Letter #155: Weak Hero Class 1

Good morning, Erin.

I’ve slept an average of about two hours every night for the last five nights. 

Which you’d think was a bad thing. But I’ve just started developing a Single’s Inferno-inspired social deduction game, and I don’t think a well-rested Daryl would have the ability to access the part of his brain that was able to envision the necessary details for such a project. So, really, the only problem is how much awesomeness may have been shaved off this project by those few hours of sleep I got every night. Alas, I fear we shall never know—and so much the worse are we for it.

More importantly, though…I watched another show you recommended to me! Woo!

Now, whether you’ve seen it or just added it to the list you gave me because it was popular and readily available on Netflix, I dunno. But an Erin recommendation is an order I cannot but follow, and so Weak Hero Class 1 I did watch.

And how did it go? Well, I had a long talk with Grok about it, and…

Cough. 

Or, who knows, maybe I really liked it!

1. I did not. 

2. …which we will absolutely get into, but first let me tell you about all the people I recognized!

• the dumbass male lead from At a Distance, Spring is Green as Si-eun (the main kid)

• the “hot dude” from Twenty-Five, Twenty-One as Su-ho (the tough kid)

• the younger cop from Revenant as Beom-seok (the wimpy kid)

• the Crown Prince from Alchemy of Souls as the main bully’s drug dealer cousin

• young Ms. Nam from Crash Course in Romance as Yeong-i (y’know, the one girl in the story)

• the lawyer who is scared into becoming a trot singer from Vincenzo as the boss drug dealer

• the gym-owner brother from Frankly Speaking as one of the main bully’s lackeys

• the jerkface store owner’s wife from Sweet Home as the boys’ school principal

• the dopey team member from Start-Up as the first bully to mess with Si-eun at his new school

• Glasses Lawyer from Vincenzo as Beom-seok’s dad (mini-reunion! woo!)

2A. Also, the big showdown with the drug dealer guy at the abandoned amusement park might very well be the one from the climactic shootout in Cafe Minamdang. But I was not able to confirm this. 

2B. …in part because I did not care enough to try to confirm this. 

2C. In other news, the dude playing Su-ho and the dude playing Beom-seok give us a nice Kim Tae-ri connection, I guess. Which absolutely is a weird thing for me to point out (especially since I’m not pointing out a Nam Do-san connection with Su-ho and the bully at the new school), but…it’s in my notes. 

2D. Oh, and I was absolutely floored when I noticed that the dude playing Si-eun was the same guy from Spring is Green. Because, however much I didn’t like Si-eun, I didn’t inherently hate him with a rage that could melt the Earth, like I did with this dude in Spring is Green. So, obviously, it didn’t cross my mind that it could be him. And, in fairness, discovering it was the same guy didn’t change anything. So…that’s probably…good?

3. The title song for this show is a trip.

4. I really enjoyed that the “good” bad guys actually behave as though they are, in fact, good people who have (for whatever reasons) found themselves doing bad things for bad people. Which I realize is pretty much limited to the main bully’s cousin and Yeong-i, but…still. I appreciated that the show didn’t have to insist that they were “good” but was able to show us that they (more or less) were. 

5. That said, apart from Yeong-i being kind of a delight and her adorable insistence that she and Si-eun start dating, I’m pretty sure I hated everyone in the show. And I mean that I hated everyone pretty much from the moment the show started, too. I was totally open to everything in the show digging itself out of that hole, certainly, but we absolutely did not start off on good footing. 

6. Now, for a while, I was kind of okay with Beom-seok, since he was the most human of the three main boys, and I really enjoyed how excited he was to have friends. Of course, I soured on him extremely quickly, of course, once his petty villain arc popped off, but I blame that as much on the character as I do on HOW F***ING LONG it took for that part of the story to play out.

6A. Seriously—what were they thinking? Arc 1 was two episodes, and Arc 2 was two episodes. Yet we had to spend FOUR FULL EPISODES on what is ultimately a petty spat between friends? Why?!

