lane-ys-world

[lane-ys-world]

I Stand, You Stand, We All Stand for My Stand In

Second chances are what you make of them. And sometimes what you make of them is the exact same mistake that caused you to need a second chance in the first place. We are, all of us, blessed with a certain amount of self-preservation, usually enough to ensure we don’t accidentally walk head long into a wall, but some people are not quite as blessed as the rest of us and so they do things that would make you question rationality because, you see, common sense isn’t all that common.

Being in love is usually deemed a cornerstone moment in life. A moment where the stars align, and the universe suddenly makes some semblance of sense. But what would happen if you were to fall in love with a part of someone, a feature, and then later realized that the feature you fell for does not belong to the person you thought it did? Well, I’d like to believe that you would be greatly disappointed by that knowledge and the resounding heartache from that revelation, but I don’t think you’d be outright crazed… would you?

Well, that isn’t what Ming thought was prudent. Upon finding out that the back he’d been drooling over for years actually belonged to a man who no longer wanted anything to do with him, he lost his right mind… but I’m getting ahead of myself. This story isn’t entirely about Ming, it’s mostly about Joe.

Joe has the worst case of bad luck this side of Pluto and it seems he’s okay with letting patterns repeat themselves.

Joe is a ray of sunshine. He is the brightest, sunniest, cutsie-est person in the known universe and he’s got the brains of a golden retriever seeing a new tennis ball. Joe is an orphan. Joe is also a stunt double for a well-known celebrity. The celebrity is a little douche canoe, but I’ll get into that a little later. The celebrity has a soon-to-be brother-in-law named Ming. Ming is secretly in love with said celebrity. The celebrity is pretending not to know about this little crush and starts dating Ming’s sister… DRAAAMAAA!

Ming finds out that Joe is the celebrity’s stunt double after accidentally hugging this man in a dressing room because he confused him with his crush. Joe has a raging crush on Ming and is not afraid to show it. Ming and Joe start hanging out, Joe sneezes a lot when they hang out (hahaha, iykyk), and – as expected – Joe develops feelings for Ming and, though Ming feels the same, he refuses to admit it and instead decides it would make more sense to push Joe away.

While all of this is happening, Mr. Celebrity is feeling high and mighty now that he is about to marry into a stupid rich family and decides to start treating the director of the new movie he’s supposed to be in like garbage. So, the director, having had it with that idiot, decides to promote Joe to the lead of the movie and toss the celebrity to the side.

Tong, the celebrity, is not pleased with this development and decides to sabotage Joe via Ming. See, by the time this all goes down Joe has established that Ming is using him as a replacement, a place holder, for his true love – or who he thinks he’s in love with – Tong. Joe makes it clear he wants no part in being Tong’s ‘stand in’ both on and off the big screen. Ming, who clearly has never been taught boundaries in life, does not do well with being rejected and decides it would be best if Joe never debuts on the big screen and, in doing so, helps Tong secure his position in the movie he’d been flip-flopping all over not three minutes earlier.

How does Ming accomplish this? Well, by kidnapping Joe, of course. He keeps Joe locked up during the most important moment of his career and because of this Joe loses his position in the movie, as well as the trust of the industry. He’s blackballed by the time he can even get word out that he’s still alive because everyone thinks he just bailed. Once it is made clear that Joe no longer has a place in the industry in above board roles, he finds a job in a not so legal production where he ends up flying over the edge of a cliff and meeting a swift end…

Except that’s not the end! Joe wakes up a couple of years later in the body of another person named Joe – what are the odds? – and this guy is also in the entertainment industry though in much smaller productions. No, seriously, what are the actual odds!?

Joe 1 now has to navigate the life of Joe 2 with the memories and emotions of his old body but the face and family of this new body. You’d think with this second chance Joe would find himself a nice, quiet office job, get working and keep his head down but instead – right there in the hospital – Joe reconnects with someone from his first life who draws him back into the industry.

Now, because Joe was in a coma for as long as he was, his new/old mom racked up debt and, in order to keep her safe and make the debt go away, he starts agreeing to do things that put him squarely back where he was to begin with… in the celebrity’s shadow and in Ming’s crosshairs. This time around, however, he has the foresight to not let himself fall head-over-heels for someone who he believes is clearly not in love with him and so he is cold and distant, even as he begins playing the role of Ming’s mistress. Ming, on the other hand, fully believes new Joe is old Joe with a new face, and even though that’s true, how could anyone admit to that? How would you even go about explaining that in a rational, believable way?

Now, even though Ming fully believed that the new guy was his old love, he couldn’t prove it, and he also didn’t really want to believe it because that would mean admitting that Joe died, in large part, due to what he and Tong did to his career. Ming wanted to be able to look Joe in the face, his old face – that is, and tell him how sorry he was that he did that to him. He wanted Joe to see the torment that he’d been going through and in that vein, Ming did something he swore up and down that he would never even consider doing. He jumped into the entertainment industry with the hopes that Joe would see his face on the big screen, or the dozen and one billboards he was on and think “Now might be a great time to reconnect with that guy who used and abused me again, just to see if we can start something new from the ashes of my destroyed life,” I suppose. But fate dealt the both of them a different hand and with that came a new set of rules to this game called life.

There was only one person who knew for certain, from jump, that Joe was Joe and that person technically had nothing to do with Joe. I’m going to refer to him as the Mountain Spirit Man because there is truly no other reasonable way to describe this person. He is a shaman, who lives out in the woods or up a mountain, or something.

Either way, he has a foot in both in the world of the living and the world of the dead, so he likely knew about this wandering spirit but I doubt it would have raised any flags for him if Ming had not – "coincidentally" – found him and started hounding him about Joe’s whereabouts because his body had still not been found after he went flying over a ledge from a motorbike stunt he’d been attempting for that shady-as-all-hell company.

Anyway, the Mountain Spirit Man is the one that tells Ming that Joe is here but also not here, which is why Ming started suspecting new Joe of being old Joe, and I can't imagine the name helped either.

Joe, actively, tries to convince everyone in his life that he’s a hapless little stand-in but soon the cracks start forming and his former self starts shining through.

First, with his stunt work, then with this association to Ming – because that was always going to cause a stir – and finally with him visiting the graves of his former parents. That last one is when he gets caught by his friends and has to explain, in full, how in the hell all this happened… like he would even have a clue how to explain his soul jumping into the body of a dude who unalived himself and left his body up for grabs.

At this point, everyone and their mothers – everyone who is important anyway – know that Joe is Joe and are acting accordingly. And by accordingly, I mean Ming is his love-bombing, sugar coating self, Joe’s one friend is still pining after him and the other friend is warning him away from Ming’s family for fear that what happened before would happen again and Tong is spitting with rage at the fact that Ming is no longer worshipping at his alter.

The 'holier than thou' prick that he is, Tong decides to take it out on Joe… for no freaking reason other than that he is the closest person to Ming at the moment.

So, now we’ve circled around to Tong. Tong has always been aware of his effect on Ming but he liked that he could string him along more than anything else. Everything that he said had been met with an enthusiastic “Yes, P’Tong!” from his dutiful fan.

From requests for money to asking Ming to kidnap a stunt double so his career would be preserved, but nothing was lower than when Tong tried to use his unborn child as a bargaining chip with his in-laws after he royally screwed up and had some very bad people coming for his head.

Tong had been making bad deals, with money he didn’t have, for projects that never quite materialized. Because of this, he was in constant need of large amounts of cash. Now that Ming was no longer chasing after him, and his now wife wasn’t given free reign of the greater family finances, he went the loan shark route to getting his borrowed riches and used his career as leverage.

When even that wasn’t panning out the way it should have been, the loan sharks got fed up with playing nice and they told Tong they wanted their money – with interest – or his head on a pike. Tong tried getting Ming on his side, Ming said: “I warned you, you’re on your own!” So, Tong goes to Joe, hoping he can convince Ming to ‘see reason’ and they end up being ambushed by the loan shark’s lackies who end up taking Joe in place of Tong because they just look so damned similar from the back.

Anyway, they go into hostage negotiations and things do not turn out the way they were supposed to and then Joe ends up being shot which lands him back in the ‘in between’. The places between life and death. Here, he is given the option to pass on, to go into the light and hopefully be reborn far, FAR away from all these people and the dangers they represent but Joe hears Ming pleading with him and regardless of anything else going on in life – or death, apparently – Joe would do just about anything to be with Ming. So, he jumps back into his body, and they live happily ever after…

I hated it! I hated this ending!

There are almost no consequences other than the loan sharks being taken to jail.

Tong’s money problems are solved by Ming’s dad – who turned out to only really hate Ming and Joe’s relationship because of how broken Ming was the first time Joe disappeared. Ming’s sister forgives Tong even after that man threw divorce in her face and then used their unborn child as a bargaining chip to try and extort money out of Ming. Joe forgives Tong for constantly treating him like trash and then putting his life in danger AGAIN. Joe had already forgiven Ming by the time he gets kidnapped, so there’s also that. The only thing missing here was glitter and a bright pink bow! How was everything just so perfectly tied off?

Anyway, I suppose that’s what second chances signify, right? The opportunity to be forgiven with the understanding that things will change for the better. And hopefully, they'll stay that way.

[lane-ys-world]

A Shop For Killers

There is an age old question that lingers amongst most of us every waking moment of our lives. Well, two questions really. What would you be willing to do for the people you love and what would you be willing to do for some money? These questions define a great deal of how we conduct ourselves, how we interact with the world around us, and how far we are willing to push ourselves to get things done. But, let’s say the circumstances change and you find out that the person responsible for killing your family has just killed the only other person you had left and they are now after you. You don’t know who they are, why they are after you, how they even know about you and who the actual hell the person you’ve been living with for most of your life really is. Now, how far are you willing to go to get answers to those questions?

The series opens on what looks like a sleepy, mountain side village. A warning is blaring over a loud speaker informing residents that live munitions military training will be conducted until evening and not to try and approach the area where the training is taking place to avoid being caught in cross fire. There are men leisurely walking in tall, thick brush – heavy artillery in hand, not to mention a sniper located a few miles away, ready and waiting. Cut to a house that has had its exterior walls blown damn near clean off, windows shattered – general disarray. But this make no sense. Why would some random house, that does not look like it is on a military base, have been caught in the cross fire of a military drill? Is that what’s really what’s going on? No! The answer is no. There is no drill. There are no military officers. None of that. So why then is the house in shambles? Who are the men approaching said house and why are they armed to the teeth? Why is there a sniper rifle pointed directly into the house’s living area? Are they hunting for someone, perhaps? A convict? A seasoned criminal with the extensive knowledge to protect and defend themselves against this many assailants? Someone with a background so gruesome that there needs to be more than 7 people at any given time coming after them? Nope! They are currently after a young woman who very recently lost her last remaining family member. Someone who has no history of being needlessly violent and she is definitely not a threat enough to require and small militia coming after her but here we are, I guess. A young woman who is currently holed up in the house they’ve shot up. A young woman whose uncle is a former member of said militia and let’s just say the militia wasn’t all that happy about letting him walk.

But he’s dead now so why attack? They were after him and he is now gone, the niece can’t possibly be a threat because she didn’t really even know her uncle, apparently, and she hadn’t even been living with him the past few years. So if the assumption is that she is a threat because he was a threat, why the theatrics? Why not just gas the house or wait for her out in public? Why not send someone in to deliver something to her ‘from her uncle’? Why the gun show? Because her uncle had been training her, her whole life. To her, it may have seemed like bonding between uncle and niece, but he had been preparing her for this moment her entire life, it seems. He taught her how to use blind spots to her advantage, how to read the angle of an incoming bullet and when she wanted to move out he made her a deal “if you can land a hit on me, you can move out’. She never really stood a chance but one of her uncle’s friends started training her and she was then skilled in hand to hand combat. She’d been training her whole life but I highly doubt she’d thought this would be the reason her uncle had been preparing her all along. That is secondary to the problem at hand though. There is still a sniper shooting at her and she is cornered. She needs to get out of her corner and either find a way to defend herself, that one dude in the other corner and the lady with the bullet hole in her arm in the other other corner, or find cover for all three of them. So it’s a godsend when she finds a sniper rifle of her very own tucked into the bottom of the living room couch. Now the playing field is fair, no?

Military training for some means the opportunity to serve their country followed by a quick return to civilian life. But for others it’s a gateway, a tunnel into the darkest parts of humanity. Some find redemption in these parts, a purpose, while others find excitement and entertainment. Guns, explosions, blood, the cries and screams of those upon whom you’ve inflicted pain. Some see this thinly veiled hell as their home, as their comfort, while others are there to get a job done and go back to pretending they aren’t the thing that go bump in the night for everybody else. Until, one day, the hunter becomes the hunted.

The discovery of Murthehelp brings in a whole new layer of problems for Jeong Ji An, our main character. The manner in which it was discovered is sketch as all get out for a world of its own reasons but that does not detract from the fact that it exists and is more than likely the reason Ji An is being hunted and Jeong Jin Man, her uncle, was killed. You may be thinking something along the lines of “well I thought he died because of his association with the militia” and although that is true, it is not the entire reason. See, Jin Man had crafted something of an empire for himself. He would sell military grand arsenal to anyone with the right credentials and bank balance. He even had a system for the types of buyers he had and the kinds of materials and services they regularly needed. Some just needed guns, some needed spyware, some needed only clean-up, some needed the full package and each of his buyers fell into one of three categories with the following codes: red (killers), purple (spies), yellow (clean-up) and there was an additional code that was reserved though it didn’t seem to be for buyers. Code green which consisted of only two people – Jin Man and Ji An.

Jin Man had created Murthehelp after having left the militia as a way to make a profit from his skills while also not really having to leave home. But that begs the question, ‘if there’s an essentials store for killers owned by this man living in the middle of just about nowhere, where the actual hell is the physical store front?’ And that was probably what the shooters coming after Ji An wanted to know as well. Maybe they wanted to destroy the market place? Maybe they wanted keys to the kingdom? Or maybe they just wanted revenge for Jin Man turning his back on them. Either way, this store front was now the centre of the proverbial universe and Ji An didn’t even know where it actually was. Yet another thing she’d been kept in the dark about.

