Post by TheBo on Dec 2, 2014 15:24:09 GMT -5
Assorted Gems
THIS IS A SPOILER THREAD. It contains FULL spoilers of this drama. It is for discussion only. Don’t read it if you think you’d rather watch the show.
I think what I’ll do is this overview, and then when I think of things I want to complain about, I’ll add posts to the thread.
The main characters of this drama are, naturally enough, a rich family and a poor family.
The poor family, named Gung, consists of a vain, sometimes shrill mother who can’t accept getting old, an equally vain father who philanders on the wife and even brings home a baby from his deceased girlfriend (maybe this explains Mom), and four adult children named after jewels: Bichwi/Jade (eldest girl), Sanho/Coral (eldest son), Ryubi/Ruby (second daughter), and Hobak/Amber (youngest son). The Gungs live in an old-style courtyard house that is slightly larger than their needs, and so they offer a room for rent (more later). They also have maternal and paternal grandmothers who constantly snipe at each other (but really seem to be bonded buddies from way back), both of whom live separately in apartments located near each other. Dad’s mom is an old-fashioned, country lady who even still makes her own soy sauces in her apartment every year, and Mom’s city mom is a carbon-copy of her own daughter: vain and barely able to cook, clean or care for herself.
Jade wants to be a drama writer and works at a television production company. Ruby is pretty and thinks she’ll marry to make her fortune; she has a boring doctor boyfriend who irritates her and has an overbearing mother besides. Sanho is a good son, he’s going to college but has also just come back from his national service in a small town, and all he does is study. He is the hope of the family. Hobak thinks he’d like to marry a rich girl and isn’t much interested in schoolwork; he is the only child still in high school.
The rich family, named Seo, consists of a flighty but very sweet mother, a strong father who insists on all doing things his way, an adult son (Yeong-guk) who is everything a parent could want, and a spoiled brat teenaged daughter (Kkeutsoon) who’s been nothing but a pain in the butt her whole life. She’s wild and arrogant. They seem generally happy, but then Yeong-guk gets it into his head to be more independent and leaves home to make his own living for awhile.
He bumbles into the Gung household. They are renting out a room because of course they’re perpetually short on funds. However, in a miscommunication, one person rents the room to Yeong-guk and another to a white American (Kyle Huntington) who is trying (and pretty much failing) to become a Buddhist monk. Kyle’s stepmother in America happens to be Korean, and he has not only learned to speak Korean like a native but is also a free spirit who thinks he can fit in anywhere. They work it out, and both men rent rooms from the family.
Ruby and Kyle become fast friends, at first because she claims she can speak English and so he delights in embarrassing her; in return, she constantly (and mostly erroneously) corrects his Korean. Yeong-guk and Jade butt heads, awkwardly romance and then marry. Sanho’s small-town girlfriend (from his army service) comes into town and shocks everyone that she expects him to marry her (I can’t remember if she’s pregnant, but she certainly slept with him and that’s enough for her) and he does marry her (this turns out very well as it happens). Hobak is thunderstruck when he first runs into Kkeutsoon and they end up having a teenage, Romeo-and-Juliet thay-ing. (None of the Gungs know that Yeong-guk comes from a “good” family, and they don’t find out that he’s related to Kkeutsoon either until late in the proceedings.)
In the Seo household, mother develops early onset Alzheimer’s disease, and this is the cause of great sorrow and pain. However, because Mom bonds with Jade, and because Jade is not horrified by her condition (although her family is), Yeong-guk’s father accepts his marriage to Jade.
So that’s the general set-up. What I liked about the drama was that it was unruly. All of these people had distinct personalities; even the ones that fit into easy stereotypes (brat rich daughter, good-looking-but-unfaithful poor dad) were interesting. I liked the actors for the most part, and even if one or two had shortcomings, they fit into the character so I could go with it.
Another great thing about this was the girls themselves were different. Particularly Jade, who was fiercely independent. She only promises to marry Yeong-guk when he reveals that he wants her to help her reach her goal of being a great dramatist. She’s subjected to enormous pressure at her job, even being victimized by a rival who is also a jerk, but she keeps her eyes on the prize. At one point, she gives a very cogent explanation to Ruby about why dramas are rewritten on the fly. I didn’t like the reasoning, but it made sense. And Yeong-guk is thrilled by this. He’s so supportive, it makes you swoon.
