chaehwa high archives

posting too much about friendly rivalry

[chaehwa-archives]

Hello and welcome to my blog <3 Right now this is mainly the place where I rant about Korean GL series Friendly Rivalry, but it might replace my old all-purpose GL blog in the future. I also make fan music videos sometimes.

You can visit my old (currently inactive) blog here.

Unhinged Friendly Rivalry Posting Archive

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 1

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 2

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 3

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 4

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 5

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 6

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 7

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 8

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 9

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 10

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 11

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 12

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 13

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 14

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 15

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 16

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 17

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 18

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 19

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 20

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 21

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 22

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 23

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 24

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 25

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 26

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 27

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 28

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 29

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 30

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 31

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 32

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 33

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 34

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 35

friendly rivalry deep dive epilogue

bridges and stairs: directional movement in friendly rivalry

blu-ray group commentary pt 1

blu-ray group commentary pt 2

blu-ray group commentary pt 3

blu-ray group commentary pt 4

blu-ray group commentary pt 5

blu-ray group commentary pt 6

FMV Archive

rivalry or revolution? [revolutionary girl utena amv]

decision to leave [friendly rivalry fmv]

love & vengeance [friendly rivalry fmv]

my seul-gi [friendly rivalry fmv]

dance [friendly rivalry fmv]

yoo jae-yi || escape!! [friendly rivalry fmv]

jae-yi x seul-gi || be sweet [friendly rivalry fmv]

jae-yi x seul-gi || futile devices [friendly rivalry fmv]

jae-yi x seul-gi || honey water [friendly rivalry fmv]

jae-yi x seulgi || lipstick on the glass [friendly rivalry fmv]

jae-yi x seul-gi || when our hearts beat at the same pace [friendly rivalry fmv]

choi kyung x ju ye-ri || just two girls [friendly rivalry fmv]

[ceceredux]

Is Jae-yi's evil dad a crank doctor? Musings on God, Gut Health, and Gay Soda

Happy Pride everyone!! (for like another hour in some timezones, shhh it still counts) And hey, it's a World Cup Summer, where we get to watch elite competition bring out transcendent human spirit in unpredictable ways even as it's all orchestrated by corrupt rent-seeking institutions who only value rivalry for the profit they can extract from it and the abuse they can sanctify with it! So that means there's no better time to vomit more words onto the internet about Friendly Rivalry <3

And wouldn't you know it, this time I actually have some beautiful and profound thoughts about the lesbians from the lesbian show about lesbians that lmaooo just kidding, I'm stuck on this loser-ass Tae-jun line to Jae-yi in episode 11:

It's one of the fakest confrontations these two ever have, for sure — he's at such an enormous advantage in this moment that he could be saying anything, and he's absolutely making that point to her by choosing words this inane and perfunctory. But even so this specific line fascinates me, because bro what?? The big Tae-jun contrast is usually between the hyper-competent surgeon and the abusive monster hiding in plain sight, but in moments like this... is it just me or does the show also keep lowkey calling him a crank doctor whenever he's not literally in the operating room?

Ok so hear me out: "You'll catch a cold from being out in the rain" is really common thing to say but it's not true, it's a classic case of correlation mistaken for causation. It's the rain and/or cold trapping you inside where all the people breathing at you are that makes you sick, which of course is a lot more front of mind for all of us in the real world 2020s (wait did COVID happen in the FRverse?? I think the timeline benchmarks we get make it just barely impossible to tell either way). Now, for your average person just running on intuition it's a reasonable mistake, but Tae-jun's whole thing is Trusted Medical Professional. Surely he doesn't actually believe it. Surely this is just another part of the game, where Jae-yi knows it's bullshit and so does he. Surely the master surgeon is not a huge dumbass about how viruses spread. Could he really come through the system that purports to demand perfect demonstration of knowledge all the way up the ladder and still carry an elementary misconception about how human bodies work?