The rules for having access to Murthehelp were simple. “Those who have received codes from Murthehelp may never attack code green. If someone disobeys this and attacks code green, everyone with a code must risk their lives to protect code green.” And turns out code green are essentially the operators of Murthehelp, and now that the uncle is no longer with us this makes Ji An the operator and owner of an illegal store front for the world’s most dangerous predators and it seems some of them have thrown the rule book out the window. So now the games begin?

In this day and age, there are a dozen and one ways to upend someone’s life. Figure out their daily routine, mess with the small things until they feel like they are losing their minds or, quite simply, blow a hole into their living room while trying to snipe them from a distance. You know, basic things. If you were on the receiving end of this treatment, you’d probably be asking yourself “why?” Why am I being shot at? Why is there a weird lady who says she knows my uncle, bleeding all over my house, telling me he helped her with things I know he’d never be caught dead doing? Why is there a sniper rifle under the couch? And, most importantly, why is there a website on my uncle’s computer that says he was selling illegal materials to dangerous people on the internet and what all does that have to do with his death? Could we then argue that we never actually knew anything about anyone we thought we did and to assume that everything is and has been a lie in such an instance?

Jin Man made only one fundamental error in the ten years since he left the militia and started his life anew. He trusted someone outside of his circle without vetting them first. A young man from the village approaches Jin Man one day and asks for a job. Any odd job would do; he just needs something to keep his hands busy while he prepares to go back to college. Bae Jeong Min was a former classmate of Ji An’s so, I suppose, Jin Man felt it was okay to let him in a touch. Then Jeong Min told Jin Man that he could help streamline his operations by opening up a website for him to display his merchandise – he was selling farming tools, as far as anyone who wasn’t in the know was supposed to know. Then one day, out of the blue, Jeong Min threatens Jin Man and makes him kill himself in a manner that would make it look like he committed suicide. Well, that escalated quickly but there is a backstory there. Come to find out that Jeong Min had been tasked, or threatened, to infiltrate Jin Man’s operation and get the entry codes and location of Murthehelp. Jeong Min is the reason that Ji An’s uncle is dead but he is currently playing the dotting friend trying to keep her from falling apart while she peels back the layers of who her uncle actually was – all information he was already privy to.

And just to add insult to injury, Jeong Min was one of Ji An’s bullies while they were in school and Ji An was still mute from the trauma she’d gone through. Jeong Min had tasked his friends with locking Ji An in a storage shed and leaving her in there for hours before calling her uncle to report the ‘bullies’ for their awful behavior and essentially cementing his position in Jin Man and Ji An’s eyes as a savior. So when they finally find the shop, get inside and find some weirdo sitting in the dark looking over cameras of the inside of the house, the inside of Ji An’s bedroom, Jeong Min is incensed for his ‘friend’ and goes to bat for her. Once they have incapacitated ‘Brother’ – the dude watching everyone on live feed, Jeong Min lets his mask drop as he now has exactly what he needs and he no longer needs to play nice. This part really ticked me off because it seems that Ji An’s executive functions have abandoned her. She isn’t, for a second, wondering why her uncle would let a weirdo living under their house and watching them through spy cams STAY on the damned property? She instead trusts some dude she hasn’t even smelt in well over 10 years!? SAY LIE!

There is one other fundamental rule for Murthehelp. One rule that cannot be ignored and one that is almost immediately dismissed – someone, either the operator or the ‘shop keep’ (Brother, also to be referred to as the mole man – due to his aversion to the sun and him living underground for the past decade), has to physically be inside the shop AT ALL TIMES. This is non-negotiable. If someone, who is authorized, is not inside the store it goes into lockdown and begins the process of shutting down and self-destructing. Safety precautions and all that. So when the mole man leaves to go and defend the house from the oncoming killers and then Ji An, after laying a beating on Jeong Min for essentially killing her uncle then stringing her along, LEAVES THE SHOP to also try and help with the onslaught in the house, the mole man is not pleased with this new development but they need to fight off tankers, the Temu version of a Korean Navy Seal team and robo-dogs now so there really isn’t any time to be going over why leaving the shop, located in a bunker below the shed behind the main house, was the worst idea possible. Also, Ji An is skilled enough at defending herself – under regular circumstances – but what exactly was she thinking she was going to be able to do going back into the house without back up or additional ammo or really anything useful? They are going up against armed mercenaries and she’s going in there with wit and determination?

The human psyche is a very strange thing. It can help you block out the worst things that have ever happened to you or it can hyper-focus on them to the point where those things become your reality. This show gave us two perspectives on this phenomenon.

The first being our main character. Someone who lost her family, watched her protector get killed in her family home, climbed out a second storey window, got hit by a van, was hunted in a hospital, hid in a mortuary freezer where her mother’s body was being kept, went mute from the trauma of it all, moved away from the home and neighborhood she knew and loved and was bullied by her new classmates due to her muteness. She grew into a strong individual who fought daily with her trauma and won. She came out the other end of her battle with anxiety and loss, not to mention the lies spun around that loss, but she seemingly blocked a lot of it out in order to survive. Her uncle, in an attempt to help he cope with her lose and trauma, equated her with a lion on the brink of death being hunted by a pack of hyenas smelling a free meal. “Only the weak bark, the strong don’t” he says, long before he became aware that Ji An’s parents had been executed at his mother’s memorial service, now forcing both he and Ji An to have to be strong. “Whatever makes you scared, keep your eyes open and face it,” He says this right before all of her worst nightmares manifest themselves. In a moment, she would lose her entire childhood, her sense of security and any hope of a normal future experience, but they didn’t know that yet. Not until that fateful phone call.

The second being our main bad guy who seems to have cloaked himself in madness and the blood of his victims. This person revels in the pain and destruction he causes. He lives for the fear and the torment but also for the anger he causes those around him who expect better of him – which is poorly thought out on their part, but that’s neither here nor there. Bale, the reason behind Ji An being hunted, the reason behind her uncle’s death, the reason behind her parents and grand mother’s death. Bale, the man who walked into a house full of civilians, while on mission to retrieve one individual, and decided that everyone else was free target practice. Bale was what you would expect darkness to look like. He embodied concealed chaos and he hid it well, until he felt like he didn’t have to anymore because no one would try and stop him anyway. Bale may have had horrible things happen to him in the past, which caused him to act out in this manner, or he may very well have been the bad thing that happened as he was just born this way. We will never truly know what his story was… So then, what would you be willing to do for the truth?

[lane-ys-world]

Thank you to everyone who got me to 50 likes!

[lane-ys-world]

Blank 'We Can Never Have Peace' The Series (Season 2)

Fair warning, there are SPOILERS littered throughout. Hell, this entire post is basically telling you what all went on so if that is not what you are looking for please run now and save yourself from my scathing report – hehe.

For clarity I will be referring to the characters as follows:

Aneung – Neung/Aneung

Khun Neung – Khun/ Khun Neung

Piengfah – Fah/ Peingfah

Aneung’s Grandmother – Granny

Khun Neung’s Grandmother - Granmama

Chet – demon/idiot/warden/Chet... (I'm sure I missed a few but, oh well)

It is now the end of an era… that’s a little dramatic to say but if you’ve lived through Blank, alongside the rest of us, then you may understand where I’m coming from with this. This show put us through the ringer and I can’t even complain about it. But there are points of concern, things I can absolutely say I took issue with and one of my main problems throughout this show was an idiot named CHET.

There are few things in the world that have the ability to incite fury within me and the mere mention of that man’s name can set me off like a baking soda volcano with a shook up cola bottle. I have a hatred so deep for that man that I would set my soul on fire if I were told that I would be born into his bloodline… I hate that man so much that I almost broke my computer screen trying to deal with his sheer AUDACITY!

And, look, I get it. Okay? I understand. He isn’t real… but the fact of the matter is there is a Chet in every one of our families. He may not be the dad or the uncle or the brother, hell, he may not even be a he but there is a CHET in all our families and the irritation I feel when I think about that fact makes my skin itch like I just got a vacation sun burn (iykyk).

Alright, now that we’ve gotten the formalities out of the way, let’s get down to business. This second season, blessed as it was, was WAY. TOO. SHORT! Everything felt like we were moving at light speed just to get to the end and the end was… something. And, no, I’m not referring to the beach scene after the hospital. I’m referring to the beach scene AFTER THAT. You know, the one where Anueng and Khun were completely different people. I understood wanting to “age” the characters, to show progression and to give a timeline to their love story. I got all that. But the characters they choose threw me off a little. I accidentally jumped to the end – ‘accidentally’ – and I was worried they’d introduced a new couple without any of us knowing it. I went back through the first part of the episode trying to find them only to figure out that it was the older versions of Aneung and Khun Neung.

It was jarring, to say the least. I feel as though they could have gone about making us aware that time had passed with those two in a different way. Because, and I’m being critical here, they made Aneung’s actor three – if not more – inches taller than she was when we left off and we, the audience, were expected to just accept that that made sense? Where? How? I’m trying to be imaginative here, but how did any of this hit the storyboards, in a room full of people, and everyone went “Oh, it’s been a few years and a 22-year-old woman grew another three inches? Yeah, that tracks…” Excuse the ever loving heck out of me, but WHAT!? I feel as though they could have done some cosmetic changes, put them in different environments, hell, just put “A FEW YEARS LATER” on the screen and carried on with Faye and Yoko to wrap up the story. Instead, I’m sat here wondering if the production company was chemistry testing those two ladies at the end for some other show they plan to produce. What was the purpose of changing the actors? And yes, I’m complaining a lot right now, but that is only because I had really high hopes for this show.

Anyway, let’s dive into the storyline.

So, the story picks up the day after Khun tells Neung to leave in an effort to ‘protect’ her. Life is still hitting her hard and she is now moved back into her family’s palace, sans Sam, sans Granmama, sans Song. She’s in this big estate filled with the memories of all she’s lost all on her own and her heart aches for what could have been. And then she gets a phone call, in the middle of the night, informing her that Neung is out on the town, getting trashed and raising hell. Now, because all of Neung’s family have entrusted her with Neung’s care, Khun cannot just say that they are now in a weird, emotionally charged predicament – of her own making – and just call it quits. She has to get up and go fix what she broke, and it seems all she’s been looking for was the opportunity to do so. But it also seems that Neung took the break up way worse than Khun did and decided that a descent into madness was fitting for how she was feeling and she does not skimp.

She was doing all the bad girl things now that she wasn’t tied down. She was staying out late, drinking and dancing with boys, not to mention not contacting her gran. She was basically a delinquent.

And when she is found, on a school night, in a night club, drunk out of her mind and damn near being felt up by some random college dude, Khun just about loses her mind. She immediately claims ownership and carts Neung out of there – not without some token resistance, of course. When they make it back to the palace, they hash it out, kiss it out and then fall asleep in each other’s arms… only for them to wake up the next morning with Neung having vengeance on the brain. She’s still sour about how Khun ended their relationship and she decides that she can do the same.

She repeats, almost word for word, what Khun said to her. To ‘pretend last night never happened’ and move forward as they were. Khun, not really knowing how far she can push the issue, decided to take a step back from it all and allow Neung the space she seems to crave. We all know that she doesn’t actually want space, she wants a chase, but that is neither here nor there because Neung ends up losing at this game she initiated.

Neung wanted Khun to feel jealous, to understand what life would be like without her there and is instead met with how Khun flirts with people who aren’t her. Khun makes Neung jealous of one of her own friends, the same friend that Neung had been using to try and make Khun jealous. She started a fire fight with no ammunition, hoping she could pick bullets up along the way, and Khun came fully prepared with a military grade arsenal. The poor poppet never really stood a chance.

Now, outside of this one fight, there isn’t really a conflict between them. Their conflict bleeds over from season one. Khun believes Neung is too young to know what she wants and in a few years she will be tossed to the side when Neung finally ‘finds herself.’ Neung is not having it, this time around, and latches on like a barnacle to a turtle shell. She will not be thrown into the depths all on her own a second time. All is well with these two, if you don’t bring Neung’s family drama into consideration. They are living their best secret-love-story lives and it seems nothing can pop their bubble. Until daddy dearest starts popping up and inviting himself into their personal space and nothing is sacred anymore.

This is where my rage begins to boil over. This is where Chet exists… I mean, he inserts himself in almost every other thing Neung does – or tries to do – and makes demands of her like he’s been there this whole time and they should seem normal to her at this point but it is within the family unit that Chet thrives, where he finds power and back up. Chet, on his own, is an annoyance that we can usually ignore or circumvent. Usually Neung lets Khun deal with Chet because she’s been doing it since forever so she knows how to make him go away, but in the family unit Chet has granny’s support. And granny has Neung’s ear. Things are now complicated but they navigate it. When Chet oversteps, Khun brings him back to Earth but when Chet starts to suspect that there is something else going on between Neung and Khun, all bets are off. Chet calls Fah back to Thailand to test the waters, then Chet flat out accuses Khun, and the cats out of the bag because Khun may be a lot of things but a liar isn’t one of them.

But before we get into how things went wrong, let’s go back to why we despise Chet.

Chet spends the majority of this show spewing random, differing degrees of homophobic rhetoric. He doesn’t like Neung’s new college friend because she seems too boyish to him and, according to his two functioning brain cells, apparently this makes her contagious because he wants Neung to stop being friends with her so she doesn’t ‘catch the gay’ from the too boyish friend….

Can you hear my eyes roll all the way into the back of my skull? No?

Alright, how about when Chet decides to bring up Neung’s friend choices in front of her grandmother, who is also a raging homophobe, and they try to gang up on Neung. Because Chet couldn’t convince Neung on his own, he decides to get back up from literally the only person who gives a damn about his opinion in this entire show. Then – because it gets worse – he decides that since Neung and Khun are ‘getting along so well’ now would be a great time to revisit his and Khun’s possible marriage. He proposes. To Khun. In front of Neung. Without consulting either of them. His justification? Khun would make a great stepmother for Neung and they’ve grown up now so the issues that caused Khun to run from the wedding the first time must have gone off into the stratosphere seeing as how HE couldn’t possibly have been the problem.

