has the option to stick by them and stand his ground and say that he is the one who should be held responsible for their conduct - Yushin can define himself against his ruler and align himself with his followers, even if his intent is simply keeping them in line. Deokman can't align herself against anyone internally because they're all her people and that would make her a tyrant. Yushin knows it too. He warns her, before she embarks on her journey, not to be too grateful that he's chosen to support her. He'll always be asking her for impossible favours; he'll never have enough to offer in return. He knows, because she was always doing it to him, never quite understanding the ramifications of her requests.
There's a love triangle going on here, but it's sewn into discussions of honour, power, diplomacy and the impossibility of being both an individual and representative of a wider institution. In the latter chapters of the saga, both Yushin and Bidam contend with political factions who both support them and demand from them things they cannot deliver. Both characters turned out to be much more complicated than I was expecting when I first met them. I feel I can't really ask for more than that.
And I STILL have more, like about Chunchu (and argh, the fact they weren't clear about the passage of time in the middle episodes thus leading to the accidental impression they soap opera aged him is one of the few straight-up criticisms of this show I have), and his developing mentor/student relationship with his aunt that doesn't quite alleviate my (or her) moral concerns about his attitude. Or about the way the final ten episodes left me feeling far more uneasy than I wanted, but the sneaking suspicion I have that the show's meditation on institutional power, and indeed the show's characterisation of Deokman as a leader, wouldn't be nearly as nuanced or complete without them, even if I desperately missed the opportunity to watch Women Do Politics at each other every other scene. And the way they didn't fuck up the Sohwa and Chilsuk story. And the pitch of the final scene, where Deokman contextualises her life and choices, not to her love interest, not even to her rival, but to herself.
"Your life will be difficult," is what she would say to her younger self. "But," she would say. "Endure it."
Not, "I wouldn't change it for the world," not "run far away and never look back," just the words the soldiers say to each other, to inspire them to get up one more time, even when their limbs are bruised and broken, because it's important to keep trying.
Damn, but I loved this show.
Apparently it was a total ratings juggernaut, which is just awesome.
Streaming within the US on Hulu - subtitled
Streaming outside the US with fansubs
Okay, I will level with you. This show is 62 hours long. And I found some of the early episodes kinda campy, which I think was mostly just me acclimating to a certain amount of culture clash in terms of visual storytelling and acting styles as well as requiring slightly more attention than usual due to subtitles. But you know what? It just kept getting better and better and now that I've seen it all, I can say with absolute sincerity that this is one of the best fucking TV shows I have ever seen.
It's enormous in scope - it tells the tale of Queen Seondeok of Silla, the first female monarch in Korean history, and, I believe, in recorded East Asian history. It was, at the time, forbidden for a woman to govern a country. Information on the historical figure can be found here. The TV show tells a fictionalised version of her life; with 62 hours to work with, it's unsurprisingly detailed in its account of more than forty years of history with a huge number of subplots and minor characters, but the centrepiece is the remarkable, glorious power struggle between its two female protagonists.
Deokman (the name of Queen Seondeok before her coronation) and Mishil (a noblewoman and consort to several kings who has been not-so-secretly controlling the court for decades) take on the roles of Mulan-as-Luke-Skywalker and the Catherine De Medici of Ancient Korea respectively as they brawl across every arena from the personal to the political, on the battlefield and in temples, they fight each other with the economy and with science and with the people they love. It’s about individuals versus institutions. It’s about power and love and ambition and dreams.
It made me cry. Nearly nothing on telly makes me cry. It pulled my soul out through my chest, broke it, and then pushed it back into my throat.
I wanted to keep this relatively short, so consider the above my recommendation. But for the interested, and those not averse to some spoilers, there's...just so much more I want to babble about, I will do so after the cut.
So, okay, first can we talk about the obvious thing that I'm gonna want to talk about? It's an epic TV show where the two main characters are women, and one of them is supposed to be over 40! How am I not gonna love that?
(Additional layer of meta awesomeness? The actress playing Mishil - Ko Hyun Jung - successfully kicked both sexism and ageism in the teeth by defying critics and staging a return to acting after a 10 year break and after a messy divorce, which is still kind of a hugely stigmatising thing in South Korea if you're a public figure. Due in part of her enormously popular role in this show, she's now one of the highest paid actresses in the country, and, at 41, is about to star in the lead role in a big-budget action-comedy film.)
