I’m mad about it for all of the exact reasons I expected, but I’m also mad about it for some reasons I did not anticipate. I’m on episode 17, so I’m still only angry about the ending by proxy from looking up spoilers before I started (trust no one) but I never intended to watch the very end anyway. I was going to watch until I stopped enjoying it or until just before the shitty finale, whichever was first. I almost stopped somewhere during episode 15 because I could sense a deeply irritating plot point barrelling towards me, but I was feeling despondent about missing so many future scenes of the prince being a badass and slid back in again. The plot point wasn’t as painful as I was expecting, so I guess I’ll keep going until something else happens that makes me want to throw things. Which is probably ep 18 the way things are going.

Anyway, here’s a whole bunch of thoughts no one asked for:

I have such an acrimonious, profoundly deep love/hate relationship with this show. There are parts of it which cater directly to me personally in a way that almost nothing ever has and that I’ve already rewatched a bunch of times and will definitely keep coming back to in future. It's just so close to catering exactly to my very soul, it has such a good cast, it has such nice production, it knows when to go big, and it has so many fucking awesome fanfic-level-gratifying moments while also being overall deeply stupid and sometimes inexplicably terrible. I don't know how it can be so good so much of the time and then make the most baffling own-goal awful writing decisions.

As I suspected would be the case, the narrative is flat out ill-conceived. There’s a framing device where it’s a story being told by one of the minor characters to some small children. Artefacts of the main characters appear in the prologue as proudly displayed mementos, all related to the love story, and the general tone of the framing device treat it as basically a fairy tale. It’s very similar to the framing device of Ever After except closer in time to the narrator because he's a guy who was personally involved. And the set up the narrator provides is that our two leads are explicitly Destined by the Stars to be together and the heroine (Shin Yool) will save the prince (Wang So) and help him shine. Without her, he’ll be cursed; with her, he will be a light to his nation. It's an either or. Their partnership averts his curse. You WILL be with the person you're supposed to be with even if you fight it. This is all openly stated. Okay? Okay.

We launch into the show proper with a massive dump of exposition about the prince's background, some very quick action and drama as we catch up with him as an adult, things get fairly heavy and it's a mostly serious atmosphere, and then Wang So travels to another country and we abruptly swap tones to completely goofy screwball comedy lightheartedness. Like a switch was flipped. Absolutely rocketing through the meet cute and tropey shenanigans you expect from a crazy romcom, our leads are thrown together, ‘fake married’ (the ceremony itself is real, but the marriage is a fiction solely to trick a shady dude orbiting Shin Yool, her family/retainers literally kidnapped Wang So off the street as a warm body to play her fiancé not knowing who he was or intending her to ever see him again), open up to each other while they’re stuck in her room pretending to have a wedding night, fall in love, and are separated seemingly forever in the span of one day and less than an hour of screen time. This single meeting leaves them pining for each other for five years and sets up the entire rest of the series.

The problems with how all this goes down are numerous. The biggest problem, the one which should have prevented them ever doing this plot in this style unless they were going to handwave it, is that our prince is a real historical figure and our fictional leading lady thus cannot end up with him. There can’t be a happy ending to this preposterous fairy tale. This is already a dealbreaker because you can’t write these kinds of earnestly cheesy romcom antics without a shred of irony and have it end tragically or bittersweet. It’s wrong. You can’t. No one fucking wants that. No one wants you to make a point of how he never consummated his involuntary political marriage for five years because he is just that idealistic and unwilling to give up his moral integrity for pragmatism only for him to end up with the political wife anyway because a) history and b) the heroine apparently doesn’t want to live in the palace. After all the drama, she can finally be with him and she’s like ‘nah’. Yool loves her freedom more than she loves Wang So, I guess.

Maybe he only shines as king because he can imagine her out living her best life as a merchant while he has to accept the burden of the throne, which he never wanted. So really, this just becomes the story of how he is ground down into compromising his personal principles and his emotional well-being for the sake of the nation after no one else will make any sacrifices. I gather his brother abdicates and then Yool abandons him. His dad traumatised and exiled him when he was like five so he wouldn’t grow up in the palace’s backstabby avaricious shitshow culture, thus ensuring that unlike his siblings he'd be a person who could be trusted with kingship one day, so abandonment and being used for the ‘greater good’ is just his whole life in a nutshell. No one he loves ever puts him first including the girl designated to save him by the stars; he can’t have anything for himself, he must surrender his whole being to duty. Something this twee is not allowed such a miserable conclusion, it’s just inappropriate and ridiculous. You also can’t have a constantly reinforced prophecy from Heaven about how they’re destined to be together and have to be together for him to become the king we all know he will be and then have them NOT BE TOGETHER.