I'd argue absolutely! We know for one thing about his religion, and the show does not pretend to have kind things to say about it. Tae-jun's very first appearance in Seul-gi's metanarration is played for absurdity, even if it quickly segues into what will become his familiar menace; we're meant to understand from his superstition and the way he railroads the needs of others to accommodate it that Tae-jun is a fundamentally unserious man, who is dangerous precisely because he has the power to make his religious hangups everyone else's business. And the subsequent scenes of his abuse of his daughters, while much more chilling, retain a heightened extremity to them, with his twisted inversion of the tale of Cain and Abel being so flagrantly sinister and self-serving that it immediately signals that he's willing to twist any narrative any way he requires to facilitate his abuse. It's made clear from the start that Tae-jun's belief that God made him special is not tempered with any of the humbling poetry and metaphysics through which the average parishioner might take on such a belief, but is held quite literally — his Electness makes it unthinkable that he be made of the same stuff as everyone else.

That belief, over and above baseline religiosity, fundamentally negates the supposedly scientific mind that turned him into a surgeon, and it forces him to resolve the contradiction by turning the work itself into a religious exercise; Tae-jun relishes the ability to act on the bodies of others at their most powerless, he relishes manipulating viscera with hands that will always remain clean, but the vital societal role of helping people that has ostensibly elevated him to his station is entirely incidental to his sense of self. And as long as his power is unchallenged, he has no reason to back down from these beliefs. If rivalry is all that matters, and if God exists, then he'd be a fool to not think God wanted him to win, just for the sake of winning.

But while a weaker show might use the disturbing extremes to which Tae-jun bends standard CCD parables as a shield to insulate religion writ large from critique, here it's just the opposite — the show sees his particular derangements as an outlier, yes, but very much part of the predictable distribution of abuse that takes root deep in society's bones. As the fucked up ethics of Friendly Rivalry's child protagonists are shaped by their families as a proxy for society, so too do Tae-jun's beliefs come from his community, from his church and its services; they are not sprung sui generis from his own wicked soul (sorry meta-narrator Seul-gi, i know despite/because of being raised by nuns you don't really get religious shit at all but there are so many more of him out there than you think). And those services are consistently played for outright parody, the solmenity of the adults and Je-Na undercut by Jae-yi being bored out her mind and quickly understanding the whole enterprise to be best enjoyed on a purely transactional basis, just like everything else in her life. Her family is pointedly hardly ever seen together in their foreboding fortress of a home, but the one place they're always together is the pews, the organizational nexus from which Tae-jun's domination over his family and his class's domination over society flow together to become a durable system. It's no accident that it's also here where we see our only glimpse of the family he grew up with, a fleeting glimpse into his long-crushed vulnerability making itself known at the very moment the cracks in his dominion are finally appearing, as he has to enact his most morbid farce in the false funeral of his daughter.

Of course what makes this blistering critique of Christianity land is that it's not unique; Friendly Rivalry does not pick favorites among powerful institutions. Religious, secular, Christian, Buddhist (those scenes with Kyung's family doing pre-test prayers are also depicted with less than zero reverence), every corner of society falls under the same microscope. And on the flip side, the show never condescends to individuals just for participating in the big institutions that make up the world around them, which we know because even the C-SAT itself is not fully vilified — a big part of the hopeful ending is the sincere implication that Seul-gi is about to ace the test, secure her future, and then go make out with Jae-yi about it! Friendly Rivalry despises the broken promises of its institutions – capitalism, religion, the education system, the family – but it never lets those betrayals negatively polarize its storytelling against the dreams of those promises made real. And paradoxically that turns it into a scorchingly honest reckoning with how much we need to. ahem. Burn It Down for that reality to ever exist. This is not a work about selling out or refusing to conform to mainstream society as abstract concepts, it's a work about abuse and the systems that produce it, with a cleared eyed focus on the how of it all: Tae-jun is not the only outcome his communities and institutions and in-groups can produce, but someone like him is an inevitable result of the impunity they provide. And since Friendly Rivalry understands that revealing power alone does not dismantle it, Tae-jun's favored technique is invariably not to hide at all; within this framework, playacting a concerned father bullshitting that Jae-yi's going to catch a cold and actually believing it are one and the same. His indifference towards an accurate understanding of his daughter's health is the flex, his power is that it doesn't matter that he's wrong.

