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omg! one of my sister's biggest complaints about fbnd (the traitor) was about kkaegeum's pants. she kept on saying he's not some 1700s gentleman and he should stop wearing breeches. :/ but! darcy from pride and prejudice wore breeches and there's an ep title that alludes to p&p! (not that kkaegeum's anything like darcy...)
he wears a sweater draped *over* his peacoat. god i love him. lots of kdrama male leads are sharply dressed–it’s a sign of status. but kkaegeum doesn’t just wear expensive clothes. he has a particular style that he’s crafted for himself. his clothes aren’t just an expression of some abstract idea (i am rich and powerful), but something he put his own thought and effort i to. like, he doesn’t have a stylist who’s bought all his suits.
shockingly, there are very few introductions to male leads that stick in my head. of course there’s leo dicaprio from romeo + juliet, sitting on an abandoned stage on the beach, smoking and writing sad poetry in his journal while ignoring his parents as they drive past him and the sun rises behind him.
and then we have enrique geum, who’s introduction is him on a plane flying over to korea. no one sits in the seat next to him and it’s full of his brightly colored things. a flight attendant is about to talk to him about it, but he turns his smile on her (and us) and she’s (and we are) utterly charmed. we hear a child crying and he makes a little papercup robot for him, then goes over and gives it to him so he can stop crying. the child’s mother is grateful and relieved. so an intro to kkaegeum: charming and he knows it, helpful, creative, a little messy, and the exact opposite of brooding.
there’s another kdrama hero whose first appearance is on a plane to korea–choi han gyul of coffee prince. while kkaegeum is happy and delightful, han gyul is made out to be some suave playboy, which he totally isn’t. he’s actually like kkaegeum, in love with a woman who is in love with someone else, someone he’s really close to. only kkaegeum lets the object of his affection go (makes a point of it, actually) while han gyul holds on to his, until she has to point out to him that he isn’t really in love with her.
it makes me wonder if the plane intro is a trope. what other heroes are introduced like this and what does it mean? it’s a kind of framing narrative technique, because it hints at the possibility that whoever arrives on the plane will leave on it–and both han gyul and kkaegeum face that prospect in their romances. but in coffee prince, it’s eun chan who leaves to pursue her dream while han gyul waits in korea for her, and in fbnd it’s kkaegeum who returns to spain, and then comes back to dok mi. the difference in their endings is planted in their plane intros: kkeageum was coming to korea for the first time. he was just visiting. han gyul was was *coming back.*
the plane intro also tends to signal at some sort of class distinction. han gyul is well off. his family has enough money to send him off to study in the US. it signals some kind of worldliness. it’s another thing fbnd skews: kkaegeum isn’t from the US, but from spain. his speaking a foreign language is more something specific about him, not necessarily a sign of power. he didn’t go abroad for an education–and actually this figures prominently in the story because we later learn that he faced some unpleasant things in having lived abraod; he was (is) an immigrant in spain. and while i imagine kkaegeum is well travelled because of his work, he doesn’t come off as especially worldy, especially when he’s next to dok mi, who gives off such a wise and world weary vibe, and when he has to look to her for guidance about some korean customs. and, of course, her story isn’t about discovering the world so much as it is about not fearing the pain people can inflict on each other (to the point that it debilitates you).
i think just one last thing tonight. something about dok mi and her private fantasy reminded me of three other of my favorite fictional women–angela chase from my so called life and dal ja from dal ja’s spring and byung hee from what’s up fox. what do they all have in common? the way they approach fantasy and love. byung hee wonders if maybe all love has to begin as a fantasy. dal ja asks when women’s fantasies became something to be embarrassed about. and angela does a little bit of what dok mi does–she admires her object of desire from afar. she says (this is a paraphrase) that maybe she likes being in love (the act of it, with all her thinking about and gazing at and talking about jordan catalano), the fantasy, more than the thing itself, if that makes sense. sometimes i get the sense from dok mi that she would be content loving kkaegeum from afar, in the privacy of her own apartment. but the fact that he wants to be loved by her–wants more than her just editing his book–demands more of her.