Like??? You promised me they will end up together in like fourteen different ways, show! If you had no way out of this, why use this broken premise? It’s not workable. Either write your fluffy fairy tale adventure about a fictional prince and give it a happy ending or forgo the troperiffic romcom silliness and forgo the fairy tale and write an historical drama about how much it sucks to be a good king. You can’t do both. You can’t give a prophecy saying he’ll ‘shine or go crazy’ and the difference between the two is her and also she’s separately prophesied to be the light of the nation and then just… drop it? Very suddenly??

The second biggest problem is that the pacing is wildly uneven throughout and their original encounter is way too underdeveloped for me to fully buy into their feelings for each other. I think his sentimental attachment to her as the ‘first person he saved’ and thus a crucial part of his later self-understanding/mature identity does make sense and would work as a reason he held on so hard to her memory all that time, except that he’s so reluctant to do it and so petulant about it right up until the moment he’s suddenly taking it seriously. If it’s that important to him, why was he being flippant and dismissive while it was happening and even while she was explaining that he had 'saved her whole world' by doing this? And as for her… obviously, she’s grateful for his help, but as far as she knows the one day charade barely inconvenienced him. She did pick him out to be her decoy husband herself, so she's predisposed to like him, but that and her instant crush on him was based purely on his handsomeness. Circumstances conspire to make him appear pretty bad as a person in front of her and he doesn’t get to do much to dispel that image in the brief time they’re together. Is this really enough for her pine after him for five years? For her to uproot her entire life in order to actively search for him and want to make their marriage real?

I mean, I get it, you are very unlikely to ever see a man that good-looking again. He is a one in a million encounter. But there’s more to life than a pretty face, Yool, even that one. I just wish this show had given me a more substantial connection rather than the same shot of him shielding her from the rain in slow motion four times. That’s basic decency on his part, that’s not enough to get gooey about. Their chemistry is good but on a writing level there’s no instant rapport or moment of spark to make you really believe they would cherish each other for the rest of their lives because of this one conversation. The whole show rests on this night, it needed to be more romantic. (Their parting was very romantic, but for it to have full impact I need to already buy how reluctant they are to be parted.)

And when they meet back up after the five year time skip, more shenanigans ensue. He never saw her face during their one day marriage adventure because she wore a veil the entire time, so he doesn’t know what she looks like. Yet when she finds him again she expects him to recognise her. Of course- shocker- he doesn’t, and then she peevishly assumes he doesn’t remember her or the one night marriage at all because it must have been insignifcant to him. Which??? You had a whole back and forth about this at the time where he stopped you from removing the veil and said it would be better that way. Obviously he remembers you, he just doesn’t know that it is you.

Thus, inevitably, there’s a triple lie pile up where he doesn’t know she’s the one-night bride, she doesn’t know he’s actually a prince, and (curveball) now he thinks she’s a man because they finally run into each other while she was wearing men’s clothes for ease of going about her business in the market as a trader. And she very awkwardly tries to buy him as her slave (because she thinks he’s a poor vagrant working as a mercenary and wants to protect him). While flirting with him the whole time. And getting offended that he reacts to her wildly inappropriate comments about his body with bemusement and sarcasm despite her pretending to be a man who is trying to purchase him.

