Tumblr user micamicster thank you for having such an amazing archive of gifsets in your my country the new age tag 🙏 they shall all be reblogged in due time *rubs palms together evilly*
always proud to put my mental illnesses to work in service of others 🫡
you know what the real problem with all that 'general writing advice' is?
in actuality, none of those people have anything of value to offer to those who actually want to improve and who treat writing as a craft they can develop.
a) if they really wanted to help, they would've been offering beta services to the people who are looking for betas instead of whining on twitter.
b) i'm sorry, but the notion that people who want to improve their writing wouldn't know that you can take inspiration from other forms of art if twitter user ao2238430us didn't tell them is fucking ridiculous. thank you for discovering that the earth is round. where would we all be without you? what's next? are you going to tell them that all languages are based on grammatical structures and rules?
c) it always ends up being a circle jerk party with 'how can people not want to improve? i would never!' and 'i'm a professional writer! i go to workshops!' and 'these snowflakes would not make a day in my shoes!' etc.
d) me! me! me! write what I WANT YOU TO WRITE! i want to consume! i demand more fics! keep me engaged! me the reader! me!
and then they make a surprised pikachu face when ficwriters see all of that and go 'yeah, no, fuck you'.
'ficwriters are a bunch of sensitive crybabies! they can't handle even a tiny bit of criticism!'
criticism in question:
yes, 'slop for pigs' is a very informative critique. thank you.
did i miss a clause in ao3's 'terms and conditions' that says that you're only allowed to post fics if you have 'improvement of craft' as an objective? or did merriam-webster change the definition of the word writer overnight, and no one told me about it?
if someone on ao3.com not using oxford commas and still daring to call themselves a writer impacts your quality of life... stay fucking miserable. i hope every fic you try to read has every single trope you hate. all of them. at once.
(because let's be honest, these people will make 20 tweets about ao3 being a slop factory and then go and read fics anyway.)
You’ve been taken an interest in me?!
Then what’s my name?! Do you even know any of our names?! If you do, tell me.
I SAID, SAY IT!
My Country: The New Age | ep. 3 dir. Kim Jin Won
if you are a parent, or may become one, or you are otherwise likely to arrive in the situation of caring for a child while they eat, promise me this: if a child doesn't like a certain food or food group, you will ask them WHY. and specifically, you will pay attention to either confirming or ruling out "it makes my mouth itch" or "it makes my stomach hurt," both of which are medically important info that children may not provide unprompted. which i know because this PSA has been brought to you by "i spent my entire childhood and much of my early teens eating peas and lentils while wondering why everyone else liked the Violently Itchy Mouth Sensation so much, like were they a bunch of legume masochists or something, before i finally realized that Violently Itchy Mouth Sensation was in fact a sinister demon appearing only to me, and her true demonic name was: Legume Allergy"
there’s something about becoming older where everything feels finite. summer isn’t endless, love isn’t eternal. you move homes, your favorite boots fall apart, your dog dies. everything feels consuming and beautiful when it is believed to be eternal. now it is all precious. everything. and there is a melancholy that comes with it.
Soo I have a blood kink... someone reported a post about it like this one time and I got a message from tumblr asking if I was okay and how to get help if I needed it. Was actually cool I didn't know it was a thing that tumblr would do and until now didn't know exactly why that had happened other than something with that post but not that they had this whole set up
Welcome to another round of W2 Tells You What You Should See, where W2 (me) tries to sell you (you) on something you should be watching. Today's choice: 악인전기 / EVILIVE.
EVILIVE is a 2023 Korean crime drama about a mild-mannered middle-aged lawyer who becomes convinced by a beautiful tall mob boss that he is tired of being nice and does want to go apeshit.
I'm going to try real hard not to do the "[guy who has only seen Beyond Evil, watching a second Korean drama] this is giving Beyond Evil vibes" thing, but you have to admit up front that comparisons are inevitable. Both of them are tight, emotionally charged dramas with a lot of blurred lines about right and wrong, and both star the absolute acting powerhouse that is Shin Hakyun playing against a gorgeous younger man who sexually threatens him a lot.