But seriously, the relationship between these two is fascinating and so well done. One of the things that impresses me most is the way the heroine is allowed to be unambiguously ambitious and the villain's obvious use of sexuality as a weapon is never upheld as the chief reason to find her morally suspect.
To clarify, Mishil, consort to two kings, wife of the head of the Council of Nobles, lover of the Chief General, who bore three sons to three different fathers, is clearly playing power games with all of them. They know it, she knows it, she has these wonderfully awkward family conferences with her husband and their son on one side of the table, and her lover and their son on the other side, where she tells everyone what they're up to this week and what their jobs are, and then we cut to scenes with each of the dads explaining to each of the sons why, actually, your mother is very smart, but don't worry, she'll always need us more than that other half of our family. And her ruthless manipulation of people is very much held up as a reason to fear her, but no one ever yells WHORE in her face, no one ever points out her sexual conduct as specifically improper.
On the other point, Deokman, the princess, is not the reluctant heir to the throne. She resolves, when she's on the run, in a cave with nothing but the clothes on her back and an army trying to kill her, having been crushed under the absurd heel of dynastic politics, deprived of everything she thought was true about her life, and with absolutely no legitimate claim to it, that she will have that throne. It's not mindless greed or hunger for power. As she puts it, there are things that happen in that country that are incomprehensible to her, and she will do something about them. But there is, in my mind, a huge, and important distinction between the narrative of the leader who is noble because she is reluctant and hesitant to take power, and the leader who is noble because she goes after power with the intention of using it to improve lives. The latter is a narrative women nearly never get. But Deokman does.
I love how angry the character is allowed to be. It is, essentially, rage that fuels her original decision to make a play for the crown. It's revolutionary fury. And it's enormously powerful for the fact it happens more than twenty episodes in, after we've seen the same incomprehensible things as she has. After we've seen her sharp intellect and indiscriminate curiosity get her into as much trouble as it gets her out of. After we've seen her previously rock solid sense of self and pride and identity swept away to the point she realises that there are situations where everyone around her would benefit from her death more than her life (and she's right is the awful thing of it), and resigned herself to that. After all that, they add one more straw to her backbreaking load, and she just snaps. "I will have the throne," she says. "This nation is absurd," she says, "and I will devour it."
Ladies and gentlemen, our heroine.
The best bit is, she never does give herself over to vengeance. Never, not even when everyone around her is telling her that she is legally and morally justified in doing so. She tears down corrupt institutions and power structures, but never individuals unless she is forced to do so.
She gets challenged on this at one point. The wandering Swordsmaster we have spent half the series waiting to appear, the one we have been cued to expect to herald a major victory for our heroine, the one we think will be on her side, finally shows up and tells her, bluntly, that he does not support her desire to become the monarch because she's a woman and she's too angry. So Deokman thinks about that for a while, then tells him why he's wrong, why being a woman and being angry are perfectly acceptable traits, and then goes ahead without him. She listens to everyone, especially the people she doesn't agree with.
Some of the most interesting parts of her conflict with Mishil revolve around the ideas of individuals vs institutions. It's probably not surprising that the narrative sees Deokman learning political strategy from her rival. I mean, it's great to watch, but it's also unavoidable for this type of story. What I absolutely was not expecting was the way that Mishil would learn from Deokman. And what she learns isn't ~the power of love~ or ~how to be a better person~, it's a shift in perspective. A heartbreaking, empowering, dangerous shift in perspective that causes her to re-evaluate everything in her life.
Mishil is unparalleled when it comes to manipulating the power structures and institutions of her nation. But those self-same structures are the ones that will ultimately never allow her to achieve her goal. Seeing Deokman, whose foreign upbringing and disassociation from the traditional class system, simply attack those structures is horrifying to her, because without them, how would one wield power? Until the day she realises that without them...without them, there's nothing stopping her from doing whatever the fuck she wants either.
