Stumbled upon them and with their concept they totally brought me back to my teen years when i would listen to Avril lavigne,Natalia kills,Tokio hotel and many others hhhhhhha
They debuted a few days ago, wishing them the best!
Note: I’m republishing these early deep dives with edits so I can have everything in one place and to make the reading experience smoother overall. Some entries will only have minor changes; others, like this one, will be extensively revised (aka basically rewritten from scratch).
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In this entry I’ll be covering the rest of Seul-gi’s Episode 1 prologue. Like the beach scene that kicks it off, this prologue is operating on multiple levels, and it moves fast. The narrative current is so powerful it’s hard not to get swept along, but in order to catch everything, we’re going to slow way down.
Seul-gi’s life story is broken up into three stages—childhood, junior high, and high school—each marked by a different actor playing the character, and by a different van. First there’s the yellow kindergarten van that drops her off at the beach, then the orphanage shuttle she rides to school, and finally we see her climb out of Byeong-jin’s black drugmobile.
Unlike the other motifs introduced in this prologue, the vans don’t ever come back, and yet they are probably the single most obvious instance of repetition in the episode. It’s pretty hard to miss three vans in a row, of similar shape and size, framed in a very similar way by the camera.
I think this is Friendly Rivalry’s helpful (and, contrary to Kim Tae-hee’s claim, even friendly) way of signaling to the audience how we’re meant to be engaging with the series. Here at the top of the first episode we’re given a very obvious visual motif, repeated three times, just to make sure we catch on. It’s like a bright flashing sign saying, “Hey! Look out for visual cues like this! If anything shows up more than once, pay attention!”
Since its main purpose (I think) is to alert us to patterns elsewhere, the van is one of the less loaded symbols in FR, but it isn’t totally arbitrary. A moving vehicle matches the kinetic restlessness of the prologue, and it implies that Seul-gi herself, as she passes from one stage of the life to the next, remains transient, rootless, unsettled.
In the last entry, Seul-gi introduced the idea of her invisibility, the quality she seems to blame for her abandonment. Her prologue is loosely organized around this theme, with each chapter adding new layers to it.
The orphanage scenes lay the groundwork. All of Seul-gi earliest memories are of being ignored and neglected. In a line-up of children put on display for adoption, she’s passed over—we can assume this was a regular occurrence throughout her childhood—and when it’s time to eat breakfast, she’s left behind and misses the meal. Her anonymity is emphasized in the saddest most adorable way possible by her pajama top proclaiming the words that she, being five years old, lacks the assertiveness to say out loud: “Hello! I’m here!”
Then we come to the scene that probably should have tipped me off that Friendly Rivalry would be a masterpiece, but unfortunately for me, I had to write a million words just to be sure. I’m referring of course to Seul-gi drinking water from the tap at night!
This moment is sooo emblematic of Friendly Rivalry. It’s ultra-condensed: a single shot and a few lines of narration. It’s visually inventive, expressing through the fanciful image of Seul-gi’s shadow with a heart-shaped hole in it more than words ever could. It’s also just believable as something a child in her situation would do. If you’re hungry, and there’s nothing to eat, but there’s unlimited water in the faucet, why wouldn’t you try to fill yourself up that way?
But above all it’s using another helpfully obvious example—another flashing sign—to teach us how to read Friendly Rivalry’s symbolism. The shadow imagery makes it impossible to miss the implication that this water isn’t just water (and, believe it or not, water is never just water in Friendly Rivalry). And of course this scene isn’t just about physical hunger, either.
But no matter how overt a symbol might seem—and this is about as transparent as it gets—FR will always resist facile Literature 101 readings. Instead of a dull this means this analogy, we’re given a cluster of related ideas. Seul-gi’s hunger for food, and her hunger for love and validation, become entwined here so that both appetites are now associated with each other—a full belly is an apt metaphor for love to anyone who’s grown up hungry—and associated with water. And because water is associated with Seul-gi’s abandonment, now her hunger is, too.