And that confluence of power and ignorance, however religiously it's justified, is reinforced by secular society at every turn. Knowledge and truth and a well-rounded understanding of how the world works and why are repeatedly discarded by Chaehwa's incentives. Unapplied math "taught" through gated study materials dominates the curriculum. The only real science education we see is Jae-yi larping as a Bond villain in Med Club, which clearly exists more to be another point of competitive ranking data than to actually do anything with those mice (and you wonder whether you can join any of the clubs at Chaehwa just because you're interested). Kyung gets accidentally pushed into her true calling because the adults that don't give a shit about her sense of justice also don't give a shit that she can quickly parse the documents she stole off Mom's desk; they just know that the maximum payout for second place math grades is engineering school, then patent law. Not actually engineering anything, of course, then we might have to teach her something.

There's no cliche Sellout STEM vs Righteous Humanities thing going on either, it's all a toxic pit with nowhere to hide. Jae-yi has to learn enough English so she can flex it as a symbol of the school's prestige in the opening assembly, and then never needs to use it again. Yeri's harp lessons aren't a corrective to Jae-yi's love of music being ripped away or the underdog story of a devalued skillset, they're simply the other side of the coin, a cynical and desperate attempt to shop around for sparsely populated fields to scam a number one ranking at literally anything (and speaking of music and the assembly, lets pour one out for that school choir that don't even get to finish their one song, the very first warning sign we see for what Chaehwa is like). And a major plot turn can hinge on Seul-gi being a better writer than everyone, including Jae-yi, not because she's particularly dedicated to it but because that's a skill that's only seen exercised for resume building — it's not the priority stat to buff, so the orphan with a unique life story can easily lap the field and be rewarded with insincere supplication by the same peers who were sneering at the country bumpkin moments ago. Again and again grift is rewarded in broad daylight and genuine learning happens almost by accident, all the way down to the killer question heist — it would already be an enormous act of cheating to give favored kids the problem in advance, but no one is paying all that money just for their kid to botch a prepared calculation under exam pressure, so the capsules also simply write down the answer. The point was never to learn something, even with an unfair advantage, but to skip to the result. The actual knowledge never mattered at all.

So if we're all gonna grow up to be grifters, what exactly will that look like? One thing that set my alarm bells off on rewatch is that Tae-jun's practice is gastrointestinal medicine, and discussions of Gut Health always have me on the lookout for medical quackery — the disgraced doctor who founded the entire Anglosphere anti-vax movement that's destroyed so many lives all over the world was a guy who thought the MMR shot caused autism specifically through bowel disease. That specific link definitely feels coincidental, since the corruption of healthcare we see in Friendly Rivalry is much more about control and surveillance and toxic incentives then the kind of anti-public health free for all I'm used to stateside; it's the original form of eugenics where you try to violently shape the population using the tools of science, rather than by withholding them. But the boundaries of these things are amorphous, and there's a shared core of disgust towards difference, fear of frailty, and charismatic manipulation across the whole spectrum of health fraud. And beyond vaccine denial there's an entire genre of alternative wellness junk specifically predicated on the fantasy of achieving perfect control of the gut microbiome, full of grifters parasitizing an incredibly rich vein of real science to make a quick buck telling people what they want to hear.

We don't know what's in "A Daejun-dong Dad's Guide to Full Marks on the CSAT," the book Tae-jun shills during one his TV spots, but given the abusive control he exerts over his daughter's diet we can hazard a guess. And in any case the title tells us all we need to know: the concept of "I'm just a normal father doing what's best for my daughter" is a classic hook that straddles the lines between real science, pop science slop, and outright grift. It's a perfect loop of bad incentives; it positions health not as a something you deserve in its own right but as a means toward results, but then sells itself not with that same credentialed expertise those results are ostensibly meant to obtain but with the faux-humble authority of the patriarch, literally Father knows best. It's reaction in its purest form — the modern patriarchy is inherently threatened by the rise of mass education and the resulting social and scientific miracles that could lead to its undoing (birth control yesterday, HRT today... artificial wombs tonite queen?) and it responds by coopting science and education into tools to reify itself. Toiling away in the classroom is only meant to deliver you to a paradise of power that frees you from challenge, skepticism, or even curiosity. And Tae-jun's specialty is the ideal vehicle for this weaponization of science against itself — the human digestive system is just too ripe for cultural neuroses that are desperate for perfect control, cleanliness, and purity when that will never be what our bodies have on offer, and the food we put through that system is too easily subject to control and restriction by the powerful, whether by the rich in our societies or by the Father (or Mother, as Ye-ri can attest) in our own homes. Which brings us full circle: what much more famous Friendly Rivalry scene does Tae-jun's fake concern about Jae-yi's delicate immune system remind you of?