You can see my point about how this story is too silly to have a sad ending, right? The comedy is really broad. The suspension of disbelief required to go along with it is enormous. She’s totally unconvincing as a man, it’s totally unbelievable he wouldn’t instantly recognise her voice when she later appears as a woman again in a veil, you can always see her face through the veil anyway, and it strains credulity no one ever accidentally outs him as royalty when Prince Wang So is a known figure in the city: it’s completely removed from reality in general. The romcom tropes are blatant and egregious. And that’s fine! If you are making a romcom! But you’re not allowed to have an abjectly unrealistic, intentionally frothy gender-bender secret-identity fake marriage where the heavens have foretold a happy ending and there’s only one bed at the inn and everything is turned up to eleven trope fest and then be like SIKE!! it’s a sad story :((( they pined for years and never got to be together :(((( nothing funny here, he’ll be a good king but kings are lonely :(((((

Which brings me to the more unexpected problems. One of which is the direction, which feels all over the place. The rhythm of scenes is often off and I don’t blame any of the actors because the whole rhythm of the show is weird and inconsistent. It’s like it doesn’t know what it wants to be and just oscillates between various styles without having a coherent overall tone. There are very different registers the show clunkily and abruptly shifts between, constantly threatening to break your immersion in its world. No one seems sure how seriously/literally to play scenes and they all shift around a lot, clearly without enough guidance on what the overall vision is supposed to be. All the actors resort to fake chuckling between lines of dialogue to convey both insincerity and comedy and it's like the direction/editing is leaving them way out on the line, just hanging. And idk if this is true, but it sure feels as if the director saw Fated to Love You and asked Jang Hyuk to basically sometimes do that (extremely unique) performance again for the comic scenes without understanding why it worked in FTLY and while asking for something completely different in the dramatic scenes. FTLY is a specific ecosystem, it’s meta, it has an element of parody. Gun the character is meta. He can be so bizarre and larger than life because the entire mise en scène of the series is designed to be conducive to that. The whole show is larger than life.

I mean, Gun sometimes randomly has magic powers. He sometimes breaks the fourth wall. He is both a celebration of and a colourful piss-take on JH’s past roles, where a large part of the joke is the contrast with his most famous part as a dead serious unflappable action hero. Gun deliberately embodies and as deliberately defies a fascinating array of clichés about leading men, just as the show itself both satirises and embraces melodrama. FTLY is wild. It has its own problems with tonal whiplash, but it does know how to balance its characters so that they feel authentic despite how cartoonish they can be. You can buy into their extreme behaviour because the show supports that stylistically. When the performances are heightened, so are the colours and blocking and camera work; everything is on the same level, providing appropriate context. These are comic characters who, while they certainly have pathos and can sustain dramatic situations with naturalistic delivery, don’t need to be grounded because the show will never ask you to accept it as anything other then a highly stylised narrative.

Wang So, in contrast, is a dramatic character in a straight narrative. There’s no layer of irony to make absurd theatrics make sense. There’s no context of winking at the camera and self-awareness. It may not be realistic, but it's not meta: this is an earnest story you’re meant to be able to take at face value. The tonal problems are like if the clunky middle portion of FTLY where the story gets bogged down in out of place tragedy and the stakes are too high for how ridiculous the show is were the entire first half.

And it’s frustrating to me because Wang So is my most favouritest, bestest, bulletproof, yes please character archetype. He’s doing the Prince Hal/Scarlet Pimpernel thing. He is a hyper-competent badass with a shrewd, brilliant mind pretending to be a blundering idiot; he’s a prince pretending to be a beggar; he's a steadfast romantic pretending to be a profligate; he’s a super honourable and generous person being forced to play a game of manipulation and politics while also trying to convince all the vipers in the pit that they should stop fighting each other. Such an emotionally available, loyal person who has to juggle all these lies and secrets!!

There is NOTHING I like better than these layers of identity and someone gradually revealing how epically not-what-you-thought-they were they actually are. I cannot tell you how much I enjoy a beautiful tortured prince running a Columbo gambit on people who either don’t know he’s a prince or don’t know he’s a badass but will find out. The fact that he’s brilliant and ten steps ahead while having three different secret identities is just SO GOOD for me. The mask dropping and him being suddenly deadly serious and crazy powerful: PERFECTION. SUBSCRIBE. And secret royalty too??? YES THANK YOU. I WILL TAKE YOUR ENTIRE STOCK. He has a group of heroic secret ninjas he commands and uses against the corrupt and greedy aristocrats like Robin Hood? YES.

