#is most fitting for a particular narrative or bit instead of anything bogged down in specifics. it's about Vibes. which like fair enough ye

[cruelplatonic]

forgive me for overanalyzing a minor thing that's treated as a comedic bit anyway, but a lot of the 'vox controls the finances/the vees rely on vox's credit cards' jokes don't land for me bc i feel like they all have independent income streams and are separately wealthy from their ventures. especially valentino who employs a lot of demons who are probably directly paid in cash

realistically i think the vees financial situation probably looks like sort of shared funds situation that they all, individually, embezzle from, even though it is wholly unnecessary to do that because 1. they're in hell, there's no legal body that would punish them. the only people they're beholden when it comes to this is each other 2. those are assets they functionally have access to no matter who is actually in possession of them. literally a chardee macdennis situation where they build cheating into the rules for each other because they all love cheating so much they construct a way to still technically be doing that. vox is still probably the guy that deals with the minute details of their common finances but both the other vees perceive that less as him controlling the money and more as him being the guy that fucking loves boring paperwork. because, again, they all separately have their own pools of wealth to draw from. vox funding the vees is only true in the sense that he's the one who most often handles the logistics and not in the sense that he's the direct source of their funds and is allocating their access to money

[overthinkingkdrama]

Exit Review: My Country

Synopsis

This drama is set in the transition between the Goryeo and Joseon dynasties, and follows turbulent friendship turned fraught rivalry between Seo Hwi and Nam Seon Ho. Seo Hwi’s late father was the greatest swordsman of Goryeo, but after being framed for embezzling military supplies he was executed as a traitor, a stain which hangs over Hwi and his sister’s lives. Seon Ho is the illegitimate son of a powerful state official, but due to his mixed parentage he can never fully belong to his father’s world and has an insatiable ambition and bitter resentment toward his father which drives him.

Hwi and Seon Ho have been close since childhood, but when they end up going head to head in the state military exam a tragedy follows that will drive a terrible wedge between them. Eventually circumstances will force them to pick sides between General Yi Seong Gye (the first King of Joseon) an his ruthless son, Yi Bang Won, in the fight which will give shape and purpose to a newborn country.

Review

Story: My Country is a difficult drama for me to review objectively, in part because I loved it so much. Watching this drama was a truly absorbing and gripping experience for me, and it plays to so many of my story preferences. I was unequivocally obsessed with this drama from the premier to the finale, but during the weeks between airings I couldn’t help but feel like I was arm wrestling with the script.

It was characterization more than anything that gave me fits. I wouldn’t go so far as to accuse the show of giving us thin or two dimensional characters. To the contrary, each of these characters has a fully realized matrix of conflicting desires, loyalties and ambitions that inform their choices and alignments. However, it is often difficult to sift through those murky motivations and draw a clear line between a character’s internal desires and their external actions.

This drama starts out with an incredible cold open that raises all sort so questions about who these characters are and immediately invests you in finding out how they ended up in this situation. It’s truly masterfully done, and I probably rewatched it upwards of 10 times through the run. It kept me asking those questions all the way until the pay off. But because the writers were so invested in keeping their cards close to the chest, clear characterization was sometimes lost in the shuffle.

That said, this drama really is one beautiful, tragic escalation after another. Just taking the first two episodes in isolation is quite a ride. I really thought after the first few weeks, or hell, the first half, that the drama would get bogged down in plotting and politics or have nowhere left to go, but to my great joy it really doesn’t let up a single moment until the finale.

Acting: Where to even begin with the acting in this drama? All three of the main male leads: Yang Se Jong, Woo Do Hwan and the inimitable Jang Hyuk are perfectly cast and give inspired performances. Everything from posture to voice to subtle microexpressions is so stunningly on point.

I came into the drama already a big fan of both Woo Do Hwan and Jang Hyuk as actors, having followed them through other projects, so it wasn’t surprising to me that I liked them both here as well. However, what did surprise me was the extent to which they were able to show off their range and talent. As a long time Jang Hyuk fangirl, I would confidently argue that this particular rendition of the Yi Bang Won character is him at his absolute best. I also went into My Country relatively indifferent to Yang Se Jong, or at least not overly familiar with or impressed by his previous work. I’m happy to announce that that is no longer the case, as his performance of Hwi is one of the most memorable of the year for me, and his sheer level of commitment to the role is awe inspiring. There’s a video of him talking behind the scenes about a moment early on where he actually yelled himself hoarse embodying a moment of panic and grief, which made me appreciate the level thought and effort he put into playing this character.