And when Khun rejects this proposal, shocked Pikachu face!

This is where I believe Chet started suspecting something else was going on with Khun. Maybe he didn’t suspect that she was in love with his daughter – who he’s been aware of for the blink of an eye – but he certainly thinks she is with someone else because that would make much more sense than the fact that she’s just not that into him, I suppose.

When he can’t get Khun to marry him, he inevitably turns his attentions back to Neung which makes the poor baby even more uncomfortable with him. She hasn’t known him all that long and he is talking at her like she has no mind or thoughts of her own. He talks about what he wants for her like his thoughts are blueprints to be followed rather than talking points. He has injected himself into Neung’s life like a bad vaccine and the effects are opposite to what he was hoping because, again, NOBODY LIKES HIS PRESENCE! I don’t know how else I can say this. Chet is that one mosquito you hear just as you’ve settled in bed and you’ve switched off the lights. Just as you think you are at peace, he starts buzzing around, trying to suck the life out you… and then disaster strikes.

Neung and Khun get caught.

Piengfah comes in like a sleeper agent because, as per freaking usual, these parents are not engaged with the raising of their child until it is time to inconvenience said child by throwing their thoughts at her and expecting her to be excited about their hair brain ideas.

Let us all remind ourselves of how we ended up here, shall we?

Piengfah was in love with Khun and got rejected. Chet was in love with Khun but – from what I’ve gathered – said nothing. Fah and Chet make a baby and Khun tells Fah, out of concern, to abort said baby as this may slow down or altogether stop the progression of her life. Fah has the baby but her own mother is not pleased with this development and even worse is the fact that Piengfah refuses to tell her mother who the baby daddy actually is.

Granny decides that Thailand is clearly too much for Fah and sends her overseas to go get her shit together and she raises the baby. Chet is left unaware of the existence of said baby. Chet is set to marry Khun due to an arrangement by Khun’s granmama and Chet’s family. Chet is pleased with this arrangement, Khun is not. She runs from the wedding and effectively cuts off Chet and her gran.

Baby Neung is wrapped in bubble wrap by granny because gods forbid she turns out like her dear darling mother. Jump forward about 20 years and Neung bumps into Khun in the market – INSTA LOVE. Khun and Neung get close, then Khun falls in love. Fah makes a reappearance to rub into Khun’s face that she is Neung’s mother. Chet finally finds out about the daughter he’s had under his nose this whole time.

Chet starts love bombing this poor girl but also he really REALLY wants her to get a DNA test to prove she’s actually his kid. Neung couldn’t care less about what Chet wants and is only concerned about what Khun wants. Chet and Fah become privy to how attached to Khun Neung is and they think they can use this to their advantage but Khun is already off the deep end at this point and she has no intentions of doing things that Neung’s now helicopter parents want when that is clearly not what she wants.

Piengfah realizes that the only way any of this works is if they give Neung some space and Chet thinks space means being a puff of air away from one another. And, lastly, Chet thinks parenting is calling in your child’s grandmother any time she won’t do exactly what you want her to, when you want her to, how you want her to and with no resistance or questioning.

Chet is the most irritating character I have had the pleasure of watching and I watched Khun’s gran make a complete fool of herself and Sam’s betrothed Kirk in GAP the series and in Season 1 of Blank.

Now, because Chet has never been taught how to deal with rejection or situations that he finds averse to his morally skewed compass he doesn’t know how to properly deal with his only child being in love with a woman. And he certainly cannot wrap his brain around that other woman being his ex-fiancé. And his last brain cell is holding on to dear life when it has to process that his child won her over where he couldn’t.

So, like any untrained and untamed animal, he lashes out. At Khun. In her own damned palace. Then he demands that Khun and Neung not come into contact with one another. Gets Piengfah and granny to back him up and they all devise a plan for Neung to go live with Piengfah overseas somewhere and hopefully – and I shit you not – GROW OUT OF BEING GAY. This move only works because they have finally hit Khun where it hurts. She has been fighting with the idea that Neung is too young for her this entire time and now she has three other people telling her that she is not worthy, that she’s too old, that she is sucking the youth out of their “baby” and if she really loves her then she’ll let Neung go and let her make her own choices.

The irony there is not lost on me and I hope it isn’t lost on you either.  

Just as Neung is about to leave for brighter skies with Piengfah, Khun has a ‘come to Jesus’ moment and decides to pour her heart out on live radio, for the whole nation to hear, about how in love she is and how her heart is breaking from having to be separated from the only person she has ever wanted for herself in this life. Neung hears this message and, because the demon and his minions had forced separation between the lovers, she makes a run for it. Hoping against hope that the prison sentence she had been serving for the past few days can finally come to an end when she is, "unexpectedly", hit by a car.

TROPE TIME – she’s in a coma now.

So, because she was on the phone with Neung when the accident happened, Khun is the first to arrive at the hospital… somehow… I mean, the accident happened right in front of Neung’s gran’s house so the warden and the guards should have been the first at the hospital but, I digress. When they do eventually get to the hospital, all they are is enraged at Khun for luring their baby to her possible death, and scared shitless for Neung. They blame Khun for them needing to be scared and then they try and pin the whole accident on her. Khun, like anybody else in life, has a breaking point and this comment pushes her over.

She starts firing back. She asks them why they felt they needed to come between two people who just loved each other. She asks how they can accuse her of being the reason Neung was out on that street when the car came barreling towards her when they were the ones keeping her prisoner. She asks what she’s ever done to deserve their ire. Asks how it can be wrong to love someone. Asks how she can be solely to blame when the only person who ever actually heard Neung, actually listened to Neung, was her? Crickets! Until granny comes in, on her sanctimonious rocket ship, and slaps Khun across the face before telling her to kick rocks.

I’m over it at this point. This whole family can go jump off the nearest bridge.

Khun takes a page out of Neung’s book and refuses to be tossed by the way side. She wears everyone – save Chet, until MUCH later – down with her sheer devotion. She shows up, reads to, talks to, pleads and begs with Neung to just open her eyes. And then she does. She opens her eyes and the first thing she does is make a phone call?

Look, I’m as confused as you at this part but the director, producer and creator all thought this worked so we’re going with it.

Neung wakes up, calls that same radio station in hopes that Khun is listening and confesses as well. Lays their love story bare for the country to hear. And, by some miracle, Khun is listening to the radio station at that exact moment and B-lines is straight for Neung’s room. They hug, they kiss, they hug some more and then Neung is walking out of that hospital with her arms around the woman she loves and her family supporting them all the way. Heavens, how I wish it had just ended there! It would have been sappy, it would have been sickly sweet, but it would have made a world of sense more than switching the actors at the last moment – YES I’M STILL ON THIS!

Like I said in the beginning, I wish the show was longer. I wish we had more time with these characters. I am in love with the chemistry that all the characters have with one another. This cast really sold this plot and Faye and Yoko were the perfect actors for their roles.

The only question I guess I have at the end of all this is does love really have an expiration date like Khun has been stressing this whole time or is the love of the right person infinite and unending like Neung has been saying since the very beginning?

[lane-ys-world]

Marry My Husband, Bestie?

Best friends are the family we choose. The people we want to talk to about all the things happening in our lives and the ones who come to us when they are in need. When you choose a best friend you are saying to the universe “This is my person”. The same could be said for marriage. You are choosing your partner, choosing who to spend your life with, choosing who you will love and care for however long you are together. So, what happens when you find out that the universe wants to cut the time you have with these people short? What happens when the universe decides to hand you a reset button to redo the last 10 years of your life? Would you take it? Even at the risk of losing your best friend? Your husband? The only family you had left?

The Betrayal

On a beautiful spring day there sits a woman, in a hospital gown, looking out an open window at the abundance of cherry blossoms. A petal slowly descends towards her and just as she’s about to reach out and grab it a woman walks over and slams the window closed. The woman, dressed in a pencil skirt, red heels, and an off white blouse, walks over to her best friend and they talk. They seem like they care for each other. Though one is clearly ill and in pain and the other a vibrant contrast, they seem happy to be in each other’s presence. When the time comes, the friend leaves and our patient stays and is administered medication through an IV.

All is going well until she is informed that her medical bills have not been paid and as such she will have to leave the hospital if they are not paid in time. She tries to get ahold of her husband, to no avail, and so she decides it may be best to just go home and get the money herself. She pulls herself together and gets into a cab outside the hospital, lets the driver know where she is going, and makes her way home. The driver, perhaps intuiting how much pain his client is in, decides to take her on a more scenic ride so she can enjoy the cherry blossoms a bit more and gives her a whole spiel on how there isn’t only one way to get to your destination. Kang Ji Won, our main character, gets out of the cab in front of her house and the driver gives her back the money she had given him for the cab ride. Tells her to keep it for a rainy day. Ji Won is probably going over how few of those are left for her but she takes the bill back after some convincing - not noticing the blue ink, heart shaped mark in the corner – and walks up into her building.

When she gets to the door of her apartment, the lock is broken. The lock, she had asked her husband a dozen and one times to fix, sits broken still. She doesn’t let her frustration get the better of her as she walks into the apartment. She’s about to take her shoes off when she notices a pair of red high heels sitting next to her husband’s shoes. She walks into the house, stealthy as is possible, and hears hushed voices coming from their bedroom.

A voice stating that they are just waiting for her to die, another asking if they should move that process along. Banter…over her death. She walks closer still to the bedroom door and sees, laying in her marital bed, her husband and her best friend. All hell breaks loose! The husband – Park Min Hwan – clearly done with pretending to care for his wife, yells at her about why she came home. The best friend – Jung Su Min – uncaring that she has been sleeping with her best friend’s husband, asks her why she’s so selfish and why she can’t just let the living go on living even as she stands at deaths door. In the end Ji Won lays in a pool of blood after her husband pushes her and she falls in their living room and hits her head on the glass coffee table in the middle of the room. THE END!

Second Chances?

Actually, that was just the beginning. Ji Won opens her eyes and they are a little fuzzy. A voice in front of her tells her to put her glasses on and she recognizes it but also doesn’t understand what is happening. She puts her glasses back on and comes face to face with the eyes of the man who killed her and she starts swinging! She is fighting for her life except he isn’t fighting her this time. He seems confused as to why she’s attacking him. Eventually he gets fed up and, just as he’s about to throw his own punches, a hand grabs his wrist and pulls the two apart. The confusion starts to lift and Ji Won realizes she’s not in their apartment but at work and all her colleagues are looking at her like she’s a few spanners short of a tool box. And, honestly, she feels the same.

For a time, nothing seems to be adding up until Ji Won makes it back to her apartment where she starts to believe that she’s been sent back in time. 10 years, to be exact. Back to a time before she was married to that leech of a man, a time before she found out that her supposed best friend was actually just a snake in the grass, a time before she’d been sick and dying. She had been given the opportunity to do it all over again. She could choose not to marry this man, choose to not entertain this friend, choose to just run off somewhere and start over. But she soon realizes that won’t be as easy as she had once thought it could be.

There are rules to her being given this opportunity. Rules that she is going to have to learn the hard way. Rules like ‘if something has already happened before then it has to happen again’. She learns this rule in two segments.

The first being the day she reappeared in the office, the day she was attacking her boyfriend. In her first life Ji Won got a burn on her forearm from a kettle falling and nearly scalding her face. She’d used her arm to deflect the kettle and had ended up with a severe burn on her wrist. In this new timeline, her manager Mr. Yu, takes the hit from the kettle for her so Ji Won doesn’t have that scar now but she later realizes that Mr. Yu does have a scar. The exact same scar in the exact same place that hers had been. She, at first, chalks this up to just being coincidence. That is, until – the second segment – she remembers that she was going to get an injury on her knee from a stack of printer paper boxes in the break room when she attempted to stop a mug from falling and shattering. She saves the mug, doesn’t get injured by the boxes and is thinking she basically has a cheat code for this new life when, after leaving the break room, someone pushing a cart with an office cupboard on it bumps into her and she ends up with that exact same injury in that exact same place as before except it was inflicted in a different way.

The rule is now almost tangible as it dawns on her. Everything that happened before has to happen again, the way it happened before… it just doesn’t have to happen to her. She has to find someone to take all her bad luck from her first life so she can live a more fruitful life this time around. And who better to take her misfortune than her lying, scheming, snake in the grass best friend? The rules seem simple enough. A life for a life, a marriage for a marriage, a death for a death. Now all Ji Won had to do was get her best friend to want to take her husband because, much like any other bottom feeder, Ji Won’s bestie only ever seemed to be interested in taking what was already hers.

Hell Hath No Fury…

Ji Won had always planned to live a quiet life. After losing her mother to an affair and then later losing her father to cancer, she just wanted to start her own family, settle down and finally feel a little bit of stability. She would accept any form of kindness because, having lived in a small town and having her mother abandon her family while she was so young, it was in short supply.

She accepted Su Min’s version of kindness because she was convinced that Su Min was the only person who would truly care for her as everyone else in her small hometown became cold towards her over time. She accepted Min Hwan’s version of kindness because she was desperate for stability, going so far as to believe that if she didn’t accept him she may never get the chance at a marriage and a family again. This desperation, this meekness, is what gave the distinct impression to Ji Won’s boyfriend and best friend that she would be an easy target.

She was easy enough to lie to, so an affair wouldn’t be that hard to hide. She was easy to lie to, so getting others to bully her based on other lies was a cake walk to accomplish.

Ji Won’s disdain for her would be husband/killer is almost palpable. But, in order for her plan to work, she’d have to fake it until she makes it and this would prove almost stress-free because as easy as it is to read her pure hatred for this man on her face, it is duly easy to notice that he is so full of himself he could never even begin to imagine that the woman he’s dating wants absolutely nothing to do with him.

