Starving Arteest

See you in my 19th life 이번 생도 잘 부탁해 // Episode 7

HA YOON KYUNG as Yoon Cho Won in SEE YOU IN MY 19TH LIFE (2023) dir. Lee Na Jung

SEE YOU IN MY 19TH LIFE 이번 생도 잘 부탁해 (2023) dir. Lee Na Jung

my 2024 new years resolution is to find a lot of money on the ground

Happy (almost) New Year everyone!!! 🎉🎇🎆

I hope 2024 will be amazing and filled with stars for you ✨🌟🌠

the way heetae sincerely doesn’t care about anyone liking him, but really, *really* wants myunghee to like him. and like, even with his friends hyegun and kyungsoo, he’s insouciant and kind of a know it all, but with myunghee he’s serious. he’s still fun loving and jokes around, but he’s not flippant. 

and the way he tells her he’s an outcast in his family, that he has no family, but it’s with myunghee’s encouragement that he reaches out to his little brother and it’s that connection later on that allows jungtae to ask his mom to unbind heetae and let him out of their father’s office, and then helps move jungtae to run to myunghee’s rescue when their dad sends someone to assassinate myunghee. she tell heetae “i’ll be your family” and proposes to him, but she helped him find some semblance of family even before that.

another thing i like about the show is heetae’s father–like as in how he’s written, not the character himself. at home he’s a tyrant. he slaps heetae around and eventually straight up tortures him; he belittles and ignores both his wife and jungtae. and so his violence isn’t only confined to his work/position as head of the anti-communist investigation. he’s as violent with citizens as he is with his family. because he’s a violent man ho uses intimidation, pain, fear, and threats as tools of control to access power. he’s Bad, but it’s not an inherent quality. he *chooses* violence because of the position of power it gets him within the military and within the then-current political regime. he’s violent because it benefits him within the system he operates. 

the thing i like best about how the show handles him, though, is that by the end he is dwarfed by history, in a way no other character is. in the first 10, maybe even 11, episodes (the drama’s 12 eps long), he looms as the central villain, even when the military comes into gwangu and starts attacking civilians. but about midway through ep11, his power becomes unstable. we see that there are higher ups within the military who are invested in his failure, people he *can’t* intimidate with violence or bribe. within the structure of the military, even as he directs his henchmen to imprison and torture gwangu residents, he’s just some fucking guy. and just like his tyranny was both over citizens and his family, the stripping away of his power happens both in his work/public life and at home–jungtae eavesdrops on him and goes to save myunghee, his wife frees heetae and asks for a divorce. and then parallel becomes a confluence with hyegun. heygun is heetae’s friend, but he’s also one of the student proest leaders. when heetae’s dad captures him and has him tortured for days, and then threatens his family, he remembers something heetae told him–that if he ever gets acpatured all he has to do is mention his name and his dad will probably kill him on the spot. and that’s exactly what hyegun does. when he’s at the end of his rope and refuses to give up any information in the face of his grandmother being threatened, he drops heetae’s name and calls heetae’s dad “abeoji,” making as though since he’s heetae’s friend, he’s close with heetae’s dad. and he laughs in his face while doing this–just like heetae did when his dad tied and beat him up–cause he knows he’s got him. and the minute he acts like he knows him, an operative runs out to let military higher ups know heetae’s dad has been fucking around with a suspected communist spy. and so guilt by association with no evidence, the same things heetae’s dad has been using to torture and violently disrupt other’s lives, comes right back around to him.

and back to how he’s dwarfed by history–ultimately he’s just a bit player. he taunts heetae by telling him he’s an oprhan with no family, and heetae tells him *he’s* the one with no family, cause no one would choose to be family with him. this is confirmed when his wife asks for a divorce and jungtae defies him and essentially chooses heetae over him after he’s shot by one of his henchmen, but it resonates even more with the ending. it’s myunghee who’s murdered, but she’s the one who is loved and remembered. heetae remembers her, myungsoo, sooryun, jungtae, and kyungsoo all remember her. heetae reads her words 41 years after her murder and he writes her a responding letter *41 years after her murder*. heetae spends 41 years remembering her, missing her; 41 years being saved by her because the world refuses to give him a death he looks for because her last wish was for him to be able to live even with the pain of her loss. her life is taken within the violence of the history she lived in, but she isn’t dwarfed by that history. 

i love weird barbie

Forgetting the sea — detail from 'Cold Shore'

Seeing spider verse with my little sister

Life is worth living holy shit

all my warrior nun stuff from last year because we saved it, you guys!

I'm honestly having such a hard time believing we actually saved something

This cleared my skin, watered my crops...makes my heart so happy

Well done, Halobearers

Everyone in Spider Society immediately knowing who Miles is without any context because Gwen probably never shuts tf up about him >>>>>>

i feel so horrible for gwen, because you can literally see the toll of her best friend’s death on her and how it affected her entire SPIRAL.

like it started when her dad thought she’d killed him, and how she couldn’t even tell the him the truth because she was afraid of how he would react if he knew the person he thought killed the boy who was like his son was his daughter. then, when she does reveal her identity to him, it’s under pressure and due to her circumstances, so she’s not comfortable or willing, and neither she nor her father were in the right mindset to hear each other out. this led to something that was MOST definitely a traumatic experience for her, and Gwen didn’t even get time to process it before she ran.

and then the confidence she felt in her relationship with Miles and the confidence she had in HERSELF is withered, by the two adults who took her in when she was at her most vulnerable.

Jessica is constantly switching between kind and understanding, to cold and demanding with her, and it’s obvious how badly Gwen is trying to work with it to satisfy her. she asks Jessica to adopt her as soon as she sees her in action, showing how quickly Gwen got attached to her, most likely because she was kind of a filler for the mom she never had. which is precisely why it makes Gwen so much more emotionally open to being manipulated. (she literally gave Gwen the silent treatment for five seconds and it sent my girl into a panic mode. like. what.)

and Miguel is revealing all these things about how the Multiverse is gonna fall apart, and people are gonna die if she doesn’t do something about Miles—the only other person she can relate to because he’s just like her; a teenager wearing a mask, trying to be what the worlds wants them to be, failing, and going through things no kid should. he’s her reflection, except he’s so much more than she is, and she knows and loves that about him, but Miguel is showing her everything he’s done “wrong”, and Miguel is the only current male role model in her life, so obviously she’s going to look up to him.

neither of them even bothered to help her fix what happened with her dad, too. they just let her go along with them for MONTHS, utilizing how desperate Gwen was for some semblance of a family to get her to catch other anamolies.

she doesn’t do what she did to Miles consciously, and it’s blatant because every time Miles gets closer to his freedom, or he does something incredible, she’s always proud of him. and when he’s hurt, she looks just as pained (and guilty).

she was torn between helping Miles, or helping the Spider Society, but when he showed her that there was more than just the options every Spider Man was handed, and that the impossible can be possible, Gwen learned from it and grew.

Miles helped her, and saved her dad in the process (because he quit before becoming captain). she finna return that favor in the second movie.

MY MOLECULES HAVE STARTED TURNING PINK

A quick summary of the last 16 months