straightforwardly (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
straightforwardly) wrote2017-09-17 08:00 pm
straightforwardly) wrote2017-09-17 08:00 pm
Entry tags:
161 | finishing Arang & the Magistrate
I, uh, kind of ended up marathoning the rest of Arang & the Magistrate this weekend? Oops? First: wow. Just, wow. I loved this series. It isn’t perfect—and I had some serious problems with the ending which I’ll get into at the end of this post—but overall? It was great. I loved Arang and Eun-oh so much. I loved their character arcs. I loved their romance. Both of those confessions (Eun-oh’s to Arang, and Arang’s to Eun-oh) just about made my heart stop. And the first time they kissed, after her confession? Ahhhh. I definitely ship it hard.
Eun-oh’s character arc in particular really got me. The journey from someone who doesn’t care to someone who ends up fighting for others—and not just people he happens to love—with all he has is something that would’ve been easy to mess up, but it came about so naturally here. I think he was the one who said it best himself, when he said that first he only saw his own pain, and then he found himself starting to see the pain of the people he loved, and then he began to see the pain of the broader world.
I also loved how Arang’s quest for the “truth” developed and changed, and her relationship with her past self. How at first she just wanted to know how she died, and how frustrated she was with Seol-im when she finally saw her body, to her growing need to learn how Seol-im lived, and how her quest to find out the truth about her death tied in with that. I loved that moment near the end where she goes to Seol-im’s grave and tells her, “I love you, Seol-im.” There’s just so many layers there. Especially considering how she treats herself and Seol-im like they're different people. (And—I think I might’ve touch on this already a bit in my last entry, I actually do agree with that. They’re not the same person, even if they are the same soul.)
The growing parallels between her and Mu-yeon as the series went on were pretty interesting too.
On a lighter note, I also really enjoyed the three stooges’ redemption. (I have no idea what their names are.) And their eventual friendship with Dol-sue, considering how antagonistic their interactions were for most of the series… ♥
Joo-wal...I have so many complicated thoughts about him. I do still think that his killing those women isn’t forgivable. But… as the series went on, I started pitying him more and more. He’s just… such a pathetic coward? And the reveal that, while he knew he’d killed people, he didn’t actually remember committing those memories—that he couldn’t live with the guilt, and begged Mu-yeon to take the memories away from him—yeah, that won some sympathy from me too.
And when I realized that he didn’t actually remember killing Arang after she got her human body back—wow. That cast all of his interactions with her throughout the series in a totally different light. And it cast him in a different light too. Still a killer, of course. But first being a starving orphan, and then growing up under Mu-yeon—it was incredibly abusive, how she treated him, but she was also the only one who ever showed him anything close to affection before Arang. He’s an incredibly weak person, yes, but I can see how he made the choices he did, and I feel bad for him. Pity really is the right word. He’s pitiful.
I wasn’t surprised when he killed himself, though I was hoping he wouldn’t. But he just wasn’t the kind of person who could live with the things he’d done, and there is some serious nightmare fuel in that whole “he keeps getting back terrible memories, and has no idea how many of them there are or what he’ll remember next”. And it did break my heart that that one servant (again, not sure of the names—so many of the side characters blended together for me), the one who cared so much for him, had just wished him a long, happy life. I hope he never found out what happened to him.
But I did love that Joo-wal became a reaper in the end. When I saw him standing there—I was relieved. It felt right. Better than him being reborn, or sent to hell, it gives him a chance to make up for what he’s done, and maybe actually heal in a kinder environment.
Speaking of reapers… I think I should talk about Mu-yeong (or Mu-young? I’m not sure which name is right; basically, the reaper I was gushing over in my last entry) and Mu-yeon. I had about zero sympathy for the current-day Mu-yeon, after everything she’d done, but I have to admit, after learning about how this all started… I do feel sympathy for young!Mu-yeon. Empathy, actually; if you push aside the specifically love-motivated bits, I ended up seeing a lot of myself in her younger self.
Also, I didn’t see that lovers-siblings twist coming (that is, that she & Mu-yeong had been tragic lovers in their first life, and only siblings in their second, before coming to heaven), but it immediately made me 100% more invested in their relationship. (Predictable? Me?) I’m especially fascinated by the implication that Mu-yeong didn’t remember their first life together—but Mu-yeon did, even when they were alive as siblings. I’m not sure if I ship them, precisely, but something about the tenor of those interactions fascinate me.
(And, on a shallow note, they look very pretty together when they’re in heaven together with her in her fairy-form and him as a reaper.)
