Why Color Rush is Amazing
I was doing a comp post of the BLs I believe honestly represent the queer experience (for Pride obvs), and the first one I thought of was Color Rush.
And then I thought, no, I have to just talk about Color Rush for a while.
And then I rewatched Color Rush and now… here we are, together, staring down the barrel of yet another super long post from moi.
TA DA!
I’ve been asked why I love this show so much and usually I direct people to the episode by episode post I did where you can watch me go from “this is cute” to “OH it’s an allegory” to “this is blowing my tiny mind.” But I think it deserves more from me. So, here it is a proper pop critique essay on one of my favorite BLs of all time…
All my love for Color Rush
BASICS
Who made it? Korea
Where to find it? Viki
Foundational Romance Trope? Fated mates
Style: High concept, skewed reality, single POV, small cast
PITCH
Despite being a typical Korean-BL short run, Color Rush was given more legs than most with a STRONG core concept and 8 episodes of 15 minutes each. Thus Color Rush (with a total run time of c. 2 hours) works better as a movie than a series and manages to satisfy because it utilizes a cinematic approach that strongly relies on manga filming techniques.
It broke ground in many ways:
It neatly avoided the pacing issues of K-BL with a magical realism component that forced intimacy in the first episode.
It was concept driven, in that it had a strong fantasy component, like Cherry Magic. However, Color Rush used this fantastical as an aspect of visual story telling (Cherry Magic was audio) which allowed it to be less soft, sweet, cute and more tense, sinister, dramatic.
It also used this concept mono/probe to say some really subversive things about the seme/uke dynamic.
The narrative backbone was an insanely perfect allegory for queer first love and the coming out experience.
It’s this last bit that made me love this show with such fervor.
Color Rush Subverting Seme/Uke
What I initially thought Color Rush was focusing on was codifying the seme/uke dynamic with an in-universe supernatural component: mono/probe.
They use mono/probe to highlight the sinister nature of seme/uke by emphasizing the obsession a mono (Yeon Woo) has for his probe but countering that by making the probe character the seme (Yoo Han), and a seme is always obsessed with his uke.
So Color Rush used subversion to explore yaoi archetypes: naturally obsessive seme versus supernaturally obsessive uke.
When Yoo Han pulls down his mask, it is an aggressive sexual act - yeah, I do mean that kind of exposure - and predatory. But all semes have aggressive predatory instincts (its how they spiral when the drama requires it). Yoo Han wants Yeon Woo to be obsessed with him. He enjoys the power that being a probe gives him. He is literally stunning to Yeon Woo.
What seme doesn’t want an uke that faints in his arms just from seeing his face? Only Yoo Han can show Yeon Woo a whole new world. That world is color, but that wold is also a relationship, love, sex.
Throughout the drama, Yoo Han teases Yeon Woo in this highly erotic way using color: the rainbow fan of temptation, the prism and the light, the memorized lists and stories of color’s history Yoo Han is all about the allowance of pleasure, the denial, the boundaries. Color Rush pushed way past standard uke/seme into full on D/s. Along the way saying some interesting things about obsession and addiction.
Cats exist in this liminal space where they are both stupid cute love muffins and threatening alpha predators. I feel like Yoo Han is played exactly the same way. He manages to be a dominating force but also whimsical and yearning, so we get these glimpses and reminders of how young he is. It gives him qualities of etherial godling capriciousness on one side and childish wonder on the other. All from behind a mask.
He’s as caught up in this thing as Yeon Woo, but he also must be in control of it. Or at least pretend to be.
“I wanted to show you a rainbow but it wouldn’t rain.”
Is such a seme thing to say. How annoying of the world not to conform exactly to the way Yoo Han wanted it to be, for the benefit of his mono, of course.
I don’t think it’s an accident of language that Yeon Woo uses the same phrases to describe seeing color that Yoo Han uses to describe seeing Yeon Woo. So it goes also with the nature of desire in this series: Yeon Woo wants the same things from color (to see, to touch, to possess) that Yoo Han wants from Yeon Woo.
Of course then Yeon Woo starts to actually become obsessed and orders Yoo Han around, and a seme can’t have that! Must CONTROL the situation. So Yoo Han barters for what he wants, time to woo Yeon Woo. Sinister, but then of course by the laws of yaoi and of this universe the only way it’s going to work is if the two characters become equally obsessed with each other. It’s the you are my destiny AKA fated mates trope in an urban fantasy BL form.
And so I thought Color Rush was being terribly clever with yaoi archetypes and romance tropes. Cute and smart and fun.
That’s what I thought at first.
And it was, but it turned out Color Rush was going deeper than that.
Color Rush as an Allegory for Queer Awakening
Color Rush is also a narrative of discovering queer identity and self-acceptance, packaged in this clever little magical contrivance: the color rush.