At first, upon realizing that she’s been granted this second chance, Ji Won immediately broke up with him. Which would have worked out great if he wasn’t psychotic and hell bent on being the only one to dictate the terms and conditions of their relationship. Before the rule dawned on Ji Won, she called it quits and ended up being yelled at and physically assaulted – in public – for being ‘overly emotional’. After realizing the rule, Ji Won had to swallow her pride and essentially crawl back to this man even though she just about jumped out of her own skin any time he so much as looked at her. But she could do this, she had to! She was going to live her life to the fullest and if that meant that she had to play around with this man – who had already proven himself willing to and capable of killing her –  for a little while, then so be it.

All she had to do was get Min Hwan to marry Su Min. So, she got to planning on how to make their relationship seem perfect on the outside while actively avoiding any alone time with Min Hwan. She had to get Su Min to believe that Min Hwan was a prime candidate for marriage because that was the only way that Su Min would invest any time into trying to tempt him away from Ji Won. And so the mind games began. Ji Won would constantly talk Min Hwan up and effectively made no time for Su Min because the best way to get Su Min to act was to take her toys away from her. The reactive tantrum that followed would have Su Min trying to lure Min Hwan away from Ji Won as a sort of punishment, not realizing that she would be playing straight into Ji Won’s hands.

Changing Fates

Ji Won figured that in order for her fate to move to Su Min she would need Su Min’s cooperation, even if she didn’t realize that that was what was happening. She asks Su Min if she would mind helping her take out some trash. Su Min, not realizing that the trash in question was actually Min Hwan, happily agreed to help her friend on the condition that Ji Won go out to dinner with her the coming Saturday for a girl’s night.

Ji Won is hesitant because now she has a playbook on all the nasty little set ups and traps that Su Min has in store for her. Su Min had intended for Ji Won to show up under-dressed to a nice Korean BBQ spot only to find out that the restaurant was hosting their high school reunion. All her old classmate, her bullies, would see her dressed that way and assume the worst of her.

Again.

Since they met, Su Min had been playing up her ‘woe is me’ act to anyone who would listen. She’d had everyone convinced that Ji Won was basically the devil incarnate and that she was leeching off of her and dear darling Su Min was just too nice to tell her to go away. In her first life Ji Won hadn’t understood why everyone hated her so fiercely but this time around she was going to give Su Min a taste of her own medicine. When the night of the reunion rolled around Ji Won showed up in a flowing white gown, gold heels, designer earrings and a brand new hairdo. She looked ready to walk a runway and Su Min – and the rest of their class – sat with their jaws on the floor because, according to Su Min, Ji Won was struggling to make a life for herself without being given a lending hand.

That was not the image that was being presented to them though and upon further – more hostile – conversation it was discovered that Su Min had been lying about practically everything but Ji Won came with receipts and put those lies to bed. That was when Su Min’s web started unraveling. That would be the beginning of Su Min’s psychotic break where she began to realize that she may be losing control over Ji Won and, in turn, all the people she had been lying to about their relationship in a bid to garner sympathy for herself.

There were other moments – both before and after the reunion –  when Ji Won upstaged and embarrassed Su Min by using her own tactics against her. Like the cafeteria. Su Min had grown accustomed to not being denied by Ji Won so, when one day during lunch Ji Won refused to eat out with Su Min and instead proposed that they eat in the cafeteria, the little demon spawn saw it fit to bring Ji Won down a peg because how dare she be denied the food she wanted by this person who she’d walked all over their entire ‘friendship’.

Ji Won remembered this incident perfectly. Su Min had been ahead of her in the cafeteria line, had piled her tray high with the reddest, the sauciest kimchi available and then she’d ‘tripped’ and landed on Ji Won. Her tray, accidentally tipping over and dumping that bright red juice all over Ji Won’s face in an attempt to help her wipe it off.

Ji Won would be prepared this time. When Su Min got in line ahead of her in the cafeteria, yet again piling her tray high, she watched with a sick kind of satisfaction at the fact that her friend hadn’t changed so she shouldn’t feel too bad about paying her back for all the crap she’d been put through. Su Min turned around after filling her tray, intending to shoulder check Ji Won, walked way too close to Ji Won and instead of meeting her friend’s shoulder Su Min was left with dead air as Ji Won moved out of her way, way too late for Su Min to right herself, and all that red sauce went directly onto Min Hwan’s very expensive designer shirt.

This time, instead of Ji Won being covered in cafeteria food, delivered by her darling best friend, it was her boyfriend who caught the back end of fate and Ji Won had to fight the smirk from crawling onto her face as she thought of those two taking all the hits and all the falls for her going forward. This would also prove to be a way to get Su Min and Min Hwan closer as now Su Min felt she owed him for his ruined shirt.

Ji Won remembered all the moments where she would sacrifice her comfort in order to make Su Min happy and all those came to an end because – again – making Su Min think that she was losing control over Ji Won would be the best way to get her to take the trash out. And the trash in question was making an even bigger mess of itself. In their first life Min Hwan had quit his job after successfully trading stocks ONCE and thinking that that was his life’s calling. In an attempt to duplicate that drop of luck, Min Hwan had gotten loan after loan, even borrowing money from Ji Won to ‘invest in their futures’.

This time around, Ji Won had invested in the winning stocks and then – according to the boyfriend – guilt tripped Min Hwan into dropping those stocks. But, because Ji Won essentially had insider knowledge now, she told him not to pull out on all his stocks. She would borrow him more money, make him more confident, in investing in a losing company. And the horse allowed itself to be led around by its nose. Because Ji Won had invested in those stocks the fate of that windfall would now be hers to claim and, because of the rules, Min Hwan would lose everything just as he had caused Ji Won to lose everything in the past.

Then, of course, there was winning against Su Min at the company retreat where, at first, Su Min had been able to win the prestige of sleeping in the glamping van while Ji Won slept in a tent and Min Hwan had been delegated a sleeping bag. This time around Ji Won got the camper and Su Min got the tent and that was also the night that Su Min and Min Hwan finally did the nasty. Essentially cementing that relationship in the eyes of both Su Min and Ji Won.

Su Min, having assumed that Min Hwan would leave Ji Won for her after they got freaky in the forest, was shocked when Min Hwan - thinking that his pee pee was made of gold - told her he wasn’t leaving Ji Won but that there was enough of him for the both of them and they could all just share. Obviously this didn’t sit well with Ji Won but it seemed to infuriate Su Min more because this effectively meant that she was still losing to Ji Won even when her bestie wasn’t even trying.

This blossoming relationship between Su Min and Min Hwan would lead to them making mistakes at work that would end with Min Hwan being downgraded from his position in the team he, Ji Won and Su Min had all been a part of at work to another, lower ranking team, and Su Min being fired altogether. But, of course, she wasn’t one to leave quietly because by the time she is set to leave everyone in the office is aware, or at least speculating, that she was the one sleeping with her best friend’s boyfriend and her reputation is essentially in tatters.

Before she leaves, Su Min creates a fake Insta account, in Ji Won’s name, discrediting the allegations leveled against her for the mistakes made by her and Min Hwan while they were at a work site together and further denying that she had been sleeping with her besties mans without her consent – essentially saying that Ji Won was aware of their relationship and wished them well. Ji Won, fed up with taking the blame for Su Min’s stupidity, did not take this lying down and embarrassed Su Min in front of the entire company and the customers that were almost killed because of the mistakes those two made.

This, however, is when Su Min thinks it pertinent to point out that she is pregnant with Min Hwan’s baby thinking it would garner sympathy from Ji Won… How that train of thought came to be, how she believed that telling her bestie she was pregnant with her boyfriend’s baby was going to work out in her favor is beyond me – well technically fiancé at this point, because Min Hwan had proposed! This is a lie, though, because Ji Won knows that Min Hwan cannot get anyone pregnant so unless Su Min was also cheating on Min Hwan there was not a chance in hell that she was pregnant and with this revelation, Su Min realized she had lost all control over Ji Won and their long standing friendship. Ji Won was now also free of Min Hwan as he’d been exposed as a cheater.

Now, you’re probably wondering how this all ties back into the rules and that part is pretty devious. See, because Min Hwan had so much debt to pay off, he needed a quick influx of cash. His mother had promised to buy him a house when he got married so he figured he just needed to convince Ji Won to marry him. When Ji Won exposed his cheating, that income avenue went flying out the window. When he heard that Su Min was pregnant, he figured he could use that to his advantage and just marry her instead. His mother would get the grandchild she’d always wanted, he would get the money from the house his mother had promised to buy him and Su Min would get her play thing. Everyone gets exactly what they need.

Except Su Min isn’t pregnant, mommy is not buying them a house immediately and Min Hwan is still under a mountain of debt and he’s also about to get fired for harassing Ji Won at work which will drive him and Su Min into the arms of someone so much worse than Su Min could have ever hoped to be.

Wildest Dreams?

There are some truly amazing and heart-warming moments in this drama because, contrary to what the show wants you to believe, this story is not just about betrayal and heartbreak and the occasional murder attempt.

There is a rather large romance b-plot going on with our main character and her office manager – who just so happens to be the grandson of the company’s owner, also to be referred to as the future owner of the company.

During a good portion of this show, Mr. Yu had been showing up for Ji Won in ways that you would expect a boyfriend or, dare I say, a husband to do but in her initial life she and Mr. Yu very rarely interacted with each other. She actually thought he was rather standoffish in her first life and now that she knows what she does, Ji Won is realizing that Mr. Yu had been looking out for her, from the very beginning in his own ‘I’ve secretly loved you since I first met you but now you’re with this douche-canoe and I’m not sure I can get in the way of what looks like your happiness’ kind of way. However, there are some things about him that are questionable – like all the information he has about things that are going to happen to Ji Won – and we are all very curious about how he knows what he knows and why him of all people?

Ji Won was finally living the dream she’d had for her future because she'd gotten rid of the dead weight in her life and she could finally move forward with her new man. But there’s enough angst to go around because what’s that one law of physics? Nothing ever goes well without something going horribly wrong? Equal and opposing forces and all that.

At first Ji Won figured that once she got Min Hwan and Su Min together that they would be each other’s problem and her fate would transfer to them. That is obviously not how that goes, or I wouldn’t be saying anything about it. Ji Won finds out that one of her new best friends, Mrs. Yang, is married to a cheating freeloader – just like she was – who is making her life a living hell – just like Min Hwan was – and has been diagnosed with cancer – JUST. LIKE. SHE. WAS! Her fate didn’t go to Su Min and Min Hwan, it went to Mrs. Yang and her husband.

When Ji Won realized this she had to make a decision, which wasn’t really much of a decision, on whether she seduces Min Hwan to put her fate back squarely where it belongs or to let Mrs. Yang carry the burden of her future. She chooses the former, only to be informed that Min Hwan is already cheating on Su Min with Mr. Yu’s ex-fiancé.

You are probably a little lost at this point so let me catch you up:

Mr. Yu is the son of a conglomerate family, which means he will be expected to marry someone of equal or greater wealth in order to keep the business among the richy-riches or whatever.

Mr. Yu, in the first time line, is more than willing to go along with this because he was in love with Ji Won but then hadn’t told her and then she got married, then she got sick, then she died! There was no catching any breaks for this poor guy. In this time line he lets his grandfather know that he doesn’t really feel up to marrying who his grandpappy chose and he would do whatever it took to end the ‘arrangement’ amicably but there was really no reason to go on assuming that that version of events would pan out.

Again, this should have been fine but this is K-DRAMA land and nothing is ever as it seems. Turns out Mr. Yu’s former to-be is extremely invested in him. So invested, in fact, that in the first time line she beat a woman to within an inch of her life for looking at Mr. Yu “the wrong way” and now, what? We were all expecting her to just let this man go with no actual reasoning?

But there was a reason, wasn’t there?

Mr. Yu had finally found his shiny spine and wanted nothing to do with Yura – which only served to make him more attractive to her as this was who she’d always wanted him to be for her – but Yura was not the type to have things dictated to her. Yura, seemingly the much richer female version of Min Hwan, did not do well with rejection. She was so bad with rejection, in fact, that she left her home in Japan, flew to South Korean, just so she could look Ji Won in the eye and, very casually, inform her that Mr. Yu was actually hers.

But, like I said, equal and opposing forces.

Ji Won may have been a lot less financially endowed than Yura but she had something - or rather, someone - of equal, or greater, force to Yura backing her up. Granted, she had a moment where she was about to let Mr. Yu go, not wanting to be like Su Min and encroaching on someone else’s relationship but Mr. Yu made it very clear that he’d broken it off with Yura and he was in Ji Won’s corner – even if she didn’t particularly like him for putting her in this situation at the moment.

Ji Won would only believe that Mr. Yu and Yura are no longer a thing when her other new best friend – who just so happens to be Mr. Yu’s little sister – explains why Mr. Yu agreed to marry Yura in the first place. That is when the claws come out and Ji Won starts really fighting for her future with this person she hadn’t known had been in love with her all along. And it is all well and good for Ji Won to be fighting for their future but there is one thing that neither of them can fight against and Mr. Yu seems to have resigned himself to fate, even after fighting Yura tooth and nail to make sure that she didn’t end up hurting Ji Won.

Actually, scratch that, Yura attempted to put Ji Won in the ground multiple times! First, she’d approached Su Min thinking that the best friend would have a way to get Ji Won away from Mr. Yu, which only ended up making Su Min looking even more unhinged as she was confronted with the fact that Ji Won had left her with the trash, upgraded and was now living it up because Mr. Yu had just gifted Ji Won 8 billion bucks in assets.

The jealousy that ate at Su Min when she realized this was damn near tangible. She looked ready to explode when she found this out but, bully for her, Ji Won was no longer entertaining her idiocy.

When Yura couldn’t use Su Min to get to Ji Won, she tried using Min Hwan. Making sure to alert him to the fact the Mr. Yu gave Ji Won things he was never able to, and would never be able to, give her and it hit at his ego and turned him into a worse version of himself… which is hard to imagine because this man is already the living, breathing, embodiment of sewage.

Remember when I said Min Hwan would get fired for attacking Ji Won? This was that! He turned into a stalker, then harassed Ji Won at work – basically blaming her for their break up – and when that didn’t get the message across, he turned her into prey.