In most narratives about a manipulative older woman and her younger rival, youth comes into it. The older woman wants the youth of the younger. So yes, that happens here too. But as to why she's jealous. Oh, god, why. It's because she suddenly realises how much of her life she's spent desperately clawing towards a throne that is already within Deokman's reach. And if she'd been younger, or born into a nobler family, maybe she would have had a chance to work out what she wanted to do next. Maybe she'd have her own grand vision, her own illusive dream for the future of the nation, instead of dragging it down into the mud as she constricts everything in an effort to retain control of the nation in practice even if not in name. She's jealous of Deokman's whole life because it let her see what she never could - the world outside the power systems that left her with such towering resentment and ambition in the first place. And once she realises that, how dangerous she becomes...
The whole thing is just staggeringly, beautifully complicated. There's even more I want to say, but this is long and spoileriffic enough already.
So I'll move on to the other two characters I wanted to talk about: Yushin and Bidam. A simplistic way of explaining them would be to say that they form a good guy/bad boy love triangle around our heroine. You can probably all guess, however, that I think the situation is a good deal more complex than that. For Bidam, certainly, romantic love is an overriding concern, but in the scheme of the show, and even their relationships with each other, perhaps part of the tragedy is that it can never be about only that. It's not even mostly about that, honestly, with the exception of the very end of Bidam's tale.
As you can imagine, I expected to hate Bidam. He was an asshole angsty floppy-haired assassin swordmaster with ~issues~ and ~emotional problems~ who was too ruthless for his own good but violently loyal to the ~right person~. Similarly, while Yushin was kind of a prissy jerk at first, the way he exhaustively and without question stuck by and fought for Deokman when basically everyone in the country was out to kill her - his quiet, determined devotion to her, really won me over.
So, again as you can imagine, I was fairly surprised when about twenty episodes later, I found myself fervently wanting to punch Yushin in the mouth until all his teeth fell out and feeling an overpowering need to hug Bidam.
To permit myself a Star Wars reference for a moment, I'm still not convinced that Anakin Skywalker ever needed to be the kind of character George Lucas clearly intended him to be, but if he had to be, I wish I could travel back in time, kidnap him, and force him to watch Bidam's arc before insisting he rewrite the entire prequel trilogy with that in mind. Bidam is a wounded child, possessed of enormous skill and bravery, fierce, irrational, immoral loyalty, and a violent fear of being discovered to be a monster and abandoned that nothing and no one can assuage. I think it's the honesty of the show I find refreshing. He has wonderful points and awful ones, and ultimately he causes his own downfall, and everyone tells him so. At the end, someone asks Deokman, isn't it better? Knowing he was tricked? That he didn't really mean those awful, hurtful things he said? And she asks why it would be better to know that a lifetime of trust is such a fragile thing, so easily destroyed by one lie that plays to his insecurities, no matter how awful or clever the lie might have been? For Bidam, the question was never, "do I trust her?" but "when will she stop trusting me?" I feel so much more for him, and for the reasons he ended up this way, because I never felt the show demanded it of me. Because I was supposed to hate him at the same time he was supposed to be breaking my damn heart.
On the other hand we have my changing reaction to Yushin. When Deokman was a soldier under his command, or a fugitive, she was the recipient of the immovable, inflexible morality of protecting those for whom he was responsible. He was brave, and sincere and loyal and it made me love him. And once she became his leader, that sincere loyalty never, ever wavered. But their relationship changed irrevocably because now he was responsible to her but not for her, and she became the one who had to deal with his inflexibility and insistence on self-sacrifice.
"If you do this," he tells her, when she tells him that she will claim the throne, "if you do this, I will support you every step of the way, but things will never be the same between us again, because I will have to think of you as my ruler, and you will have to think of me as a pawn." And I scoffed and thought to myself, yes, yes, that old chestnut to rack up the romantic tension. And then the series proceeded to fucking demonstrate to me why that was true. Not with some cheap, "oh no, I must send him into danger and not play favourites!" plotline, but rather with the way he will not ever put himself first. That he won't take the pragmatic choice that won't force Deokman, as a human, to lose Yushin, her friend, because it's more important that Yushin, as a commander, not lose the support of his followers, even when they're being dicks, because if he does, he can't serve Deokman, his Queen, nor can he, in future, protect those who follow him, having set the precedent of giving them up for political expedience.
