Very Rambly Thoughts On: Queen Seon Deok

This is probably the last of the “archeological finds” from my old LJ account.^^ It’s a compilaton of the entries I made way back when I was watching the drama. Ah, sageuks. Even when I was still the impressionable noob to kdramas I didn’t have much luck with the historicals. I always started out all eager and enthusiastic but eventually ended up disappointed. Gosh, I was SO annoyed with this one but still persisted till the end. Yup, the Early Days of Drama Addiction. Over the years there’s been only a handful of sageuks I’ve truly liked. Anyway, I went a bit silly along the way, you’ll see. 😀 I swear, it was the tedium of forcing myself to watch the whole darned thing. *g*

A dig into the archives – 2010

I recently did some digging in my old LJ account to find something I’d written about an older drama and thus came across couple of old posts that I thought might merit a re-posting. Here’s the first one. Written when I was still a relateive noob and had stamina to marathon dramas. 🙂

Thoughts On: Black & White

                                  See, it really was black and white. Subtle… not. 😛

What with the Beach Blossom Madness, talking about the charms of Mark Chao with kfangurl @ The Fangirl Verdict, I suddenly got the urge to make a little trip along the memory lane. 🙂 Which lead me to my old Black & White post @ LJ. And that sent me down the rabbit hole of B&W OST songs and clips of promo footage at YT and finally skip-watching bits and pieces of B&W episodes. I have such fond memories of group watching the drama and all the flailing. For some reason I never managed a proper post for B&W but here is collection of my fangirly reaction posts at the time I was actually watching the drama, back in the day. No major spoilers there and I’ve blacked out the bits that reveal a bit too much of the plot.^^

Thoughts On: Fermentation Family

Oh, I’d totally forgotten I had this sitting in my draft folder. It’s the last one of Archeological Finds aka old posts from my LJ. Somehow 2012 now feels like a lot further away than it truly is. The promo material for Fermentation Family was really uninspiring for a drama with such a pretty setting, even the posters were bland. It really deserved much better.

The background of this drama is a traditional Korean restaurant that is famous with its Kimchi. Through the joyful and touching stories of the restaurant family members, who are not that perfect in their lives, and the variety of stories of the restaurant guests with all kinds of characteristics, the drama suggests a direction of a heart-moving ‘alternative family’.

2-3 EPs of ILiCDD a day, to keep the blues away…

The tittle says it all. I Live in Cheongdam-dong is a total happy pill. Life’s been a bit on the moody side lately and I felt I needed something to cheer me up. ILiCDD is just about the perfect thing to do the trick. I remembered how good it always made me feel, so I ventured on to watch an odd episode here, another there. Once again I laughed like a hyena, teared up, went ‘aaaawwww…’ and felt much, much better because of the uplifting spirit of this gem of a drama. On that note I decided to resurrect the posts I wrote while watching ILiCDD back in 2012 (with a few minor edits). I can’t beileve it’s been 4 years already!

Thoughts on: Tree With Deep Roots

With Six Flying Dragons currently airing, I decided to take a walk on the memorylane and go refresh my memories on the ‘sequel’ aka Tree With Deep Roots. I’d clean forgotten I had writen about it @ LJ, way back when. This is what I thought about TwRD then. 🙂 No spoilers, as far as I can tell.

The dance with The Devil – Mawang

For years Mawang / 마왕 (also callaed The Devil/Lucifer but I prefer the romanized Korean title) was my favourite drama. Nothing I watched, no matter how good, was able to surpass it. It felt like the drama had left a permanent imprint that took it’s own sweet time to fade. Apart from a short comment once I’d watched it the for the first time, I never wrote a proper post on Mawang. Years later I wrote a kind of reflective musing during the re-watch but that was it. One of the reasons is probably that there were several beautiful pieces written already and by writers who are way better at it than me. 😉

So why now? I honestly haven’t got a clue. I guess I was hit with nostalgia while browsing my LJ as I was looking for something quite else and suddenly came across the post I wrote while re-watcing. So, I stepped on the memory lane and this is the result.

Mawang is the 2nd installment (Resurrection/Revenge being the 1st) of what was supposed to be a ‘revenge trilogy’ by writer/director team Kim Jo Woo and Park Chang Hong. Only, that never came to be as the 3rd part was stuck in limbo. No funding, if I recall it right. Neither Mawang nor Resurrection were ever hits, albeit both had (and still do I suppose) a faithful following and Resurrection even managed to claim a ‘mania drama’ status. The sad thing with kdramas is that quality hardly ever equals popularity. Unfortunately the Kim/Park team hasn’t managed to put together anything to rival these two dramas since. I liked Fermentation Family a lot but it was rather an odd duck and the less said about Shark the better. I’m forever grumpy about the way Shark turned out to be, it having been touted as the 3rd part of the trilogy. Just goes to show that one or even two great shows can’t guarantee the quality of the next one from the same crew.

As this drama is best watched without as little knowledge of the plot as possible, I suggest skipping most of what’s under in case it’s on your to-watch list. All one really needs to know is… it’ll most likely break your heart.

Thoughts on: Vampire Prosecutor

Below is a VERY looooong and rambling post about OCN’s Vampire Prosecutor. It consists mostly of my LJ reaction posts made during the airing of both seasons, though there are a few where I ponder a bit more about the nuts and bolts. I may have been a tad excited, judging by the exclamation marks and uninhibited squee, LOL! Mian, there are times I seem to revert to an overhyper teenager when I’m really into a drama.

Still patiently waiting for Season 3.

I’ve read the whole thing through and it shouldn’t contain any blatant spoilers but I’ve ‘hidden’ those parts that look like giving away too much of the plot.

Pages: 1 2 3 4

Thoughts on: Just You

It was Nov of 2011 and I managed to sort of accidentally acquire another drama to watch on top of my usual roster. The drama in question was Just You/Only You/My One and Only and my first taste of a daily drama. Yeah, one of those with 100+ episodes and still without subs at the time I decided to dive in. Clearly something was wrong with me. LOL! I decided that it’d be strictly filler, not to be followed religiously (unless I got obsessed and in that case all bets would be off). The chances were that I might even bail out in horror or get bored to death at some later date but the first 2 episodes were rather cute, so … Besides, it had sweetie Seo Joon Young (OMG, he was adorable!) as the lead and Han Hye Rin (Ra Ra in ‘Gisaeng’) as his OTP. Being a daily the drama has gzillion other characters so it took a while to place them, let alone remember what they were called, ha. Even harder to do with no subs but as it’s a KBS drama, there were subbed KBSWorld epis later on.

A really long post ahead ^^

Thoughts On: Keizoku 1 & 2

And this will probably be the last of my Archelogical Finds. Unless I go for another ‘hunt’ at my LJ 😉

(LJ 15/4/2012)

I always ment to watch Keizoku 2 – SPEC but somehow never got round to it while it was airing. Then darkeyedwolf‘s post about the SP along with the hq version of the series appearing around the same time reminded me finally to find time to watch it. SPEC is a sort of a remake/reboot of the Keizoku – Unsolved Cases, a drama from 1999, which I happened to get hold of and watch a while back. That was a really strange experience all in all, though the fact that I mainlined the whole series + the SP and concluding (really bizarre) film within a day may have something to do with it. LOL!