Letter #72: The Good Bad Mother

Good morning, Erin. 

I’m supposed to be reading anime books, right now.

Well, I say “anime books,” but I mean light novels, which are essentially the not-especially-literary novels/novellas that are written often exclusively in the hope that they will be turned into an anime series. And then a manga spinoff. And then a series of erotic statuettes priced at hundreds of dollars. 

Point is: every summer, I set about a task of…well, for the sake of brevity, “doing anime things,” and I decided that this year’s thing was putting some kind of dent in my 200-book backlog of light novels. I even picked out a handful I thought I’d most likely want to dig into. 

…so obviously I picked up an unrelated literary-type novel and started reading that. Because the most important thing about plans is not giving yourself a chance to follow through on them. 

Sigh. 

It’s really good, though, so I’m not as annoyed at myself as I should be. It’s Book of Extraordinary Tragedies by Joe Meno, who’s written three of my absolute favorite book (four, if you count his short story collection), but who’s also written three other books that I literally threw in the garbage—so there’s still plenty of time for things to go sideways.

But, when he’s on, my favorite thing about his writing is the writing itself: I like the rhythm and tone of his sentences, his voice, his turns of phrase—all that boring technical stuff that no one ever wants to hear me talk about. I not only revel in it, though, but, as a writer, get jealous of it. It’s what I wish I could sit down and do. And then feel very inspired to try to do. And then never quite get all my mental ducks in a row to actually manage, eventually taking yet another hit to my self-esteem…but I digress. 

Anyway, this is all a long way of getting to a line from the book that I thought I would share with you that is indicative of the kind of thing that makes me writer-jealous—even though it’s A) not a particularly brilliant sentence in a technical sense, and B) not quite as impactful out of context: “It just goes to show you what love can do, how it can break you into one million completely dissimilar pieces.”

Which brings us neatly to The Good Bad Mother, don’t you agree? 

Yeah, that’s right: ya boy was being thematically on point THE WHOLE TIME! 

1. A couple of letters ago, I predicted you were going to point me in the direction of this series, and I knew you K-drama sweetheart was going to be one of the reasons why. So, I’m just gonna point out that this would be a really nice time for you to jump into Alchemy of Souls. For, y’know, reciprocal reasons. 

2. The first episode of this series was just 75 minutes of the dad dying on the bus in Start-Up, and I did not appreciate it. I mean, it starts with a baby pig doing a backflip into mud. I do not understand why it suddenly turned out to be Titus Andronicus. What the hell.

2A. No, seriously, my very first note is that I thought the husband/father was obviously going to die. I didn’t know he was going to be f***ing murdered as part of a corrupt real estate scheme, but that man could not have been more marked for death if he’d had a literal bullseye painted on his back. 

2B. At least we saw it all up front and didn’t wind up with yet another left-turn murder mystery interrupting the adorable slice-of-life shenanigans of our protagonists.

2C. …not that there were any adorable slice-of-life shenanigans, of course. Because this was Titus f***ing Andronicus. 

3. Okay, it’s a bit of a lie that there wasn’t anything adorable or shenanigans-y about the show. Because it had those twins—and they were a flippin’ hoot. ESPECIALLY the girl, who I thought was absolutely fantastic. Just totally on point with everything she was expected to do: be funny, be cute, be rascally, be a little jerk, be heartbroken, be smitten. I mean, she couldn’t overcome some of the hackneyed dialogue she and her brother would have to speak, from time to time, but that’s not her fault. You can only save bad writing so much, y’know? And the boy was a good balance to her, as well. I frequently thought she was too fiery for him to keep pace, but he was, on the whole, exactly what he needed to be: very much the second fiddle, but also very much the safety valve that kept the show from overindulging in her. 

4. Not to beat a dead horse, but this show was almost relentlessly grim. Which in and of itself isn’t the worst thing in the world (though, by the time we got to Mother having stomach cancer, it was laying the misfortune on a little too thick, don’t you think?)...but I had a really hard time reconciling it with how much of the show was centered in typical “quirky small-town antics lol!” It’s not that I necessarily had a problem with either of these on its own, just that…rather than complementing each other or balancing each other out, shifting from one tone to the other always gave me a bit of whiplash. 

5. …and, given the choice between the two, I think the relentlessly grim stuff was preferable to the quirky antics, because I think it was just done better. (That is, I didn’t think the small-town stuff was particularly well done—apart from the twins, of course.)