As for Ruby, in Kyle Huntington (and yes, I’m totally amused by that name), for the first time in my drama experience we have a viable, non-Korean love interest and main character. I think making him a candidate for monkhood made him safe to Korean audiences. Also, the Korean stepmom probably helped, as did the fact that he was a Harvard graduate who was the son of a rich American. For me, it was great that he really sounded like an American (which the actor is), rather than a German or French person with heavily accented English, which is who we usually get on these shows. Kyle’s portrayer wasn’t a great actor, but he was funny and fit the part.
Finally, Kkeutsoon, although horrid and annoying and even fitting into the stereotypical spoiled daughter slot, remained appealing and had a touching sense of her own place in the world.
So we’re tumbling along, everyone having their own adventures I may expand upon later, when suddenly (and in the very last episode mind you), everything switches around and goes back to same-old, same-old Korean-drama-finish.
Despite his promises to Jade before marriage, after she gets some drama hits under her belt and the birth of their first child, one day Yeong-guk asks her, “How long will you keep up this drama thing? Aren’t we enough for you?” This is the man who assured her he would always support her in her career. He took her away from someone who was going to set her up in her own private castle in Switzerland just so she could write. And she just folds and stops working. She becomes the good wife. What? This switcheroo made me very angry.
Ruby and Kyle are clearly headed for the alter. They are a happier, more balanced version of Ruby’s parents. Then suddenly, he just decides to become a monk—again, nearly in the last episode. He leaves her, she follows him but then decides he’s really into the monk thing and lets him go. But that’s not all. Although she clearly had decided that marrying her pusillanimous, arrogant jerk doctor boyfriend and pushing out babies was not the life for Ruby, the last we see of her, she’s done just that. We got no lead-up, we just see her pregnant and billing and cooing with her previous worst enemy, her now mother-in-law. Totally disgusting.
What happens to Kkeutsoon is maybe more complicated, but as I’ve complained elsewhere, the explanation of this is revealed in an inner dialogue that was not translated by the idiot who translated this drama for DF. But we know the story in general—even though everyone is against their marriage, high-schoolers Hobak and Kkeutsoon insist on having a big white-dress wedding ceremony. Unfortunately, on the way to the wedding, Kkeutsoon’s sweet, addled mother just up and dies (for no apparent reason). Next time we see her, in the last completely untranslated 12-20 minutes of the drama, Kkeutsoon, enormously pregnant with her non-Hobak husband in tow, is at her mother’s grave giving some sort of inner-dialogue denouement about her new life. Which I know nothing about. Thanks, stupid stupid DF translator.
THIS IS A SPOILER THREAD. It contains FULL spoilers of this drama. It is for discussion only. Don’t read it if you think you’d rather watch the show.
I think what I’ll do is this overview, and then when I think of things I want to complain about, I’ll add posts to the thread.
The main characters of this drama are, naturally enough, a rich family and a poor family.
The poor family, named Gung, consists of a vain, sometimes shrill mother who can’t accept getting old, an equally vain father who philanders on the wife and even brings home a baby from his deceased girlfriend (maybe this explains Mom), and four adult children named after jewels: Bichwi/Jade (eldest girl), Sanho/Coral (eldest son), Ryubi/Ruby (second daughter), and Hobak/Amber (youngest son). The Gungs live in an old-style courtyard house that is slightly larger than their needs, and so they offer a room for rent (more later). They also have maternal and paternal grandmothers who constantly snipe at each other (but really seem to be bonded buddies from way back), both of whom live separately in apartments located near each other. Dad’s mom is an old-fashioned, country lady who even still makes her own soy sauces in her apartment every year, and Mom’s city mom is a carbon-copy of her own daughter: vain and barely able to cook, clean or care for herself.
Jade wants to be a drama writer and works at a television production company. Ruby is pretty and thinks she’ll marry to make her fortune; she has a boring doctor boyfriend who irritates her and has an overbearing mother besides. Sanho is a good son, he’s going to college but has also just come back from his national service in a small town, and all he does is study. He is the hope of the family. Hobak thinks he’d like to marry a rich girl and isn’t much interested in schoolwork; he is the only child still in high school.
The rich family, named Seo, consists of a flighty but very sweet mother, a strong father who insists on all doing things his way, an adult son (Yeong-guk) who is everything a parent could want, and a spoiled brat teenaged daughter (Kkeutsoon) who’s been nothing but a pain in the butt her whole life. She’s wild and arrogant. They seem generally happy, but then Yeong-guk gets it into his head to be more independent and leaves home to make his own living for awhile.
He bumbles into the Gung household. They are renting out a room because of course they’re perpetually short on funds. However, in a miscommunication, one person rents the room to Yeong-guk and another to a white American (Kyle Huntington) who is trying (and pretty much failing) to become a Buddhist monk. Kyle’s stepmother in America happens to be Korean, and he has not only learned to speak Korean like a native but is also a free spirit who thinks he can fit in anywhere. They work it out, and both men rent rooms from the family.
