Letter #13: Extraordinary You

Good afternoon, Erin.
 
So, with it being Ash Wednesday, we mark the beginning of Lent, today, which means no meat on Fridays for the next two months—and, more significantly (to this preamble), the annual need to come up with a Lenten promise: some modest sacrifice or service or self-improvement that acts as a test of our self-discipline.
 
This year, having just sat through the character role-heavy Extraordinary You, I’ve decided that I should reignite my long-dormant protagonist powers and refocus my mind towards the optimism and positivity inherent to a person for whom the activity of his daily life is about things working out for him.
 
As such, and to properly orient myself in this early stage of my journey, I have a question: would we consider my envelope-flap drawings equivalent to supportively painting the inside of a sword guard?
 
Alternatively, I’m prepared to admit that, in the absence of a pager message from you that I could use to bolster me through a devastating period of my life, I have looped your “Where Do I Go” cover to ease me into sleep on a couple of nights when I just couldn’t quiet my mind—but that’s only if the first thing doesn’t count. If it does, then I have definitely not done the second thing and was only saying it for effect.
 
Obviously.
 
…let’s talk about Extraordinary You, shall we?
 
1. This must have been so much fun (especially early on) to watch weekly. At least, if you had someone to talk to about it—online or otherwise. And, like, assuming whomever you spoke to was down for lots of speculation and theorizing. Some people aren’t. And those people are drags. But if you have someone to muse wildly with…this would absolutely have been a great week-to-week show. My notes are full of stuff that kind of speculation. (I got more than a few things right. Which, I know, doesn’t surprise you—since I’m the world’s greatest detective!)
 
2. That said, I’m not sure I fully understand the mechanics of this show. Or, really, I suspect the mechanics of the show don’t fully make sense. Which, for the most part, is fine—except there’s a heavy reliance on those mechanics as the show goes on, and it feels like a lot of handwaving. Or maybe it’s fine. I dunno. I think if it had been less significant (not consequential, but overtly significant to the plot and resolution), I would have been fine to just ignore smaller stuff in service of the overall story. But I’ll probably get into it a little more specificity, later on.
 
3. And that Dan-oh’s pretty fun, isn’t she.
 
3A. Speaking of Dan-oh, there’s this…okay, go with me on this…so there’s this one scene where she’s making Haru be an Instagram boyfriend, and she’s posing for some pictures in the hopes that he’ll use photo angles (and, from “the show but not the character” side, both the shortness and waist-placement of her skirt) to help make her legs look long. And she’s disappointed by the result. Now…I don’t know if her legs are proportional to the rest of her or not, and I certainly didn’t notice them looking short or anything. I mean, maybe—proportional or otherwise—she’s literally just annoyed that they aren’t “long.” I dunno. But…like, she’s got really shapely legs. I know they were going for a gag with the whole “I said make my legs look long!” bit, but…c’mon, if she was going to complain about how something looked in photos, her “9/10 would leg again” legs seem, I dunno, a weird place to put the attention, even if it was the easiest pull for the joke.
 
3B. Anyway. Because it’s always something I include: obviously, Dan-oh #BestGirl.
 
3C. …except for whoever the heck student #14 was. I mean, did you see her picture in the roll book?! Hoo-boy.
 
3D. Er, um, that is…D-Dan-oh #BestGirl. And I don’t understand why anyone would dislike her.
 
4. But Do-hwa (the violin guy) was by far my favorite character, and it’s a pity there wasn’t more for him to do. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I liked the Dan-oh/Haru love story plot, but Do-hwa was just more interesting as a character than Haru, so I’d have liked him to be much more engaged in the overall “whatta we do about the wriiiiiiter???” stuff.
 
5. …also, Dan-oh x Do-hwa AND YOU CAN’T MAKE ME STOP.
 
5A. Seriously, though, I thought they had great chemistry and wanted more for them as a duo than we ever got.
 
