Oh my! I think this episode does a lot for character development and interaction.
So, I love the interplay between Jun Pyo and Jan Di (I’m not totally against her….yet…she still has her moments). You can tell that when he calls her a punk and a gangster that it is done from a place of LOVE. He’s so cheeky, that Jun Pyo. He was completely enjoying getting his life saved! Jan Di has a positive effect on him, he smiles much more, even if he still hasn’t gotten down the correct way to share his feelings of affection. Did you see how tickled he was when he put the ducks in the swimming pool? I thought he was going to fall out of his chair from cackling so much. He clearly cares about her, but he also relates to her in a completely different way than Ji Hoo. He’s kinda real with his. He insults her, and she gives it right back to him. For some reason, I enjoy this back and forth. Whereas Jan Di’s interaction with Ji Hoo is weird (girl, get off your knees! you could have totally bandaged his finger standing up!)
Ji Hoo and his emotional state, now that’s a different story. I know you think I’m always on Ji Hoo’s side because of his fabulous wardrobe choices, but this time I think that while Ji Hoo is a man responsible for his own choices, I wonder if his association with Min isn’t entirely healthy. I know we briefly mentioned this last time, but I’m with Ji Hoo, “Exactly who are you to him?” Are you the motherly figure, are you a potential girlfriend? Have you been playing Ji Hoo all these years, feeding your own narcissism to have an incredibly rich and attractive man at your beck and call? Min can’t be all, I’m a little jealous of Jan Di, but then continue to STRING JI HOO ALONG!!!! Ji Hoo is a MAN, with MAN feelings, you gotta treat him like a man. So her own kind of vagueness doesn’t help. Is she dumping Ji Hoo on Jan Di? Is she now supposed to fulfill this mother/girlfriend freaky role for him? I’m not really buying that Min is all that torn up about leaving Ji Hoo. C’mon! You know how emotionally fragile that man is!
This is also the episode where I get more interested in the interplay among the boys. Jun Pyo clearly knows that Ji Hoo has a thing for Jan Di, even if Ji Ho doesn’t, so he’s taking every opportunity to throw his ‘relationship’ in his face. Look, I’ve got my arm around Jan Di! Look, Jan Di’s in my room! Yet, they all rush over when there is an emergency, and that emergency is JUN PYO’S WITCH OF A MOTHER!!! You need to prepare yourself, there is a reason why they are all afraid of her. You know it’s bad when Yi Jung can barely pull of his charming wiles. SHE. IS. BAD. Although it tickles me that Jun Pyo refers to her as “the hag,” you notice he doesn’t do it to her face. She is a piece of work. Even when things are rocky, they rally to each other’s side, and this is why the Boys become more interesting to me than Jan Di.
I also find the class dynamics getting more pronounced: Jan Di is a dry cleaner’s daughter with a ‘commoner’s pride.’ They talk about her like she’s an alien. And yet Jun Pyo is cool with crossing that class barrier. Interesting. I wonder if Jan Di’s inability to be feminine is supposed to be yet another marker of her class origins. Do you notice just how uncomfortable she is when they dress her up (and yes, I realize that it is problematic that she is getting dressed, Pygmalion-style, by these boys who try to transform her)? You would think Jan Di never wore a dress in her entire life. What, working-class girls have no femininity? In her drunken state, we do get some insight into her low self-esteem. She really doesn’t think she is smart, pretty or has any redeeming qualities whatsoever. But I also think that she can be stubborn when it comes to her pride.
Jun Pyo, working on getting into Jan Di’s heart. Did you notice how closely she held those goggles? She just doesn’t know it yet….the problem is, even when she knows it, she will act the same way!
Thoughts?
High Yellow - Asian Popular Culture 
I absolutely LOVED that Jun Pyo got Jan Di the goggles! It was a very meaningful present because she wanted them, didn’t say anything, and he got them for her (I think) not to impress her but because he truly wanted to please her. Notice how it was (somehow) via the phone that he was able to win the auction – he didn’t want to make a big show of getting them! It’s a good thing that she was grateful, too, and that they actually made her think about him. At least a little.