Ruby and Kyle become fast friends, at first because she claims she can speak English and so he delights in embarrassing her; in return, she constantly (and mostly erroneously) corrects his Korean. Yeong-guk and Jade butt heads, awkwardly romance and then marry. Sanho’s small-town girlfriend (from his army service) comes into town and shocks everyone that she expects him to marry her (I can’t remember if she’s pregnant, but she certainly slept with him and that’s enough for her) and he does marry her (this turns out very well as it happens). Hobak is thunderstruck when he first runs into Kkeutsoon and they end up having a teenage, Romeo-and-Juliet thay-ing. (None of the Gungs know that Yeong-guk comes from a “good” family, and they don’t find out that he’s related to Kkeutsoon either until late in the proceedings.)
In the Seo household, mother develops early onset Alzheimer’s disease, and this is the cause of great sorrow and pain. However, because Mom bonds with Jade, and because Jade is not horrified by her condition (although her family is), Yeong-guk’s father accepts his marriage to Jade.
So that’s the general set-up. What I liked about the drama was that it was unruly. All of these people had distinct personalities; even the ones that fit into easy stereotypes (brat rich daughter, good-looking-but-unfaithful poor dad) were interesting. I liked the actors for the most part, and even if one or two had shortcomings, they fit into the character so I could go with it.
Another great thing about this was the girls themselves were different. Particularly Jade, who was fiercely independent. She only promises to marry Yeong-guk when he reveals that he wants her to help her reach her goal of being a great dramatist. She’s subjected to enormous pressure at her job, even being victimized by a rival who is also a jerk, but she keeps her eyes on the prize. At one point, she gives a very cogent explanation to Ruby about why dramas are rewritten on the fly. I didn’t like the reasoning, but it made sense. And Yeong-guk is thrilled by this. He’s so supportive, it makes you swoon.
As for Ruby, in Kyle Huntington (and yes, I’m totally amused by that name), for the first time in my drama experience we have a viable, non-Korean love interest and main character. I think making him a candidate for monkhood made him safe to Korean audiences. Also, the Korean stepmom probably helped, as did the fact that he was a Harvard graduate who was the son of a rich American. For me, it was great that he really sounded like an American (which the actor is), rather than a German or French person with heavily accented English, which is who we usually get on these shows. Kyle’s portrayer wasn’t a great actor, but he was funny and fit the part.
Finally, Kkeutsoon, although horrid and annoying and even fitting into the stereotypical spoiled daughter slot, remained appealing and had a touching sense of her own place in the world.
So we’re tumbling along, everyone having their own adventures I may expand upon later, when suddenly (and in the very last episode mind you), everything switches around and goes back to same-old, same-old Korean-drama-finish.
Despite his promises to Jade before marriage, after she gets some drama hits under her belt and the birth of their first child, one day Yeong-guk asks her, “How long will you keep up this drama thing? Aren’t we enough for you?” This is the man who assured her he would always support her in her career. He took her away from someone who was going to set her up in her own private castle in Switzerland just so she could write. And she just folds and stops working. She becomes the good wife. What? This switcheroo made me very angry.
Ruby and Kyle are clearly headed for the alter. They are a happier, more balanced version of Ruby’s parents. Then suddenly, he just decides to become a monk—again, nearly in the last episode. He leaves her, she follows him but then decides he’s really into the monk thing and lets him go. But that’s not all. Although she clearly had decided that marrying her pusillanimous, arrogant jerk doctor boyfriend and pushing out babies was not the life for Ruby, the last we see of her, she’s done just that. We got no lead-up, we just see her pregnant and billing and cooing with her previous worst enemy, her now mother-in-law. Totally disgusting.
What happens to Kkeutsoon is maybe more complicated, but as I’ve complained elsewhere, the explanation of this is revealed in an inner dialogue that was not translated by the idiot who translated this drama for DF. But we know the story in general—even though everyone is against their marriage, high-schoolers Hobak and Kkeutsoon insist on having a big white-dress wedding ceremony. Unfortunately, on the way to the wedding, Kkeutsoon’s sweet, addled mother just up and dies (for no apparent reason). Next time we see her, in the last completely untranslated 12-20 minutes of the drama, Kkeutsoon, enormously pregnant with her non-Hobak husband in tow, is at her mother’s grave giving some sort of inner-dialogue denouement about her new life. Which I know nothing about. Thanks, stupid stupid DF translator.