This is the second appearance of water in Seul-gi’s prologue, and it won’t be the last. The first time, the edge of the water is where she finds herself alone, and the water itself is like a vast dividing line, cutting her life in two—water as rupture, as wound.
This time she’s drinking the water, trying to heal that wound incurred on the water’s edge. What was external is now internal; the trauma of her abandonment has become reflected in her habits, her way of being in the world. The most tragic line in the whole episode is when Seul-gi casually tells us how she used to imagine, when the water didn’t fill her up, that there was a leak somewhere inside her. Kids don’t know how to process neglect. The only way she can make sense of the emptiness she feels is to assume she’s defective somehow.
The bullying scene adds a new wrinkle to the theme of invisibility, as Seul-gi has her first encounter with its evil twin. Because she comes to school in a van marked with a Sunshine Nursery logo, Middle School Seul-gi is suddenly hypervisible—and, surprise, it sucks! Water wasn’t enough to satisfy her hunger as a child, and as an adolescent Seul-gi learns that simply being noticed will not quench her thirst for belonging. Visibility can be another, even crueler, form of isolation.
The story takes a detour when we learn it’s hard for kids at the orphanage who lack references to find regular jobs. This throwaway line suggests that Seul-gi is far from the only child abandoned by this society—whole segments of the population have been forgotten, written off as inconveniences and left to fend for themselves.
A situation like that produces people like Byeong-jin, who create opportunity where there is none. Under his wing, Seul-gi gets a gig using a fake ID and falsified prescriptions to score pills for selling on the black market, and can we all please take a moment to admire Seul-gi’s evolution from her femme princess phase to butch streetwear queen.
The conversation between Seul-gi and Byeong-jin is our introduction to the grown-up version of Seul-gi played by the one and only Chung Su-bin. We’ve been listening to her narrate, and we’ve seen her in montage, but now we see how she acts around other people, and I have never fallen for a character faster in my life. She’s prickly, kind of an asshole, and bristles at the mere thought of social interaction.
Byeong-jin is responsible for the next twist in our dual theme of visibility/invisibility. It’s thanks to his suggestion that Seul-gi actually begins to apply herself in school, and wouldn’t you know it, the kid’s a genius!
I’m always reminded here of that Stephen Jay Gould quote about Einstein’s brain and all the people with the same potential who have died working in sweatshops. It’s basically by chance that Seul-gi first realizes that she’s smart. What if she never did?
One of many things I appreciate about Seul-gi’s story is the implicit recognition of how unlikely and contingent her success is. Friendly Rivalry could have been an inspirational bootstraps narrative about the value of studying hard and believing in yourself, but thank god it isn’t. What rescues Seul-gi from the life of dead-end jobs and/or petty crime that seems inevitably in store for her is a random conversation with a drug dealer, and the fact that her dad happens to be a math teacher at a prestigious school. Most kids in her situation aren’t so lucky.
As Seul-gi rises through the ranks, she finally gets a taste, for the first time in her life, of how it feels to receive positive attention, and—how interesting!—the theme of hunger makes a return. Unlike the water that never filled her up, and unlike the visibility that made her a target for bullies, the attention she receives thanks to her grades does satisfy her hunger, physical and emotional.
And so Seul-gi successfully overcomes her trauma, graduates at the top of her class, and becomes a fully adjusted normal adult. The end!
Anytime Friendly Rivalry seems headed for a neat resolution like the above—the girl who just wants to be seen is finally recognized for her talents, yay—you can expect a swerve in a new and more interesting direction. What if this long-sought recognition is…bad, actually? What if her hunger itself is dangerous, insatiable? What if doing well at school turns you into a drug addict?
The curse hidden within this positive attention, and all the material benefits that come with it, is that it’s all conditional. To keep receiving special treatment, she needs to keep doing well in school. Going back to her previous life is “a fate worse than death.”