I agree, their interactions are much more…enjoyable to watch? Less painful? In this episode you can tell that they’re “going easy” on each other in their own special way – Jun Pyo loving the ducks in the pool, but still admitting that he’s going easy on her. That prank was much more of a person affectionately messing with you instead of an enemy trying to ruin your life. I love that he called her gangster in this episode! It’s another show of how he wants her to stay spunky. It’s too bad she was drunk when he told her that despite her “faults” she’s still ranked number one in his heart.
Ji Hoo, I really DID feel for him in this episode. I mean, come on he was freaking CRYING while he was playing his violin out in the woods and then his finger gets cut and it’s all so OMINOUS! I really loved his speech to her about how he wanted to hold her as a MAN (Dudes need to PAY ATTENTION, because that’s one of the things that we women LOVE TO HEAR!) and just in general how active and engaged he was! But she totally strings him along. Min is definitely relinquishing her “Ji Hoo responsibilities” on Jan Di – they’ve both said at different times that he smiles whenever he mentions one of them. It’s understandable that, to Jan Di, this means that Min makes him happy and she should stick around. To Min, though, it means Ji Hoo must be ready to move on and she can leave him in Jan Di’s care and go on and live her own life. I’m sorry, but if you admit that you’d never sleep again if you ever lost someone and then proceed to LEAVE ANYWAY, you are one confused woman. I think it’s in this last part that she finally decides to be his “mother”, because it’s similar to pushing the baby bird out of the nest: you raise a child so that they can one day leave you and go out into the world to be successful on his own, so it hurts when he leaves because of the mutual affection you share but it’s a necessary hurt. It just sucks because Ji Hoo did NOT want their relationship to end up as mother-son.
Playing with the puppet was totally creepy, I’m sorry but they could’ve picked a different toy!
Interesting fact about Min in the manga: she is a model, particularly known for her super-long hair, and at her birthday party she decides not to inherit her parents’ company (no specification as to what kind of company it is), grabs a pair of scissors, cuts off her hair, then announces that she is going back to France TO BECOME A LAWYER. I think that if Min had done this in the kdrama she would have been a bit more respectable. But, no, she wants to go and continue modeling…because women can’t possibly WANT to be lawyers, no. Min would have made a much stronger role model for Jan Di if they had kept this aspect in it, but because they make her want to continue modeling I think that, in turn, makes Jan Di weaker because you realize her idol is a model and only a model. I’m not saying models can’t be inspirational! But in general, having a mentor who is a woman in a profession of beauty v. a woman in a profession of justice makes for a very different mentee. What are you really valuing? Freedom to travel, as Min says? Or beauty only?
I don’t think that Jun Pyo rubs his “relationship” with Jan Di in Ji Hoo’s face at the point when he puts his arm around her and leads her away, at least not in a spiteful way. To me it was more like saying “See? You’ve got YOUR girl, and I’ve got MINE, and this is the way it should be!” I loved that Jan Di and Jun Pyo started arguing about how much each other owed them for saving each others’ lives. Who ended up owing who? It should have been Jun Pyo, just because he tried to take advantage of the mouth-to-mouth Jan Di was giving him (totally a scene out of The Sandlot!). But he’s SO PLEASED (see this picture: http://i294.photobucket.com/albums/mm96/javabeans122/drama/kkot/kkot3-028.jpg). Even when he sees the video those SHBs show him of Jan Di and Ji Hoo, he’s not willing to give up on her but goes to “confront her”. Um, actually he tries to forcibly kiss her (“face-rape”?) which isn’t okay if you don’t know whether the girl actually wants to kiss you or not! But his question after she resisted redeemed him for me, because, again, he’s dumb and has no idea how to express his feelings: “Am I that loathsome?” NOT TO ME!
I know there’s more to get to but this post is a little long, so I’ll end it with this for now: is it bad that I kind of love how often Jun Pyo throws things? Is it bad that I like that he’s a little violent? Because this is one of the first cases when I think that in an emergency situation I would NOT be able to crush him if he messes with me!
Whew. Thoughts?
[…] published on High Yellow on February 19, 2011, Written by […]