After blacking out their shared office space when everyone else had gone home and Ji Won was working late he’d snuck up on her, hunted her, tossed her around and then almost unalived her by strangulation but – as always – Mr. Yu to the rescue.

Mr. Yu got there just in time to fling Min Hwan away from Ji Won like he was a paperweight and then got the both of them – himself and Min Hwan – thrown in prison. Once Min Hwan got out the next day, he found out just how far into the shitter his life had gone all from not staying away from Ji Won.

Well, when the obvious options didn’t pan out, Yura tried the nuclear approach and decided to involve Ji Won’s mother! Ji Won’s mother, who had run off with SU MIN’s FATHER, was now back in the picture trying to play up being a redeemable person and when that failed Yura decided to cut her loses and just have them unalive Ji Won all at once.

Again, FAILURE!

You’d think she would have gotten the message by now but it seems logic is an elusive entity. When that plan fails, Yura wants to clean house. There can be no traces of her involvement in any of these acts which means everyone involved needs to turn up missing, ASAP. This also fails! This woman just sucks at executions because her plans are amazing and the only problems are the people she puts her faith in to follow through with said plans which makes her a shit judge of character but that’s not a trait we have to worry about for long as she takes the fate of someone else soon enough and peace falls upon the land.

Sugar Daddy Says What?

‘I’m your allowance, use me’ is not a statement any of us expects to hear. Out in the woods. On a company retreat. From our anyone, least of all our manager, while he’s pulling his shirt down to reveal his pecs to us but that is exactly what Mr. Yu had said to Ji Won after showing her the little blue ink, heart-shaped birth mark?, on his chest. But it wasn’t a birth mark.

As a matter of fact, it looked oddly familiar to Ji Won and this was because that same push of fate that had thrown her 10 years into the past, had done the same with Mr. Yu.

Why this mark? This was the mark that Ji Won’s father would put on his gifts to her – easily one of the most identifiable markers her father could have left on anything.

What is this mark doing on Mr. Yu then? Well, it is around this time we find out that Ji Won’s father had essentially been playing time travelling cupid from the great beyond because he sent Mr. Yu back expressly to protect Ji Won in this new reality but also because he knew that Mr. Yu had been in love with Ji Won in their first life.

This explains A LOT.

Why Mr. Yu had been so disdainful of Min Hwan and Su Min, why he knew so much about things that would happen to Ji Won, why he always put himself between Ji Won and Min Hwan no matter what it would look like to people who weren’t in the know. It explains why, even after being pushed away, Mr. Yu continually fought to be by Ji Won’s side but there was one thing he wasn’t fighting for – his own life!

The rules that apply to Ji Won apply to him as well because he had also died in his first life which meant that in order for him to go on living in this new reality he had to find someone to take his fate for him as well. Someone would have to die, in a car accident, for Mr. Yu to be able to go on living.

Mr. Yu is content to be ‘used’ by Ji Won to get a leg up in whatever she needs but Ji Won is trying to figure out how he’s going to survive. He’s resigned himself to fate to the point where he is willing his fortune to Ji Won and his cat. This man is essentially saying ‘I’ve had a good run’ before the starting bell has even gone off.

To an extent, I understood that he didn’t want to hand deliver someone’s death to them so he was just going to be with Ji Won for as long as he could be, but Ji Won had just finally found stability in his arms and she wasn’t ready to let that slip through her fingers.

Fate takes this decision out of their hands though when, after being confronted with the consequences of her actions, Yura gets arrested for all the nonsense she had been engaged in and ends up in a car accident trying to escape the country before the charges stuck. On the day of Yura’s accident, Mr. Yu’s tattoo mysteriously disappears, perhaps relaying from the great beyond that he no longer had to live as an allowance but could finally enjoy his second chance. 

And their future finally begins with them getting married, then having their twins, then another baby and, on the anniversary of the day that Ji Won died in 10 years’ time, they went to see an exhibition on cherry blossoms. Why they didn’t just stand outside under a cherry blossom tree, I don’t know but that is their story.

There were moments when I wondered if maybe the show was going too far in certain aspects, like Su Min’s personality and how awful she was, only for them to bring it all back together with the fact that she had been jealous of the fact that when Ji Won’s mom and her dad ran off together her mother had begun treating her like a burden while Ji Won’s father did everything in his power to fill in the gaps. Su Min’s entire personality hinged on the fact that she was jealous that they weren’t all miserable like she was.

Min Hwan, on the other hand, had been coddled to the point of it becoming a problem. His mother was the worst kind of enabler and she went on blaming Ji Won for everything that happened and would end up happening to him because it was all Ji Won’s fault that they broke up and Min Hwan ended up with Su Min to begin with. Honestly, the mental gymnastics to have to go through in order to make heads or tails of some of these trains of thought are astonishing.

In the end, we get our hard earned – HARD EARNED –  happily ever after but there remains an existential question here. Would you be willing to pass your fate onto someone else knowing full well it was going to kill them?

Would you be able to live with yourself, with no guilt, knowing what you did about how someone else was going to die because you had already lived it?

Would you try to defy fate or help it along, or would you just accept that this was how things were and you just didn’t have it in you to make someone else live through that?

[lane-ys-world]

I just saw Wuju and I just want to know if we are actually still expecting that to materialize? The release has been pushed SOOOO many times... JeffBarcode aren't even with BOC anymore... Are we really still thinking this is going to happen?

upcoming thai ql prayer circle 🤝🤝🤝

[lane-ys-world]

Source: Sundae Kids

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At long last 🌈🥹🥹

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Mawin deserves to be with someone who loves him back... I hope they don't rob us of that.

Mawin my BELOVED this poor boy is trying so hard but he's so nervous and I love him so, so much.

MY BABY. Mawin! Beloved child! This boy has such a crush and he's trying so hard and I just want to give him a hug and promise him he's good enough.

And Ton is such a good friend. He's doing his best to build his friend up and support him!

[lane-ys-world]

Death's Game - Where Death toys with you until she's bored...

“The most painful death to a mortal, is one that is foreseen”

In every culture there is a certain disdain for suicidal ideation. So much so that most religious or cultural leaders will warn that the afterlife will more than likely be unpleasant if one chooses to cut their life short as that is not in the plans of their maker(s).

Nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, could have prepared me for what happened in this drama.

Death is usually portrayed as a formless entity. It is something that happens, not something that speaks and breaths. It is certainly not something that dolls out punishment… is it? In most utterances death is an event, an occurrence, something that life heads towards or culminates to. There are not many cases where death, itself, is given a face.

The last drama I can correlate this one to is Doom At Your Service, but Doom (Myul Mang) was more the end of all there was. The end of a day, the end of a life cycle, the end of a memory. Not so much death.

In this drama, Death has a face, a name and a mean streak a mile wide. There is one subtle catch though. You only ever meet Death when she comes for you. You are never intended to meet Death before the time she has set forth. You do not control the timing of the end of your life, that is her function and she takes her work very seriously.

“You are guilty of coming to find me before I came to find you.”

So, what happens when an individual decides that they can no longer take their existence and chooses to exit stage left? Death. And when you meet her she gets to choose the punishment for not just throwing away your life but also making her work overtime because you weren’t meant to meet as yet. So, in retribution for your insolence, she gives you a choice… find a way to live or into the fiery pits you go. So now the question becomes “How do I live when I’ve already died?” 

On a sunny day we see a man walking, cellphone in hand with a big smile on his face, down a busy street. He seems excited about the day and it’s infectious. Choi Yi Jae, our main character, is going into an internship interview today and is feeling pretty freaking chipper about it. This is the opportunity of a lifetime and he has no intention of squandering it.

He’s nearly to the building his interview is set to be in when someone runs past him, into oncoming traffic, stopping in the middle of the busy street and getting hit by a car. The impact forces the man to fall back onto the pavement, right in front of Yi Jae, and he inevitably passes on. This causes Yi Jae immense emotional turmoil and he flunks his interview.

Seven years go by and life doesn’t seem to be getting any better. His latest interview has not panned out, he is suspecting his girlfriend of cheating and his landlord throws him out for being behind on rent. Nothing seems to be going how he wants it to be, so he decides he’s about had it and he jumps off the ledge of a high-rise…

But then he wakes up on a plane?

“Humans always struggle to live only after they die, not while they are still alive…”

Turns out, he’d met Death and the terms of his punishment had been set out. His punishment was that he would be sent back to Earth twelve times. He would be expected to adopt the lives of the bodies he inhabits and if he could survive the imminent threat of death in that body, Death would allow him to finish living that life and dodge going to hell altogether. Sounds easy enough, right? All he has to do is live. All he has to do is survive.

This concept seems easy enough on paper but in practice, Yi Jae realizes how deep the waters he’s treading actually are. There are some rules that Death makes him aware of before sending him back the first time: He’s not allowed to kill anyone and he is not allowed to kill himself.

In his first life Yi Jae seemed obsessed with the idea of making money. He felt that the culmination of wealth would be the only way he could prove his worth and so that was all he focused on. He needed to get the best internship at the best company, land the best job in said company and work his way up the corporate ladder and, when that didn’t pan out exactly how he wanted it to, he started to spiral. So, you would think with the massive do-over he’s been granted he would just try to enjoy living but, alas, that is not to be because you can take the man off of his destructive path but apparently all you’ll be doing is giving him another chance at running down that same path.

So it begins...

“Do you still think death is the end of it all? This is only the beginning…”

Life one, he is placed in the body of a CEO on a plane that is set to explode. He fails at that life. Life two, the body of an extreme sports enthusiast mid-air, with no parachute. Fails at that one too. Life three, a high school student who was about to jump off a building because of how badly he was being bullied. He almost succeeds with this one but inevitably gets his head bashed in by his bully. Life four, he is put into the life of a mafia enforcer who is being interrogated for theft and kidnapping. The body of a national boxing prospect turned murder convict, a baby that was abused by their parents, a model that gets hit by a car, a serial killer that gets killed by another serial killer, a police officer who dives off a roof to protect his partner, and so on.

In a good sixty percent (60%) of these lives he died due to greed but he kept weaving the lives together. Any time he died he would reincarnate with the distinct thought that if he could make money in this life then he would live well in the next life. Until his target shifted from money to revenge.

Yi Jae was constantly being warned by Death. The purpose of your reincarnation is to live, he was told. Try not to focus so hard on Earthly luxuries and just live, he was warned. He was even warned that the closer he got to his final reincarnation, the more painful the death would be. He took all this for granted and just kept on messing up over a bag of money. A bag, might I add, he inevitably gives away anyhow!

By the time he has decided that he actually wants to live, that he’s ready to try and power through this thing called life, he’s just about forgotten who he actually is. He’s been in so many different bodies, been called so many different names, looked at so many different faces in the mirror that remembering who he is is proving difficult. And back to the spiral we go.

“But if you manage to avoid the deaths they face, you could carry on living…”

Death gives him one final warning at the end of his eleventh (11th) reincarnation. This final reincarnation would hurt the worst. He didn’t believe it, nor did he much care until he looked in the mirror and saw, gazing back at him, a set of eyes so similar to his own.

His last life would be that of his mother. She had already passed away and he was now left to live the life of the person he had hurt the most in his first life. Before waking up in this last life Yi Jae had resigned himself to going to hell, to ending this torment as quickly as possible but he could not bring himself to end it quickly in this body, in this his last chance at dodging hell, because he knew that his mother would have never wanted him to give up that easily. But would he be able to live this life with the threat of death constantly hanging over his head? Would this be the life that made it possible for him to understand why Death was so angered by his disregard of his own life or of the lives he impacted with his choice? Or would this be the life that tipped him further over the edge, now that he was truly alone?

“Your soul will enter the bodies of 12 people facing imminent death. And you will end up dying regardless of which body you wake up in…”

In his seventh (7th) life he decides that he wants to tell his ex-girlfriend what really happened to him because he was confronted with her grief for the first time. Unable to hold himself back, he approached her with a new name, a new face, but he knew what would interest her. He told her a story, his story, but as though he were coming up with a novel – fiction.

He told her of all his past lives, laid out how and where and when he had met Death, explained how he was still trying to just survive… but all this as though it was fictitious, as though he were planning out a storyline for a character. She engaged, intrigued by this insane story but she kept him at arm’s length. To her, he was a fan with an interesting story to tell and she wanted to help him plan it out so he could write it well. She was still grieving, still processing the mere thought of her lost love so there was no way she was even entertaining the idea of this man as anything other than a project, a welcomed distraction.

Days after meeting one another, Yi Jae decides that he cannot keep lying to her any more so he comes clean. He tries to break it to her as gently as is possible that the main character of this story he’s been telling her is actually him. She doesn’t believe him, at first, but then he starts recounting things that only the two of them would know – inside jokes, future plans, the works. She believes him and for a split second we all forget that this isn’t some great love story but actually the seventh circle of hell - however we are quickly brought back to our senses when they get pancaked against a nearby wall by a drunk driver.

The driver steps out of his car after reversing away from the lovers who are now sprawled on the pavement and, almost nonchalantly, tells his passenger to make the mess go away.

Yi Jae, feeling disheartened, angry and aggrieved hears this and realizes that the driver is without remorse.

The driver just so happens to be the owner of the company that Yi Jae was meant to interview at seven years ago. But then, from his past lives, Yi Jae starts to recount other moments with this exact person. A moment from when he was a mafia enforcer being told to put a bomb on an airplane that would end up killing a CEO… a moment from when he was an extreme sports enthusiast where he was offered an obscene amount of money to dive out of a plane without a parachute… a moment from when he was a boxer where he was offered the opportunity to become nationally recognized if he took the fall for someone else’s crime…

Slowly but surely Yi Jae comes to the conclusion that this man is a monster and that monster has just taken the life of the person he loved and he was going to do whatever it took to get back at him for it.

So, when Yi Jae is reborn as a serial killer, he sets a trap for the monster and watches as he goes from predator to prey.

“The pain that death brings you will only get worse from now on”

The deaths the Yi Jae had to endure were almost biblical. For the life where he felt he could outsmart death, he was burned alive – essentially being given a taste of hell. For the life when he felt bigger than death, like he was invincible, he was quickly and painfully brought back to Earth. For the lives where his ego got the best of him, he died from head trauma.  For the life where he was too trusting, he died from a knife to the gut. He died in ways that make the audience question what the point of everything is.