6B. I mean, yes, the response that pours forth from Beom-seok’s jealousy isn’t petty but, rather, extremely serious (in magnitude, at least), but it’s not like we were dealing with a Civil War-level philosophical divide causing irreconcilable differences, here. He just wants Su-ho to be his best friend and is hoping he’ll suddenly become a mind reader to realize this. And Su-ho, for his part, is every part the controlling, condescending jerk Beom-seok eventually accuses him of being (though, of course, Su-ho is in no way exclusively that). It’s so insignificant, and the…situation it turns into felt so inauthentic—and slow!—that I didn’t buy into it for even a moment. 

6C. Which is not to say that I didn’t see a Beom-seok jealousy arc coming or that it, in and of itself, doesn’t make sense as a plot element. It was obvious that Beom-seok was enamored of Su-ho, and his inability to earn a particularly special place in his orbit was always going to lead to some kind of fight. I mean, I assumed it was going to be that Si-eun was essentially Su-ho’s soulmate that was going to set him off, but…the script had other ideas.

6D. But, really, Yeong-i? That was what they went with? It’s so stupid—and, for something that is meant to drive a wedge between the three of them, too external to the core of the group to feel narratively satisfying. That is, Yeong-i’s blossoming friendship with Su-ho has a plot reason for happening, of course, but that’s exactly how it feels: plot made it happen so more plot could happen because of it. Which is a horrible way to spark a character-centered conflict—because, while Yeong-i’s blossoming friendship is an acceptably natural result of her now living with Su-ho, her living with Su-ho is (at a writing level) arbitrary: she doesn’t have to live with him, narratively. She can, of course, because there isn’t strictly a reason for it not to happen, but it isn’t a natural effect of resolving the issue with the drug dealer. So, as an impetus for the conflict, it feels forced.

6E. And, worse, it takes forever to resolve. It’s half the f***ing show! Who thought that was a good idea?!

6F. And worse than that, it’s a plot that comes waaaaaaaaay too soon in the story. We only just establish that these three are a definite unit before they fall apart. Of course, that Su-ho and Si-eun’s past actions allow the bully group to take advantage of Beom-seok’s split from them to avenge themselves against the boys who humiliated them is a perfect wrinkle to the tiff and elevates the stakes significantly. But you have to build up to that, have to establish the connection between the heroes before they split, have to justify the anger Beom-seok feels that he’s willing to throw in with the bullies to vent his spleen at Su-ho. (Them helping him deal with the bullies from his old school doesn’t count. Because, much like the issue with Yeong-i moving in with Su-ho, this is just a thing that happens because the script lets it happen so that the plot can continue.) This is a Season 2 kind of arc—and, as an idea, I think it’s great. I’m always happy to see character choices come back to haunt them. (And we’re going to talk about that a little bit later on.) But this? No. Too soon, too slow, too stupid. 

6G. And when I say “stupid,” I mean not only that I thought the story was dumb, but that it was executed poorly, with Si-eun’s actions against the bullies being alternately clever and boneheaded—not because he made a miscalculation (as with his fight against the main bully’s cousin) but because the script needed him to stop using his head so that he could get punched a few times. Just ridiculous.

That said, I think Beom-seok gave maybe the only genuinely good performance of the series. So…there’s that. 

Which, to clarify, is not me saying I thought the other actors were bad. My gripes are with the characters, not the actors. (Though, again, I wasn’t really wowed by any of their performances.)

7. It took me a while to get oriented with this show, but once I decided it was a soap opera where violence replaced sudden reveals that someone was pregnant, it made a lot more sense. 

8. Relatedly: even for a show with a somewhat heightened sense of realism (which is necessary for it to be so focused on fights), it absolutely did not get away with the consequences for a lot of the violence. Like, forget about legal ramifications for a moment. Si-eun, at one point, gets full-on punched in the throat…and doesn’t die. I mean, just…shut up, show.

8A. Or, wait, I just remembered how Su-ho gets cracked in the back of the head with a metal bat, is knocked out, and then is just fine a couple of hours later. Like, he takes hits to the head and everything. I know the show puts him in a coma later (and you saw how I reacted to that), but that should never have happened. Because he should have died at that abandoned amusement park.