However, EVILIVE makes Beyond Evil look warm and fuzzy. The series is tight, violent, messy tale of what happens when bad choices are the only choices left to make, but you lean real hard into them anyway. So especially if you're a fan of Infernal Affairs, The Gangster, the Cop, and the Devil, and/or other homoerotic East Asian crime-and-punishment media, let me give you five reasons why I think this ten-episode series is worth your time.
1. Daddy's home
But which one of them is Daddy??? Well, that's part of the fun. See, one of the characters is older and more composed, but also clearly the economically and hierarchically subordinate of the pair; the other is younger and has spent more time obediently submitting to his crime bosses, but has all the money and wields all the power in any room he walks into (and also uses every inch of his 6'2" frame to do it). So whichever one you think deserves that title, you're right.
Watching Shin Hakyun in a couple other things, I realized how often he's cast as a sniveling, pathetic, nerdy boy-man -- and he makes good use of that experience here. His Han Dongsu starts off as a wet paper towel of a person. They put that handsome fellow in the worst possible haircut a Korean man is allowed to have by law, frumped him up in some ill-fitting suits, and left him out in the rain for a couple scenes. It'd be criminal how much they nerfed his hotness if you didn't know from the start he's got a glow-up coming.
And it's a perfect contrast to the tall, lanky, and always slightly underwashed Seo Doyeong, played perfectly by Actual Runway Model Kim Youngkwang. Equal parts sleepy-eyed and vicious, Seo Deoyeong is a perfect handsome thug. He too looks like a lion who asked a good fairy to turn him into a beautiful Japanese lesbian, only his good fairy missed slightly, but the results were still pretty great.
And oh boy, does he want to fuck that old man in half.
There is a lot going on in this show, but the core dynamic is the weird dance between these two as Seo Doyeong opens the door to the criminal underworld and Han Dongsu makes the choice to step through it. The Korean title translates roughly to 'Villain Story,' so you know from the start this is going to about one guy looking at another and going, I can make him worse. And then he does.
I know there are those of you reading this right now who like it when those boys get rough with one another. I am here to tell you that EVILIVE does not disappoint on that front. If you consider stabbing someone a love language, this to you will be romance.
2. The TENSION
And I don't just mean the sexual tension, though, as my previous point noticed, there sure is a whole lot of that.
EVILIVE is not an easy feel-good funtime show. The very first scene (a flash-forward) involves seeing a character get stone-cold murdered by another character. This show features Legitimately Bad People Who Do Legitimately Bad Things. You may want some of them to get away with it because you like them for other reasons! But you know that geting away with it gets less and less likely every time you see them do yet another Legitimately Bad Thing.
The general shape of the plot is that a deeply stressed normie man who has been repeatedly fucked over gets a chance to strike back against the people and organizations that fucked him over by going to work for a violent mobster -- because all the systems that were supposed to help him are deeply corrupt and run by people arguably even worse than said violent mobster. So you don't even get the moral high ground of saying that Han Dongsu should have done things the right way because, motherfucker, he tried. He tried doing things by the book, and all that got him was a bunch of debt and humiliation. Worse, it got his loved ones a bunch of debt and humiliation to go right along with his.
Yeah, you notice I call him "normie" up there, and not "normal"? Han Dongsu is not a normal guy. Maybe he was, once, a long time ago, but life broke him very badly. Now he's trying to do what all the nice people say he's supposed to do, all the while being a bottled-up rage monster beneath the surface.
That's where Seo Doyeong comes in.
I do think the back half of the show is unevenly paced, to the point where I don't think it should have taken your full standard sixteen episodes of a regular-sized Korean drama, but I definitely think it should have gotten more than ten. The show kind of handwaves over months-long stretches of time that I very much would have liked to see play out, especially to watch Han Dongsu and Seo Doyeong bounce off one another some more.
If I were to put on my tinfoil hat, I would say that you would have to fast-forward over those stretches, because if you did show the extent of those boys' interactions during those periods -- enough to give some later events in the show the gravity they deserve -- things would quickly get unsustainably gay.
All right, all right, I know I'm calling things gay again, but how gay is it?