(Also: I think I was right about Mu-young seeing his sister in Arang...but that’s not quite the impediment to shipping as I thought, haha. Though, at this point, I think I could only ship those two in an early series canon-divergence—definitely not after Eun-oh and Arang started getting closer)
(Also: this is stupid, but the wig that the actress for current-day!Mu-yeon was so obviously a wig, and it was really distracting. There were parts where I could see her real hair [which was a different color] underneath, and—I am definitely not a person who notices when an actor wears a wig; in fact, I think this is the first time I’ve ever watched something and realized they were wearing a wig, but it drove me crazy. Agh.)
I’m also fascinated by how their story ended, and how differently they saw the world. Mu-yeong saw himself as saving her from a worse fate; she saw him as dooming her to the worst fate of all. I think I actually agree with Mu-yeon there—I’d rather suffer in hell than not exist at all. I didn’t actually expect Mu-yeong to take himself down with her, but I also wasn’t surprised? That is, the moment he revealed that that was what he’d planned, I realized that it made perfect sense for him to do that.
That being said, I was delighted when I saw, at the end, that the Jade Emperor had bent the rules and reincarnated Mu-yeong as a goat, just for his death god counterpart (Yeom La? I’m not sure that’s right, but I’m going to call him that for clarity’s sake). It was really sweet how Yeom La actually didn’t mind the rule-breaking, for the first time in the entire series. ♥ In fact, I found how much he cared about his reapers in general really touching. When, earlier in the series, he got so upset about Mu-yeon killing off his reapers…♥ ♥ ♥ It was super-sweet, and was right up there with Joo-wal’s appearance as a reaper with my favorite things about the ending.
AND it looks like I’m talking about the ending now? So let’s first go through the other things that I liked or at least worked for me.
Choi saying that the afterlife is unjust/unfair might’ve been a bit too on the nose...but I don’t care, because seeing someone who stomped on those weaker than him his whole life see how it is when he's the one being stomped on was incredibly satisfying.
I still don’t ship Dol-sue/Bang-wool, but mostly I wanted them to be happy, and them being together did result in more of Them Being Happy, so I decided to accept that as a necessary evil. I do love that Bang-wool finally had a total awakening of her sixth sense, and all the pork that she could ever want to eat. ♥ (Which—on that note, A+ courting technique, Dol-sue. I approve.)
Dol-sue becoming the magistrate was pretty well foreshadowed, and was one of my two favorite options for magistrate-related ending possibilities, so I was pretty happy with that. (My other favorite, by the way, was Eun-oh continuing to be magistrate, and he and Arang working together to help both the living and the dead. <3)
SPEAKING OF WHICH. THOSE LAST 2-5 MINUTES OF THE LAST EPISODE. UGH. UGH UGH UGH UGH. I had an “oh no” moment when I saw those kids, but that was because of my general distaste with characters having children; I didn’t realize at first what had happened. And then. AND THEN.
Okay, apparently kdramas really seem to like “reincarnation as a happy ending”, and. No. That’s not a happy ending. I do find reincarnation a fascinating concept, but I also firmly believe that a reincarnated person is not the same person. They can’t be. They had a different family, a different childhood, a different life. They didn’t have the same experiences to shape them. There might be some similarities, but that’s it.
I can’t figure out if Arang remembering is better or worse. Better, because at least one of them remembers/is the same person—but worse, because the person she loved is technically gone forever. I know that they meant for this to be a parallel to the beginning of the series, when Eun-oh knew his own life and Arang didn’t, but it made for some fridge horror instead.
It kind of reminded me of why I hated—well, almost everything about Goblin’s ending, but specifically the part with Reaper and Sunny. I remember I had this strange feeling while I was watching their reincarnated selves laughing together—like I was looking at strangers who just happened to look like the characters I’d loved. That’s what Eun-oh made me feel like there. That wasn’t him—it was someone who looked like him.
And this drama was doing so well with this concept, with how it handled the difference between Arang and Seol-im! I don’t know how they could handle that with such deftness, and then… drop the ball so hard there.
But even if they both remembered—I still don’t think it’s happy. What about all the other people who cared about them? Eun-oh, especially. What about his dad? He cared so much. How is he going to feel about his son disappearing? And Bang-wool. She basically performed a ritual, and then… had to see these two people, at least one of whom had been a friend of sorts, just… vanish right in front of her eyes and never return? You think that’s not going to scarring for her?
Plus, her and Dol-sue being the reincarnated Eun-oh’s parents... was kind of creepy. Especially since, you know, he grows up looking exactly like he did in his past life? Do you really think they’re not going to notice? So creepy.
Basically: Nope. Nope, I’m not doing this. The Jade Emperor set them back on earth with their mortal, adult bodies not long after their “disappearance”, and they got to live out their lives happily and healing together as Arang and Kim Eun-oh, and no one is going to tell me otherwise. I refuse. It hurts too much otherwise.