Yes, it's the festival, the moment where Jae-yi realizes she's in love, and ok maybe I will write a little about the lesbians.

Despite one scene being significantly more important than the other, the parallels are striking. In both instances, Tae-jun is dispensing plausibly believable health advice to try to undermine his daughter's confidence, and this time it isn't even complete bullshit! But it still mostly is — yes, too much soda and grilled red meat is bad for you, but no self-respecting nutritionist is going around snatching single glasses of coke out of people's hands at parties, because they understand that health is a cumulative process that has nothing to do with purity or abnegation in their own right. But Tae-jun's deeply rooted beliefs in his own superiority cannot allow for the existence of bodies that aren't subject to paternalistic moralism. So even though he knows the science, he uses technically accurate facts in a thoroughly unscientific way, where the adverse affects of certain chemicals in sufficient amounts over long enough timeframes get reduced to an absolutist question of sin — the tiny molecules inside us that simply do what the laws of physics demand are transformed into scales of judgement weighting our souls. The problem is not Jae-yi doing something bad for her health; his abuse has already ensured she has to live with depression-induced sleep deprivation that's ruining her life. The problem is being outside his control, whether because of her stubborn love for her sister or because her heart was controlled by Seul-gi instead. And that brings us to the other key parallel: he only deploys this particular move in circumstances where one party has enormous power over the other; he delivers the line about catching a cold when he finds Jae-yi with the phone he planted, cornering his daughter with no way out.

...Except at the food stall he's the one reeling! As if aware of his own typical staging Tae-jun tries to enter the scene as a sinister figure, very rudely snatching his daughter's glass right after her girlfriend lovingly filled it up for her (a moment which shattered my heart when I finally noticed it — it might the first time Jae-yi reflexively waits to receive Seul-gi's care as if it's normal, as if she could deserve it). But he's probably legitimately scary in every single scene of Friendly Rivalry except this one. He has no aura, no menace, and there's no real tension; he's nothing but an annoying pest, and Jae-yi and Seul-gi seem untouchable. For maybe the only time in the series they're completely united, neither holding back from the other, openly relishing each other's presence and the visceral pleasures of life itself. Seul-gi's response to his wheedling is to belch soda bubbles, and Jae-yi, in full sight of her father, looks at her like THIS:

Hye-ri is the master of making her most affectionate expressions her subtlest but my god does she commit to the perfect exception here. No one has ever been more in love or less guarded about it than this, the moment the full force of Jae-yi's feelings hits her like a runaway train, when she realizes that Seul-gi has just instantly neutralized everything she's ever been afraid of. The end of Friendly Rivalry is so bittersweet because it's all about Seul-gi and Jae-yi being bound to each other and strengthened by each other even as they're torn apart, but the festival gives us that brief utopian fantasy — what if they could skip all that hard miserable work of getting into the Yuri Hall of Fame and just be together, two teenagers in love for the first time? And in that fantasy they don't just get to have a real date, or play out a kiss they can't have yet in each other's eyes with all the people around them none the wiser. They achieve a temporary invincibility, they go to a place together where Tae-jun cannot reach them even as he's standing right there. It's a heartbreaking "could have been" even as it's really happening – a world where this persists, where they kiss under the fireworks because Kyung never has to interrupt, would have to be a world where Tae-jun was just an out of touch old man, where the long shadow of his abuse did not fall over every corner of their lives.

And it's not an accident that that moment is communicated by the two of them putting food in their bodies purely for pleasure — once you start wondering if Friendly Rivalry is using hunger and the Gut as a metaphor for love and desire where a patriarchal class system tries to control and suppress both, you can't stop seeing it. Seulgi's malnourishment creates the heart shaped hole in her shadow. Jae-yi falls in love with her for good while she eats junk food messily and defies her panoptically-controlled diet in response. Ye-ri's eating disorder is paired with the constant threat of sexual exploitation and the financial and familial isolation that turbocharges both. Kyung's gastritis-exacerbated back pain mirrors her sex drive being a huge physical inconvenience that she can't get truly in touch with or talk to anyone about. And then the romantic climax of the whole show is lesbian intestinal surgery, culminating in Jae-yi taking the scalpel from her father and leaving a very conspicuous scar in an area of Seul-gi's body that she might be seeing a lot more of in the future. None of these thematic layers or the conclusion they build to are subtle, but all of it utterly passes Tae-jun by. To him the Gut is simply a collection of unclean matter subject to his purifying control, invested with religious meaning only through his own power over it, and therefore he cannot see what's happening when love transforms the same guts he saw as an instrument of humiliation into something truly holy, something he has no right to touch.