6. Hey, nice to see Start Up Step-Dad as, y’know, not a total jerkwad.
 
7. I love that Haru never really left the school, overnight. Because, as an unplanned extra, he literally didn’t have anywhere to go. Plus, I guess it fit with the whole flowers/”wait for me” theme that he was always waiting for her to show up at school.
 
8. Oh—I knew Haru was going to be the name you liked, once he got his name. But, before that, since I was heading into the series on the lookout for which name you’d probably pick, my frontrunner was Sae-mi (the best friend girl who thinks Nam-ju is hers by right of firsts).
 
8A. And, again, haru is Japanese for “spring.” Like, as in the season. Not the water. Or the coil of metal. Or the act of suddenly leaping. It’s used for both boys and girls, mostly with endings added on, like Haruko (“spring child”) or Harumi (“spring beauty”) for girls and Haruo (“spring man”) or Haruichi (“first [son], born in the spring”) for boys.
 
8B. Yes, yes, I know—we’ve established that you speak five languages. I apologize. I just don’t often get a chance to show off my very, very, veeeeeery limited Japanese.
 
9. Speaking of Sae-mi…I was surprised to find out that she was, well, everything she turned out to be. Like, I thought she was just the best friend character, but she turned out to be both a villain and an erstwhile leader of the gang of bad girls. Which, when I think about it, would have been less surprising if I’d remembered just how insignificant to the “stage” story Dan-oh is supposed to be. But, yeah, I was caught off-guard when she was suddenly less a goofy jealous girl and more a full-on main villain. (Also, I thought she looked like Kat Denning, who I do not like. I liked Sae-mi just fine, though, so it didn’t lose her any points.)
 
10. Oh—another Sae-mi thing, which is a really nice detail: at Nam-ju’s birthday party thingy (where Kyung ends up declaring Dan-oh’s his one-and-only sunshine gal), Sae-mi is wearing a red dress. Which, if you throw your mind back a few episodes, is the outfit she was upset she’d forgotten to pack for the school trip.
 
11. No, wait, actually…still another Sae-mi thing: her very first line of the series is “it’s such a cliché.” Which is either an important first marker for the themes of the story or…not. It’s hard to say. But I’ll get into it, later on. I assume.
 
12. The camera filters used for the "stage" sections and the "shadow" sections were subtle enough that, if you didn't see them switch from one to the other, you might be forgiven for not knowing if you were watching a real or fake scene, in many instances.
 
13. We got a decent floppy sun hat out of Dan-oh in the class trip episode. And you know I like a floppy sun hat.
 
14. Stupid little detail that I appreciated even though it was stupid and little: in two specific instances where characters were at odds with each other (Kyung and Haru over Kyung's opinion of Dan-oh, and Nam-ju challening Do-hwa to a swim contest), one was in black and the other in white. Y'know, 'cus opposites and rivals and stuff.
 
15. I don't know why the big "date at the movies" scene was to see Spider-Man: Far from Home, but...well, I guess the Peter/MJ romance subplot was pretty good in that one. Maybe it's not the worst movie to choose for that scene. Hmm. Okay, it gets a pass.
 
16. I feel bad that Squid Boy's girlfriend took so long to get into the story...but not as bad as I feel for her being an obviously attractive girl cast alongside mostly much more TV-attractive folks. She clearly had personality to make that not matter much, but, again, we didn't see her very much.
 
16A. ...which is to say I think her character was underserved. Like, why bring her in so close to the end just to...not really do anything with her? Especially when she was very much a "you're not looking at me now, but you won't be able to look away, when I'm done" type of actress. I get that she was really just there to give Squid Boy some play, as things rounded out, but...I mean, they don't even really do anything with him, over the course of the show, so why do the whole girlfriend thing? Especially if they're both going to pretend to not know the other is self-aware!
 
17. Here's a subtle one (or possibly a "that's a stretch, Daryl" one): the main musical composer for this show is the same as for Start Up...which I thought to look up because the bass note-driven "must run dramatically" music of Extraordinary You immediately brought images of a running Nam Do-san to mind.
 