I don’t want to limit my praise to just that trio of actors either, because the entire cast is incredible. I didn’t know much about Seolhyun before this role, but I thought she was really strong as well, though her character doesn’t feature as heavily as one might like or expect from the promotional material around this drama. The villains too are captivating, especially the detestable Nam Jeon played by veteran actor Ahn Nae Sang. Wow, you are really going to love to despise this guy. I just cannot say enough about the performances from top to bottom, because we would be here all day. The acting is really what makes the drama, especially the stunning chemistry between the characters, and more specifically the chemistry Yang Se Jong has with all the other leads.

Production: There is some movie quality cinematography throughout this drama. It just looks very, very good both in the way it is shot and the attention to detail, the props, the costumes the sets. There is a beautiful long tracking shot following Hwi through a battle field in episode 3 or 4 that was just jaw dropping. It really felt like they were flexing, honestly, and it’s refreshing to see this kind of cable quality coming out of South Korea and ending up on American Netflix for people to watch and appreciate.

I love the music in this drama. Some of it can come across a bit camp, like the electric guitar and strings heavy instrumental “My Country” that accompanies many of the sword fight scenes, but I loved Bang Won’s wailing violin theme music every time it showed up, and the OST definitely sets a mood.

One of the more distracting choices the drama made was to allude to certain historical characters like Poeun, Sambong and Choi Young but never have them actually appear as characters, in the present or in flashbacks, opting to address certain important events and philosophies through fictional expys such as Nam Jeon and Seo Geon instead. They even resort to filming certain scenes in strange oblique ways so that we understand Sambong is in the room but we don’t see his face.

The only thing I can figure is the writers wanted to use the audience’s familiarity with these historical figures without chaining the story too closely to the actual flow of historical events. Or perhaps they decided to exclude these characters in order to avoid too much direct comparison to the critically well-received and highly rated drama, Six Flying Dragons, which covers much of the same time period.

Feels: For me My Country watches like a bitter-sweet tragi-romantic melodrama centering on a toxic love triangle with a historical backdrop. And when I say “love triangle”, I am 100% referring to the interplay between Seon Ho, Hwi and Bang Won (my sincere apologies to poor Hui Jae) because that’s how the entire drama is structured. My Country is one of the most purely homoerotic things I’ve ever watched. If it weren’t for a few limp attempts to imply Seon Ho’s romantic interest was in Hui Jae and not his former friend, I would say “unapologetically homoerotic” but alas, South Korea isn’t quite there yet.

The romance between Hui Jae and Hwi never quite caught fire for me, though lord knows they were trying. It always felt like a side dish to the main course that the drama really wanted to serve: namely the star-crossed relationship of Hwi and Seon Ho. (And this is not meant as a dig toward those who liked the Hui Jae/Hwi romance. This section of the review is just about my subjective experience.)

There were moments where I worried, or couldn’t quite tell where the drama was taking us with regard to Seon Ho and Hwi, or where I feared everything was going to end in senseless destruction and they couldn’t successfully bring the plot to closure in just 16 episodes. But for the handful of issues I had with the writing of the drama, its final resolution was poetically, heart-wrenchingly, perfect.

My Country just pushes so many of my narrative and aesthetic buttons and plays heavily to my id. This is a drama that I’m going to be thinking about for a long, long time. I will definitely be watching it again and I will try to get as many other people to watch it as possible. I liked it that much.

Would I recommend My Country: The New Age? Yes, oh god yes. Please watch it. Watch it and then come talk to me about it. Definitely one of the best of the year.

9/10

[the-desolated-quill]

Mass Effect - Video Game blog

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. If you haven’t played this video game yet and wish to remain spoiler free, stop reading now)

I have a PS3, which means I never actually got the chance to play the original Mass Effect when it came out. Mass Effect 2 was the first game in the series to be released on PS3 and it did a very good job introducing newcomers to the franchise. But thankfully the first Mass Effect was rereleased on the Playstation Store, which meant us Playstations users could finally experience the entire Mass Effect trilogy as a whole. And since Mass Effect Andromeda comes out at the end of the month, I thought I’d play through and blog about the entire trilogy.

Mass Effect is a sci-fi, action RPG series that allows you to customise the protagonist’s name, gender, background, combat style and appearance. I played as Commander Alice Shepard, a colonist and soldier who received many medals of valour for her heroic deeds during the Skyllian Blitz. Set in the 22nd century, humans are fighting for recognition among the numerous alien races on the Citadel (the hub of galactic civilisation). Shepard is appointed as the first human Spectre, a group of elite warriors who perform covert missions for the Council by any means they see fit. Your first mission? Track down a rogue Spectre called Saren before he and his geth army unleash upon the galaxy the Reapers. A race of sentient machines hellbent on destroying all life in the galaxy.