Well, to some degree, only as gay as these things ever are. I mean, you know the genre, so you understand the inherent sexiness of busting the lip of a guy you have a complicated life-or-death relationship with. If one of them were a girl, there'd be no question about what we're looking at here. (See: the Butch and Sundance digression in point 5 of my Sand Sea rec post.) You pretty much can't create the intense dynamic needed to sustain this kind of story without getting into at least a little unintentional homoeroticism.
Except I don't think it's entirely unintentional, and for that, I'm going to point (again) to Seo Doyeong.
When we first meet Seo Doyeong, he claims to have a girlfriend -- but then we actually meet her, and she's everyone's girlfriend but his. He never shows any interest in women. He never mentions romantic or sexual histories with women. I don't think he even interacts substantially with any adult women, minus one critical scene. Actual Runway Model Kim Youngkwang playes Doyeong like he clearly has the 'fight' and 'fuck' sections of his brain cross-wired, and he is always spoiling for a fight.
Now, of course, we are getting into the murky territory of 'just because a guy doesn't express interest in women doesn't necessarily mean he's gay!' Which, you're right, it doesn't. But when said guy is spending damn near every scene looking like somebody's about to get their dick sucked, yeah, it kinda does.
Wait, did I say we weren't talking about sexual tension? Well, that's fine, because there's still lots of high-stress surprises left! I've already made allusions to some of the general shapes of the narrative, and I'll make even more before this rec post is through -- and I don't feel like those are spoilers, because you can know the trajectory of the story and still find yourself holding your breath about what's going to happen next. It's like Breaking Bad! You know he breaks bad! That's not a spoiler! It's in the title!
EVILIVE's plot exists in a tangle of warring organized crime factions, all the bosses and goons vying for power inside said factions, the politicians they've paid off, the lawyers who know all their secrets, the businessmen trying to maximize their profits through illegal enterprises, the corrupt law enforcement agencies trying to make the conclusions fit their preferred narratives... What I'm saying is, it's going to get messy.
Oh, and there's also the one honest cop who's onto them, so, you know ... good luck with that.
3. Baby brother. Baby.
Every tragedy needs collateral damage. EVILIVE's comes in the form of Han Dongsu's dipshit younger half-brother, Han Beomjae.
God's perfect failure to launch, Beomjae is an underachieving doofus who has some real computer smarts, but lacks the ability to get his shit together in any meaningful fashion. Dongsu has taken care of Beomjae pretty much their whole shared lives, and now he also takes care of Beomjae's precious daughter, Minhui, who lives all but full-time with Dongsu and his wife.
I like that Beomjae's not some perfect angel either. Pretty much the first thing we do is see him scamming a customer at his part-time job so he can earn some extra cash. He's sweet and earnest, but he's also absolutely capable of taking advantage of situations to get by. When he's lying to customers about the price of refurbished hardware, that's one thing. When the big brother he'd do anything for gets wrapped up with a mob boss, that's quite another.
The show is kind of fuzzy about what the age difference is between them. Shin Hakyun is nearly twenty years older than Shin Jaeha, Beomjae's actor, but we get one little flashback when we see the boys together as kids, and there they look like they're maybe five and ten. I'm going to call bullshit on the flashback and go with the actor ages, because to me it definitely makes a big difference in Han Beomjae's character if he's supposed to be thirty and has been managing being a single dad -- and mismanaging everything else about his life -- since he was twenty.
Beomjae's a gentle little disaster, a petty fuckup who's used to getting by on petty crimes and trying his best (which is not very good). He is not a bottled-up rage monster. He does not want to go apeshit. He wants a mild-mannered existence, scraping together what he can to make a, well, mostly honest living for himself. Unfortunately for him, he's wound up in a genre that doesn't reward honesty.
Shin Jaeha turns in a solid performance here, especially considering his part is more understated than a lot of the others. Most of the time, he's sharing the screen with at least one of two real heavy hitters, but he holds his own. At first, I thought Beomjae was going to be annoying and exhausting, little more than a burden on Dongsu, but he turns out to be wonderful -- and because this show is the kind of show it is, you know eventually that's gonna hurt.
4. It's just beautiful
Ugh, this is the point where I have to get mad about how few screenshots there are of this show to poach from the internet, because it's lovely. The folk behind the camera are quite talented, and shots are framed and lit so well.
Here, I'm going to do my best with what's out there.
