#make him overcompensate / lash out / self-sabotage

[fieryncbles]

I'm adding Ben Glenroy from Only Murders In The Building to my muse list.

[kuronekonerochan]

*deep breath, takes cover* so...about Start Up *activates shields*

Warning: This is a rant... a looooooooooooooooong raaant (pls read this in that long man jap commercial singing voice, if you don’t know what I’m talking about google it...it’s...wow).

First, let’s start with how I feel watching this drama vv

^^ Found footage of drama viewers who went into this hooked by the first engaging episodes thinking it would be a good drama and not crumble to the ground in the second half, after already having gone through Do You Like Brahms? and Record of Youth just in the past few months of 2020.

I think the problem with dramas this year is that the scripts seem like they were written without purpose. A writer should want to tell a story. They should have a clear picture in their minds of what story they want to tell. Of who their characters are as people and how they want them to be at the end and what happens to mold them into who they become and how they get there. 

These scripts don't seem to want to tell a story at all. The writers instead seem to have something to say instead of a story to tell. They want to say ppl are like that and they behave a certain way and so we end up with scripts like Do You Like Brahms? or Record of Youth with a million characters portraying relatable irl attitudes and it works as social commentary, but without a proper plot for a story they want to tell to streamline the whole thing it becomes little more than people watching that is interesting at the beginning as character study but quickly falls apart when it becomes apparent they have no idea what to do with the characters they've created. 

And in DYLB the characters ended up having no time to have properly structured arcs because they stopped the drama and filled the runtime with secondary characters demonstrating various forms of pettiness in human nature and when they got back to the main characters and broke them down they suddenly ran out of time to make them heal on screen so it was a rushed mess.

 Record of Youth was so worried with showing also a billion characters for the different types of ppl there were, that besides PBG, most characters had little to no development They were just there, there was no story it was all pointless.

Start up also had this  vast set of characters, each with defined personalities and individual issues to overcome: the sister with her internalized (and misplaced) guilt and her defense coping mechanism of lashing out on her sister and overcompensating stubborn behavior; the mother with her life choices; the grandmother with her past lies and current health issues; Dal Mi with her rage issues and her inferiority complex and her relationship with her sister; Do San with his confidence issues and his self sacrificing/self sabotaging bullshit; Ji Pyeong with his loner complex and his guilt towards grandma and back into her family and the unresolved issues with Dal Mi; plus the found family aspect, the team growing together, Ji Pyeong being begrudgingly supportive against his will and Nam Do San being disarmingly honest and kind to him even when they disagree bc that's how he is, even if he now stands up for himself and starts to be cheekier.

 And that's how the drama was going... until it wasn't. Because there was a sandbox competition and jargon and stuff to cram in there for conflict and a love triangle they decided to drag for some reason... and suddenly because some events needed to happen the characters start behaving in a way that makes no sense to their established personalities. Do San is blowing up all the time and him and Ji Pyeong hate each other all of a sudden... no more endearing bickering, pure vitriol; Dal Mi after the whole reveal with the letters never had a personal conversation with Ji Pyeong again; the mother had an out of the blue christian mea culpa...without barely talking to any character prior besides the MIL; and one of Do San's friends is pissed at Ji Pyeong, also out of the blue bc years ago he was mean to his brother and he killed himself. He is mad now, halfway into the competition...not when they met Ji Pyeong at their old place, or during the whole "fooling Dal Mi as a CEO" arc, or even at the beginning of the sandbox...just randomly now. Artificial conflict who?

 And Dal Mi and her sister...well the drama doesn't have time to unpack all that, or show a proper personal conversation between Ji Pyeong and Dal Mi, but this drama also needs to end with the family back together and Do San still needs to end up as the brilliant confident engineer he needs to be, and since him and his Sherpa, who should have been the one to nurture him (even with a bit of tough love), are now busy hating each other...well TIME JUMP TIME!

Character development on screen who? Do you like Brahms? Start up sure does bc they did the exact same thing...when you write yourself into a corner...stop writing, do a time jump and tell everyone everything already happened. 