It’s going to be a bit hard to judge this game on its own merits due to the fact that Mass Effect 2 was my first proper introduction to the series. It’s hard to tell if any of my criticisms I have toward this game are merely because I’m used to how the sequel operates. I’ll try my best not to compare the two, but I will say this. I think Mass Effect 2 does a far better job introducing you to this universe than the first Mass Effect does. Mass Effect 2 managed to trickle out important information about the world and lore whilst telling an engaging narrative. Mass Effect 1 however does have a tendency to get bogged down in exposition a lot. Maybe it only feels slow and plodding to me just because I’m already familiar with the lore, but there are a number of occasions where you’re encouraged to talk to your teammates and they just provide you with massive info dumps as opposed to meaningful interactions.

But anyway, let’s start with the story because that’s the main selling point of the Mass Effect franchise. On the whole, I liked it a lot. Bioware really put in a lot of effort building this universe and its lore and all that hard work really pays off. All the alien races are really cool. I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for the turians personally because I just love their design and their methodical, militaristic nature, but the other races like the asari, krogan, salarians and quarians are all really interesting too. I love the relationships between the races and their histories. For example you have the quarians who actually created the geth centuries back only to lose their home world in a Terminator style revolution. All the stuff with krogan are interesting too. The salarians used them to defeat an insect race called the rachni only for the krogans to rise up and were eventually sterilised by the genophage. And then of course there’s all the stuff with the long extinct Protheans, whose technology (or so the characters initially think is Prothean technology) serves as the basis for the whole of galactic society and innovation.

In fact it’s the politics of it that I find to be the most interesting thing about Mass Effect. The Council races mistrust humans and frequently patronise them (the turians in particular have a lot of contempt in humanity due to the fact that the two races used to be at war due to a misunderstanding at first contact) and the non-council races view humanity with disdain, feeling they’re getting too many privileges and are dangerous. This plays into the game’s moral choice system and how you play the game. Do you try to appease the Council and improve galactic relations or do you dismiss diplomacy and charge in headfirst, risking further alienation? The game is ostensibly about humanity, through Shepard, carving a place for themselves in galactic society. Either peacefully or through force. This especially comes to a head near the end where you have to choose to either save the Council from annihilation at the hands of Sovereign or let them die, which would mean an all human council taking their place. Considering the headache the Council give you throughout the game, it would be severely tempting to let them die, but it could have dire consequences on galactic relations in the future. (I chose to save the Council by the way). Shepard is basically dealing with two conflicts. The A plot of stopping Saren and the B plot of finding the right balance between serving the alien Council and looking out for human interests.

The antagonists are really cool. The Reapers are an incredibly compelling threat and suitably mysterious. The conversation you have with Sovereign is definitely one of the highlights. He’s ancient, cold and intelligent. Utterly compelled to carry out the genocide of every sentient race in the galaxy and the scariest thing about him is that we don’t know why. He displays a high level of arrogance, claiming the motivation and purpose of the Reapers is beyond our comprehension. It certainly does raise a lot of interesting questions going forward. And then of course there’s Saren, who really makes the Reaper threat a lot more personal. Unknowingly indoctrinated by Sovereign, Saren believes that helping the Reapers is for the greater good, claiming that if he can prove to the Reapers that organic life forms can be useful, they’ll be spared. Saren is very much a tragic character. He’s ruthless and at times bloodthirsty, but he’s not evil. Not really. He honestly believes he’s doing the right thing and that he can somehow outsmart the Reapers’ machine logic, only to then get in way over his head and become an unwitting pawn. He makes for a great antagonist and part of the thrill of the conflict comes from trying to convince him that he’s been indoctrinated and trying to convince the Council that Saren is now a threat. (Although I’m surprised it took so much to convince the Council that Saren is working for the Reapers. I mean just look at him).

(Does he often wear sinister cyberpunk outfits to work?)

Gameplay is okay. I much prefer Mass Effect 2′s game design. Instead of ammo, your weapons can overheat and you have to wait for them to cool down, which can get a bit annoying. There are a number of side missions you can do, but they tend to get very repetitive due to the similarities of the maps. Every lab is the same, every spaceship is the same and every mine is the same. You can hack certain objects for collectibles by playing an incredibly repetitive and boring mini game where you just match the button prompt. And if you for some reason can’t press a simple button, don’t worry. You can use omni-gel, which you can get by recycling unwanted items, to bypass all of it. So if you’re in the habit of recycling a lot like I am, you’ll have so much omni-gel that the game actually starts to become disgustingly easy. Omni-gel can also be used to repair the Mako, which you’re required to drive around maps. Now a lot of people complain about the Mako saying it’s hard to control, and I honestly don’t know what they’re talking about. Granted it’s a bit of a pain when you want to reverse or make a sharp turn in the middle of a battle, but it’s not undriveable. It’s like one of those RC cars I had as a kid and it’s easy enough to control, so I don’t see what all the fuss is about. I was more bothered by the repetitive maps more than anything else.