I mean, yeah, this show gets a cheat in how Actual Runway Model Kim Youngkwang is so gorgeous that you can't really get a bad shot of him. But the camera knows how to lean into his menace so effectively that it uses his natural resources perfectly.
Also, the posters they did for the main three are stunning.
I actually think this beauty is not just an incidental charm, but a key feature of the show. As I've said a couple times now, this show is quite violent. The violence, however, is presented in a way that is both lovely and awful at once, so you have something worth looking at even during the brutal scenes that isn't just ceaseless human misery. This is especially important to me because I'm pretty squeamish about violence! While I had to look away from the screen more than once (scenes with severing and breaking fingers in particular), I always kept wanting to look back.
Also! This show is set in 2008, which means it's got a cool recent-past vibe to it. Pretty much everything looks modern, except all the technology and cars are just out of date. It's a neat effect.
5. It resists an easy moral
Ah, we're back to Beyond Evil! You knew it was coming. Anyway, Beyond Evil ends -- and I'm saying this in as unspoilery of a way as possible -- with the people who did bad things getting punishments suitable to the level of badness they did. It's a show that skates the edge of copaganda but avoids it because of its steadfast belief that power and privilege should not insulate you from the consequences of your actions. Through this belief, it creates a story about a fantasy world in which power and privilege do not insulate you from the consequences of your actions.
Ha ha ha oh boy that is not EVILIVE's take on things.
EVILIVE exists in a world of extensive corruption and collusion between organized crime, politicians, and businesses -- and that world is very real. I remember when the South Korean president declared martial law last month, which prompted an immediate oh hell no response from pretty much everybody in the vicinity. A lot of non-Korean people were asking online how a country whose citizens seem so cool and action-oriented keep electing a bunch of absolute shitbags. And the answer seems to be, the whole system is jaw-droppingly corrupt, which means all the candidates are shitbags. You must be this shitbag to play. There is no non-shitbag option.
So it's not like Han Dongsu and Seo Doyeong are inventing some new kind of crime here. This is not the tale of how two bad dudes disturbed a pure and perfect ecosystem. It's a story about how, when presented with the choice of becoming the abuser or staying the victim, the "moral" choice is not the easy one.
I don't even think you can draw an easy conclusion about "oh, back when he was poor, at least he was happy and had friends!" because no he wasn't! His lack of money created so many problems for him and everyone around him! He has moments of happiness and togetherness, but they are vastly overshadowed by the grinding horror of his day-to-day life and the way it keeps him from being able to provide for or protect his loved ones. And he's haunted the whole time by the knowledge that the reason everything is so fucked up in the first place is that, once upon a time, he tried to do the right thing.
The real villain of the show is poverty, with a henchman of how it's so much easier to join a bad system than it is to challenge it. If anything, I wish the show had been a little more upfront about that, because I think that it's subtle about it to the point where it's easy to take away a shallow 'wow, bad things happen to people who do bad things!' lesson. That's not what it's saying. Yes, bad things happen to bad people, but sometimes good things happen to bad people. Actually, frequently good things happen to bad people, because the bad people do the things that make enough money to keep the bad things from happening to them. And bad things happen to good people because the good people don't have enough money to keep the bad things from happening to them. And if you're going to end up suffering either way, why not choose the way that also lets you live in a really nice house?
...I mean, okay, I guess there is at least one easy moral here, and that is DON'T GAMBLE ONLINE, WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU, JUST SET YOUR MONEY ON FIRE, IT'S FASTER
Ready to play ball?
For some reason, EVILIVE is not available on your regular streaming services. MyAsiaTV was how we were watching it, except that between episodes eight and nine (argh!), whatever external site they were hosting the videos on went kablooey for me. I'm leaving the link there because maybe it'll work for you? However, in searching for a replacement, I found that this DailyMotion account has the episodes as well, and has had them uploaded for over a year now, so perhaps that's a more reliable source. Whatever works for you!
In both cases, the subtitles are absolutely fine -- definitely some hiccups and typos here and there, but on the whole they're fine. They are, however, bowdlerized to the point of hilarity. You get scenes where these blood-covered gangsters are stabbing one another, and the subtitles have them yelling things like, "You jerk!" Which adds to the experience, but maybe not in a good way.