(...wait is this whole show about all the different disgust responses girls are trained to have toward their own existence and how that changes for worse and for better under each other's gazes, that's not why i like it so much is it, hahaha jesus christ ANYWAY -)

Tae-jun will use the same line from episode 11 one more time, in episode 15. But this time Jae-yi's hair wasn't wet from the rain. She was swimming, and when she throws an equally bullshit line about her own exercise regimen back at him, she's covering up that she was swimming to save Seul-gi, to pull her to the surface and put her own air in her lungs. That scene, excised from its own moment and only revealed to us in the finale, is famously Kim Tae-hee's partial solution to the "they never get to kiss for real" problem, the only real moment where we know for sure Friendly Rivalry, a show that is not shy about making itself hard to watch, added something in to throw a bone to the fans. So it's remarkable that they managed to find a way to thread that needle without compromising the story, and it's even more remarkable that I don't hate, hate, hate the moment with a burning passion — in a vacuum "CPR-as-subsitute-kiss" is a horrendously tacky trope, and people being immature about it in real life is why doctors stopped recommending mouth to mouth entirely in the hopes that it would get more people to actually attempt the chest compressions. But Friendly Rivalry makes it work, for one thing with excellent direction; the CPR goes by in a few frantic minutes where all we feel is Jae-yi's fear (that wide shot!) and the only physical gesture the camera lingers on is Seul-gi's ensuing wrist grab. But it also works thematically, because the basest mechanisms of survival have been at the heart of this love story from the very beginning. Of course Jae-yi sealing Seul-gi's lips to fill her lungs is romantic, not because it has anything in common with a kiss, but because it has everything in common with cutting open her insides to extract a secret she swallowed to prevent her lover's own self-sacrifice, and then sewing her back together again — all the with the power and purpose of well-trained medical science.

So by the final time Tae-jun is trying to cow Jae-yi with condescending bullshit about her health that he probably also believes anyway, he doesn't know he's already lost. He'll be able to gain the upper hand in his schemes against the children he's torturing, sure, but the world he so carefully engineered for them is no more: Jae-yi will never heed him again, and Seul-gi will never fear him. His final appearance is on its surface a reminder of his impunity, a haunting specter that will follow Seul-gi wherever she goes, but the framing puts the lie to that. Friendly Rivalry's telltale vertical lines tell the real story, and this time it's Seul-gi looking down from high above, and a pathetic man stripped of his self-aggrandizing narratives, with no other purpose than to look up at her, all alone in the rain.

Hang on to that umbrella, Tae-jun. You wouldn't want to catch a cold.

[deathlonging]

i cant even start talking abt it . why jeyi exemplifies the gothic romance love interest. the way jeyi plays the role of both protector and threat. the way jeyi's position at the top of the forces that crush seulgi also renders her seulgi's best option in defending herself from them. how a new layer is revealed w the car scene where yeri lies her (& gyung's) way out of the car after charming jeyi's father, and the audience is exposed to the tense reality of their intimacy, a closeness beyond proximity and understanding. in a lesser show jeyi's victimization at the hands of her father would put her on equal grounds w seulgi, who eventually is also targeted by him, but here it only exacerbates their difference, jeyi's dominant desire to protect, seulgi's desire to obey and be vulnerable, w a starkness they both fall into relieved and pleased, indulging the truth of this like nothing else. even jeyi being stripped of (giving up) all her power and ostensibly becoming equals materially w seulgi does not erase this dynamic, but will rather allow them to live by it without the dangers that plagued them before--the detection of jeyi, the humiliation of seulgi. using the instruments of their divide to free each other......thissss is how you do a modern gothic love story

[chaehwa-archives]