18. Given my anime/manga background, I was a big fan of how this show would constantly change the elements of the school uniform (and what counted as being part of it)—to the point where it could hardly be called a uniform at all, since no one was dressed the same way. Like, I get that there are summer and winter uniforms (had those in elementary school, so I'm extra-familiar), but explain to me how a denim jacket has the school crest emblazoned on it. It's nonsense. Beautiful, satirical nonsense. 'Cus Lord knows that's exactly how these kinds of high school comics go, isn't it: the uniform is never uniform.
 
19. ...seriously, though, who's the girl that's #14 in the class roll book? And why isn't she in any of these scenes? I'm asking for, um, narrative reasons.
 
20. Y'know who I enjoyed? The dumb troublemaker guys (who eventually call themselves Y3). They were funny.
 
21. The two nerd guys, too. Also funny.
 
22. Oops—almost forgot to rate the smooching: a solid OK/10! A little bit of the "pressing faces" issue, but also enough actual puckering up to cover for it.
 
23. "He makes me the main character every time I'm with him." Damn. If only we all had someone who makes us feel that way. I mean, maybe you do. Maybe everyone else does. Maybe it's just me who's left out. So, okay, fine: if only I had someone who made me feel this way. Screw the rest of you and your perfect, fulfilling romantic entanglements! Who needs you!
 
[storms off in a huff]
 
 
[comes back]
 
Unless any of you is actually, like, thinking this about me, in which case, I need you, as I just made clear, at length, a moment ago. And so I'll be, y'know, over there, having some tea if you wanna just…but the rest of you...
 
[waggles finger]
 
24. I think it's fun that all the burned pages of the other comic book are all, apparently, one-sided: the flipside of each dramatic surviving panel of the comic is just a blank, white page.
 
25. I don't know whose idea it was to have Haru—the guy with the sword wound on his hand—lie down next to a razorblade, a screwdriver, and a pair of scissors, in his pre-"I made you a starry sky out of curtains!" scene, but...
 
26. I still can't believe that Do-hwa becomes so inconsequential to the story that no one thinks to tell him that Dan-oh frikkin' died.
 
27. HOLY CRAP I FOUND #14!!! So, I took a picture of her ID photo in the roll book, then I looked up the full cast list. I perused the actors' headshots until I got a couple of maybe-hers, then I did an internet search for the character names as they'd be written in Korean. Then I matched up the Korean “letters” from the search to those under her name in the roll book. BOOM. World's...greatest...detective.
 
27A. Sadly, I don't think we ever got much of #14 (Park Ae-ri, as portrayed by Song Ji-woo). She appears to have been dropped, just like Bad Girl #3.
 
27B. Fortunately, though, we get more of Twin Tails Girl, as things go on.
 
27C. Wait, are they saying that Twin Tails Girl and Hot Girl Who Drools Over Kyung end up with the nerd guys? Dude. How'd that happen? Also...yay? I guess?
 
27D. NO! MY BELOVED #14 WAS ERASED FROM THE ROLL BOOK NOOOOOOOO!!!
 
27E. ...what?
 
28. I still can't believe that Do-hwa becomes so inconsequential to the story that no one thinks to tell him that Dan-oh is back.
 
29. So, I don't want to say I got bored or anything, like you were musing I might, the other day, but I certainly noticed that there was a lot of stalling for time with stuff that didn't really contribute to story/character progress as we got into the last…maybe, third of the series. It wasn't filler nonsense, but it was pretty obvious that we were getting a lot of scenes of just, like, Haru and Dan-oh sitting on a bench coming up with reasons not to kiss or Dan-oh dropping Kyung's hand and running off to sit on a bench with Haru so they could come up with reasons not to kiss or Dan-oh waking up in a hospital bed and dropping Kyung's hand to then running off and sit on a bench with Haru so they could come up with reasons not to kiss or literally any scene with Nam-ju. I can't say it was a matter of hitting an episode count or not, but I definitely think the base story needed some tightening up. But I'll get into some of that, a little bit, in a moment.
 