6. THAT SAID…having Mi-joo (the childhood friend/love interest/twins’ mom) in any scene automatically elevated it. I thought she was great, and, though I know she was obviously an important part of the show, I wish she’d been a bigger part of the whole thing.

6A. And, yes, she was #BestGirl. I mean, it was pretty close to being a three-way tie with her daughter and Facial Mask Lady, but she was the only one whose screen time directly affected the overall quality of an episode. 

7. I also wish we’d had more time with Thief Friend—but I think that might be down to my affection for the actor more than the character. 

8. Speaking of actors, though—shall we quickly run down the list of folks I recognized? 

• Firefly Guy from Hotel Del Luna as Kang-ho (the protagonist)

• Mago from Hotel Del Luna/the venture capital boss from Start-Up as Thief Friend’s mother

• Bleached Hair Guy from Alchemy of Souls as Thief Friend

• the gangster businessman from The Uncanny Counter as Mi-joo’s dad

• Dr. Sad Face’s awesome older sister from Thirty-Nine as Mi-joo’s mom

• the evil First Councilor from My Sassy Girl as the corrupt prosecutor/presidential candidate

• the Crown Prince from Alchemy of Souls as the livestock division bureaucrat

• the “oh, just let is slide” TV producer from Because This is My First Life as Thief Friend’s dad

9. This show is really good at giving you details that tell you A LOT of information, if you take a moment to think about it, and allow you to glean things that will be revealed much later in the story—for example, that Mother was an artist; that Kang-ho was the twins’ father; and that something terrible was imminently about to happen to one of our protagonists. 

9A. …of course, at the same time, the show would sometimes do a great job of subtly letting the audience know something and then later follow it up with a character practically turning to the camera and explaining what we were being given hints about. (Like the whole thing with him not being allowed to go on his school picnics because Mother considers gimbap to be bad luck. By the middle of Episode 2, the show has done enough to clue you in to the picnic thing being about her being afraid of the food and not her simply wanting Kang-ho to study…but then the show has to give you a big explanation in Episode 11 as though I had no way to figure this out on my own, rather than just quickly confirming it and making me feel all clever for having put it together myself.)

9B. Or the Town Chief getting repeatedly stuck with pins as he was getting a new suit. I gave such a laugh when that happened because he’s an acupuncturist, so it was an obvious joke. But then the tailor has to say, “Heh, and you’re an acupuncturist!” and ruin the whole gag. 

9C. That said, they mostly manage to get away with the whole “we’re going to tell you yellow is good luck—except it’s actually totally a sign that something bad is about to happen” visual cue without spelling it out for us, in fairness to them. They go to the “yellow items” well a little too often for the characters themselves not to take notice that they should avoid the color. But that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t often used subtly enough to still be effective. (Like, did you notice that the mother’s sheets were yellow in her final scene? Kang-ho goes to lie down next to her, and I literally said, “OH GOD THE SHEETS ARE YELLOW OH NO OH NO OH NO” because I knew that meant she was about to die. (Though, full disclosure, I also freaked out earlier in that day when they brought out a yellow cake for Mother. I thought she was going to collapse right then, but she didn’t.))

10. Speaking of Mother hinting that she was an artist at heart: I know we see her doing an excellent job painting a variety of things, early on, but it was the flower design she put on those pancakes she made for Kang-ho’s birthday (the day he got locked in the storage shed) that really tipped me off. I thought that was a great extra detail to let us know about her artistic talents—to say nothing of how much it said about how much she loved her son, despite the way she treated him. 

11. And, while we’re on it…can we talk about how totally rad her South Korean flag with the birds painted on it was? She was making it for the Olympic torch passing by their village. I was really impressed with it. 

12. I wasn’t the biggest fan of it taking two whole episodes for the backstory to play out enough for the plot to start, but I can’t lie: starting in the ‘80s meant the chance to get some rotary phones on screen, and that just made me happy. So, really, I’m not complaining all that much. 

13. I wasn’t fooled for a moment about whether or not Kang-ho had killed that woman and her baby. Because I am the world’s greatest detective. 

13A. …that said, I was absolutely confused by how the woman’s body was later discovered washed up on those rocks. 

13B. But I did suss out that she’d hid the baby on the boat when they showed her jumping into the water to avoid capture. Just so we’re clear. 

14. I really enjoyed how, for a stretch of the story, the Canadian farmhand’s Korean consisted mostly of what sounded like stock phrases from dramas. 

15. Kang-ho uses IU to represent the standard of beauty, and I approve of this. (Suck it, Suzy.)

16. I really liked how Mi-joo figured out that Mother had planned to kill herself and Kang-ho. And how she let Mother know that she was aware of it. 

