eloisewraysford

this is my alter ego

[vavaharrison]

[vavaharrison]

[luv4rgirl]

spoilers ... finished secret forest (stranger) s2 today and OH GOD i feel so empty. this show has got to be one of the best I've seen in a while.

ofc s1 was an excellent start and s2 didnt fail to deilver either, the directors and writer involved seriously need to get their asses ate for this piece of work. idk if it was the build up at which the events rolled out in, the cast, the exciting plot or all of the above but this series manages to get you hooked from the get go. lee sooyeon (the writer) did an absolutely fine job with the story and the acting???? doona and seungwoo and all the actors involved portrayed each character perfectly to the point where i was more invested in their characters' growth instead of the main cases they were handeling for a hot minute 😭 and the fact that we get to see a realistic progress in their character's personalities throughout s1 and s2 alone is very satisfying.

I usually enjoy watching investigation, political shows and most of them always have this guaranteed sense of justice and saftey intertwined with their endings which is fine! but what i liked abt secret forest was unlike these shows the writer perfectly presents how even though justice is served most of the time corruption is hard to pluck out from the roots its a harsh yet realistic fact in this world where money and status is all that matters. for instance we see lee yeon jae continue her bribery and threatening system till the end of the show despite being able to find other ways to get what she wants she simply continues to follow in her father's footsteps, which doesn't necessarily make her bad person but it shows how the idea of 'money can solve anything' was implemented in her head and her inability to change easily like every other person in power.

Seeing how the ending didnt have a this is 'the end' type of closure gives me hope that in a year or two we'll get a third season with new stories and see more of si mok and yeo jin as this series can turn to a pretty solid show with 5 or more seasons getting more of secret forest (stranger) while simultaneously keeping the excellent plot and writing would be amazing 👏🏾 im very happy i didnt drop this show after ep1 its was worthwhile.

[insignificantly-notorious]

Is really the trope of workaholic, no nonsense, stubborn and charismatic public servants characters and their people-person ‘✋🏼☺️😊🥰✨😃✨☺️’ partners that does it for MEEEE!!!! 😭😭😭😭😭

And the people-person ‘✋🏼☺️😊🥰✨😃✨☺️’ partners are equally as stubborn and WILL THROW HANDS!!!!

[shikshiin]

My space is a mixture of your space and your time.

I miss them.

[leeenuu]

By the way, what makes you think that you can trust what I'm telling you? Who says I do? I don't trust you.

BAE DOO-NA and CHO SEUNG-WOO as Han Yeo-jin and Hwang Shi-mok SECRET FOREST (2017) dir. Ahn Gil-ho

[inkingtwice]

Si-mok and sass.

[vavaharrison]

No matter how hard you look, you can’t stop a fog. And no matter how many criminals you catch, they never disappear.  

[beardedmrbean]

[6qubed]

that was everything I was hoping it would be. marvelous

[fthgurdy]

Re: the last post, the article mentions that some places use clams to test the toxicity of the water. It’s like that in Warsaw- we get our water from the river, and the main water pump has 8 clams that have triggers attached to their shells. If the water gets too toxic, they close, and the triggers shut off the city water supply automatically.  

The clams are just better at measuring the water quality than any man-made sensors.

Edit: check out this documentary trailer : https://vimeo.com/408820791

[zvaigzdelasas]

God Bless Our Troops

[looksmokin]

They hot glued a spring to a clam and gave it full control over the water supply

[sindri42]

No of course not, that would be ridiculous.

They hot glued springs to eight clams and gave them collective control over the water supply.

[strangetikigod]

No of course not, hot glue would kill the clams.

The used silicone adhesive to attach springs to eight clams and gave them collective control over the water supply.

[emily84]

[velociraptrix]

[should-be-sleeping]

Excuse me but that’s clearly a chemist.

[clarenecessities]

there’s something endlessly hilarious to me about the phrase “hotly debated” in an academic context. like i just picture a bunch of nerds at podiums & one’s like “of course there was a paleolithic bear cult in Northern Eurasia” and another one just looks him in the eye and says “i’l kill you in real life, kevin”

[crockpotcauldron]

[ossacordis]

I heard a story once about two microbiologists at a conference who took it out into the parking lot to have a literal fistfight over taxonomy. 

