Life, the universe, and everything in Heesu In Class 2 as an extended metaphor… WHAT'S NOT TO LIKE, REALLY???
"We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share. This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity." (The Alchemist, Paolo Coelho)
It gives the drama real dimension, some poetry if you will. I personally adore contrast and balance in storytelling, and what could be more contrasted than (seemingly) silly emotional high schoolers struggling to form new connections while trying to maintain old ones, and (seemingly) inanimate floating rocks suspended in the far-away unchanging sky? How do you reconciliate Small, Finite, Grounded reality of day-to-day life, with Immense, Infinite, Unreachable things? The drama, one episode after another, tells us: well actually, they're not so different…?
Sometimes, that's what distinguishes "okay" writing from GOOD writing. Just as an example:
There's simply having Hee-su being dejected about Chan-young liking Ji-yu (while Seung-won actually pines for him)
and there's Hee-su feeling like he's suddenly and arbitrarily excluded from Chan-young's solar system, blind to the fact that he has his own Pluto (Seung-won) orbiting around him
I suppose the result is the same, but the meaning is delivered with more nuance—no plain flat colors, but shadows, gradients, and interesting hues.
The cosmos is infinite, and impossible to apprehend in its entirety: Hee-su, similarly, has trouble seeing "the big picture" through his own limited world view, and remains firmly locked in a bubble of his own making—trying and failing to manipulate his environment to fit his desires.
When things don't work out for him, he ends up feeling like a sad insignificant star, rotating around his sun, Chan-young, but slowly comes to realize he's not defined by it. The cosmic metaphor is extended to every other character; they're all the center of their own story, even if they have side-story/background qualities (Hee-su's sisters, the lesbian student, the girl threatening to out Hee-su, the girl who is crushing on Hee-su, or Ho-sik and his newfound knitting hobby…), they're their own a star, with their own complex goals and wants, gravitating away and towards each other.
Hee-su's coming of age journey has him understand we're all the center of our own solar system, orbiting around each other and pulling in others, before they orbit around us in turn, each with our own trajectories, in the grand scheme of things.
Space, or the universe at large, only seems uncomplicated and untangled (every shiny dot apparently fixed in the sky, nicely spaced away from one another) because we see it from afar. Anything from up-close reveals a whole other kind of complex web.
Stars die, feelings get crushed, asteroids crash, people fall in love. Stars are reborn, hearts change, we're all made of stardust etc, etc, etc,
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