29A. Actually, to that end, I think one of the major issues that the show ran into was its shift from Dan-oh being the main character to Haru and Kyung. I'll get into the broader issues with Kyung at the end of the notes, but pulling away from Dan-oh as the driving force of the story—not just broadening the narrative focus to all three but increasingly (and then actually) relegating her to a plot point for several episodes—not only changed the tone of the show but also the impetus for the whole thing. It's a pet peeve of mine, this kind of narrative switcheroo, because it typically means we've lost the reason we were enjoying things in the first place. It's one thing to have the main point be figuring out how to get through the story in the best way possible or what it means that they were in a previous book that seems to be playing out in a different setting, with all three of them doing some of the heavy lifting to get to the solution, but it's quite another to have the story suddenly turn into a grudge match between Haru and Kyung with Dan-oh sidelined as the MacGuffin they're both struggling to clutch at. Sigh. Y'know, in Daryl's Big Book of Rules, one of the top ones in the literature section is "Never change your protagonist."
 
30. That they found a comic book in ye olde Korea is...weird. Right? Even beyond the confounding mechanics of how this stuff is supposed to work? Because it’s anachronistic. I mean, not for the meta-reality, since it’s a story about the past that’s written in modern times, but it’s still weird. Even if it makes sense, on a certain level. Or maybe I’m just being a noodge.
 
31. I was not a fan of how the characters became self-aware in the previous comic book. I feel like it would have made more sense if they'd remained ignorant, had their stories play out, and then tried to fix or make up for the past—with the memories of the past being what woke them up to their roles as characters—in the current comic. Like, to me, it's waaaay more dramatic for Haru to have manifested himself into the current comic because of his desire to find Dan-oh and change things for her/them both. I have no idea why Haru or Squid Boy or Dan-oh woke up while in the previous book.
 
32. ...that said, I don't know why a lot of what happens in the story happens the way it does, because I am not at all clear on the particulars of how the whole thing is supposed to work. Like, who is allowed to affect change and why? Haru sneaking in without the writer noticing (as it were) makes sense, in that he could move around because the writer totally overlooked his presence. But, once he stops being a nobody and gets listed in the personae dramatis at the front of the book, shouldn't that negate his powers? Like, how is it possible for Do-hwa to swap out the flash drive at that "Confess Your Love!" assembly without it being overwritten when Ju-da's sneakers keep getting swapped back to her old, ratty ones no matter how many times she puts them on? And how is she allowed to even keep those sneakers to begin with if things just snap into place whenever the writer starts a scene? How does Dan-oh keep her pictures of Haru on her phone? The lockscreen keeps getting switched, so why do the pictures stay? Why does she get to keep her bucket list on her phone? Is it because all characters involved remember these things? And, heck, how does any of this look from the writer's perspective? Does his editor say, "Dude, I loved the bit where Y3 Guy proposes to Bad Girl #1! I totally didn't see that coming!" and then the writer just says, "Um...thanks?" and wonder how much drinking he did last night that he forgot he totally changed a scene he wrote and drew?
 
33. And what exactly was the story, in terms of this? Is it a metaphor for reincarnation? Is it a satire of genre fiction conventions? Is it about the dangers of not learning from history? Free will? Fate? Taking the oft-cited red pill? Is there any particular reason this story was about characters being aware of their being characters and being subject to the whims of the almighty writer? Like, I get the practical aspects (broadly), but I don't get why it had to be this setup.
 
33A. I think the show tries to nod it all away by having the college professor in the finale talk about hifalutin Heidegger nonsense, but that feels like such a cover. Like if they'd started talking about quantum mechanics as some handwave-y catchall.
 