If he’s going to die even when he’s trying to help someone, when he’s trying to save someone, when he’s trying to be the good guy, what is the purpose of anything at all?

It is only in his final life, where he stops trying so hard to do anything at all that he finally gets to live. His punishment there? Living isn’t really living if you’re constantly looking over your shoulder waiting for death to come knocking. The constant fear of when he would keel over or when he would be struck by lightning kept him from engaging with others for fear that they weren’t trustworthy or that they would inevitably die because of him. His punishment was realizing the depths of the fear, the sadness, the sheer loneliness he inflicted on the people he loved by jumping off that building and in the end he was the one who was left all alone.

When this drama starts the quote “The most painful death to a mortal, is one that is foreseen” is writing on the opening screen. If you really think this statement over, there truly is nothing quite as terrifying as knowing that your death is near and you have no way to change or stop it from happening. You are bound to go crazy, to a point, trying to figure out when it could be or what you could do to circumvent it. But knowing that death is coming and accepting that death is coming are two completely different trains of thought. Knowing that something is coming gives one the idea to try fix, change, plan for the coming event. Accepting that something is coming is living in each moment as though it were your last, because what if it is…?

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Blank The Series - A BLANK slate?

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you put two stupidly attractive women in a television show and basically said “Make this show as disgustingly cute as humanly possible?”

No? Well then you clearly haven’t seen Blank The Series. Now, if you’ve been into GL (Girls Love/ Lesbian) dramas for a while now then maybe you’ve seen GAP The Series. If not, then it’s time to come out from the comfort of the rock you’ve been living under.

These two stories intersect due to the two sisters, Neung and Sam. After Song, the middle sister, tragically passes away following an argument with their grandmother over her sexuality, Song vows to never return to their family home and gets into a car accident on her way back to her girlfriend. Of course their grandmother, who has spent all this time raising them, rejects the relationship and then blames Song’s girlfriend for her death. The family is then divided with Neung blaming her grandmother for her sister’s death and Sam trying to just keep her remaining family together. Things come to a head, however, when Sam falls in love with a woman and their grandmother, set in her homophobic ways, tries to get Sam to marry a ‘nice boy’ she chose and deems worthy instead.

This backfires…greatly!

Sam, still wanting to keep the peace but also wanting to love who she loves, becomes a shell of herself before her grandmother’s eyes – unable to eat and incapable of engaging on any meaningful level with either her grandmother or her betrothed. This is when Nana realizes she’s gone too far and is at risk of losing her remaining granddaughter – because Neung booked it the minute she got her bearings and promised that she, too, would only ever return when her Nan was cold and due for a meeting with her maker.

Neung upon finding out that Sam was about to choose Granmama over the love of her life – they’re sisters, they still tell each other just about everything – decides it’s time to intervene and sticks her neck out for Sam in order to show her that her grandmother was the only person in the family getting anything out of the rules she was making and she expected everyone else to pretend to be happy with said rules – I’m paraphrasing, obvi. Well, fate or destiny or common freaking sense intervenes and gran takes her foot off Sam’s neck and ‘allows’ her to follow her heart – which leads Sam right back to Mon (her girlfriend).  Happy endings all around, right?

Not quite.

See, as Sam’s story has a happy ending we come to realise that the gran still has huge expectations of Neung… like the fact the she too was expected to marry a ‘nice boy’ that granmama deemed fit for her. That went over like a cinder block in a lake. Neung ran from the wedding!! She was already in her dress, at the venue, on the day and she decided “yeah, this isn’t for me.” So, she ran. Which is how she declared her excommunication. Her Nan was not pleased with this turn of events because it embarrassed the family, made them indebted to the nice boy’s family and all that jazz.

The boy (Chet), who so happens to be Neung’s high school best friend’s baby daddy, had had a crush on Neung since the beginning of time – why he then went and slept with her best friend is still beyond me. Ooooh, and let’s not forget the fact that Neung’s high school bestie – Piengfah – was also in love with her. Honestly, at this point we should just have NA (Neung Anonymous) meetings because she’s starting to seem like an addictive substance.

Now, you may be thinking ‘there is no way in hell this gets crazier!’ You would be WRONG! Not only are the baby daddy and her bestie in love with her, but so is the child of those two! Yes, a cool twenty years (I’m working off of the show, not the books – don’t come for me) after the baby was born, she too falls in love with Neung! And where her mother and father both failed, she succeeds in climbing over Neung's walls and military crawling her way into her heart. And babe, that’s just the beginning because, you see, Daddy Chet and ABSENT MOTHER Piengfah, are absolutely not going to allow their 21-year-old daughter to fall in love with someone sixteen years her senior and they are going to pull all the stops… but that will be in season 2 which is dropping in May, 2024.

Now, let’s talk about how these two stories compare to one another.

Before we continue though, please remember that this is in no way intended to downgrade any one of these shows and, honestly, I loved both iterations of the siblings so we are not going to put anybody down here!

GAP the series, which aired in the second half of 2023, follows the story of Sam and Mon. Sam is depicted as an emotionally stunted individual who is completely uncertain of her own feelings – so much so that her friend circle has to second guess all her decisions in order to figure out what it is she actually wants. Why is she like this? Because of her grandmother, obviously.

Sam’s grandmother, after Song died and Neung ran, put immense amounts of pressure on Sam and essentially stripped her down to “yes, granmama” and “no, granmama”. Being from one of the royal families in Thailand, there are expectations of this family that Neung will no longer live up to and so they have fallen onto Sam.

So, gran did the sensible thing the moment the eldest sister left and doubled down on her control of Sam’s life because she was the only person who knew what would create a fruitful and successful life not just for Sam but for the family image.

How does dear granmama accomplish this? By giving Sam an ultimatum.

When Sam was of age she asked her gran if she could open her own business and she was told that she could have her own business until she was a certain age then she would have to completely give up that dream and get married to the man that was chosen for her.

Sam is business minded and has grown her company into something she is quite proud of. The kicker? Her betrothed is her business partner and keeps sticking his nose in her business – not always in the worst ways but he definitely thinks her knows what is best for here without consulting her.

Enter Mon.

Mon comes into the company as an intern. Her area of focus being social media marketing. She excels at this, gets the company numbers up and is fitting in well. Mon has a secret though… she’s been in love with Sam since their school days but Sam doesn’t remember her. Mon has crafted her entire life around the idea of being “good enough” for Sam and she feels like she’s finally on the right path. Sam starts to notice Mon and they start a secret affair because Sam made a rule that dating in the workplace is prohibited so if anyone catches on that they are fornicating in the office, Sam is going to be forced to fire her girlfriend.

But, of course, things must be better before they get worse so Kirk, grandmama’s lapdog and Sam’s betrothed, finds out about Sam and Mon and immediately runs to tell granny that she needs to get the little miss back under control before she destroys the family image by being publically gay? Look, I don’t know what this idiot thought he was doing but gran finds out.

Cue confrontation!

Sam yells, gran yells, Kirk – for whatever reason – is also yelling. Then Neung appears, as if out of thin air, dragging Mon along to also yell. Now we have a full house! Back and forth, yell yell yell and then Sam decides Mon is more important than all that noise and she starts to make her exit when gran falls back onto the chair behind her gripping her chest and you’ll never guess what was going on there…

If you guessed that she was performing open heart surgery on herself, you would be sorely mistaken. No, she’s apparently having a heart attack! Neung isn’t buying it and Sam decides to believe her sister so her and Mon leave… only for Sam to abandon Mon once gran is admitted to the hospital.

Sam then goes about planning her wedding and Mon plans on flying halfway around the world to avoid her now ex but Sam is struggling and gran is suddenly feeling a little guilty about caging her barely free bird.

All that aside, Mon and Sam end up married and Kirk ends up in a ditch… or at least I wish he did 😒.

Now, onto Neung’s story.

Neung has always felt pressured to be perfect. Her grandmother groomed her to be the perfect lady after all. Not a hair, nor a thread out of place. Neung’s entire life had been planned out like a well written story and all she had to do was jump from page to page quietly and allow all the things that were intended for her to come her way. She goes through the motions set before her like a good little doll and allows her gran to have full control of her life. That is, until her sister comes home one day and tells the family that she has fallen in love.

You'd think this is good news but from the looks on grans face it would probably be closer to the look you'd give someone if their dog urinated on your custom polar bear white fleece rug.

She turned her nose up at the very thought that her granddaughter would be ‘defective’ and immediately told Song to end that useless relationship so she could focus on more realistic things… like marrying the man that dear ol’ gran had already chosen for her. When Song refused, all hell broke loose and gran kicked her out.

So Song left, Neung raged and the grandmother stood on her sanctimoniously high horse thinking she had saved her bloodline from embarrassment or whatever. Then the news came that Song was deceased and still the grandmother refused to take accountability, choosing instead to blame Song’s girlfriend.

This is where I think Neung drew the line. Blaming the person that Song chose to love for her dying was the final straw and she decided she wanted no part of this ruse any longer. She left the family home and decided to live the life of a struggling artist. Her grandmother cut her off so her finances were up in the air most of the time but Sam was always there to be safety net.

Neung had resigned herself to never finding love, never being happy, never having anyone to call her own because she had been taught that no one was worthy of her. No one that her gran didn’t say was worthy, anyway. So she went on living like that… until the sun came out from behind the clouds and we all know what they say about dynamite coming in small packages.

This new force of nature was a pint-sized, 20-year-old beauty with an innocence that could make cherubs sing. She came by Neung’s store one day and asked to have her portrait done – Neung is actually an artist, but she’s ‘struggling’ by choice at this point – and Neung wasn’t going to turn a paying customer away. So they sat, for hours, while Neung got every detail of this girl’s face down on paper. The girl, coincidentally named Aneung, had been planning this meeting for ages and once she had her in she was not planning on being shut out again. And, boy, does this little nugget wear Neung down.

Eventually Neung admits that Aneung has become an integral part of herself and she doesn’t want to extricate herself from Aneung. That’s all well and good, until Neung finds out who Aneung’s mother is.

She is now confronted with her best friend from high school who she told to abort her baby because she felt it would possibly ruin her life to go through with the pregnancy. Piengfah – Aneung’s mother – also admits that she named her baby that, out of spite, as a reminder to herself that the person she loved the most told her to get rid of her baby before it was even born. And now Neung is in a guilt spiral because the person she has come to love might not have been born if her mother had listened to her best friend.

Anyway, not to give too much more of the story away, the gran dies. We should all be very sad about this… Neung is beside herself because she realizes she will never have the opportunity to make up with her gran. Again, guilt spiral!

Maybe if she had listened… maybe if she had married the guy gran chose… or if she spoke to her kindly the last time they were together…

All these possibilities are running through Neung’s mind and then Aneung comes to her, wanting to help her in any way she can. And, for a time, Neung allows this. Neung then wakes up the morning after her grans wake with the bright idea the Aneung is too good for her and she needs to push her away. Which she does, spectacularly. Aneung is besides herself while also trying to reason with her lover but nothing seems to be working so she leaves. And once again, Neung is all on her own…

This show has me wanting to call my gran just let her know how grateful I am that she isn’t a controlling crazy person. All this heartache, this strife, could have been avoided if the gran had loosened up a little sooner.

She raised women who were intellectuals, strong in their own rights, brilliant and business minded and she refused to trust that without the presences of the Y-chromosome in their lives they would be fulfilled and happy.

They all missed out on some of these best years of each other’s lives because of all of them being stubborn to some degree. Only the two sisters remain and in May we will see how Neung and Aneung’s story closes off with season 2.

There are a lot of unresolved feelings, a lot of hurt and a lot of misunderstandings going around but only time will tell if everyone will find their way back to their soulmate.

Stay tuned.

[lane-ys-world]

It's my 6 year anniversary on Tumblr 🥳

I've barely been on this blog in all this time but maybe this is the year that I change all that.

[lane-ys-world]

Love and Leashes

I have been watching K dramas for a little less than five years now and I’m astounded every time a new one makes an appearance. From the cast and crew to the sets to the overall budgets that these shows never seem to actually have (note the seems to... I know they actually have budgets).

All right, let’s get down to it.

Love and Leashes is a Netflix Original Korean movie that was released just in time for a good ol’ Valentine’s movie in. The show centres on Jung Jiwoo (former Girls Generation’s Seohyun) and Jung Jihoo (former U-KISS’ Jun Young).

Jihoo is a new hire in the PR division and Jiwoo is your standard “Ice Queen” – or at least that’s what the office manager would like you to believe. Jihoo seems like your average good looking, hard-working, ‘have my stuff together’ type but he has a secret. This secret is revealed literally ten minutes into the movie when Jiwoo picks up a package that was intended for the new guy. The package? A collar. Not just any collar – a black leather, spike studded masterpiece with the name Miho on it.

Naturally Jiwoo is confused as she did not order a collar but the plot thickens when they both reach for the box the collar came in and out falls a coupon for a BDSM store. This is a little weird because moments before Jihoo said the collar was for this dog but now Jiwoo is thinking that maybe it’s for his Sub (this is not the case, but I’ll get to that in a minute).

Well, you’d think things would get a little awkward around the office for the both of them but Jiwoo makes a point of trying to keep things as neutral as possible while Jihoo is sitting on the edge of a bomb waiting for the pin to drop – it does, but not in the way you’re thinking.

Fast forward (about 5 minutes) and Jihoo is asking our resident Ice Queen to be his Master... Yup, that’s right, the collar was for him not his Sub. For those still trying to put the pieces together JIHOO IS THE SUB!

Anyhow, Jiwoo is taken aback and Jihoo (being the masochist that he is) internalises this as being a rejection of his sexual proclivities rather than a co-worker not wanting to complicate a workplace relationship. Jiwoo, however, mulls the idea over and eventually decides she wants to know what it feels like to be a Master and tells him YES. You can imagine what happens next...

Not you can’t. This is a K drama!