Which means she’s now under pressure to succeed at all costs. But even without this external pressure, she simply wants more. (As the script book puts it: “Even when I didn’t eat, I felt full. And with that came greed.”) She’s been bitten by the bug now. She knows she’s good—she wants to know how good. How far can she go?
The point here is explicit: The drive to succeed academically is like an addiction. Schools produce little junkies.
And what symbol could FR possibly use to represent Seul-gi’s first pill-fueled study sesh other than—you guessed it—water.
No longer an external ocean, or an internal hemorrhage, now water is the medium Seul-gi submerges herself in. In this third iteration, the already-complex symbol becomes even more complicated. Flailing as she sinks, Seul-gi is clearly not at home in the water. (As we’ll be told explicitly much later, she doesn’t even know how to swim.) But once in her private bubble, insulated from all outside distraction, she adapts quickly, and is soon crushing math problems like energy drink cans.
The problem is she can’t live down there. Whatever fulfillment she finds in the water, it’s limited to what she can snatch while that bubble lasts. Eventually she’s going to have to come up for air.
The end of Seul-gi’s prologue, as I said in the last entry, is riddled with narrative gaps. It’s actually impossible to fully decipher what’s going on here until Episode 13, but just to spell it out in brief:
Offscreen, Tae-joon helps Seul-gi’s dad track her down as part of their CSAT cheating scheme agreement. As she’s packing her yellow suitcase (full of drugs stolen from Byeong-jin) to go live with him, she gets a mysterious call from Seoul. This call is most likely from Hee-yoon, her stepmom, notifying her of her father’s sudden death, which is simultaneously being reported on the news (Seul-gi turns on the TV to cover up the sounds of her drug smuggling), although his name is omitted from the report.
This isn’t the first time so much information has been withheld about such a major plot development. As in the opening scene, we are once again prompted here to become active participants in piecing together the story. Friendly Rivalry never doubles back to show us that phone call from Seoul. We have to guess who it’s from and what it’s about based on the clues we’re eventually given.
And that brings us up to the very first title card. Each character’s prologue will be followed by a title card like this, with the color of the pencil changing each time. Seul-gi’s pencil is yellow: the yellow of the kindergarten van, of the uniform she didn’t wear that day, of the sand, the utility knife she uses to cut her hair, the blanket she studies under in the middle of the night, her pencil case, highlighter, suitcase...and probably a few other things that I missed. The color theming goes crazy, okay.
Before we wrap up, a few other little details.
Seul-gi’s prologue introduces the legendary Stair Motif ™ which is so important I wrote a whole separate essay about it. This girl seriously can’t get enough of stairs.
This is also our introduction to Seul-gi’s shoes, a character in their own right. Were there not enough motifs for you in this show yet? Oh good, shoes are another one.
I’m obsessed with these brief shots of Seul-gi eating during the drug-shopping montage, and drinking water from the tap at night during the drug-doing montage. Motifs! Motifs everywhere! No matter how much her circumstances change, Seul-gi remains in many ways the same hungry kid who drank tapwater trying to feel full.
As a top-ranking student, she may have found a way to plug the leak inside for a little while, but is academic success really enough to heal those childhood wounds?
I’d also like to point out the fake ID that Seul-gi uses under the name Lee Min-ju, because yes even this is going to come up again later.
Ohhhh and I almost forgot! This hallway photo of Seul-gi posing with her regional math competition award. No way the province where she grows up will suddenly become important in the final scene of the last episode or anything.
Lastly can I just say this shot??? Seul-gi’s prologue finds a million brilliant ways to emphasize her solitude—she’s always studying alone, in places where and at times when she’ll go unnoticed—but none are quite as striking as this wide shot of Seul-gi studying on the staircase (!!!) at the top of the school with the trees billowing behind her, an image that captures all her newfound power along with a profound sense of smallness and precarity. She’s on top of the world...and look how easily she could fall.
And with that I think I have finally done justice to the first ten minutes of Friendly Rivalry. Ten minutes :) This show will actually make you insane.