I actually finished this before Trick or Treat sign-ups ended, to my surprise. Now I have about 22 hours to decide whether I actually want to last-minute-add this fandom to my sign-up (meaning that I’d need to add another section to my letter), or if I’ll just wait until Yuletide. Decisions, decisions.
Eun-oh’s character arc in particular really got me. The journey from someone who doesn’t care to someone who ends up fighting for others—and not just people he happens to love—with all he has is something that would’ve been easy to mess up, but it came about so naturally here. I think he was the one who said it best himself, when he said that first he only saw his own pain, and then he found himself starting to see the pain of the people he loved, and then he began to see the pain of the broader world.
I also loved how Arang’s quest for the “truth” developed and changed, and her relationship with her past self. How at first she just wanted to know how she died, and how frustrated she was with Seol-im when she finally saw her body, to her growing need to learn how Seol-im lived, and how her quest to find out the truth about her death tied in with that. I loved that moment near the end where she goes to Seol-im’s grave and tells her, “I love you, Seol-im.” There’s just so many layers there. Especially considering how she treats herself and Seol-im like they're different people. (And—I think I might’ve touch on this already a bit in my last entry, I actually do agree with that. They’re not the same person, even if they are the same soul.)
The growing parallels between her and Mu-yeon as the series went on were pretty interesting too.
On a lighter note, I also really enjoyed the three stooges’ redemption. (I have no idea what their names are.) And their eventual friendship with Dol-sue, considering how antagonistic their interactions were for most of the series… ♥
Joo-wal...I have so many complicated thoughts about him. I do still think that his killing those women isn’t forgivable. But… as the series went on, I started pitying him more and more. He’s just… such a pathetic coward? And the reveal that, while he knew he’d killed people, he didn’t actually remember committing those memories—that he couldn’t live with the guilt, and begged Mu-yeon to take the memories away from him—yeah, that won some sympathy from me too.
And when I realized that he didn’t actually remember killing Arang after she got her human body back—wow. That cast all of his interactions with her throughout the series in a totally different light. And it cast him in a different light too. Still a killer, of course. But first being a starving orphan, and then growing up under Mu-yeon—it was incredibly abusive, how she treated him, but she was also the only one who ever showed him anything close to affection before Arang. He’s an incredibly weak person, yes, but I can see how he made the choices he did, and I feel bad for him. Pity really is the right word. He’s pitiful.
I wasn’t surprised when he killed himself, though I was hoping he wouldn’t. But he just wasn’t the kind of person who could live with the things he’d done, and there is some serious nightmare fuel in that whole “he keeps getting back terrible memories, and has no idea how many of them there are or what he’ll remember next”. And it did break my heart that that one servant (again, not sure of the names—so many of the side characters blended together for me), the one who cared so much for him, had just wished him a long, happy life. I hope he never found out what happened to him.
But I did love that Joo-wal became a reaper in the end. When I saw him standing there—I was relieved. It felt right. Better than him being reborn, or sent to hell, it gives him a chance to make up for what he’s done, and maybe actually heal in a kinder environment.
Speaking of reapers… I think I should talk about Mu-yeong (or Mu-young? I’m not sure which name is right; basically, the reaper I was gushing over in my last entry) and Mu-yeon. I had about zero sympathy for the current-day Mu-yeon, after everything she’d done, but I have to admit, after learning about how this all started… I do feel sympathy for young!Mu-yeon. Empathy, actually; if you push aside the specifically love-motivated bits, I ended up seeing a lot of myself in her younger self.
Also, I didn’t see that lovers-siblings twist coming (that is, that she & Mu-yeong had been tragic lovers in their first life, and only siblings in their second, before coming to heaven), but it immediately made me 100% more invested in their relationship. (Predictable? Me?) I’m especially fascinated by the implication that Mu-yeong didn’t remember their first life together—but Mu-yeon did, even when they were alive as siblings. I’m not sure if I ship them, precisely, but something about the tenor of those interactions fascinate me.
(And, on a shallow note, they look very pretty together when they’re in heaven together with her in her fairy-form and him as a reaper.)
(Also: I think I was right about Mu-young seeing his sister in Arang...but that’s not quite the impediment to shipping as I thought, haha. Though, at this point, I think I could only ship those two in an early series canon-divergence—definitely not after Eun-oh and Arang started getting closer)
(Also: this is stupid, but the wig that the actress for current-day!Mu-yeon was so obviously a wig, and it was really distracting. There were parts where I could see her real hair [which was a different color] underneath, and—I am definitely not a person who notices when an actor wears a wig; in fact, I think this is the first time I’ve ever watched something and realized they were wearing a wig, but it drove me crazy. Agh.)