The worst part is that he's often partially right, but it dumps the problem further up the line, because Deokman, the Queen, can't afford to lose Yushin, the commander, and the support of the political factions who are loyal to him. He has the option to stick by them and stand his ground and say that he is the one who should be held responsible for their conduct - Yushin can define himself against his ruler and align himself with his followers, even if his intent is simply keeping them in line. Deokman can't align herself against anyone internally because they're all her people and that would make her a tyrant. Yushin knows it too. He warns her, before she embarks on her journey, not to be too grateful that he's chosen to support her. He'll always be asking her for impossible favours; he'll never have enough to offer in return. He knows, because she was always doing it to him, never quite understanding the ramifications of her requests.
There's a love triangle going on here, but it's sewn into discussions of honour, power, diplomacy and the impossibility of being both an individual and representative of a wider institution. In the latter chapters of the saga, both Yushin and Bidam contend with political factions who both support them and demand from them things they cannot deliver. Both characters turned out to be much more complicated than I was expecting when I first met them. I feel I can't really ask for more than that.
And I STILL have more, like about Chunchu (and argh, the fact they weren't clear about the passage of time in the middle episodes thus leading to the accidental impression they soap opera aged him is one of the few straight-up criticisms of this show I have), and his developing mentor/student relationship with his aunt that doesn't quite alleviate my (or her) moral concerns about his attitude. Or about the way the final ten episodes left me feeling far more uneasy than I wanted, but the sneaking suspicion I have that the show's meditation on institutional power, and indeed the show's characterisation of Deokman as a leader, wouldn't be nearly as nuanced or complete without them, even if I desperately missed the opportunity to watch Women Do Politics at each other every other scene. And the way they didn't fuck up the Sohwa and Chilsuk story. And the pitch of the final scene, where Deokman contextualises her life and choices, not to her love interest, not even to her rival, but to herself.
"Your life will be difficult," is what she would say to her younger self. "But," she would say. "Endure it."
Not, "I wouldn't change it for the world," not "run far away and never look back," just the words the soldiers say to each other, to inspire them to get up one more time, even when their limbs are bruised and broken, because it's important to keep trying.
Damn, but I loved this show.
Apparently it was a total ratings juggernaut, which is just awesome.
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no subject
Date: 2012-06-21 08:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-22 09:23 am (UTC)Hope you enjoy it if you get around to watching!
no subject
Date: 2012-06-21 10:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-21 10:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-21 10:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-22 09:49 am (UTC)I approve of your delay being to watch a different show about ladies with institutional power in a language other than English. Let me know what that one's like. I think it aired over here at some point - I remember seeing some ads for it? But not on a main channel, alas. :( It does sound interesting too, but not being in SPACE I'd probably need to hassle you for spoilars about its awesome before running off to devour it. <3
I really wish I knew more than the tiny bit I know about Korean culture and women within it because I'd love to know what people thought of the show, from a gender perspective, over there? The last thing I want to do is be insulting to a culture I am really not overly familiar with, but when I was living there, while it's by no means a quagmire of virulent oppression, I would certainly say that my experience and observations were of a culture that was more externally and obviously sexist than ours, at least by the standards I'm familiar with - cus clearly there are cultural variations and assumptions at play here. Again, language was a barrier to any real deep observation but what I saw of the media there, but again, (and like our media), a lot of the female roles seemed relegated to supporting or romance interests or leads in romantic comedies, that type of thing. It also has the same "impossible body photoshopping" problem in its advertising and on its magazine covers as we do.
Though having said this, it's also the country that produced Duellist, which is a fabulous movie with a great female protagonist.
So I imagine, that, like here, the forces of sexism mean that this sort of stuff is unusual but happens sometimes. But I really have no idea and I'd dearly love to know how it was received - whether the treatment of women in the narrative was something that received any attention, whether it was successful in the ratings because of that, in spite of that or utterly incidentally to that, you know?
SO MANY QUESTIONS.
