Saturday, May 13, 2017

W - Two Worlds

    I just finished watching another Kdrama "W - Two Worlds" last night...I must say this one hits eerily closest to home than all the dramas I've watched before...just a little background on the main female lead: 30 year-old cardiothoracic resident who created her dream guy in the form of the main male lead (the main character of the famous webtoon "W" drawn by her father)...ok, I can't draw to save my own life...but if I could, I would have drawn and created my own dream guy...of course nothing is stopping me from creating my own dream guy in my imaginary world and imagine how our day-to-day sweet romance would play out...but I'm digressing....

    Anyway, I loved this Kdrama...it's a fiction fantasy, sci-fi, psycho-thriller, mystery, drama and romance all snowballed into one...my mind is still reeling from all the suspense and plot-twists...it gets a little messy at times...and confusing too...what with all the movements between the real and cartoon worlds...not to mention that I don't understand Korean and the English subtitles sometimes don't exactly convey the actual meaning of the lines in Korean...still, I loved how this drama gives you the idea that perhaps in every created worlds (even cartoon worlds), the characters in the worlds are really alive and sometimes develop their own will and desire....

    I think another concept that many would find attractive is that 2 people from 2 different worlds can meet and eventually fall in love with each other...actually that's pretty cliche...but i think in this drama it's more like the girl created her dream guy who lives in a parallel world but eventually ended up saving his life and brought him to (real) life...now who doesn't love the idea of a dream guy turning into reality? Doesn't matter if he has no identity or money in the real world...

    Although initially I didn't think the main actor of the drama is good-looking, he actually fits his character well...he does look like as if he came out of a comic book...he's tall, fair with a cute boyish charm that befits a main character of a webtoon...the main actress is quite pretty...but I do wonder why they always make the female lead awkward and easily flustered...especially when in front of the male lead...and somehow, although the male lead doesn't think the female lead is beautiful, he finds her charming in her own ways and falls in love with her...does this even happen in real life?

    In the drama, there are a lot of variables in the cartoon and real world which changes the dynamics and course of the cartoon world...and because the female lead (from the real world) went into the cartoon world and became the female lead in the cartoon world, the original female lead in the cartoon world started to disappear because she has lost her purpose of existence in the cartoon world...which got me to think, sometimes in life, your happy ending might have been someone else's sad ending...and I wonder if maybe that's why I think I don't deserve a happy ending...because my happiness is at the cost of another person's sadness and suffering...

    Anyway, there are some nice songs in the OST of this drama...and the songs are very suitably written for the drama...i don't usually like songs with rap, but "In the Illusion" feels like the perfect song for this drama...a friend asked if he should watch this drama, so I told him that if he liked the idea of cartoon characters coming to life and real people going into the cartoon world, then watch it!

Saturday, May 6, 2017

My Kdrama binge: Of mermaid and time traveller...

    So it has been a little more than one year since my last post...I guess my life in Malacca had been so uneventful that I hardly felt the urge to type out a post...true to my INFJ self, I'm turning into a hermit who drama binges...previously it used to be Taiwanese drama series but I must have been bitten by a Korean bug recently...so I'm binging on Kdramas: Doctors, Descendants of the Sun, Strong Woman Do Bong Soon, Romantic Doctor (Teacher Kim), Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok Joo, The Legend of the Blue Sea and Tomorrow With You...

    And the poison is working its way into this jaded myocardial tissues...so I need to purge them out by typing them in a blog post...I didn't want to watch the Legend of the Blue Sea initially because it revolves around reincarnation of a man and his mermaid lover...I thought it might be boring...but after the first 2 episodes, I was hooked...must have been Lee Min Ho's too-beautiful-eyes-for-a-man gaze that did me in...and I did love the idea of a love that transcends time and death...that 2 people who loved each other will still be destined to love each other in their reincarnated lives...except that I can't believe in reincarnation...anyway, with love like that, it's only nice and wonderful if you're the leading man and lady who are in love with each other...if you were the other guy who was in love with the leading lady or the other girl who was in love with the leading man, imagine being reincarnated and still suffered from unrequited love...yea, life's just unfair that way I guess... 

    I was very intrigued with Tomorrow With You because it was about this guy who's a time traveller...I'm a sucker for time travelling stories...it all started with Back to the Future (I think that was the first movie that got me so fascinated about time travelling)...then there were Star Trek, The Butterfly Effect, Jumper, The Time Traveller's Wife and Midnight in Paris...anyway, what I loved about Tomorrow With You is how two people who were never destined to be together in their lifetime somehow got their lives intertwined with each other because someone meddled with their lives in the future...the guy and girl escaped death from a subway accident 7 years prior...guy lost his parents in the said accident and somehow developed the ability to time travel (only to the future) when he rides the subway which passes the accident site...he met another time traveller who guided him in the ways of time travelling...present time was set in 2016 and somehow the guy could not travel pass 2019...he eventually finds out that he died in March 2019 and there was a girl who died at the same time he died...so after being advised by his time travelling mentor, he decided to meet the girl and try to change their future...

    So as how most dramas start out, guy and girl didn't like each other in the beginning...but the guy decided to marry the girl within 3 months of their meeting because of the things he saw in the future...i loved how their love developed in their marriage...how being able to see what happened in the future made the guy want to love and protect the girl even more...and made him treat her even better than he would have...I loved how despite the guy's self-centredness and selfish motives and the girl's inferiority complex and feelings of inadequacy, they fought through their differences and cherished the moments they had in the present...I loved how both of them tried to become better persons for the other person...I loved how when the guy disappeared into the future and the girl continued to wait for him to return...

    But somehow, it seemed like no matter how hard the guy tried to change the future, it didn't seem to work...and for some time, his present self was stuck in a future that was past his date of death...which meant he didn't die on the day he was supposed to have died...but the girl did...so he tried really hard to get back into the present time before their death date and succeeded...eventually he managed to save them from dying but it wasn't without a sacrifice...I suppose time travelling is a fascinating but scary thing...it's like the more you try to change the past/ future, the worse things might end up...but I do wonder how it might be like to be a time traveller's wife...or even to be a time traveller...the burden of knowing what will happen in the future and yet not able to change it...

    I guess we all have things in the past we wished we had done or hadn't done...and we all have wished we could go back in time to do/undo the things we regretted on...and if I could go back in time, there's really one thing I would have wanted to do that perhaps would have changed the present in a much better way...but of course that's not possible...and I've always been a worrier of tomorrow...it would be nice to be able to see what the future holds for me...