Yeon Woo is trapped in a grey world which is an allegory for the sexually/romantically unawakened innocent. The color rush experience therefore represents both sexual awakening and the epiphany of queerness.
(Rainbow sparkles, anyone?)
The lore of the world is that monos have a history of kidnapping and hurting their probes, because they become obsessed with the only person who allows them to see color. Yeon Woo is terrified of this, terrified of becoming the monster. He is gay/mono growing up in a culture/family/religion that vilifies gays/monos. As a direct result, this boy is terrified of being gay/mono because it is associated with monstrosity. (I’m gonna stop with the gay/mono slash thing. They are basically interchangeable.)
“Love makes monsters of us all.”
We’ll come back around to Yeon Woo in a moment.
Yoo Han
As the confident (seeming) probe Yoo Han represents out gay - comfortable in his own skin, flirtatious and very intersted in Yeon Woo. He is a threat under these circumstances, because he has what Yeon Woo wants, he is what Yeon Woo wants, but he also is what Yeon Woo wants to be. He is the world of color, he is the monster.
The scene where Yoo Han has Yeon Woo caged and is explaining colors to him by whispering in his ear (still masked) while petting his hand is possibly one of the sexiest things to happen in BL since Pharm feed Dean at the swimming pool. It has the same tension and the same interweaving of plot and action.
It is an act of seduction, but of identity seduction.
Yoo Han is temping Yeon Woo to cross into being queer. To accept color into his life is to accept himself.
Initially, Yoo Han capitalizes on this sinister sexy seme dynamic partly because of his mask. It isn’t until much later that we realize the mask is an outward manifestation of Yoo Han’s own struggles with identity, his face blindness. Essentially, the mask is Yoo Han’s visual representation of his own challenges with self acceptance and society. AKA A different kind of coming out experience, but no less a queer allegory.
Yeon Woo’s realization of this (in the hotel room after Yoo Han confesses) is his cornerstone to empathy and eventually self-forgiveness and understanding. We are both monsters, we are both unique, we both struggle, and we both love.
Yeon Woo needs to understand that while Yoo Han seems to be in control and have the power in the equation, he is just as caught up as Yeon Woo. They can be monsters together.
For a first timer Heo Hyun Jun (AKA Hwall from The Boyz) as Yoo Han did a great job with a difficult role. Masked he had to do most of his emoting via body language and eye movement, and I think it really helped that he’s a trained dancer.
Yoo Han’s character fit the brief too. The type of arrogant pretty-boy who wants to be a K-pop idol by his very nature wants to be something special. In being Yeon Woo’s probe, Yoo Han gets to be the most special thing in the whole universe to one person. And it’s a boy he already likes. Isn’t that what every seme secretly wants in the end? To be the most special and important person in their uke’s universe. Isn’t that what the whole dynamic is about?
Of course we learn later that this is because Yeon Woo is actually unique to Yoo Han. His is the only face Yoo Han can recognize in a sea of strangers. For Yeon Woo, this discovery represents that moment of being queer and realizing that your crush is queer too, that there are others out there in the world. Not just that love can be reciprocated, but that your kind of love (that is hated by others) can be reciprocated.
Color Rush is exploring the idea that to be so transported by another person is to want to dwell in their skin, see what they see, drift on the sensations only they can provide. It’s highlighting the unmoored nature of new passion.
“I want to be with him, but also, in a strange way, I want to be him.”
This is particularly common to the queer experience.
Which brings us to Yeon Woo.
Yeon Woo
The narrative is told from Yeon Woo’s POV, which is normal for yaoi stories. They usually focus on the uke’s POV. I talked about Yoo Han first because Yeon Woo is realizing who he really is (gay), because of Yoo Han. As happens to many of us queers, it is the act of sexual and/or emotional awakening inspired by meeting another person that makes us realized who we want, and by extension who we are. Our crush is also our first “oh no, what am I?”
What Color Rush does that I have never seen in BL before (and rarely in any other queer narratives) is put Yeon Woo through the 5 stages of grief that result from this queer awakening (in 5 episodes). That grief centers around Yeon Woo finding his probe and loosing greyscale (and mourning the safe quiet world of his past self). But it is a perfect queer first-love allegory as well.
first Yeon Woo tries to deny his probe
then he gets angry at Yoo Han for not avoiding him
then they bargain
then there is depression
and finally acceptance
Incidentally, if you’re queer you often go through grief stages as part of your first love/sexual awakening, especially if you live in a non-accepting culture or family. Unacknowledged, that grief is often the reason youngsters get angry and forceful about their queerness:
Why don’t we get to experience first love without simultaneously mourning other people’s expectations of us?
Why should we have to grieve an identity (straight) that the world forced on us?
When Yeon Woo grieves for his mother, he is also grieving his inability to share the experience of losing his greyscale identity. He is mourning the only other person in his world who could fully understand what he is going through.