9. Speaking of the violence, though: this show is a lesson in finishing what you start. Between the consequences of thinking villains will acknowledge defeat if you defeat them or how frequently our heroes STOP HITTING THE BAD GUYS when they have them on the ropes (because they should know to just stay down), the good guys seem hard-pressed to only go halfway—and it always comes back to bite them in tush. Like idiots. 

10. Speaking of: Su-ho getting cracked in the head is the result of the boys’ plan to get the boss drug dealer arrested. A plan that immediately went south because they thought of it THREE SECONDS BEFORE THEY IMPLEMENTED IT. They had three whole f***ing days to come up with something and…they just…didn’t? Really?!

11. Relatedly: when Si-eun shows up with police to the boss drug dealer’s house, the police say they can't do anything since no one is opening up the front gate for them. Then they get in their car and leave. And they just…leave Si-eun there. For some reason. 

12. Now, in fairness, there were things about the show I enjoyed. Like…I appreciate that Su-ho owns a second windbreaker. That was nice. 

13. But, okay, seriously: watching Si-eun beat the main bully into a bloody pulp at the start of the show was incredibly satisfying. (And stabbing his lackey in the hand to keep him from intervening was pretty great, too.)

13A. …but it wasn’t anywhere near as rad as Si-eun jumping the main bully at his new school. I frikkin’ LOVED that. 

13B. Though, come on, how did no one get a teacher or something? He just walked into a school he clearly doesn’t attend, stabs a kid, then wanders the halls until he finds the MMA fighter kid to have a drawn out fight with him. And then he just leaves. H-How???

14. The bullies on this show are cartoons. And I don’t mean that they’re exaggerated or over-dramatized, which would be fine (for the most part). No, I mean they are two-dimensional and have absolutely no long-term memory. They lack basic awareness of prior events, as though they are background characters in a heavily-episodic children’s cartoon. Like, the main bully’s lackeys, having seen what should come across as a mentally disturbed Si-eun UTTERLY DISMANTLE their boss in front of them, their first thought appears to be to bully him some more the next day and then demand he come fight them after school. What did they think was going to happen? 

15. The subtitles can lie to me all they want, but Su-ho calls Yeong-i ajumma, and it is funny as hell. 

16. Oh, this is going back a bit, but…in fairness to Beom-seok, I was equally annoyed to see Yeong-i spending so much time with Su-ho. I was instantly on the Yeong-i x Si-eun ship, and I did not want whatever maybe-thing Yeong-i and Su-ho might stumble into. I’m pretty sure they aren’t meant to be a thing (and she does flirt pretty heavily with Si-eun even after moving in with Su-ho; and he never deletes the app that lets her track all his moves, so…), but I didn’t have any reason to believe or give a crap about their friendship or whatever. It happened off-screen, I didn’t vote for it, and I just did not care. 

17. But the worst thing about the show, though, is that, in Episode 2, Su-ho tells Si-eun to get on his bike so they can go to dinner…but he and Beom-seok are already on the bike, and there’s no room for three boys to be on there—but then we just cut right over to the boys walking into the diner. How’d they get there, show, hmmm? You’re okay with seeing boys getting beaten to near-death, but you won’t show this? HOW DID THEY GET THEY GET THERE YOU COWARDS?!?!?!

…and that was how I felt about Weak Hero Class 1. Or, as I have it in my notes: “dumb, but intense.” 

Needless to say, I will not be watching Class 2. (I mean, Yeong-i’s not even in it. So, like, why even make another season, then, right?) It wasn’t for me. And…yeah.

BUT…this wasn’t the worst Korean show I’ve seen recently. So, just you wait, seonbae. Just you wait.

Is it the next one? The one after that? The one after that?

Who can say. You’ll just have to keep reading. 

As ever, I hope you’re doing not just well but better than anyone else in the world. Which, given I’ve just discovered that Yoojung from Weki Meki now has a YouTube channel, means you’d have to be flying higher than high as a kite. Which, yes, is a hard ask, but…still, it is my hope. 

More soon.

—Daryl