Letter #102: My Demon

Good morning, Erin. And—as promised—welcome to Phase IV! 

“But Daryl, you dashing pseudo-academic,” I hear you say, “what significance is there to marking a fourth ‘phase’ when, as was made almost comically apparent by the content of your so-called Phase III, you never stick to any of the thematic intentions you always ascribe to your K-drama epochs?”

Well, dear Erin, that is the beauty of it, this time around: my theme for Phase IV…is playing catchup on the shows I was supposed to have watched during Phases II and III but didn’t (either because I’d gotten distracted by keeping up with weeklies or desperately needing to sate my unhealthy interest in dating shows). We’re talking recommendations from you, half-started shows I set aside, those actress-based “trilogies” I swore were coming—all of it.

I know. I’m a genius. 

But, my cleverness aside, that is why we’re starting with Letter #102 and not Letter #101, seonbae: because I promised you a Kim Yoo-jung trilogy, not a detour into palace intrigue. 

Which, of course, brings us neatly to My Demon, a show I’ve already mentioned as being…not very good. But that was before I finished it—maybe things got better!

Only one way to find out:

1. …no, it doesn’t get better. (Actually…according to my notes, it may have gotten worse. Really? Yikes.)

1A. Which means spoilers, probably, because you don’t need to watch this one.

2. Like, seriously: they manage to make Kim Yoo-jung look generically beautiful. That’s the level of bad this show is. Yes, a small part of it admittedly comes from her losing a lot of the youthful plump to her face (‘cus she’s in her mid-20s, now), but…I just don’t know what they were thinking with the way they styled her. And if they couldn’t even get that right…

3. Also, she’s terribly miscast as Do-hee. And so is the dude playing Demon Guy. (She’s more palatable than he is, because she at least knows how to act. He’s just…awful.) They were cast because of their look, clearly, and the only praise I saw for them was how hot they were as a couple—but neither of them is good. And, worse, for all the internet fawning over their looks, they don’t have ANY chemistry! No matter how good they look in still images, there are no sparks between them—and one of them spends much of the show being literally on fire.

4. But I did recognize them—and some of the rest of cast, which is…something…I guess:

• our lead girl from 20th Century Girl as Do-hee, the female lead

• Monster Boy from Sweet Home as the titular Demon Guy

• Grandma from Start-Up as Chairman Ju, Do-hee’s adoptive mother

• Director-senpai from Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha as Do-hee’s third-wheeling not-cousin

• the dancer guy from Vincenzo as a crazed assassin

• gossipy Chinese restaurant owner from Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha as…well, God

• the 18th life girl’s little sister from See You in My 19th Life as the girl with cancer

4A.We get a nice little mini-reunion daisy chain, with the cousin and God both being from Cha-Cha-Cha, and with God also having been with the little girl with cancer on 19th Life, and with the little girl with cancer and Demon Guy both being from Sweet Home 2. Which is neat. 

4B. I’m also 70% sure I recognized a couple of locations (the entrance to Do-hee’s apartment building looks very similar to the rich teacher’s in Crash Course in Romance; the interior of Demon Guy’s office building looks like the school from…something; and the abandoned domed building near the end looks like…I don’t know what, but I could swear I’ve seen it before), but…let’s be honest, it’s probably just me being tunnel-racist, again.

5. One thing in defense of the actors: the script is awful. Which isn’t going to help anything. I mean, there was no saving the dialogue.

6. …unless you count pretty much all of God’s lines, because this might be my (personal) favorite writing for God as a character in a story. She’s aloof but not detached; unfeeling but not uncaring; all-powerful but not haughty—and it’s all summed up in her assertion to Demon Guy that when she gave people free will, she meant it: she told humanity the rules of how everything works…and then humanity frequently ignores the rules and wonders why things don’t work out. Which, as someone who subscribes to a more hands-off understanding of God, tickled me to no end—but, regardless, I think it was a clever way to bring the character in without picking a specific “side” (that is, neither a specific popular interpretation of what God is like nor one that entirely overrides arguments doubting God’s existence (after all, what proof do I have a bear walking through my backyard if he leaves no footprints?)) and to bring a bit of order to Demon Guy’s whole supernatural ordeal.

6A. Relatedly, I thought it was an interesting idea to portray God as being both all-knowing and limited-in-knowing by making her fully aware of everything that was happening but not able to see how things would play out—and that inability to predict the future being one of her favorite things about observing her creation. 