They sign a 3-month contract and their first formal ‘interaction’ as Dom/Sub is... well...intense. Not because of their own physical pleasure, but the pleasure of the people in the rooms next to theirs (they went to a Motel, it got loud. That’s all you’re getting out of me).

Of course Jiwoo immediately thinks she has failed as a Master and Jihoo somehow figures that it’s his fault the night went poorly. Anyway, the next few outings are much better – what with Jihoo getting his Master a pair or bright red heels and having her step on him with them. There’s also the candle wax in the bathtub scene and OH, they did a thing at their office that finally sets that bomb Jihoo’s been sitting on off.

You’d think that, because of the nature of this relationship, the couple would have been sexing it up all over the place but, alas, they do not. There are NO SEX SCENES IN THIS MOVIE so if that’s what you were looking for tough cookies. As closely as this movie resembles Fifty Shades, it is still, in fact, a Korean drama.

The relationship between Dom and Sub is quickly coming to a close when Master Jiwoo tells her Sub she wants to try out being in a more traditional relationship. I don’t know about you but my first thought when she said this to him was “This must be a dream come true for him,” but he DECLINES on account of his unresolved traumatic feelings from his previous relationship.

This is an all round, feel good movie. There are a lot of funny moments, a lot of relatable moments and all in all a lot of goofiness – and I loved every minute of it.

 Now that the spoilers are all out let’s break it down a bit more (P.S there are more spoilers ahead – he he):

 ‘You cannot possibly be this dense’ Moments

D/S moments in the office!?

Yup, you read that right. They did a whole scene in the office where Jihoo was feeling a little jealous and needed his Master to reassure him that she wasn’t going to run off with the new guy (different new guy). How the new guy even became a factor in this? Your guess is as good as mine.

So, Jiwoo makes Jihoo take his belt off, ties him up with some duct tape and proceeds to whip... the counter. She whips the counter near his hip (you didn’t think she’d go that far at the office did you?). This all gets recorded and somehow the recording ends up in the work group chat – Queue Internal Affairs nightmare.

So, the bomb has gone off... IN A BIG WAY.

They both get called in and, with Jiwoo being seen as the office Ice Queen, the commentary in that room would have been grounds for a sexual harassment lawsuit under normal circumstances because the ‘boys club’ that is IA wanted a better understanding of why Jiwoo was a Dom – which was honestly none of their business.

Jihoo starts fretting when the meeting is over that they are about to get fired but Jiwoo is set that they can’t get fired if someone else’s recordings are leaked and they are somehow worse... Yes, there were a bunch of other recordings and yes, somehow the workplace BDSM scene wasn’t all that bad in the grand scheme of things.

 ‘What the hell just happened’ Moments

Ex keeps calling and HE ANSWERS

Remember when I said Jihoo has traumatic relationship stuff? Yeah... well, he was in a long term relationship, he finally felt comfortable enough to tell his ex about his sexual desires and SHE SHUNS HIM – called him a pervert even.

This had my blood boiling for so many reasons but the top of the list is the fact the Jihoo still has his ex’s number saved on his phone, is still making excuses for her behavior towards him AND let’s her in when she shows up to his apartment unannounced, uninvited and while he is preparing to host someone else.

This girl made me so mad I was ready to throw something at my screen.

Oh, and because that wasn’t bad enough, she blames HIM for the end of their relationship even though she BROKE UP WITH HIM.

Now, I’ve seen this premise in a lot of other K dramas as well - where people will make excuses for other people’s behavior or take on baggage that is really not theirs to carry just so someone else feels vindicated – and it continues to infuriate me but I do understand that there are cultural differences and I cannot judge. No matter how mad the scene makes me. *sigh*

Hilarity ensues

Yup, D/S moment at the office.

While at the office, during their ‘reassurance’ moment, Jihoo tells Jiwoo that she should punish him somehow for having lost faith in his Master and proceeds to give her options. Jiwoo then proceeds to cuss Jihoo out from here into outer space.

She held nothing back and he seemed to be eating is all up.

They move from station to station, desk to desk and she acts out the frustrations she has with her co-workers and he takes the verbal lashings she’s dolling out.

There is screaming and moaning and laughing and, oddly, a bunch of shredded paper being thrown around.

They almost get caught when the night guard comes to see what the commotion is about but they hit the deck and then make a hasty get away.

This scene showed that even when the Dom is seemingly being abusive from the outside, they are working within the bounds of what the Sub is comfortable with and they are expecting the Sub to say if they have gone over their comfort zone.

The Sub asked the Dom to demean him, cuss at him, and she delivered and he seemed to be eating it up.

‘Why are you playing with my emotions’ Moments

Emotional Damage from EX

When Jiwoo tells Jihoo she wants to be in a relationship with him, he shuts her down because of his ex. He continually tells Jiwoo that his ex still hates him for the end of their relationship and that it’s his fault because his sexual desires were too much for her to handle and he shouldn’t have put that on him.

Jiwoo explains to him, in a different scene, that if she loved him, and this lifestyle excited him, the least she could have done was give it a try – fair advice especially considering the two of them didn’t even know each other that long before they entered into this relationship and Jiwoo still put in the hours to learn how to be a good Dom for him.

 Best friend get bamboozled

Jiwoo’s best friend sets out on a date only to find that her date is just some nut who gets off on hurting women (NON-CONSENSUALLY).

He shows up to their date, they go to a love motel (don’t ask me – I also don’t know) and upon arrival he starts making threatening advances and tries to imply that because the bestie is into pain, he can forgo being a decent human being.

This scene made me so upset, but it also scared the heck out of me. There are women out there who have to deal with these weirdos and they probably (like the bestie) feel they can’t report these cases to their police because “well, this is what you’re into, isn’t it?” – which is the argument whats-his-face used before trying to SA this woman.

Luckily she got the upper hand and hog tied him before he could do any lasting physical damage but this isn’t always the case and this part of the movie gave me a scare I don’t think I’ll be recovering from for a while.

  Stuff my BDSM research told me was important that this show did(n’t) do enough of

AFTERCARE

From what I’ve gather, this refers to the process that either parties take to help each other or themselves wind down after the intensity of play. In some case, taking care of the Sub after play is a way for the Dom to decompress as well.

Now, considering this woman had never been introduced to BDSM before this relationship, and that she was hurting this man quite intensely (in my OPINION, please bear in mind this is just that) that the aftercare for her would also be documented as – from what I’ve heard – Doms do not generally go around beating on people and would like reassurances that they aren’t monsters after the fact.

What we did see was the aftercare the Sub got. There was a scene where Jiwoo whips Jihoo and his back gets TORE UP! Afterwards, Jiwoo tends to his wounds. She leaves a bunch of marks on him from a bunch of different interactions but never anything that won’t fade within a few days.

Now, I am aware that in some of their scenes Jiwoo asks if Jihoo is okay being hurt and he constantly says something along the lines of “because it’s you, I’m alright,” I genuinely am finding it difficult to understand how she could walk away from their interactions without any other form of reassurance. But, I digress, I have never been in such a relationship and as such do not understand the nuances of it. I’m just working off what the internet has shown me.

 Research, research, research

One thing this movie showed a lot of, and I was very appreciative of this, was the intense amount of research Jiwoo was willing to do in order to do right by her Sub. Granted she does not seem like the type of lady who likes to fly blind anyway, however, this can be a touchy subject to someone who has not been introduced to it beforehand and she took the task of learning how to be the best version of herself for her role seriously.

I also really liked the fact that she didn’t stop researching the minute the relationship got going. She was in chat rooms and websites, and of course actually talking to her Sub about their preferences rather than flying by the seat of her pants. This made me feel like Jiwoo was actually invested in Jihoo as he was and she was trying to be the best version of herself to best compliment him rather than try to change him into something she felt more comfortable with (yes, that is a jab. If you know, you know).

 Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk ;D

[lane-ys-world]

Vice Versa The Series

 – What a ride!

Our universe is not the only one in existence – or at least that’s what the Marvel Universe, DC Universe and this series have said to be true.

 As usual, the breakdown of the series first and then my thoughts:

The series follows two you men. One at the peak of his career (Puen) and the other just about to get the opportunity of a life time (Talay) when disaster strikes.

 First, Talay goes to the beach with friends and ends up drowning – and the story ends (Hehe, no, I’m just kidding). He wakes up a while later in an unfamiliar hospital room, surrounded by unfamiliar people, and being called an unfamiliar name. Anybody else would have checked themselves into a mental hospital and called it quits but Talay is approached by a nurse and told that he isn’t actually losing his mind. Guess what, the nurse, yeah she’s not from the current universe either. Okay, this may get confusing so we’ll refer to the origin universe (where Talay is from) as Uni1 and the alternate universe (the one he currently finds himself in) as UniAlt from here on out.

Talay, after a boat load of questions and a healthy dose of skepticism, comes to accept that this is his new reality and he has to live it to the best of his abilities – which goes against the usual actions of the person whose body he’s currently in (Tess) and so everybody is a little freaked – rightly so – but no one is quite as shocked as Tess’ father (who just so happens to own the ONLY TV/Movie production company in Thailand) who is now bearing witness to his youngest and most spoilt child actually taking a vested interest in the family business.

While Talay is finding his feet and being told how to possibly get back to his own body, a new traveller appears in the form of a misplaced musician. By misplaced I mean from being esencially tone deaf one day to being able to make angels cry with a single note the next. That and the fact that our newbie musician is singing songs that don’t exist in UniAlt have Talay brimming with certainty that this person is also a traveller from Uni1, but how does one approach someone about possibly being from a different universe? Surely you don’t just walk up to them and say ‘you’re not from around here, are you?’ Surely not. But would you believe that that’s almost exactly what Talay does? And so the love story begins. This one doesn’t end in tragedy (I promise) but there are some speed bumps and potholes along the way – because, why not?

You know those stories of people who fall into comas and wake up one day speaking completely different languages even though they had never left their native countries? This show made me think of that. What if when those people fell into their comas, their consciousness got swapped with someone else’s and they have to now find their way back ‘home’? What if their ability to now speak a foreign language isn’t a mistake?

These are the ideas and images this series brought to mind. Being trapped in an up-side-down version of your world in a foreign body, with a foreign family and friends, having to make the best of someone else’s life cannot be easy to come to terms with. It must have been even harder for Talay, knowing that they only way home was  by finding his ‘portkey’.

The portkey is explained as what we lei-people would refer to as a soul mate. Your portkey is the one who is able to open up your heart and wouldn’t you know Puen thought Talay was his portkey from jump while Talay was still thinking over how they just hadn’t met the right people yet. So, Puen plays the long game, while also making himself indispensable to Talay. Things come to a head when Talay shoves a friend of theirs at Puen in hopes that she’s his portkey, but then gets upset when the two spend time together – jealousy is a tricky little monster, isn’t it?

Anyway, they figure their stuff out shortly after, finally admitting their feelings to each other and are essentially glued to each other from that moment on until fate decides to separate them – YET AGAIN – by sending Puen home to his own body first (fate didn’t even have the common decency to use the FIFO method, tsk tsk) and all this before he could tell Talay his actual Uni1 name seeing as how he’d been using a nickname up to that point so that, for once, his fame wasn’t a deciding factor in how others treated him.

The time that Talay and Puen spend separated after finding happiness with each other is nothing short of agonizing. Talay tried to go the place his dreams told him to so he could get home but for a month that area was inaccessible, while in Uni1, Puen was trying to re-acclimate to life in the limelight without his other half.

Now, because Talay hadn’t made it back home, when Puen finally tracked down where he lived in Uni1 he was ecstatic – only to come face to face with Tess in Talay’s body. Puen would then spend days showing up at the house only to be told that his soul mate was still stranded in the other universe. Then Puen and Tess make a deal – Puen would leave his phone number, stop showing up at the house, and when Talay was finally back where he belonged he would use said number to call Puen to him. That never happens because the number gets lost and Talay, upon returning, spends ages just trying to get close to Puen only to be pushed aside by agents and the likes because of something that Tess had done while they were switched. Don’t worry, they sort that part out too.

Just as they’re getting comfortable, Puen’s fame rears its ugly head and he is forced to choose between his career and his love. I’m just about pulling my hair out at this point because this show has me so absorbed, so absolutely involved that I’m ready to defy the laws of Physics so I can reach into the screen and fix things for these two just so they can have a moment of peace! Anyway, before Puen can make a decision, Talay makes a statement to the press that sends a very clear message – STAY AWAY. Puen believes this for all of five seconds before he remembers what they have been through just to find each other and he does what any rational person would do in that situation – shows up to the house and asks Talay’s mother if she’s cool with them being together, OBVIOUSLY! And they live happily ever after... I hope.

This is definitely a slow burn drama. The leads don’t just fall over themselves and then all of a sudden *romance*. No. Puen has to work himself to tears – literally – before Talay even considers him as his portkey. 

The scripting of the series was beautifully done and the actors delivered time and time again. There were moments when it felt a little slow but those never took away from the magic that was this show. If you’re into time travel, alternate realities, dreamscapes, or anything else along those lines, this may just be the show for you. All in all, an excellent series, with an intriguing plot and a beautiful love story.

[lane-ys-world]

[lane-ys-world]

Unforgotten Night – the uninhibited detonation leading to a slow burn that we didn’t know we needed

With the show ending in the next episode, I figured it was time for a recap.

The show follows Kim (who runs an auditing firm) and Kamol (a mafia kingpin) on their journey to finding their perfect match. Kim has just gotten out of an on-again off-again relationship with a friend, De, and finds himself adrift as he had begun developing feelings while his friend found love in the arms of another. Kamol is a picky lover and the fact that he is into BDSM has made finding the ideal lover a hassle.

Kim and Kamol find each other when Kim decides to go drown his sorrows at the bottom of a bottle and Kamol sees him and takes an instant liking to him. One thing leads to another and Kamol realises that he has found, in Kim, what he has long since been looking for. Kim, however, being confused by liking what Kamol had done to him – violent as it was – runs and tries to forget their night together but Kamol is not one to be denied and he pursues Kim and eventually convinces Kim to move in with him (it took like 4 days...).