~ The Holy Trinity ~

Mother: Fragrance of the First Flower

Daughter: 23.5

Holy Spirit: Jeongnyeon: The Star Is Born

Hildegard of Bingen: Friendly Rivalry

Emperor Constantine: Gap

[chaehwa-archives]

I’d love to know your thoughts on the fact that in Episode 7 Seul-gi is threatened by Byeong-jin with a knife and later in Episode 8 (same day) she is stabbed by Beom-su

I feel like there’s definitely a parallel there. Maybe something to do with Byeong-jin being from Seul-gi’s past that she’s trying to distance herself from (like when he says he’s her hometown buddy and Seulgi says that she was born in Seoul) but the group she’s trying to become part of (Chaehwa/Seoul) is the one that ultimately stabs her in the back

I think it’s interesting that while Byeong-jin threatened her, he didn’t actually hurt her but Beom-su literally stabs her.

Hah, as I’m always saying, you can watch this show a hundred times and still not catch everything. Thank you for pointing out this connection that I never would have made on my own! I think you’re definitely onto something here, but I don’t have much to add to your theory. I agree it’s kind of an ironic twist. Byeongjin represents the threat of Seulgi’s past catching up to her, but it’s a very “out of the frying pan into the fire” type situation. Despite its image of classy refinement, Chaehwa isn’t any safer than the mean streets Seulgi is trying to run away from—it’s a twisted reflection of them. And the moment Seulgi starts to feel secure there, under the shield of Jei’s power and watchful gaze, that illusion of safety is shattered by Beomsu.

It’s easy to see why Seulgi, faced with the same exact cruelty and desperation she met at her old school, assumes there’s only one way out: to keep climbing to the very top, where no one can touch you. But (as the rooftop scenes also suggest) “the top” is not a position of true safety. Seulgi is stabbed when she’s top of the class. And Jei, who also climbed to the top to protect herself, grows disillusioned and begins seeking other forms of escape.

It’s interesting that Byeongjin’s bark is worse than his bite. He’s always talking a big game and uses intimidation and the threat of violence constantly. But he never does actually hurt anyone. I kind of get the vibe that he’s never used that knife and would probably would be too afraid to use it. I think that helps reinforce the theme that none of these people are innately violent—Beomsu only lashes out when repeatedly provoked, and even though stabbing Seulgi is bad, it’s also a pretty understandable action given the worst night ever that she’s having. If only she had stabbed the headmistress instead!

[anniesugdenjr]

jeyi's consent play already going crazyyyy. claiming your girl your pet your plaything, in the school hallway in front of all in the gothic school of all time, forcing your hand in hers, pulling her along no questions, her trying to come away, detach.. and not letting her goooooo. jeyi's protection, her claim. by Force, assumed, Taken, Not given up, no matter seulgi's protestations. their hierarchy, their power play, their love storyyyy. all at once, already lain out in this one single moment. jeyi never stopping taking seulgi, seulgi never stopping needing jeyi (which ofc material conditions + jeyi's own schemings and machinations work to create this specifically to be the case, again and again) ... It goes round and round, on and on like a perfect intricate carousel. these two frozen in place like figures on it, moving back and forth, their push and pull, their long decided outcomes in struggle, their role play.. until something breaks until something changes until something stops it going around and around Forever...

[hagiomoto]

Let’s Make Food, Unity & Peace for Lebanon in War

As a result of the devastating strikes and the harsh war that Lebanon has endured, thousands of people have been left without homes, safety,

He still accepts donations over here if you wish to support him and his project

[chaehwa-archives]

hi! i just wanted to pop in and show my appreciation for this blog! FR has been on my watch list for ages and i finally binged the whole thing today HAHA. i tend to miss details in shows, esp in foreign languages so this was so useful to have as a reference :)) how do you end up noticing and piecing together these details? the writers' intentionality with plot and dialogue fly right over my head sometimes

I’m so glad the blog has been useful! That’s what I hoped it would be when I started it, a resource for folks who don’t catch everything on the first watch and want to delve more into the subtext. Honestly I am far from the most perceptive viewer, so my secret is just rewatching a million times. There are so many details I didn’t pick up on until I had the episodes memorized, and even then there were so many more things I missed until they were pointed out to me by other people. The beauty of FR is you will end up making some new discovery every time you watch it. It was literally just today that I read a post (which now I can’t even find? did I hallucinate it?) that made me realize how in Episode 1, after water and hunger appear as intertwining motifs in Seulgi’s prologue, the episode ends with Jei grabbing Seulgi’s dripping wet hand in the bathroom and saying “I’m hungry,” intensifying all the associations between water, appetite, desire, and deprivation, and turning Jei’s domineering overture into a mirror image of Seulgi’s loneliness as she drinks from the tap at night. Like!! How did that soar right over my head. Anyway. That’s FR for you. I hope you have lots of fun thinking about it!