This is honestly a tiny bit like getting the More Bang-won and Also He’s the Lead and Also Here’s Some Romance that I wanted so bad after watching My Country. There’s a reason I ended up watching it despite knowing it has a terrible ending and then kept watching it despite it having additional problems. This character played by this actor is essentially irresistible to me. I'd sit through something infinitely worse for more of him being any flavour of this archetype. Jang Hyuk is so good at duality and balancing power with vulnerability, so good at creating real depth and gravitas out of the slightlest hint of nuance, so capable of making Cool Action Guys into believable human beings that I would probably watch literally anything that gives him the chance to pull one of these reversals. And having him play Prince Hal? I mean, it’s not even ‘probably’: I definitely would watch anything. ANYTHING. Like, this show is not at all what I would pick if I needed to convince someone what a phenomenal actor he is, it's far from his best work because of the aforementioned issues, but I am so here for this character that I do not care how annoying the flaws can be.

Seeing him be awesome and get revealed as awesome to various characters is 100000% worth it and I will be revisiting those scenes a lot. Every time he Gets Dangerous I want to frame it and hang it on my wall. He wears it so well. I'd follow him into battle any day.

But his epicness and fully realised duality only truly kicks in around 8 episodes into the show. Before that it’s like they hadn’t quite decided how much of his persona is fake and how much is his genuine behaviour only slightly adapted. He was always hiding his general strength, dexterity, and martial arts skills, that’s fine. He was definitely only pretending to be a philandering idiot to cover his secret spy business and divert suspicion away from himself as a power player in the palace, but his actual personality seemed to be in flux at the beginning. There are some hints of wolfishness towards girls which I’m not sure how to take. He acts oafish and goofy when no one is around to fool sometimes, only becoming calculating and quiet under duress. In later episodes, he’s vastly more mature and his behaviour is obviously always very intentional, which is a huge improvement and is what kept me watching tbh, but it’s not quite consistent with the comedy scenes from the first quarter of the series where it is more ambiguous.

There needs to be a clear line between his real self and the mask, and he needs to not ever be ‘acting’ for the audience. That’s cheating. It also makes him less appealing as a character when we’re not sure what about him is sincere, especially his flaws. A lot of things that seem like actual flaws he has towards the beginning are part of his facade later- but has he changed or was that just sloppy writing? How much is him getting too used to putting up a front and not quite shaking it or him taking things less seriously than he will later? How much is an exaggeration of his real self but not a fabrication? We don’t know.

His ‘idiot’ persona is too obnoxious and draws too much attention to itself, usually for the sake of OTT out-of-universe comedy rather than something that makes sense for him as a fictional person, and the payoff of other characters finding out he was pretending to be incompetent isn’t big enough to justify how relentlessly the show harps on the dramatic irony of them thinking he’s this total loser. There are too many scenes where the show doesn’t draw enough of a distinction and doesn’t make it obvious enough that he’s nerfing himself, especially his intelligence. And then when he’s revealed, the contrast isn’t stark enough because by the time he’s mingling with the side characters again we’re back to being comedic and he’s being made ridiculous again. There ARE A+++ reveal scenes and they are very very worth it, but I’m just saying the really BIG reveal was not big or satisfying enough for my taste. Not enough aftermath.

Yool gets the ‘holy shit’ moment where she’s confronted with the truth in massive spectacular fashion, but everyone else is just told by her immediately afterwards and without fanfare. And they don’t see him ‘as himself’ for a while after finding out who he really is; they meet him still in disguise and not knowing that they know. Then the mutual knowledge moment is glossed over off screen. This is a waste and a disappointment. The entire big reveal is overshadowed by the two remaining secrets (he doesn’t know Yool knows and he still doesn’t know she’s a woman or his one night bride) and a bunch of convoluted plot nonsense. The rush to get back to silliness and the pacing (always time for endless cryptic conversations with the villains over cups of tea) undercuts some of the grandeur the moment was allowed. It’s especially unsatisfying not to have a big reveal for Yool’s foster-mother who has been so stridently judgemental towards him- like, what is the point of this joke about her being snobby and classist to someone who is actually royalty if you’re not going to pay it off? It’s frustrating. We want to see him vindicated in front of her and we don’t.