6B. Having her wear a hat that says “GOOD” (in English) with the second O faded out (GO D) was a little on-the-nose…unless most people in the Korean audience don’t read English enough or well enough that it was more subtle to its original audience. Then it was kinda clever. Though, in-universe, Demon Guy is like, “Who are you?” and I’m shouting, “READ HER HAT, YOU MORON,” so…I dunno. Maybe it’s actually really subtle after all. 

6C. …or Demon Guy’s a moron.

6D. Regardless—my favorite line: “I’m a companion on the journey of everything.”

7. Speaking of reading things: I appreciate that the Netflix subtitles chose to translate “coin lockers” as “storage lockers” (which I think is a more common term), despite “coin locker” being both A) what was written—in English—on the lockers, and B) Do-hee saying—literally, in English—“coin lockers” when she references them.

8. I cannot tell you how many of my guesses about what was going to happen turned out to be wrong. I mean, I could—like, I could count up all the self-assured predictions I made that turned out to be wrong, but…suffice it to say, whatever the number, it was pretty much all of them. And I’m not sure if that’s a positive or a negative, here—though, as a definite negative, for as little as I was able to predict, the beats that were meant to be twists were very, very obvious. 

9. There is some kind of symbolism going on with the colors black and white—but damned if I have any idea what it is. I mean, maybe it’s just about how striking they look or how immediately you can have to characters seem to be in opposition by placing them in the opposite colors, and there isn’t a specific intention to who is wearing what in any given moment beyond the pure aesthetic. (Or maybe it’s something about brides and grooms? Because of the whole fake marriage?) But, like, there’s the whole thing about what Do-hee wears to the funeral and how the two sword dancers wear opposing colors…and, I dunno, it feels like something’s there beyond the aesthetics, is all, and I just can’t figure out what. I mean, I also don’t care enough to put a lot of effort into figuring it out, but…still. 

9A. That said, maybe there wasn’t anything to it beyond the aesthetic, in the same way that I don’t think there was much to referring to Chairwoman Ju as “The Almighty” beyond the fact that Do-hee would literally be involved with God and God-adjacent events later on in the story. Or maybe the parallel is that Chairwoman Ju also sort of sat by and allowed her “creations” (her children) to do as they pleased. I dunno. Whatever. This show isn’t worth the effort. 

10. Oh! That’s what made me watch the show: I was promised a fake marriage. You know I love a good fake relationship in my shows. Oh, thank you for reminding me, notes. I’d forgotten that. Here I was thinking I was just that desperate for something with Kim Yoo-jung and ignored how bad the trailer looked. But, no, I got suckered by one of my favorite tropes. Kim Yoo-jung was just a bonus. 

11. And I mentioned the sword dancing, a moment ago, which is a good time to talk about Ms. Jin, the self-proclaimed “Beyonce of Traditional Korean Dance”—and, from that line alone, my obvious pick for #bestgirl. If you watched this show, I’m positive you would have known she was my favorite. I mean, even without flowy sleeves, she was winning me over with the whole dance thing—but then she turned out to be, like, a nutcase, and I was pretty much all-in on her. She was immediately my favorite thing about the show, and I was never disappointed when she was on screen. She had the most character-driven story out of the whole cast (apart from maybe Do-hee’s not-nephew) and was easily the most interesting because of it. I’m sure no one else liked her, but I’m also sure no one else disliked the leads, so…no accounting for taste. 

12. Also good: the opening theme, “True” by Yoari, is maybe the best thing to come out of the show. 

13. I mentioned the actors being miscast, but I want to bring up something specific about Kim Yoo-jung that I mentioned in my Backstreet Rookie letter: she is playing a character that is many years older than she is in real life, and I just don’t think she has the…life experience, perhaps, to bring the gravity of being in her early-30s to the performance while she’s in her early-20s. It’s part of why much of her performance (and, like, aura) feels so generic: she’s playing an older rich businesswoman instead of being one—that is, she’s doing an impression of what she understands being older and business-y to be rather than playing a character who happens to be these things. Lots of actors do that, of course, and many of them mostly get away with it—but most actors don’t have the natural charisma of Kim Yoo-jung. There’s none of that energy in her performance, even taking into account that she’s not playing a character that suits the typically bright characters I’ve seen her play—because I’ve also seen her use that energy for characters that aren’t as upbeat (...that’s a few letters away), and it totally works. I just think this was a role she wasn’t made to play—at least, not yet.