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Date: 2012-06-21 10:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-22 09:50 am (UTC)If you have the time to watch (and seriously NO TIMETABLE because it's soooo long!) then you totally need to let me know what you think - even if you don't think it's as awesome as I do, I needs people to discuss it with, precious! :D
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Date: 2012-06-22 01:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-22 09:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-22 01:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-22 09:52 am (UTC)Also, the live tweets may have, um, given you hilarious impressions of this show. I'm not sure whether I should confirm them or reassure you that it's super serious. I think I'ma go with, I STAND BY EVERYTHING I TWEETED. But context might be for the weak... :p
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Date: 2012-06-22 03:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-22 03:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-22 09:54 am (UTC)As I said above, it does start kinda slowly, but if you give it a shot, I really recommend sticking with it, it does nothing but improve and complexify and just...aaaaah when was the last time I watched a show where I felt it was deliberately allowing space for ambiguity of intent and motivation, without judgement. ANCIENT KOREAN QUEEN OF MY HEART. *flails*
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Date: 2012-06-22 06:12 am (UTC)Do you happen to have a preference/rec for the subtitles?
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Date: 2012-06-22 10:28 am (UTC)And I'm always happy to talk at people who find spoilers a relief (as I do!) rather than offputting. If you do start watching it and find you need a spoiler-canary, feel free to ask me anything. One of the things I noticed about the show as I was watching was that at times I'd be like, almost expecting certain plotlines to misstep? And do something icky? But then, they'd always...not do that and instead be careful to leave space and ambiguity.
For instance, there's this one subplot where there's this royal maid and this, well I guess knight is the best word. And he's trying to kill her (ORDERS), a very, very long way from home, but there's a sandstorm in the desert and he actually ends up saving her life, but the psychological effects of a bunch of recent events plus her health issues have left her mentally traumatised and she's basically zoned out and in a stupor, and this knight ends up taking care of her for years and finally getting her back home and he's fallen completely, sincerely, and totally creepily in love with her. And then the maid gets her faculties back and starts to recover, and I was like, fuck, are they going to try and make this romantic? Nooooooo! But they...didn't. Their interactions, their storyarc, is thematically Romantic and emotionally complex, but it's not a love story. In some ways it's the way what the maid seems to want is to just leave him behind and forget him that's most powerful; the opposite of love is indifference, or in this case, perhaps, ambivalence. But as you can imagine, I spent most of that subplot waiting for it to get screwed up - I was so surprised when it didn't.
Though I guess it's probably also the sort of subplot that makes me glad I didn't watch this along with fandom, who, I imagine, would have turned the two into some epic, doomed 'ship... ;)
As to subtitles, I don't really know. I can't watch it on Hulu as I'm outside the US, so I watched the version with fansubs (which I think are the main fansub for it that's kicking around on the net), and I found them absolutely fine. I will say that my tiny knowledge of Korean honourifics did help. The fansubs don't always translate things like the titles they have for "Big Sister" or "Mister" or what have you, so I was lucky those didn't trip me up. But a ten second google search would have cleared it up if you didn't know. I also enjoyed the way the subtitle team seemed to be trying really hard to evoke a sense of archaic speech, so you do have words like "obloquy" and "inveigle" all over the place, but I felt that added to the atmosphere. Occasionally there's a tonal slip up where suddenly the speech seems more casual - "They have been our ancestral ancestors for generations and that's a really big deal!" - that was unintentionally humorous, but only mildly and honestly they were rare enough I enjoyed them when they came up.
I've got the DVDs on order so it'll be interesting to see how the subs measure up. I've heard sometimes fan subtitles are actually better than official ones, so I may have to make myself some custom discs...
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Date: 2012-06-28 02:22 am (UTC)And I think I will go with the fansubs then, but you'll let me know if you end up strongly preferring the official ones? But yeah, I generally hear that fansubs tend to be better. I am just obsessive about translations and have had some very bad experiences with subs.
And yay, I see that Netflix has it! I will have to figure out which subs it uses.
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Date: 2012-06-29 05:51 pm (UTC)In particular (oh here I go gushing again!), I love Deokman's respect for Mishil's desire to rule the nation. She opposes it, because she thinks Mishil's leadership is extraordinary, but ultimately harmful to the people because it is based on accumulating power to the nobility, and Deokman believes undercutting the peasant classes will eventually create an impoverished and unstable nation unable to defend itself or advance socially. But she never stoops to dismissing her as a pretender because she "stole" what was rightfully hers by grace of blood or lineage. Blood and lineage are simply unique tools she has at her disposal that make her the best choice to oppose Mishil. She explains, at one point, to her nephew, that really, Mishil's psychological claim to the throne, because she has been its defacto leader for years, whatever they may think of her actions, is just as valid as her own, or his. She simply chooses to oppose it. Because she believes she can do a better job. GAAAAAAAAAH. I heart them allllll.