Trouble soon visits their doorstep as Kamol’s business dealings and personal relationships start threatening the foundation of his and Kim’s relationship, but will that be enough to finally drive Kim away? You’ll have to watch it to find out (wink wink).

Back story:

Kamol is an orphan who found himself without anyone to care for him when Evan, his boss, took him under his wings and eventually handed [him] a portion of the kingdom to run. Kamol built quite the empire, making nice with government officials and shady smugglers alike. Kamol finds no fault in taking a life to keep the empire running.

Trouble comes in the form of a man desperate to leave his mark on the casino industry – Danai – when a bigshot Korean investor comes to town and a bidding war between Danai and Kamol ensues. Danai chooses to start threatening Kamol in the most personal manner possible, openly provoking him, causing Kamol to give as good as he gets...

Kim is the eldest (actually I’m pretty sure he’s the only) son of his parents. He runs an auditing firm and is a stable and steadfast employer – I say this because of how protective his employees are of him. Kim gets into a physical – apparently no strings attached – relationship with someone he considers a very close friend.

The relationship comes to an abrupt end when De finds himself falling for someone else. Credit to De, he immediately insists that his and Kim’s relationship ends when he gets serious with this other guy. This leaves Kim feeling a little lost because he had been developing feelings for De, only to find that the opposite was true for his friend.

This is where the story picks up – a heartbroken Kim and a sexually frustrated Kamol find pleasure and pain in each other’s arms and Kamol vows then and there that Kim is exactly who [he] has been looking for.

The Awkward Elephant in the Room

Now, I’m not going to sit here and pretend this series was perfect. Coming in on the tails of KinnPorsche, it had big shoes to step over. Because of the timing of its release, it would be impossible to say that comparisons weren’t being drawn but mafia, possessive alpha-male tendencies and a touch of BDSM are where the similarities end. Kamol has proven that he is his own character and not the shadow of some other show’s character.

Although I do believe the show is good – well written, well timed, the works – I take great fault in the manner in which Kamol and Kim are ... intimate? I’m not really sure if I should call it intimate because they kiss – and I mean this genuinely and not in a ”I’m just trying to be funny” kind of way – like two guppies playing volley ball with an air bubble. I cannot get that image out of my head any time they kiss for longer than two seconds.

They (the actors) work well off each other, IN MY OPINION, and have shown that they have chemistry... but sometimes when they kiss I wonder if the director said “Just put your faces together” because they just couldn’t get it down. I mean, the first interaction was bound to be a little clumsy, what with them just meeting and then diving headfirst into a very physically and emotionally taxing situation, I was expecting a little clumsy. What I wasn’t expecting was the level of discomfort I felt anytime they kissed. It was weird. That’s it. It wasn’t even clumsy, it just looked like they didn’t want to put their mouths together – which would have been fine... if they weren’t the lead couple.

From their first kiss in that club bathroom, to their most recent kiss at their 'vacation spot'... a good seventy percent (70% - I'm guesstimating here) of their lip service was borderline criminal.

Tsk tsk tsk.

If I were a Khom...

I swear that man had the most reason to spend at least half of this show just cackling. His self-control is commendable. From the private moments Kamol has in his office to the random happenings of the house he guards, Khom has to be the most put together person around.

He has seen his boss at his most desperate, has seen [him] at his most murderous and somehow in between all that is the man who watches his boss pine after his boyfriend twenty-five hours a day while also trying to run an empire.

More than anything, Khom has been the point of contact between Kamol and the outside. From fielding calls from Candy, sending men to watch Kim, taking care of Baiboon, being the head guard, almost being unalived... multiple times. Honestly, if I were Khom I would have asked for a 6 month vacation. That man works way too hard.

When the one you love asks something of you, it must be done

SOOOOOO... Kim asked Kamol to ‘quit the mafia lifestyle’ and go legit. I wouldn’t be worried about this, aside from the fact that Danai, Danil and Cherry are still not accounted for and they seem the type to not let up on something, simply because others are no longer invested.

Cherry has been in love with Kamol since the beginning of time and has drawn it up in her head that she and he would end up together. Even though he has made no indication of being attracted to women – I suppose she felt he would change for her, and only her (please, tell me you hear that eye roll). This woman deluded herself to the point of putting Kamol’s actual love in danger and then being shocked by Kamol’s response to her betrayal.

Danil has, much like Cherry, drawn it up in his head that Kamol is and will always be his. The only difference between him and Cherry is that he has actually had the pleasure of sharing Kamol’s bed, so he knows what it is he will be missing if Kim runs off into the sunset with Kamol. Danil is the absolute image of ‘pint sized and angry’ what with him yelling at everyone and everything in his path and screeching like a banshee at Kim, Kamol, the staff and Evan (hell, he might have yelled at a few potted plants too - who knows?). Danil also seems borderline unhinged with his thought process running along the lines of “If Kim goes away, Kamol will come running back to me so all I really have to do is get rid of Kim...” even though Kamol has expressed multiple times that he is no longer interested in being in any kind of relationship with Danil.

Danai is a problem not just for Kamol, but for Evan, which is painting a big ol’ bullseye on his back. This man really does not know when to quit. He has been beaten, circumvented, and flat out embarrassed by Kamol so many times; I’m almost embarrassed for him... almost. He brings everything that happens down on himself and – seeing as how he shows no remorse – a lot worse is coming for him and he'll deserve every little thing coming his way.

All of this is to say that Kamol can go legit in his business practices, but the darkness he currently lives in will always taint their lives and my biggest fear is that something horrible will happen as retribution for him leaving the mafia lifestyle behind, something more permanent than our routine kidnappings.

Kim and his incessant need to do the exact opposite of what he is told...

Can you hear my eyes roll?

“Kim, please stay home. It’s not safe there...” and what does Kim do? He goes where he’s told not to go, resulting in him being slapped in the face, tied to a chair and damn near blown up because someone (cough, Kamol) planted a freaking explosive. “Kim, whatever you do – don’t open the door...” and Kim opens the door to a bunch of people hell bent on kidnapping him because of his association with Kamol. “Kim, don’t run away from me again...” and, well according the snippet we got for next week’s finale, Kim runs away from home and, you guessed it, he gets kidnapped AGAIN.

You’d think that at this point he would have learned that being away from Kamol, or the safety of their home and the sixty-leven-hundred guards stationed there, is a bad idea but in spectacular fashion, he has found himself kidnapped or attacked at least once a week since getting together with Kamol. I used to blame Kim’s increased danger status on his association with Kamol but halfway through the fifth episode I realised that Kim is just incapable of following instruction.

Predictions for the finale

Judging from the snippet we saw, Kamol is going to get mad at Kim because of De. How he is going to justify being mad about De after the multiple times Kim tried to tell [him] about his past is going to be fun to watch because he has not a match stick to stand on in that regard.

As a sign of trust, Kamol told Kim about his past bed mates (though I’m pretty sure he did that because Danil was quite literally crawling out from beneath the floorboards, but whatever) and when Kim tried to reciprocate Kamol deftly told him that it wasn’t important (pretty sure Kamol said that because he knew he would want to go unalive whoever Kim had in his life before) but now that the cat is out of the bag, thanks to Danil, Kamol is feeling a little antsy and Kim is picking up on it.

Because Kamol is upset about De, Kim is going to assume that that is the end of their relationship, pack his bags and head out. Again, thanks in no small part to the pint sized menace that is Danil. Danil is going to convince Kim that it would be best to leave before Kamol comes home because he is going to get kicked out. Kim, having self-esteem the size of a grain of sand in terms of his relationship with Kamol (sometimes, only sometimes), is going to self-sabotage himself into believing Danil, which will result in him being taken by Danai.

Danai is not making it out of this coming episode in one piece and neither is Danil (I don’t think). If you put the pieces together of how annoyed with Danil Kamol has been, how irate Kamol is known to be where Kim’s safety is concerned, and how crazed he has been any time Kim has had a mark on his skin that [he] didn’t put there, I believe it is safe to assume that Kamol is going to go batsh*t crazy and destroy anything in his path between himself and Kim – Danil, Danai, Cherry and whoever the hell else might try to get in his way.

Kamol and Kim will have their happy ending. I cannot see a version of events, after all that these two have been through, where they don’t walk off into the sunset and live happily ever after but what that looks like is still up in the air and that is something we will just have to wait to see. Just a few more days to go.

[lane-ys-world]

Check Out The Series – The dumpster fire that keeps on giving

I’ve watched my fair share of BLs in the past three or so years and so I’ve set standards, for myself, about what is acceptable and what isn’t. These are personal to me, so I’m in no way expecting everyone to feel the same way I do.

From Cutie Pie to KinnPorsche and everything in between - The good, the bad and the downright raunchy... there are some places I just won’t go.

This series sent me into a spiral in the first two episodes and for some reason I just couldn’t stop watching. It was like driving past a really bad accident on the highway and not wanting to see all the gore but also not being able to look away.

“Meet Cute”

My first problem was the “meet cute”. These two characters (Nine and Daonuea) meet at a resort after having broken up with their respective partners (Praew and Tee) and deciding to get away for a little while to reassess their lives – I guess.

They end up being in neighbouring rooms and, because this spot is in the middle of nowhere and there isn’t much to do, they end up trailing behind one another all day long and eventually end up at the pool. For a time, they were simply two guys staying next door to one another but eventually they figure they might as well be friends, which leads to them going to this barbecue-esque set-up that the resort staff put together and they end up drunk... or at least one of them does.

Anyway, one thing leads to another and they end up in Daonuea’s room. They do the nasty – because, why not? – but the next morning Nine is nowhere to be found. Daonuea feeling, yet again, rejected heads to check out (haha – I see what they did there) and he bumps into Nine who then asks if they can exchange contacts. Now, you would think that Nine would contact Daonuea, seeing as how he was the one who requested that they exchange numbers, but can you believe that he says absolutely nothing from the moment they leave the resort? All the while, Daonuea is sending this man text after text until he finally just gives up.

So, the meet cute was adequately executed... only for us to later find out that they have been bumping into each other since college – if not earlier. I mean, there was the theme park (which was weird because how do you stop a person from falling and then just walk off but then later reminisce about how you were the one that caught them???), then their almost-meet when Tee stole Nine’s thunder and his gift... it’s all been really messy. We could argue that that was exactly why we went back week after week – the resulting mess. I still think, even if the mess was juicy, that it could have been better executed.

Over-acting/Overselling

There were times when the sound of Daonuea’s voice haunted me even in my dreams. The grating sound of him saying “P’Tee” or the ever present “P’Niiiii” was the nails on the chalkboard of my waking nightmares. I found it difficult to get through scenes where the three of them were together for fear that he would utter both their names in the space of a minute and I’d be left with that shrill sound in my mind for the next 24+ hours.

I’m not saying that the actor is bad. As a matter of fact, I’m saying the opposite. This actor sold me on the idea of this annoying, lovesick puppy that couldn’t choose between the toy and the treat. He was the perfect mixture of desperation meets sadness meets loneliness and the perfect example of why dating in your workspace is bound to blow up in your face.

I could ignore all the other cast and write this whole review on the actions of our two mains alone and be able to regale you for pages on end, but there was one character in this drama that made my teeth itch and my neck hairs stand on end anytime her name was so much as mentioned in a scene – Praew.

If I opened a dictionary tomorrow and looked up Psycho Stalker Girlfriend with Trust Issues and a Penchant for Using Self-Harm as a Tool of Manipulation and this woman’s face didn’t screech at me as I approached the definition, I would be shocked. Her character was one of the most irritating throughout the series and she only redeemed herself by not imposing herself on Nine’s life anymore – after he kicked her to the curb... again.

Look, I get it. She had her career to think of. She has her issues to sort through... all that. But to put Nine in the position she did and expect him to pick her up time and time again was beyond selfish. She made me want to physically reach through the screen and yank on her hair. And don’t even get me started on her treatment of Candy – sigh.

“I was cheated on, so it’s only fair I cheat too”

No matter how you look at it, what Nine and Daonuea did was and will forever be cheating. I don’t care if they were destined, or unhappy in their respective relationships or so in love they couldn’t tell up from down. Hell, I don’t care if the goddess of love herself came forth and ordained them – you don’t mess around in your relationship and expect the resulting relationship to be healthy. This bit Nine in the butt more than once (Daonuea finding out about Praew and then finding out about Nine’s Friends With Benefits situation(s)), though it seemed to mostly circumvented Daonuea – strange.

I’m not saying that Daonuea didn’t get any consequences from his and Nine’s actions but I feel that Tee sort of just accepted that he was no longer wanted and slunk back into the shadows though when the show started he was very vocal about winning Daonuea back... where did the fight in Tee go?

Praew, on the other hand, took it upon herself to stamp herself onto everything Nine touched. Even going so far as to show up at his workplace, to snoop, while he was out of the office but then getting caught.

Scripting/Translation

The script was messy... I say this knowing full well that I didn’t understand all of what was said (context wise) but I also say this because the resulting translation could not have turned out how it did if the script wasn’t messy. Cause and Effect.

There were moments where I actually wondered if the characters on the screen were communicating with one another or if their shots had been cut from someplace else, but I digress... this could have just been a ‘lost in translation’ thing and I just didn’t get the context of the scene. At this point, all I can do is hope that that was the case.

Overabundance of nudity

I may be alone in thinking this... I may not be... but the usage of nudity in this show was borderline pornographic. I say this, after having watched KinnPorsche (IYKYK).

In the origin episode, they limit the amount of nudity... that’s it. That was where restraint went to rest and just never got back up. In the following episodes Nine and Daonuea find themselves in countless stages of undress. Then, of course, there’s the scene where Praew is attempting to seduce Nine. Look, it was all a train wreck, okay. It started to feel like the cast being in some state of undress was a plot point.

This entire show could have been a lesson in getting out of abusive relationships, or working through infidelity or even learning to love yourself after the one you love betrays you... it could have done all that and more and instead it presented as an over scripted porno leaving the audience to wonder when their next view of the actors’ naked bodies grinding on each other was going to be.