Anyway, watch it, then come back here, and we'll go together to see what AO3 has in the way of fix-it fic, okay?
If Han Dong Soo hadn't been sick and tired of being submissive all his life and if Seo Do Young hadn't been ready only for a dominant position, it could really, actually, honest-to-God eventually work out, your Honour.
I agree, it could work out, and it definitely will be an interesting challenge for any 'fix-it' fic writers to make it work in a fully canon-compliant way! The paradox of their relationship is that they are immediately, incredibly, compulsively attracted to each other and they DO satisfy e/o's needs in a psychosexual way. Yet beyond that, when it comes to collaborating as two individuals, they inevitably clash. Do-young wants absolute submission and does not tolerate his authority being questioned or challenged in any meaningful way, however, at the same time he can't help but view submission of any kind as weakness (as reinforced by the environment he is in), and when people obey him he just loses interest in them. He is very feline in his predatory ways - he loves to play, he loves the chase, he loves to sink his teeth in his prey and feel them struggle...but if there is no resistance he gets bored. Dong-soo does enjoy his submissive position, which their power dynamic naturally dictates, he loves the praise, and the pampering, and being so openly wanted and conquered (and how almost impious and in everyone's face all of it is), however, as you said, he cannot tolerate being subjugated, humiliated or disrespected any further, because of his prior experiences and a lifetime of being fucked over. Do-young wanted to maintain their established dynamic at all times, Dong-soo clearly wanted separation and be treated as an equal, a partner, in the matters of business and life that concerned them both.
Both of them are deeply insecure about the exact same thing, both of them carry a lot of rage and resentment towards those in a position of power over them, and both of them lash out, albeit differently, when threatened. They also live under extremely volatile conditions, are constantly paranoid due to habitual betrayals, and have no real ways of communicating with or really hearing each other. And yet, even when they can't stand one another - the attraction, the mutual pull is still there. Go figure, what a delicious mess.
I think, the proverbial Rubicon of their relationship's demise is definitely the little fucked up thing Do-young did with Moon Sang-guk. Not the murder itself but the format of it, so to speak, haha. It was too much of a betrayal and too much of a humiliation for Dong-soo to ever get over. It was a very impulsive choice, and a bad idea; it was supposed to put Dong-soo back in his place & to reinforce their pact by turning it into mutual assured destruction, but Do-young certainly miscalculated and crossed too many lines in doing so for them to ever bounce back. From that moment on they are in freefall. Not that avoiding the Moon Sang-guk situation would have automatically saved their relationship, but it would have definitely slowed the deterioration down by a lot. Even after he knows he is betrayed, even after he breaks it off between them - Do-young does nothing but hesitate when it comes to Dong-soo, and he keeps hesitating until the very end, which proves fatal. (there is also an elephant in the room in the form of Beom-jae, but it's a whole separate essay lol)
Had they more time, were the trust between them not so broken, were they both trying to make it work, have they understood where the other shouldn't be pushed - they would have been able to make it work. It still would be an incredibly toxic, turbulent, not safe, not sane, worst married couple you know type of an affair - but it would have worked.
Sorry, op, I got carried away lol. It is such a great relationship, doomed and tragic in many ways yet somehow functional, inescapably intersectional, complex, and twisted, and subversive, and PASSIONATE...it's so much fun rotating it in my head and going through all the 'what ifs' :)
actually, extremely fucking funny that seo do young was an extremely famous baseball player before. can you imagine the discussions between baseball fans in an happier universe where he and hds fucked it out and got together instead. the baseball forum boards and subreddits that regularly have new fans making posts going "So I looked up what happened to seo do young (he was such a good player, the things we have missed, etc etc) and I know he became a gangster (so sad, it's a tragedy, etc etc) but what do you mean he's FUCKING HIS LAWYER" (the posts get locked immediately because there is nothing new to say on the subject and definitely not because anyone is worried about getting sued or actually beaten up) (especially not because the comments usually get full of pictures of HDS and people arguing whether they would go gay for him)
everytime a player does something violent either during a match or IRL there is always that one guy going "they can always use more gangsters in shinnam!" and now there is always at least one going "well, I hope his lawyer is cute"