Um, anyway, right! Subtitles! I actually got my DVD boxsets the other day! I've had to surrender them until my birthday, but I did check that they all worked and sneakily rewatched a few of my favourite episodes with the subtitles. Honestly, they were really pretty good! I'm actually hardpressed to say which I prefer, and also this is based on a somewhat erratic sample size, but basically both versions occasionally suffer from humorous bad word choice, but by and large do a good job of translating both the tone and emotion of what's being said. The fansubs seem to focus more on technical accuracy sometimes to the point of being grammatically awkward or a little surreal, while the official subs sometimes fudge the lines a bit in order to get the point across to a native English speaker, but there were no lines where I felt that the subtitles diverged wildly in their meanings. In general, I actually think I would probably recommend the official sub to a new watcher because it flows better and has - overall - fewer awkward moments without sacrificing accuracy. Although there were occasional lines where the slightly offbeat specificity of the fansub was really striking and I was sad to lose it. I also enjoyed the fansub's use of the correct Korean honourifics rather than (at times vague) approximations.
But I know that you're invested in technical accuracy and the fansub is pretty great too - as I said, it's how I fell in love with it, and I haven't watched the whole thing with official subs yet.
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Date: 2012-06-22 06:18 am (UTC)I also see a ton of vids on DramaFever (which supplys most of HULU with Kdrama- but there are tons more at the DF webstie) You might already know about this already.
Anyway, Yay!! I love seeing people talk about Kdrama. :)
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Date: 2012-06-22 06:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-22 10:35 am (UTC)I don't watch much Kdrama though I've seen a little and have a small collection of Kmovies that I think are great.
I do know about DramaFever - unfortunately they still haven't really launched in the UK where I am (though they say they're going to soon), same as Hulu not letting me stream. :(
Also HI! :) Friends are always welcome - I'm sorry the vid train has been so PAINFULLY slow this year. I've made, what, two? It's freaking ridiculous. I think because I got caught up in comics and sadly a lot of the shows I was watching either stopped or I stopped liking so much so I was a bit short on inspiration. I have plans to vid QSD though! But I need to wait for my DVDs which I'm not getting til my birthday in a few monhts. *shakes fist*
Anyway, Kdramas, yay! :D
Spelling mistakes! Yay! :D (Seriously, who cares about spelling mistakes!)
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Date: 2012-06-23 07:53 am (UTC)I had no idea that DramaFever wasn't available in the UK. Sorry, that is crappy. :(
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Date: 2012-06-22 10:33 am (UTC)*despairs over time*
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Date: 2012-06-22 10:36 am (UTC)Seriously, though, it is super long. On the one hand, it makes it super epic, on the other, I feel sort of guilty reccing it to people!
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Date: 2012-06-22 01:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-24 10:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-24 05:31 am (UTC)Great Queen Seondeok is, btw, up on Netflix for streaming. It's 62 hours, so it's looks like the whole show is there. I did find out recently when I watched a Chinese made film that you stream though a device like a Blu-ray player, you might not get subtitles. Streaming through a computer should always work.
The Chinese movie was Detective Dee & Mystery of Phantom Flame. Enjoyable, though far from perfect. I bring it up because two of the one of the main characters is the historical figure Empress Wu and another is her right hand, Jing'er, a kick ass woman of many talents. The central character is, of course, Detective De. So while the women are very competent, complex character never vilified as pure evil, there's sort of an element of the legendary man pointing out where they are misguide. Eh. Props for putting sidekicks of both genders in equal peril, though.
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Date: 2012-06-24 10:42 am (UTC)I think being in Britain strikes again though, because I have a Netflix account, but the show definitely isn't available to me through their website, which is likely because they don't have a license to show it in the UK. I know that Hulu basically sublet a bunch of asian dramas from DramaFever - a legal streaming service specifically for Asian language drama - and DramaFever hasn't launched in the UK yet, so maybe Netflix has a similar agreement which is why their UK branch doesn't have it yet? In any event, that's frustrating, but nice to know that it's fairly widely available in the US at least.
That movie sounds neat, though. I'll add it to my list! Though once again, it's not available on Netflix... GRR!