17. I was not as happy with Mother hanging herself being the thing that made Kang-ho stand up. I mean, it’s fine, but I thought it was a little too cliche for the way the scene was framed—not narratively but…I dunno, aesthetically? It just felt to me like the show was playing the moment like we weren’t all totally aware of what was about to happen.

18. Okay, so, how short was this cast that Mago from Hotel Del Luna was one of the tallest people on the show? 

19. Speaking of: man, they olded-up some of these actors, didn’t they. I mean, the actress who played Mi-joo’s mom is 45. And they turned her into Sophia from The Golden Girls. 

20. The two gangster lackeys who ended up posing as farmers were a lot of fun…but they felt like characters from a very different show. (Y’know, like a light comedy about ending up in a quirky small town full of antics or something.)

21. I’m 99% sure that Mother has dried pig testicles dangling from her rearview mirror. 

22. When they finally confirm that Facial Mask Lady was, in fact, the runaway daughter of a yakuza boss, they tried to give her the traditional Japanese hime haircut…and it just did not work.

23. The show wanted to have its cake and eat it, too, with Kang-ho’s accident making him “seven,” alternately having that mean he’d just lost enough memory that he was effectively at the intellectual level of a seven-year-old and legitimately having him regress to being seven years old, depending on what they wanted him to be able to do in one scene or another. 

24. Speaking of Kang-ho: I really want to see…um…Firefly Guy play a clear-cut villain, one of these days. I think he might be better suited to that than his handsome smile would lead people to believe. And not a stoic, detached villain, either. (Which he’d also be pretty good at, considering how creepy he was in Sweet Home while being a good guy.) I want to see him as a villain who’s always an inch away from losing his cool and beating someone to a pulp. Or, if no one wants him to be an outright villain, make him the protagonist bad guy in a film where every character is a bad guy. I think he’d be good!

25. I liked the parallel of Kang-ho’s inadvertent pet pig surviving the farm fire because she’d been separated from the other pigs in the same way that Mother had separated that one pregnant sow back in 1987. And I especially liked that the show didn’t feel the need to tell us this was a parallel. 

26. I was not a fan of Kang-ho giving his mother a pass on her treatment of him as a child because he thinks it’s what allowed him to be able to get revenge on the people who killed his father and so deeply mistreated his mother. I think it’s totally realistic for him to justify it in his mind—that part’s fine. But I feel like the show thinks this is an objectively correct way to see it, and I absolutely disagree. I mean, I don’t for one second believe that God gave her stomach cancer as punishment for being a mean mom, but that misappropriation of causality would at least show some accounting of her bad actions, regardless of exactly why she did them. Past a certain point, she wasn’t just trying to protect her son from the corruption of “the system,” she was inexcusably abusive. And I felt like the show didn’t want to deal with that fact. 

27. Now, I’m not a Korean lawyer, so maybe I’m missing nuances here…but I feel like Kang-ho prosecuting a case in which he is one of the victims is, like, a problem, right? To say nothing of both his parents being victims, a key witness being a woman he was until recently engaged to, and the main victim of the crime being a woman HE HIMSELF is currently under suspicion of murdering. Again, I’m no expert, but I feel like Attorney Woo might have a thing or two to say about this. And beluga whales. 

And…I think that’s all I have in my notes. Believe it or not. 

I thought this was a bit of a mixed bag, but I liked big chunks of it and couldn’t put it down, once I started watching it. I probably spent more time listing things I wasn’t fond of than the stuff I did like, but I also think I mostly enjoyed it. I mean, Lord knows I was crying pretty much the whole way through the story, so it’s not like I wasn’t emotionally invested. It was just a little scattershot. 

Figure I rate it somewhere around Our Beloved Summer, if that helps. 

That said…can we take a second to talk about how YOU GAVE ME V PICTURES!!! 

Oh, goodness me, that absolutely made my day, you have no idea. 

No, I’m serious—here’s literally a photo of my diary:

The other three pictures are currently up in my office, and you’ll have to come see them, when I’m back from vacation. (I’m genuinely still smiling about it.)

And, as an extra-special bonus fun fact: you know how I struggle with everyone changing haircuts and stuff, so, though I immediately said, “Oh my God—it’s V!” I quickly started to doubt myself because he had different hair in each picture. So I spent (no joke) two hours at work trying to google my way to confirming it was him…which I mostly managed to do by eventually searching for images of him by description of the clothes he was wearing.

…nope, still smiling about it. 

—Daryl