[chaehwa-archives]

Happy Pride 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈

Happy Pride! ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜🩷

[anniesugdenjr]

most obvious comment ever but this theme of Hunger, both explicit and implied, both literal and metaphorical, throughout the story, is soooo good. posting this to reblog w more examples / references in future... but wow her empty stomach, her synthetic fullness, her deep cravings, her absence, her losses, her emotional repressions, her disassociation..... Amazingg. i love ofc how much it relates to the class positions → literally, in school, and obviously in context of class system.. seulgi's unique specific drive in a kingdom of wealth and property. she can't go backkk. how that all starts here, in the orphanage, the addiction and the promise of escape

[schoolhater]

please help her

her gofundme

saving al-genina

sudan solidarity collective

[barishal]

This is absolutely horrific. PLEASE pay attention to Sudan. We are 1 year and 5 months into the genocide. There is little to no support from the West! Many of the families and grassroots organizations depend on us to help them. So please donate and share!

[withbriefthanksgiving]

As of 25 May 2026, the gofundme is still up and taking donations

[khutsydoh]

jeyi/miya-sama parallels in the way they both hold some (patriarchal) power in an all-girl's school setting that makes them an ideal of feminity for other girls to look up to and allows them to police other girls + making a girl "special" by choosing her, thus making her vulnerable to violence by the other girls

[red-cosmicc]

hospital roof, oil on canvas 10" × 10"

[chaehwa-archives]

Hi!

I´ve only just found your tumblr today, so sorry if you´ve answered this before and I just overlooked it, but I´ve just finished my first watch-through of FR (there will be a rewatch) and now I´m looking for fanfic.

Are there any you could recommend in particular? I´m looking for something canon-compliant or close and so far there is little in the ao3 tag that´s catching my eye. So, do you have any favourites I shouldn´t sleep on?

Or are you just not that into fanfic? (That´s fine too. Or if you´re too busy to answer.) - Also I just started your deep-dive series and so far it´s super neat!

Rock on <3

Aww no apology necessary! To be honest I’m not the biggest fanfic reader, and from what I’ve seen most FR fics out there are...let’s just say “probably written by teenagers.” But I do have a few recs! These are all set in the universe of the show and they are written by cool people who may or may not hang out on this website :)

lover’s reward (post-canon JaeSeulgi reunion)

Darling, I do not dream of labour (Yeri POV!)*

just take what you want (i won’t make it easy) (Ara POV!)*

*These authors each have several FR fics so be sure to check them all out.

Sorry if this is uncouth but I’m also going to plug myself, I wrote a little Kyung x Yeri post-canon one-shot you can read here and I’m working on a longer piece you can read here.

And thanks for reading the deep dives! Hope you enjoy them <3

[chaehwa-archives]

You should deadass write a thesis about FR. Your analyses are a masterpiece

That’s so sweet thank you 😭😭 and thanks for reading <333

[chaehwa-archives]

And for anyone who missed it, here’s my summary of the 2-hour group commentary from the Friendly Rivalry Blu-ray release, featuring Hyeri, Subin, Kang Hyewon, Oh Woori, and director Kim Taehee.

blu-ray group commentary pt 1

blu-ray group commentary pt 2

blu-ray group commentary pt 3

blu-ray group commentary pt 4

blu-ray group commentary pt 5

blu-ray group commentary pt 6

[chaehwa-archives]

For anyone on this website just getting into Friendly Rivalry, here’s a hundred thousand words you can read about it if you are insane (like me). My attempt at a thorough analysis of the themes, characters, and symbolism. Also the plot gets mostly explained along the way.

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 1

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 2

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 3

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 4

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friendly rivalry deep dive pt 33

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 34

friendly rivalry deep dive pt 35

friendly rivalry deep dive epilogue

bridges and stairs: directional movement in friendly rivalry