This is latest mutation of the time jump trope is even worse than the usual kind. The romantic trope one was usually for self reflection, to make a break from the conclusion of the dramatic plot and transition smoothly into a happy ending (since killing off the bad guy, who one of the characters might be related to or had befriended before he went off the deep end and thus have conflicting feelings about, and immediately jump into the smooching mood might be a tad too much), or fix up the power imbalance in traditional kdramas (the female lead spends the whole drama as his secretary...time jump glow up for curriculum abroad so she doesn’t have to work for him all day before coming home together...not that sexy, kind of exhausting really), or simply kdrama trope tradition like the last minute amnesia...just because.

 But in our year of the devil 2020 time jumps are now where the meat of the plot should be. The emotional resolutions, the healing, the forgiveness, where relationships are mended and strengthened and the important events take place. It’s the divine spa for plot holes and lazy writing where scriptwriters sip their drinks and congratulate themselves for a work well done, because in the end it all worked out...their characters come out of the time jump spa feeling refreshed, with a new purpose in life at peace with themselves and all their struggles past them, just in time for a happy reunion, or just footage of them looking at cellphones and posters and talking about other characters so the audience knows all is well and they’re all pals now... and then they go back to their chores and the camera pans out (okay this one I realize due to the pandemic maybe having the entire cast together could be difficult, but at least showing them interacting one on one for god’s sake).

I know this was long and ranty, but I am getting tired of this new trend of  Don't show and don't tell...at least not to their faces. Go with "Oh, haven't you heard? xoxo gossip girl". I am all for good character study and social commentary, but maybe tell a story and then according to the actions of the characters give them realistic personality traits. And only then, after having a clear plot in mind, incorporate the characters into the story and not the story into the characters.

[tyrannuspitch]

wait no i’m ready to talk about loki and remorse now

first off, i want to draw a clear line between guilt/remorse and shame. we know that loki’s ego is not bulletproof but compensatory, and that he routinely internalises feelings of hurt as feelings of inadequacy and inferiority. that’s his whole thing. however, having low self-worth is not the same thing as being able to recognise his own immoral actions. we need further proof to say that’s in there.

okay so. early on in the loki show they specifically have him say that he doesn’t like hurting people, and from the way he says it you can tell he means he actively dislikes it, not just... an absence of sadism. like apathy or something. so, yes, he feels guilty about what he’s done, and he doesn’t entirely believe his own justifications for it.

and my initial reaction to this was. hmmm. is this a new decision they’ve made for this show, or are they drawing on actual, previously established evidence of this in the films.

and, you know, it’s something loki keeps/would keep extremely locked up. it’s a vulnerability. it’s something that gets in the way of his survival tactics. it means admitting that many of the negative things people say about him are true. almost all of the time during the films, he could be feeling guilty but hiding it, overcompensating/self-sabotaging/lashing out and so on, or he could be utterly remorseless and/or convinced of his own justifications, and only getting worse out of entitlement and panic. there’s no real way to know.

but! here is at least some evidence to support this:

when loki fakes his death in the dark world, one of the last things he does is apologise to thor. it’s non-specific - he could even be apologising for dying - but it’s also a little desperate. he says it three times. it seems genuinely important to him.

the thing is, faking his death is something that could so easily be done incredibly spitefully. even if it were still a noble/tragic death, he could use it against thor. he could draw it out or find a way to guilt him or blame him... there are so many ways he could twist the knife here. but he doesn’t do any of them. for the first time, he’s not demanding apologies, he’s apologising.

he also explicitly doesn’t forgive odin. if he were just saying what he thought thor wanted to hear, i think he would probably overdo it and renounce everything. but instead he says: our dad still sucks but i love you. that’s not something he would come up with artificially, given how often he’s redirected resentment of odin towards thor. that’s a possibility loki can only even see through growth.

sure, loki has an ego and he likes the idea of being remembered as a hero. but Also. loki loves his brother and on some level wishes he’d never betrayed him, and this is finally a “safe” way for him to show it. he doesn’t have to take full responsibility, he doesn’t have to deal with the fallout of having expressed one (1) vulnerability, he doesn’t have to watch their relationship fall into back into the old patterns. he can just have one last Moment and leave. 

he also has plausible deniability with others and himself about it because he’s lying about so much at the same time as making a genuine apology.

basically i feel like this is almost certainly genuine because:

1. he didn’t have to say all that, and if it were about vengeance, there are better revenges.

2. it was more or less the only emotionally safe way for loki to say all that if he wanted to. if we were ever going to see something genuine, it would be in this moment