34. ...wait, did you really date a guy just to find out what a breakup was like? I'm still kind of shocked, but, at the same time, I'm thinking about the girls I've dated and why I dated them, and...given that I don't think I actually liked 99% of them at the time we started dating (I've found I crush on girls who, it will always turn out, can't like me back, so I end up dating girls because I'm in the mood to date and figure “why not?” when they ask (or, in a couple of cases, because they're far too pretty to turn down, despite my lack of my interest in dating at that moment)), maybe it's less that I'm shocked than extremely jealous that your reason is so much more interesting than my stupid reasons.
 
34A. ...see, this is why I shouldn't try to finish writing these at 1AM. We've talked about me not doing that. But I don't learn.
 
35. HOW DID THEY SQUEEZE A F***ING TIME SKIP INTO THE FINAL EPISODE?! Just…I cannot believe this. (And they didn't even do it in a self-aware way, which would have made it totally worthwhile.)
 
36. Actually, wait, did anyone tell Do-hwa that Haru diappeared? I bet they didn't. The jerks.
 
37. Okay, so…let’s finally address the Kyung Question: what an absolute dick.
 
37A. No, I mean, he absolutely is, but he’s also just a frustrating and confusing character, which is the part I want to get into. I just don’t get what his role in the story is supposed to be. That is, I totally get that he’s in a “stage” villain role, regarding his treatment of Dan-oh, but that he’s also supposed to be redeemed because it’s not really his fault ‘cus she reminds him of his dead mom, which makes all the pain of her death flood back and causes him to lash out, and he’s also under the thumb of his uber-villain dad, so he actually really likes Dan-oh but has all this stuff burying his ability to express that. Which, in a “stage” sense, means that he’s got his own storyline, but also that it serves no direct help to the main storyline of Ju-da x Nam-ju, which is weird since he’s a support character and not a main character, but he also has way more to do than Do-hwa who is literally one of the three main characters. I just don’t understand how he’s supposed to function in the “stage”-story.
 
37B. But that’s not even the most frustrating part of it all! Kyung, in my opinion, is actually a fantastic character with A LOT of complexity to him…but, by the time we start to deal with it, we’re already too far into the series for me to care. He’s so wonderfully conflicted, torn not just between his painful memories of his mother and his love for the girl who is paralleling that part of his past, but also between his role as “stage” villain and as “shadow” love rival. He wants to do everything he can to save Dan-oh, to love her like she deserves, but he doesn’t know how…but he also only starts doing this AFTER SHE AND HARU HAVE HAD THEIR ROMANCE SOLIDIFY. So he doesn’t even have a real chance! So, like, what’s it matter if he’s the tortured soul pining for a way to just let himself love, if the love triangle is mostly just in his head since the girl in the middle of it all doesn’t like him at all. If it was going to work, he would have had to become self-aware waaaaay earlier in the story, before Dan-oh x Haru became OTP.
 
37C. …that said, the moment where he has to decide if he should (essentially) kill Dan-oh in the hospital in the hopes that he can reset her in the “shadow” and, thus, keep her all to himself is fantastic. It’s exactly the kind of heavy, nuanced thing his character is built to deal with. But, again, it comes too late.
 
So, yeah, that was Extraordinary You. Things got a little wonky, as we moved to the end, but overall a good time, if you're familiar with high school (shojo) romance tropes. Which I absolutely am. Of course.
 
But what will we do next? Why, the same thing we do every night, Pin—er, no, wait…True Beauty. Next is…is True Beauty.
 
--Daryl

PS - So, another note about my stupid envelope drawings: back when I was in high school, I was obsessed with the band They Might Be Giants, whose songs were wacky, bouncy, and entirely about unrequited love, which, at the time, was not just my favorite subject but also…let’s call it a hobby of mine. And, back in the day, the band was selling some t-shirts, and the one I absolutely had to have was called "the love show" shirt, and it looked like this:

I miss that shirt. And, now that I'm thinking of it, again, I can only assume everything I draw is some faraway part of my memory trying to recreate this image and all that it meant to me.