13A. To clarify: I don’t think this was a situation like that with Jeon Yeo-been in A Time Called You, where the show itself somehow managed to muffle the natural charm of the actress. I mean, the script is certainly garbage, so I don’t know who could have made it better just with a performance. But I know that Kim Yoo-jung, good as she is, wasn’t going to do it. 

13B. …that’s a lie: Kim Go-eun could have done it. She doesn’t have the kind of look they were going for, I guess, but she would have brought something to the role. Because she’s an actor who you can see being (in actor’s terms) very present in a scene—not just in that she internally feels whatever emotions she is meant to at a given moment but also in that you can see her reacting to it, processing information as it comes in (as if for the first time), the wheels turning in her head as she deals with each new moment in front of her. Man, she’s so good. This has mostly been an unnecessary digression, I know, but she really is just so good.

14. I liked Demon Guy’s big room full of clocks. It looked like a leftover set from Alchemy of Souls. And I loved the sets in Alchemy of Souls. 

15. I found it interesting that, in the cosmology of this show, you could sell your soul to the devil, be cast into Hell, but still be reincarnated. This is never addressed or explained, so I’m not sure how normal this concept is to the audience at large, but…seemed interesting to me that there was a potentially guaranteed way out of Hell, given time. 

16. There’s a scene where the show employs both day-for-night shot AND overlays it with CGI rain. The sheer audacity of it all.

17. Do-hee’s not-cousin doesn’t wear a tie to his aunt’s funeral, and that’s…that’s just not done.

18. I really enjoyed the three tertiary character co-workers at Do-hee’s office. I thought they were well-utilized comic relief, and I wish they’d been used more. But I especially liked their product-placement color-coded vitamin drinks(?) and how they each had their assigned color. I’m easy to please, like that.

18A. Actually, pretty much every product placement scene with these drinks turned out to be funny, and not just because they usually involved some or all of the three co-workers. Demon Guy had a couple of them (one or two being part of a running gag, of sorts), and they really worked for what they were: “Ugh, this isn’t my drink! Disgus—actually, wait, this is surprisingly good.”

18B. …though, wait, maybe he was doing the gag with instant coffee. Hmm. Y’know, I think it was instant coffee, because he had such a snooty approach to making coffee for himself. But, still, he was in the break room, some or all of the three co-workers were there, and it was all very funny. 

18C. And, for the record, this is maybe the only funny thing in the series. Sure, there are lots of attempts at being funny (like the gangster gag), but they all fall flat, either because they aren’t funny or aren’t at all compatible with the otherwise serious tone of the show. 

19. Speaking of product placement, though: the coffee candies are back! Yay! I mean, it’s not as exciting as suddenly having to go on a date to Subway, but it’s still nice to see old friends.

20. It’s bizarre how quickly everyone just accepts that there’s a literal demon running around.

21. Having Demon Guy’s office be at the bottom of what looks like many below-ground-level floors is clever. (Y’know, because he’s the devil and all.)

22. They are very inconsistent with how Demon Guy’s powers work, once he loses his tattoo to Do-hee.

23. Great line out of context: “Is this how little you think of our friendship forged by capitalism?!”

24: And another one: “Unnie, you shouldn’t throw-up your happiness!”

25. I’ll give him this: Do-hee’s not-cousin does his darndest to do some proper acting. And it was all in vain. 

26. There is a sequence where Demon Guy fights a gang (like, proper yakuza-types), and the show decides it would be cool to do this as though he and Do-hee are dancing a tango (because he has to be in physical contact with her to use his powers). It goes on for way, waaaaay too long, and it isn’t anywhere near as funny as the show wants it to be—but the worst part is that the start of the very next episode REPEATS THE TANGO SEQUENCE IN ITS ENTIRETY. I could not believe it. 

26A. No, seriously, it’s so bad that a lot of the dance is just flashing Kim Yoo-jung’s legs, and I still fast-forwarded through the whole thing the second time. 

27. There’s also a moment where someone has a tin of those butter cookies I used to love. You know, the round blue can? Where all the cookies are stacked in these little frilled paper holders, like for the buttons of cupcakes? (You’ve had these, right?) Seeing those put me in a good mood. So, good call, show.

28. Oh, here’s a bit of a pet peeve: Demon Guy is awful at pretending to drink from an empty cup. He’s supposed to drink as part of a gag, so he hams it up a bit and, in so doing, throws his head back so that the cup is brought to his lips in such a way that all the liquid inside it would have poured out onto his face rather into his mouth. 