I’m also fascinated by how their story ended, and how differently they saw the world. Mu-yeong saw himself as saving her from a worse fate; she saw him as dooming her to the worst fate of all. I think I actually agree with Mu-yeon there—I’d rather suffer in hell than not exist at all. I didn’t actually expect Mu-yeong to take himself down with her, but I also wasn’t surprised? That is, the moment he revealed that that was what he’d planned, I realized that it made perfect sense for him to do that.
That being said, I was delighted when I saw, at the end, that the Jade Emperor had bent the rules and reincarnated Mu-yeong as a goat, just for his death god counterpart (Yeom La? I’m not sure that’s right, but I’m going to call him that for clarity’s sake). It was really sweet how Yeom La actually didn’t mind the rule-breaking, for the first time in the entire series. ♥ In fact, I found how much he cared about his reapers in general really touching. When, earlier in the series, he got so upset about Mu-yeon killing off his reapers…♥ ♥ ♥ It was super-sweet, and was right up there with Joo-wal’s appearance as a reaper with my favorite things about the ending.
AND it looks like I’m talking about the ending now? So let’s first go through the other things that I liked or at least worked for me.
Choi saying that the afterlife is unjust/unfair might’ve been a bit too on the nose...but I don’t care, because seeing someone who stomped on those weaker than him his whole life see how it is when he's the one being stomped on was incredibly satisfying.
I still don’t ship Dol-sue/Bang-wool, but mostly I wanted them to be happy, and them being together did result in more of Them Being Happy, so I decided to accept that as a necessary evil. I do love that Bang-wool finally had a total awakening of her sixth sense, and all the pork that she could ever want to eat. ♥ (Which—on that note, A+ courting technique, Dol-sue. I approve.)
Dol-sue becoming the magistrate was pretty well foreshadowed, and was one of my two favorite options for magistrate-related ending possibilities, so I was pretty happy with that. (My other favorite, by the way, was Eun-oh continuing to be magistrate, and he and Arang working together to help both the living and the dead. <3)
SPEAKING OF WHICH. THOSE LAST 2-5 MINUTES OF THE LAST EPISODE. UGH. UGH UGH UGH UGH. I had an “oh no” moment when I saw those kids, but that was because of my general distaste with characters having children; I didn’t realize at first what had happened. And then. AND THEN.
Okay, apparently kdramas really seem to like “reincarnation as a happy ending”, and. No. That’s not a happy ending. I do find reincarnation a fascinating concept, but I also firmly believe that a reincarnated person is not the same person. They can’t be. They had a different family, a different childhood, a different life. They didn’t have the same experiences to shape them. There might be some similarities, but that’s it.
I can’t figure out if Arang remembering is better or worse. Better, because at least one of them remembers/is the same person—but worse, because the person she loved is technically gone forever. I know that they meant for this to be a parallel to the beginning of the series, when Eun-oh knew his own life and Arang didn’t, but it made for some fridge horror instead.
It kind of reminded me of why I hated—well, almost everything about Goblin’s ending, but specifically the part with Reaper and Sunny. I remember I had this strange feeling while I was watching their reincarnated selves laughing together—like I was looking at strangers who just happened to look like the characters I’d loved. That’s what Eun-oh made me feel like there. That wasn’t him—it was someone who looked like him.
And this drama was doing so well with this concept, with how it handled the difference between Arang and Seol-im! I don’t know how they could handle that with such deftness, and then… drop the ball so hard there.
But even if they both remembered—I still don’t think it’s happy. What about all the other people who cared about them? Eun-oh, especially. What about his dad? He cared so much. How is he going to feel about his son disappearing? And Bang-wool. She basically performed a ritual, and then… had to see these two people, at least one of whom had been a friend of sorts, just… vanish right in front of her eyes and never return? You think that’s not going to scarring for her?
Plus, her and Dol-sue being the reincarnated Eun-oh’s parents... was kind of creepy. Especially since, you know, he grows up looking exactly like he did in his past life? Do you really think they’re not going to notice? So creepy.
Basically: Nope. Nope, I’m not doing this. The Jade Emperor set them back on earth with their mortal, adult bodies not long after their “disappearance”, and they got to live out their lives happily and healing together as Arang and Kim Eun-oh, and no one is going to tell me otherwise. I refuse. It hurts too much otherwise.
I actually finished this before Trick or Treat sign-ups ended, to my surprise. Now I have about 22 hours to decide whether I actually want to last-minute-add this fandom to my sign-up (meaning that I’d need to add another section to my letter), or if I’ll just wait until Yuletide. Decisions, decisions.