A Twist of Things to Come

Thanks to hominysnark I got this up on GC last week. OMG WIN!



Then on the weekend, Pearce gave a shout-out to her newly-engaged brother, in Non-Geek of the Week.

Today, we continue our gift posts, starting with Gifts for the Star Wars Lover from Amalia the Savage. Stay tuned, though -- there will be more fun gift ideas coming out through Wednesday.

So, I've been working my blissful way through scads of lovely Korean and Japanese dramas, TV shows and movies shared with me by the loverly micehell. Many of them star pretty Asian boys, and while I acknowledge that it is likely both racist and genderist of me to say so, hubba, HUBBA.

Several of the K-dramas in particular seem to involve certain themes (especially those with my favorite dolly Jun Ki ):

1. Pretty boys getting tied up and/or beaten/otherwise imperiled. (No complaints about this from me.)

2. Filial piety and family love. This includes children's dedication to honor their living or dead parents (including single-minded quests to avenge their deaths, but also includes the devotion of parents to their offspring. Koreans seem especially fond of showing the devotion of fathers to their children/adopted children. (Which is fine, but begins to drag a bit the more saintly dads sacrifice their lives for their children. Or maybe I'm just jealous, because I suspect my own father would not have been so anxious to take a bullet for me, though I never had any doubts my mother would have. *shrug* Luckily, it never came up.)

3. Childhood sweethearts being fated to fall in love, manage it badly, and dwell in picturesque, angsty love triangles (usually involving brother/rivals). (Unless you count the Stover Twins in fourth grade, my lack of tolerance for the chic having two brothers fall for her may also be rooted in jealousy. Ah, the Stover Twins. They were blond, and the only way I could tell them apart was the mole on the back of one's neck. They teased me a lot. Our whirlwind affair ended when I hit them both on the head with a broom for singing a vegetable jingle with my name in it once too often. *sigh*)

4. Faked death of the hero. (I got nothin'.)

5. Long underwater shots of our hero appearing to drown as he sinks unconscious through the water.

6. Amnesia. I kid you not, honest-to-goodness, can't-remember-my-fricken-name, my-sworn-enemy-is-now-my-best-friend am-freakin-nesia.

It's like a drinking game. I really liked Iljimae, which had the amnesia start from severe childhood trauma (which blocked out his life before the age of nine), and the brother/rivals didn't know they were related. But in Time Between Dog and Wolf the amnesia is of the blunt force trauma variety, and the brother rivalry only starts up after the hero brother is presumed dead.

It also makes me wonder if I could write the perfect collection of K-drama tropes in the same way David Allen Coe wrote the perfect Country and Western song. *snrk*

In any case, I know that getting as into this stuff as I am is probably a massive short-selling of my intellectual heritage.

But I canna help it.

I can tell that Jun Ki is trying really hard to cast off the pretty boy image, but casting him as a reasonably successful Muay Thai fighter? I have more muscular arms than he does! It's not like Iljimae, where they effectively hid his slight frame under the padded shoulders of period costume.

*A bajillion points if you know the origin of the quote in the title of this post.