[winchysteria]

have i told this story yet? idk but it’s good. The Orangutan Story:

my american lit professor went to this poe conference. like to be clear this is a man who has a doctorate in being a book nerd. he reads moby dick to his four-year-old son. and poe is one of the cornerstones of american literature, right, so this should be right up his alley?

wrong. apparently poe scholars are like, advanced. there is a branch of edgar allen poe scholarship that specifically looks for coded messages based on the number of words per line and letters per word poe uses. my professor, who has a phd in american literature, realizes he is totally out of his depth. but he already committed his day to this so he thinks fuck it! and goes to a panel on racism in poe’s works, because that’s relevant to his interests.

background info: edgar allen poe was a broke white alcoholic from virginia who wrote horror in the first half of the 19th century. rule 1 of Horror Academia is that horror reflects the cultural anxieties of its time (see: my other professor’s sermon abt how zombie stories are popular when people are scared of immigrants, or that purge movie that was literally abt the election). since poe’s shit is a product of 1800s white southern culture, you can safely assume it’s at least a little about race. but the racial subtext is very open to interpretation, and scholars believe all kinds of different things about what poe says about race (if he says anything), and the poe stans get extremely tense about it.

so my professor sits down to watch this panel and within like five minutes a bunch of crusty academics get super heated about poe’s theoretical racism. because it’s academia, though, this is limited to poorly concealed passive aggression and forceful tones of inside voice. one professor is like “this isn’t even about race!” and another professor is like “this proves he’s a racist!” people are interrupting each other. tensions are rising. a panelist starts saying that poe is like writing a critique of how racist society was, and the racist stuff is there to prove that racism is stupid, and that on a metaphorical level the racist philosophy always loses—

then my professor, perhaps in a bid to prove that he too is a smart literature person, loudly calls: “BUT WHAT ABOUT THE ORANGUTAN?”

some more background: in poe’s well-known short story “the murder in the rue morgue,” two single ladies—a lovely old woman and her lovely daughter who takes care of her, aka super vulnerable and respectable people—are violently killed. the murderer turns out to be not a person, but an orangutan brought back by a sailor who went to like burma or something. and it’s pretty goddamn racially coded, like they reeeeally focus on all this stuff about coarse hairs and big hands and superhuman strength and chattering that sounds like people talking but isn’t actually. if that’s intentional, then he’s literally written an analogy about how black people are a threat to vulnerable white women, which is classic white supremacist shit. BUT if he really only meant for it to be an orangutan, then it’s a whole other metaphor about how colonialism pillages other countries and brings their wealth back to europe and that’s REALLY gonna bite them in the ass one day. klansman or komrade? it all hangs on this.

much later, when my professor told this story to a poe nerd friend, the guy said the orangutan thing was a one of the biggest landmines in their field. he said it was a reliable discussion ruiner that had started so many shouting matches that some conferences had an actual ban on bringing it up.

so the place goes dead fucking silent as every giant ass poe stan in the room is immediately thrust into a series of war flashbacks: the orangutan argument, violently carried out over seminar tables, in literary journals, at graduate student house parties, the spittle flying, the wine and coffee spilled, the friendships torn—the red faces and bulging veins—curses thrown and teaching posts abandoned—panels just like this one fallen into chaos—distant sirens, skies falling, the dog-eared norton critical editions slicing through the air like sabres—the textual support! o, the quotes! they gaze at this madman in numb disbelief, but he could not have known. nay, he was a literary theorist, a 17th-century man, only a visitor to their haunted land. he had never heard the whistle of the mortars overhead. he had never felt the cold earth under his cheek as he prayed for god’s deliverance. and yet he would have broken their fragile peace and brought them all back into the trenches.

my professor sits there for a second, still totally clueless. the panel moderator suddenly stands up in his tweed jacket and yells, with the raw panic of a once-broken man:

WE! DO NOT! TALK ABOUT! THE ORANGUTAN!

[inkingtwice]

for the fic writers meme- questions 8 and 12 :D

Oh yay! 😊 Thank yooouuuu.

8. Apologies in advance for the length of this; it's less snippet and more excerpt, but I love it all and it's not likely to ever see daylight outside of my hard drive, so...

“This is a new service,” Han Yeo-jin said. Her voice was rough, as though she had been shouting. Si-mok spilled some soup on his hand; he hadn’t heard her porch door open.

“I thought you might forget to eat.”

She was wearing a sweater, though the autumn evening was still warm. In the dim light from her kitchen window her face seemed older and wearier. Her shoulders did not form their usual straight line.

“The soup is too salty,” he warned her.

She sat on the bench beside him and took the second cup. “I tried to eat.” She pried the lid off and blew gently on the surface of the soup. “It made me sick. That was a few hours ago. The extra salt will be good.”

He looked more closely at her face. She didn’t appear sick. She sipped, then waited, her face tight and frowning. “Was it him,” she said.

He tipped his cup back, considering. He’d intended to talk about anything but the case. Han Yeo-jin put her cup down and stared; he’d taken too long. “Probably,” he said, and tipped his head to relieve some of the muscle tension in his neck. “Old injuries match the x-rays from the report. I won’t be certain until the lab can match DNA.”

