#kww2023

[kodrama]

#kdramawomensweek

DAY 4: BAD GIRLS CLUB

[melonatures]

#kdramawomensweek (2023)  and - day eight, timeslip [what if two female characters from different dramas...could meet?]

one of the ways fiction fails women is with its failure of imagination for what our lives can be. this failure comes in many ways:

our social roles limited to being mothers, wives, and daughters

a lack of subjectivity, as in stories are not told so that the reader or viewer is invited into the experience of them through point of view of a woman; or a woman’s experience is not a legitimate or accessible or interesting mode of storytelling

our experiences limited to being fuck-able, rape-able, beautiful, cisgendered, but not in a way that affords subjectivity (see above)

and more

one of the things i’ve always enjoyed about kdramas is their preoccupation with modes of living. they ask the questions:

how do people live?

why do they live this way?

what is hard about living?

what threatens how people choose to live?

how do you live alongside others?

last night i browsed through part 2 of the glory and one minor character, the old lady landlord, reminded me of another from a very different drama, age of youth—the old lady landlord. 

[image cr: lil98s]

the glory is a soapy, improbable revenge drama, while age of youth is a coming of age slice of life. i think the breadth between the two shows illustrates what i’m trying to understand about why i’m so charmed by both these women. they’re both old, unmarried or otherwise partner-free, without children (the one from the glory lost her child), financially independent, and able to offer housing and safety to younger women. my favorite thing, though, is that they both grow gardens on the rooftops of their homes. how lovely is that? to imagine an old woman not only as someone’s grandmother, or living with illness, or confined to a home, or as someone’s caretaker, but as a free person with her own place, with the leisure to garden and the power to offer homes to younger people. and both of these women are able to exist in such vastly different stories.

the other thing i love about kdramas is how they open up my own imagination. i tend to get stuck in the rut of surviving from day to day—go to work, pay my bills, deal with my body, live as [list identities here] in [list society here] with [list family bullshit here]. but when i saw the old lady landlord last night i had a spark of imagination—wouldn’t it be neat if that’s what my future held? she, and the old lady landlord of age of youth, made me stop and think about my own mode of living, and what my life can be, happily, when i’m old. 

[dramaheroine]

Kdrama Women’s Week-Day 1: In Her Head

Kim Do Woo (Writer)

-My Name is Kim Sam Soon (2005)

-What’s up fox (2006)

[kodrama]

#kdramawomensweek

DAY 3: THE HELP

[kodrama]

#kdramawomensweek

DAY 1: IN HER HEAD

[kodrama]

#kdramawomensweek 

DAY 2: IT GIRL

[a-silly-rabbit]

Starting new set design project for May. Final picture has pencil at bottom for scale. (He will be cut out when finished drying)

[linjingshu]

#kdramawomensweek ; day 8 — timeslip

GIANT 자이언트 (2010) // CAN WE GET MARRIED? 우리가 결혼할 수 있을까 (2012)

i do this frankly stupid thing out of morbid curiosity where i watch the older works of writers who have gravely disappointed me with a project in order to understand the hype. sometimes this leads me to realize that the pioneer of one of the first onscreen gay kisses on japanese tv & writer of one of my favorite family dramas ever has also written the most homophobic cohabitation story i’ve ever seen in my life during his next decade of screenwriting. sometimes the person who wrote a pop romcom in order to mock feminism that is, in essence, virulently homophobic, also wrote the first lesbian romance to air on prime time television for a MAIN character five years down the line. the person who wrote really complicated women whose interpersonal relationships were fascinating to me will go down to write a misogynist drama that treats its female lead like a guest actor a decade later. it is very much a mixed bag, i guess. i bring this up because this (often futile) action itself is an instance of timeslip to me.

in this vein, both giant (from writers who will go on to write empress ki, a drama i will rage quit) and can we get married (ha myung hee has let me down many times, but record of youth was a new low) are my backtracking dramas. i’m not even finished with the kid episodes of giant so i’m not qualified to comment on how good the storytelling is as a whole just yet, but it’s a longass family drama about revenge and construction that spans over the course of nearly 40 years iirc. can we get married, also a family drama, operates on a much smaller scope and its events never make an attempt at ringing universal to its audience. cwgm is about a doomed marriage negotiation that takes place alongside 1. a daunting divorce, 2. middle aged people who had sworn off love finding it in unexpected places and 3. exes who, against all odds, find their way back to each other.  

giant is an ambitious period piece, which cwgm isn’t. so lee deul ja gets to be the backbone of the story in a way i doubt yoo kyung ok will get to in giant, because so far her character is a peripheral one. what these two women have in common is their blue eye shadow that’s deemed tacky by society to wear as vibrantly as they do; an attempt of a crow playing at being a peacock, if you will. they love their daughters fiercely, something that softens and hardens their integrity of character in equal measure. yoo kyung ok will not hesitate to steal from fellow proletariat or sell them out to a third party that wants them dead if it benefits her, and lee deul ja will never give up her back end cosmetics shop, which she’s used to support her daughters to a high profile marriage and college respectively. she’s parsimonious in the way people born into poverty are, and she will never let her daughters get cheated, even if it means cheating someone else’s child in the long run.

during the second episode of giant it occurred to me that both of these women would be a road not taken to each other, if they were to ever meet. yoo kyung ok gives up her daughter to an affluent lifestyle with her partner to live in a hovel herself and become a prostitute with bad credit also on the run from her creditors. lee deul ja never remarries and by the skin of her teeth raises her kids into adulthood. when her teenage daughter, a neglected rich kid, runs away from home to seek her out in daejeon, yoo kyung ok can’t bear to reveal her identity and tarnish her daughter with all the things it carries. despite this, her child obliviously manages to become her saving grace. lee deul ja never leaves her daughters alone out of shame once they’re established in society due to an inferiority complex that i believe many other writers would’ve jumped at the chance to display in her tormented psyche (lol). this remains a constant even when one of her daughters would rather that she did, actually, and it’s been a while since i watched cwgm, but i distinctly remember her preferring death over being denied the opportunity of fighting for her children’s rights.

i don’t know yoo kyung ok very well yet, i don’t know what seoul has in store for her. but i did find myself thinking that if these two ever passed each other by on the street they’d immediately recognize each other for what they are—even being nearly 40 years apart in time—and perhaps they’d be wary of each other’s cunning, only to think to themselves in private: this lady has excellent taste, if only because she goes against the tide as stubbornly as i do.