i want to watch fbnd tonight but i’m sooo tired. i was just thinking about how in the dramabeans recap for the first 2 episodes javabeans wrote about how dok mi and kkaegeum see each other.
and i thought about how soo ah from sufbb is seen. when she first appears the band, made up of 5 boys, is sitting across from her. they’ve been watching girls cross the street, rating them. when soo ah crosses the street, she passes the test and they’re awestruck–she’s not fat, she’s very pretty, she’s wearing nice clothes, she’s got heels on, and her hair curls just so at the ends. she looks like the ideal. soo ah is just minding her own business, crossing the street to get into her dad’s car. she has an entire world inside her–her father is bankrupt and is just about to leave her to live on her own in a rooftop apartment, one of her closest friends is in love with her and she doesn’t feel the same, and she’s afraid her peers will turn on her once they realize she’s no longer wealthy (she’s right). but non of the boys see this. they just see that she’s hot, and know that they like that about her. her interior life is something that the lead of the show will learn about her, and over the course of the series they’ll grow closer and he’ll come to appreciate her as a person he identifies with and not as this vision of feminine perfection.
when kkaegeum first “sees” dok mi she isn’t minding her own business. she’s trying to gawk at his cousin who lives across the way from her, only the person she sees in her binoculars instead is kkaegeum. he doesn’t even realize she’s a woman, and he mistakes her for a man. when dok mi is first seen, she isn’t an ideal that needs to be made human. when she’s first seen she’s transgressing a boundary (which will later be incorporated into how she and kkaegeum interact). and it’s more than one boundary–it’s not just that she’s being a voyeur and is intruding on kkaegeum and his cousin’s privacy, it’s that the ideal world is something she creates for her own pleasure, not something that is thrust upon her. the gaze is hers. but it’s a complicated kind of gaze. first, it’s private, unlike the one the boys in sufbb have. it’s not something to share. second, it’s very specific. she’s not rating a whole bunch of men and choosing the best looking one (although there is that one preview, lolllll). and third, she’s aware that what she’s doing is wrong.
i want to focus on how her act is private and how she knows it’s wrong. for her, i think, the wrongness of it isn’t only because she’s breaking people’s privacy, but also that she recognizes that she doesn’t totally see kkaegeum’s cousin as a person. he’s just this pretty fantasy she has. and so the reason she keeps it private isn’t only because she knows she could probably get in trouble for the act, but because she knows she could cause hurt with it. she doesn’t want to hurt people, so she keeps her little fantasy in her head. what’s the phrase we used to use for her? “do no wrong.” and so in the rest of the show we see how placing whatever fiction you’ve made up of someone and placing it on them can be violent. do hwi made up a story that almost destroyed dok mi’s life; jin rak makes up a fantasy of dok mi that is totally divorced from who she is and who she understands herself to be. when kkaegeum tells dok mi stories, it isn’t to place her in something he’s already created, but to communicate with her, to speak to her directly, to reach her, the person who is directly in front of him.
it always gets me how kkae geum creates scripts and literally gives dok mi, who is so eloquent and makes her living making other people's words better, the words to use to say what she can't. and his words are so simple and straight forward, while hers are much more lyrical.
gonna start calling enrique kkae geum. also i figured out the words to something i couldn't articulate way back when: a central aspect of dok mi and kkae geum's romance is care--how to care for yourself (dok mi shows kkae geum) and how to take the care you feel for others and act on it (kkae geum shows dok mi). also, metaphor is a HUGE part of their romance. they're both storytellers, with kkae geum telling dok mi all these stories explaining how it is he sees her and how she can speak to him and befriend him and what he wants from her. and dok mi uses stories to explain how she sees herself. (and this isn't even counting that they're professional srorytellers--that's what they both do for a living.) but back to the metaphor--falling for kkae geum through his book, that's metaphor in action. wanting to be loved the way dok mi loves the sea, that's a metaphor in action.
i like how little dok mi smiles. and it's not the thing where she's spunky and scowls and is sarcastic, like she legitimately gets to look sad a lot
