Shining Inheritance/Brilliant Legacy
I couldn't get episodes of My Girlfriend is a Gumiho soon enough last week, so I started up on Shining Inheritance also known as Brilliant Legacy, actor Lee Seung-gi's previous drama. (Lee Seung-gi being the main actor in MGiG.) I had heard that it was good (it hit 40% in the ratings at some point) so I figured I'd take a look at it.
I've since marathoned the 28 episodes (including one day where I'm pretty sure I did nothing else but watch the show). I'm not sure what to think of it. Doing nothing but watch Korean drama has a way of making me feel guilty (how 'bout them blogposts you promised, DK?)
Certainly it became compelling at some point. Wikipedia summarizes the set-up pretty well, but the series itself takes 5 episodes to establish this. I was thinking 1 or 2, with more time given to the Boy and the Girl hilariously competing over his inheritance. That it took 5 episodes instead felt like torture. The Girl was Cinderella-ed ("dead" father, evil stepmother, missing autistic younger brother) and the Boy was such a massive jerk, I wondered how they ended up together and if they were going to hamfist it like they did with Goong.
The bad news is that I never got my hilarious competition over the inheritance. The good news is that what I got instead was a passably believable romance between the two leads. Better than kisses, better than forehead touches or sex in these Korean dramas is when they can just be friends with each other. They supported each other and worked well together. I wanted these two characters to get married and run the company together as a compromise between the Boy Who Was Supposed to Inherit and the Girl Who Will Inherit Because She Has the Right Attitude. (This is not the ending I got. It feeds into my small disappointments.)
I'm always deathly afraid of the sexism in Korean dramas and it's undeniably here. The Girl doesn't get to grow as much as the Boy (and neither did his mother and sister). Her evil stepmother drove me mad the way she was supposed to, though I can admire her skill in the art of lying. The incentives were more or less there and they made sense. (I say "more or less" because I am making the active choice to buy into this. There is room in there not to do so.)
I didn't have many qualms with how the carefully crafted lying slotted into the structure of the drama itself either, considering the limitations of the art form. I know the drama needs to drag stuff out, but this didn't piss me off as much as it could have. I appreciated that the Girl figured out how untrustworthy her stepmother was before I needed to start screaming at her. I enjoyed how the "dead" father and missing brother (who generally stay away from the main action) ended up with friends of friends of the Boy and the Girl even if it meant that it took the dad about 20 episodes to ask the people he'd been seeing intermittently the right kinds of questions. (Why do dramas do this, btw? Is it because they don't want to introduce new actors?)
There's potential commentary there on the nature and importance of money (I am a bit tweaked at how they describe money as "scary") but this is something so trite that I'm not motivated to look too deeply into it. It does mean the ending in which the massive inheritance was given to employees of the company instead thematically makes sense. The ending I wanted would have degraded the message a bit (though it still could happen in the long run. The couple could get married, he could still end up president, and they could keep on with their awesome teamwork. I was just deprived of having it depicted. Argh.)
And to restore some more of my geek cred, the series can be a fascinating portrait of how systems of debt and shame work in South Korea/Asia. Stuck in a hard place, the Girl has no choice but to borrow money from friends. This is shameful, but she mitigates it through promises of repayment and the cheerful idea that the work she will be doing goes towards that repayment. One of her friends is also indebted to her from an earlier time, and so thinks of this loan of money as repayment for that. And on and on, the cycle of debt continues. Repayment must also be made properly, with a careful dance with the proper insistence that it was nothing, and gracious acceptance. Deviation from this pattern is only acceptable with the proper palliatives (such as declaring your love. But even that might not be enough.)
I did expect a few more kisses for a 28 episode series (I only got 2) but it was enjoyable.
I've since marathoned the 28 episodes (including one day where I'm pretty sure I did nothing else but watch the show). I'm not sure what to think of it. Doing nothing but watch Korean drama has a way of making me feel guilty (how 'bout them blogposts you promised, DK?)
Certainly it became compelling at some point. Wikipedia summarizes the set-up pretty well, but the series itself takes 5 episodes to establish this. I was thinking 1 or 2, with more time given to the Boy and the Girl hilariously competing over his inheritance. That it took 5 episodes instead felt like torture. The Girl was Cinderella-ed ("dead" father, evil stepmother, missing autistic younger brother) and the Boy was such a massive jerk, I wondered how they ended up together and if they were going to hamfist it like they did with Goong.
The bad news is that I never got my hilarious competition over the inheritance. The good news is that what I got instead was a passably believable romance between the two leads. Better than kisses, better than forehead touches or sex in these Korean dramas is when they can just be friends with each other. They supported each other and worked well together. I wanted these two characters to get married and run the company together as a compromise between the Boy Who Was Supposed to Inherit and the Girl Who Will Inherit Because She Has the Right Attitude. (This is not the ending I got. It feeds into my small disappointments.)
I'm always deathly afraid of the sexism in Korean dramas and it's undeniably here. The Girl doesn't get to grow as much as the Boy (and neither did his mother and sister). Her evil stepmother drove me mad the way she was supposed to, though I can admire her skill in the art of lying. The incentives were more or less there and they made sense. (I say "more or less" because I am making the active choice to buy into this. There is room in there not to do so.)
I didn't have many qualms with how the carefully crafted lying slotted into the structure of the drama itself either, considering the limitations of the art form. I know the drama needs to drag stuff out, but this didn't piss me off as much as it could have. I appreciated that the Girl figured out how untrustworthy her stepmother was before I needed to start screaming at her. I enjoyed how the "dead" father and missing brother (who generally stay away from the main action) ended up with friends of friends of the Boy and the Girl even if it meant that it took the dad about 20 episodes to ask the people he'd been seeing intermittently the right kinds of questions. (Why do dramas do this, btw? Is it because they don't want to introduce new actors?)
There's potential commentary there on the nature and importance of money (I am a bit tweaked at how they describe money as "scary") but this is something so trite that I'm not motivated to look too deeply into it. It does mean the ending in which the massive inheritance was given to employees of the company instead thematically makes sense. The ending I wanted would have degraded the message a bit (though it still could happen in the long run. The couple could get married, he could still end up president, and they could keep on with their awesome teamwork. I was just deprived of having it depicted. Argh.)
And to restore some more of my geek cred, the series can be a fascinating portrait of how systems of debt and shame work in South Korea/Asia. Stuck in a hard place, the Girl has no choice but to borrow money from friends. This is shameful, but she mitigates it through promises of repayment and the cheerful idea that the work she will be doing goes towards that repayment. One of her friends is also indebted to her from an earlier time, and so thinks of this loan of money as repayment for that. And on and on, the cycle of debt continues. Repayment must also be made properly, with a careful dance with the proper insistence that it was nothing, and gracious acceptance. Deviation from this pattern is only acceptable with the proper palliatives (such as declaring your love. But even that might not be enough.)
I did expect a few more kisses for a 28 episode series (I only got 2) but it was enjoyable.