She hummed an absent reply and leaned her elbows on her knees. “You think his accomplice murdered Congressman Youn, don’t you?”

Si-mok sighed and twisted the lid back onto his cup. His neck still ached. Stress and lack of sleep seemed to hide in the muscles of the shoulders. He wondered if it always had and he was only now noticing, or if this was new. Pointless question: there was no way to tell.

“Possibly.”

“It was too personal. It had to be someone with a grudge.”

“Yes.”

Han Yeo-jin rubbed at her temples and hummed again. “Well. That was probably him that I—that I shot in the arm. I guess that’s something, right?”

The strain in her voice was difficult to read. The way her fingers clutched at her hair before she shook them suggested guilt. “You had no choice,” he told her.

“I know.”

“You saved Mrs. Park’s life.”

“I know.” Han Yeo-jin took another cautious sip of her soup, then another. She was curled around herself as though she had taken a blow.

“How do you feel?” he asked finally, because trying to determine it for himself in the dim light was clearly not working. She huffed a laugh and looked at him over her shoulder.

“Now it’s your turn to ask me that, is it?”

Difficult to tell if he’d offended her. He fell back on the lessons she had taught him, the sort of bald honesty she tended to employ to encourage confidences. “I don’t know how to help. I’m worried about you.”

This was the source of the tension in his shoulders and neck, he realized; speaking it made it clear. Worry.

Her laugh wasn’t a laugh. She took a ragged breath and wiped her face. “I don’t know how I feel. I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel. I guess that’s the problem. I killed someone.” Her next breath was more even, but shorter. “I had to. I know that. But I killed someone. I took him out of the world. Somebody’s son.”

There was nothing Si-mok could think to say that would resolve that. It was true. That it had been necessary didn’t make it less true.

“You also saved somebody’s daughter,” he said.

She set the soup down between her feet and pressed her hands to her face, took several deep, unsteady breaths. Not helpful, then. Or maybe it was? People often claimed to feel better after tears. Maybe he should go and let her shed hers in private. Maybe he should stay and make her tea, her preferred response to upset in others. Maybe there was something better he should say. He’d only told her what she already knew: she was more than intelligent enough to have concluded it already. But he had never taken a life, himself. Yoon Se-won had done it for revenge and believed it to be a right act, yet still carried the weight of it. Han Yeo-jin had been forced to do so in the performance of her duties as a police officer, in connection to a case he had involved her in. A case she had involved herself in, on his behalf. Whether he stayed or left her alone, the damage was already done.

“What can I do?” he asked her. “Tell me what you need me to do.”

“Oh—” She heaved a sigh and wiped her face. “You already brought me soup.”

“I could make you tea.”

Her laugh this time was a laugh. She sat up and rubbed at her neck. “Hwang Si-mok,” she said, “Thank you. You are a good friend.”

A good friend would probably know what to do without needing to ask. “Tea?” he repeated.

“No. No tea.” She sighed. “Just sit with me for a while, okay? Will you do that?”

“Yes.”

This didn’t seem like it would be helpful. But she seemed to know what she needed now; she was thinking again.

This was well before I wrote in transit, and well before season two came out. It took a crazy long time to get down the dynamic of HSM trying to feel his way into offering support, and HYJ figuring out how to accept it. (And then we got a season centered around that, which made me SO HAPPY.)

I'm not 100% happy with the pacing, but pretty pleased with the reverie in this part: HSM's head is just such... a tough nut to crack.

12. I'ma have to go with S2E14, when all the brakes come off at once. Plot-wise, it's still an episode and a half away from climax but the final, steep climb toward it, which is a structure they employed in season one as well. Thematically, though, it's the climactic episode, when the big pieces come together and we can see how all these little compromises and corruptions, these "that's just the way it is" choices to accept what we feel we cannot risk trying to change, can lead to life-changing (or life-ending) acts. All the big threads wind together in this episode.

In terms of character development, it's gloriously cohesive: Si-mok and Yeo-jin working at a furious pace and as a single unit against not only the culprit and his father but the entire system and its roadblocks, switching roles without hesitation, playing to their own and one another's strengths. And backing each other up in more personal ways, too: he pulls her back twice when she gets too involved, and she does the same for him at least twice. There's nothing of the feeling-their-way element to their partnership that characterized their best moments in season one: these are two people who have remembered that they know each other well and trust each other in a way they can't do with anybody else, and it comes across so clearly in their interrogations of Kim Hu-jeong. Their confrontation with their respective bosses might be the climax of the plot, but it's a denouement in nearly every other respect.

[sexy-mok]

[eternalfiremoth]

[vavaharrison]

[vavaharrison]

[sexy-mok]

Cho Seung Woo for Helicobacter Project Will 2022.