From a queer perspective, could I just highlight that is is why found family and queer friendships are so important? Because we all need someone to talk with who has been through a similar experience. And when you are queer and suffering through love and/or sex for the first time, you need someone outside of the new relationship to talk it over with.
First love and queer self discovery are kinds of madness, like the color rush, euphoric and transporting. What form his madness takes rests on Yeon Woo directing it outwards or inwards. It’s inwards for his character (self harm) even as the narrative implies monos direct their madness outwards (murder) but that is, as ever, society’s warped expectations. (Like the perpetuated misconception that gay = pedophile.)
The scene after Yeon Woo’s attempted suicide is so sad because we realize why hi’s aunt was trying so desperately to separate them. Not because she thought it was wrong, but because she knew Yeon Woo’s personality so well she understood what he would do to stop himself from hurting his probe. To stop himself from becoming a monster. (To stop himself from being gay.)
“The colors of my world are also the colors of his world.”
Color Rush is exploring how first love and sexual awakening shifts not only your perception of yourself, but also your feelings about the world around you and what it expects of you.
Yeon Woo hurts because he cannot cope with what he is being told he will become, evil, simply because of how he was born, mono.
Sound familiar?
Simultaneously, the narrative taps into to the idea that reconciliation between the unawakened before-identity (greyscale), and the now-person you’re becoming (colorful) requires empathy for yourself. Yeon Woo has to forgive himself for his desire, but he also forgive Yoo Han for awakening that desire in him, and for forcing him to confront his own identity. An identity that is in part formed by wanting Yoo Han.
IT’S SO GOOD.
It’s about Yeon Woo’s struggle to accept what mono means to him as an identity, contrasted to what mono means when he is with Yoo Han versus when he is alone, contrasted to what the world expects of him as representative of mono. (Seriously, just substitute the word gay for mono…)
Yeon Woo’s character arc is towards a realization that he and his probe are not so different. It’s the first step towards understanding that his desire (what he wants to do to Yoo Han) has been rendered corrupt by societal expectations. He has to learn that it is what he and Yoo Han can be together that is important.
Yoo Han, on the other hand, is open to the world and to being in love, possibly too open to it, because he has never been limited by expectations, but he still makes the effort to understand Yeon Woo and the prison the world has put him in. The judgment Yeon Woo has labored under for being a mono is so much like the judgement for being gay in a homophobic society. Hence the symbolism of Yoo Han breaking Yeon Woo out of the mental institution (I mean COME ON, gay conversion therapy anyone?).
The obvious solution is for them to become equally obsessed with each other, and we see this as Yoo Han reminds Yeon Woo of the risks he is willing to take, sacrifices he’s willing to make, and that he is falling in love too. It’s empathy, but it’s not enough. It’s not until Yoo Han explains his face blindness, proves that Yeon Woo is literally the only person he can see, that Yeon Woo moves beyond mutual obsession into mutual love.
The very act of loving another turns that person glorious and unique. And isn’t that what’s best about love?
Yeon Woo got to accept and realize that he was something special to Yoo Han. That they each correct a flaw in the other (or what the world sees as a flaw). A much gentler message then mutual obsession, but also an explanation for a lessening of that obsession.
At root, obsession is based on fear of loss and lack of trust. When Yoo Han tells Yeon Woo that his is the only face that he can really see (and only when they are together), Yeon Woo finally understands that he is as necessary to Yoo Han as Yoo Han is to him. They are each other’s one-of-a-kind - soulmates.
In the end, Color Rush was a picture perfect execution of the fated mates romance trope but just crazy queer about it.
Even after his realization and willingness to trust, Yeon Woo has questions, but I liked that. It’s the butterflies of new love. Not being able to predict the other person. Yeon Woo’s questions are about discovery, and yes, still about doubt and fear, but at least they indicate his openness to Yoo Han and willingness to try.
“Am I obsessed with you because you’re my probe or am I obsessed with my probe because it’s you? Does my world truly change when our eyes meet or am I just being dragged into yours?”
and then later
“I hate being confused.”
Again these are the manifestations of queer awakening that we all ask ourselves. It’s that first wave of joyful discomfort that same sex attraction almost always forces upon us.
Am I actually gay or is it just this one person?
Do I change the way I think about myself and others because I have met you?
Is it you or your easy acceptance of your own identity that attracts me?
Do I admire you or do I want to be you or do I want to sleep with you - or is it all in the end the same thing?
Where is the line drawn between who I am and who I love?
And if we cannot exist without connection to others, that connection must form part of our identity. How then does passion incorporate what is special?
And the ending! Back in school, together, rooftop assignation trope immanent, like they’ve returned to not just normal life but to the normal BL path. The show resolved both the seme/uke mono/probe conversation it was having with us, and its allegory for queer awakening.
For me Color Rush was pitch perfect. I feel both honored and humbled to have gotten to experience such a multi-faceted gem.
Read my review of Color Rush 2 here.
(source)