29. In a similar (but more understandable) vein: when Demon Guy picks up Do-hee to bring her bed for some sexytime, he lifts her from the small of her back, not under her butt—which is very polite, but also not at all how you’d do that. It’s neither hot nor practical, and, let me tell you, one or both is usually governing your decisions, in that kind of moment. 

30. In the obvious cliche Joseon backstory, Catholicism’s “all equal in the eyes of God” conceit is the thing that appeals to the two lovers who, because they are from different social backgrounds, can’t get married. But, as I watched them attending their…mass? prayer group? Bible study? I wondered how much of the religion itself they truly subscribe to. It’s not important to the story, but I did wonder if this was a legitimate conversion (and she did seem to be into it than he did, for the record) or a transactional decision. 

31. Speaking of the obvious cliche Joseon backstory: the thing we like about cliches is that they comfort us with familiarity—though there is, obviously, a point past which we find them tedious or boring. Worse, though, is that My Demon goes a step further and makes the cliches seem like lies. The framing of the overall story hints at the same old “hundreds of years ago, when tragedy befell our past lives” plot every supernatural show seems to rely on, but it also does a good deal of work to indicate that there is something more to the story, to make it seem like the hints of cliche are a misdirection—only to then make a big deal of revealing that, in fact, the story is just the same old “hundreds of years ago, when tragedy befell our past lives” plot every supernatural show seems to rely on. That’s not how you do a twist, show. That’s called lying to us. 

32. Y’know, at the end of the day, I guess the evil psycho not-brother did a pretty good acting job. It’s just too bad he didn’t have more to do than just be, y’know, obviously evil. 

33. Oh, here’s something—and bear with me as we go: Do-hee’s not-sister’s twin boys are named Austin and Justin—which is a very (I’m going to call it) Korean way of doing “matching” names for them. Because what I’ve noticed about Korean siblings with these kinds of names is a matching of one of the two syllables that make up their given names (Ji-soo/Ji-young/Ji-min or Hye-won/Ji-won/Chae-won), whereas Americans would keep the same first letter of each name (Evan/Ellie/Edmund). Austin and Justin are “matching syllable” names. I thought this was an interesting detail. Assuming I’m interpreting it at all correctly. 

34. Speaking of the twins, though: the not-sister using her sons as valets to take her bag and hat is a brilliant gag. It’s only done once, and I wish they’d thought to do similar things with them throughout. 

35. …I’m spending way too much time on this show. I just…I have so many very specific notes. Ugh. Never mind—let’s speed through these.

36. Demon Guy can’t bring people back from the dead, but he can, like, conjure them in your dreams—perhaps literally pull their souls in to speak to you, but I think it’s just forcing you to dream of them. Either way, I find that creepy and upsetting. Which is maybe a me thing, but I will force myself awake on those rare occasions when a dead relative appears in my dream. I find it cruel, not comforting, and I will always reject it. It’s one thing to wake up and remember the hot YouTuber I was just flirting with is not my girlfriend, but it’s quite another thing to wake up and remember the loved one I was having a meal with is not alive. 

36A. Just, y’know, FYI if you ever get dream-altering powers, Erin.

37. We got our obligatory main-dude-in-shower scene. Which is fine. 

38. No scene of Kim Yoo-jung sunbathing in a bikini or trying on a series of miniskirts at the mall or walking around her apartment is just an oversized t-shirt. Which is…which is fine.

39. As a Darkwing Duck fan, it was awesome to see Do-hee break out a gas gun for self-defense, once she realizes someone is trying to kill her. It was less fun seeing her fire the gas gun while running—that is, running into the spray of mace she was firing—which should have left her blind, choking, and puking her guts up…but didn’t.

40. Do-hee says she needs to brush her teeth before sitting down to eat her breakfast, and I died a little. 

41. The end of this show can absolutely jump in a lake. Like, I lived through Goblin, show. Your whole bag didn’t even register.

And that, I think, is more than enough to say about that. And how it was not very good. 

But you know what is very good? Spending a silly amount of money on watches. Which is something I’ve recently done. Because I always make good decisions.

Well, I mean, I think they’re nice watches, so…they’re not terrible decisions. Which, given my track record, is pretty good.

You’d probably like at least one of them, I bet. Maybe the one made of reclaimed ocean plastic, or the big one with the red I don’t know why I’m still talking about any of this.

Sigh…

Hope you’re having a great day. And a great everything else, too.

More soon.

—Daryl