You can’t customise your armour like you can in the sequels, but there is a large variety of armour and guns for you to choose from as well as mods that can be fitted for added benefits like heat absorption to prevent your gun from overheating or more powerful shields and so on. Unlike the sequels, you can also do the same for your squad mates, not that they’re much use. I swear the AI for them is fucked. There are instances where an enemy is hiding behind a crate and instead of doing something sensible like walking around the crate, they choose to fire at the crate. I’ll tell you something else that’s fucked too. The cover system. There are numerous instances where I’m standing right next to a wall and press the X button, and Shepard will just stand there like a blancmange. And whose idea was to make me crouch before going into certain types of cover? Crouching is usually reserved for stealth. The last thing I think about in a firefight is ‘Oh shit. I’d better crouch now.’

Finally let’s discuss the characters and the moral choice system. Throughout the game you get moral choices that earn you Paragon and Renegade points that can open up certain dialogue options provided you remember to upgrade your Charm and Intimidate skills in the Squad menu (yeah I’m glad they got rid of that in the sequels). Now the game boasts that all of your choices will change the story and have an impact, and that’s true in the sequels, but in this game and this game alone... really? Sure you see Shepard slowly change and evolve the further you go along the Paragon or Renegade paths, but I can’t really detect that much difference in the narrative. It seems to play out mostly the same to me. You’re also encouraged to talk with the other characters often in between missions to really bond with them, but as I said before, they have a tendency to speak almost entirely in exposition most of the time and (with the exception of Wrex where you share a pretty tense exchange on Virmire and how its resolved depends on how you’ve interacted with him previously) it never really seems to make much of a difference no matter how much you interact with them.

I suppose that’s really my biggest problem with this game. It does feel very much like setup. Mass Effect 2 (and Mass Effect 3 to a certain extent) does an excellent job introducing new players to the franchise whilst also continuing the overall narrative and telling its own self contained story. You could (and can) play Mass Effect 2 without having played the first one and still follow along. With the first Mass Effect, it very much sacrifices meaningful character interaction in favour of setting up a grander narrative. That’s not to say I hate the characters or that they’re underdeveloped. I really like them. I love the cynicism of Wrex and the skepticism of Ashley, Garrus and Tali are pretty cool, and Liara is just utterly adorable. I just never felt any real kind of bond with them like I did with the characters in Mass Effect 2. In Mass Effect 2 you had loyalty missions and meaningful dialogues and you feel like you’ve really gotten to know this group of people and formed a strong emotional connection with them. I just didn’t get that with this game, which unfortunately affects certain parts of the narrative. On Virmire for instance you have to choose whether to rescue Ashley or Kaiden, leaving the other to die for the cause. It should have been a very powerful and tragic moment, but I didn’t really feel anything because I felt like I hadn’t really bonded with the characters as much as I should have (also it wasn’t exactly a hard choice. Kaiden is by far the most boring character in the game, so naturally I was going to sacrifice him).

It also sadly affects the romance. In the game you can choose one of three characters to be your love interest. Ashley if you’re a man, Kaiden if you’re a woman and Liara for both. (I picked Liara, in case you’re wondering). Again, because I feel I haven’t bonded with the characters as much as I should, it’s hard to be invested in the romance, especially when nothing really comes of it other than a sex scene. It’s also all a bit forced. I remember in Mass Effect 2 that the game would give you the option to make the relationship with a character more flirtatious if you wanted, and thus open another a whole other level to the dynamic between both characters, but here it’s like the game wants you to start a romance to the point where it becomes kind of awkward. When I was talking to Liara, one minute we’re talking about why she chose to be an archaeologist and then suddenly she starts throwing herself at me saying she feels a bond between us. Like... Liara, I’ve literally only just met you. Calm down. And then there was one really awkward bit where Kaiden suddenly got pissy because he thought I was romancing himself and forced me to choose. I wasn’t even aware I was romancing Kaiden! I thought I was just being nice! (perhaps that was the intention. To show what women have to go through when a man misinterprets friendly gestures as romantic ones. I don’t know. I suspect I may be giving the developers too much credit on that one).

While Mass Effect is still an enjoyable game despite its faults, I’m very glad that Mass Effect 2 was my first proper introduction to the series as it is a far superior game and story to this one. Which, in fairness, is what a good sequel should do. Improve upon the original. I guess it shows that Bioware respond well to constructive criticism, and that’s always good :)