I just… you have to be so careful with making your leads ridiculous. You can’t have his ‘real’ character only exist in serious scenes, because so much of the first half of the show is comic scenes. That’s the base you’re building on. You need to construct the right foundation or your whole structure is going to fall in. The second half is very, very good for Wang So as a character- he becomes a lot more consistent and pretty much never has to deal with being handed the Idiot Ball or anything like that. He’s just as smart when the other characters are trying to pull romcom shenanigans on him as he is when he’s up against the villains. But yeah, in the beginning they sometimes compartmentalise his intelligence or his seriousness for the sake of comedy or plot expedience and I hate that. They use him as a clown too often, they have him yelling and OTT too often. The fact that he’s still able to have this insane gravitas on a dime whenever they need him to, even as the writing is actively shooting itself in the foot, is a testament to Jang Hyuk’s indomitable charisma.

Then there’s Wang Uk. Maybe I’m being unfair to this dude because I’ve only seen him play sketchy second lead antagonists who aren’t quiiiiite villains in a boring, weak way rather than an interesting, woobie way, but there’s something off-putting about him. And maybe I’m being unfair to his acting because I’ve again only seen him in this (which we’ve established seems to have a lot problems with its direction of actors) and Bride of Habaek (which was truly dreadful in every way), but it’s not great. He really can’t carry the part he’s supposed to be playing as a warrior prince and a credible rival to Wang So. He does solid crazy eyes, I give him that, and he can seem genuinely unhinged when it’s called for, but he’s completely unconvincing as a dashing romantic figure or as a physical threat. He seems so insubstantial in the part, it’s like his costumes are wearing him. He lacks screen presence unless he’s losing his marbles and he can’t do righteous anger or stoic intimidation at all. His awkwardness in fight scenes doesn’t help.

The wardrobe people don’t do him any favours with the ‘clothes wearing him’ situation, either, because for some reason he’s dressed the fanciest despite clearly not being able to pull it off. The wig they’ve got him in is not only also pretty unconvincing, the show’s choice to conceal their fake hairlines with giant fringe has it practically swallowing his whole head.

He is drowning in this wig! And having repeated dialogue about him being the most handsome of the princes is just inviting scepticism, to put it delicately. Then they directly pit him against Wang So as a love interest and leading man (not a flattering contrast) and the characters (including Yool!) proceed to talk about how much more desirable Uk allegedly is, but meanwhile Wang So is now walking around looking like this

and like… surely you jest, show. Surely you realise inviting comparison to that is little short of cruel.

Surely you realise pitting Wang Uk's awkward ass against this guy

is not going to look like an even matchup no matter how good JH is at helping other actors seem capable in action scenes?

(Also, is it intentional when shows cast someone this preposterously gorgeous as the lead and then constantly have characters talk up the second lead rival who isn’t remotely in his league as being better looking? Wang So’s notable handsomeness was basically a plot device early in this series, but after we had our fun with that, the characters slowly start pretending he is unattractive or at least less attractive than Uk. Yool’s nanny calls him ugly! Comedy??? Casting director ensuring you don’t root for the wrong dude even while the narrative goes through the motions of suggesting he might be an actual romantic threat? I mean, it’s not universal, because Kim Jae Wook (the world’s most beautiful living man) has played second lead like four times. Jang Hyuk himself inexplicably played second lead in Wok of Love (seriously, I want to know why, it is a mystery, no idea what he’s doing in that show) and was predictably both much hotter and way more interesting than the main dude.

He had his own adventures with a bad wig in the first few episodes, but it's not like he ever looks less than fantastic. Once his hair had grown enough for them to show his actual hairline and use his own fringe with no wig, he actively doesn't look like a real person he's so absurdly perfect. There were times I'd forget to follow the dialogue because I was just staring at him. We all know how much I hate facial hair, but even that is transcended. It totally works for him.

While I'm being superficial, I notice Wang So really dresses down compared to the other princes even when not in disguise. He is the only member of the aristocracy who never wears any jewellry, the only thing he's got as far as bling is the binyeo holding his hair up. All the other men are in furs and earrings, but he never is. Reminding me of my unanswered question of why, in My Country, they put him in a clip-on earring on his right ear when his left ear is actually pierced in real life. I've literally never seen him wearing a real earring apart from during his brief, ill-advised rap career when he was a tiny baby, but you can see the hole so it hasn't healed over. Did they not have a real earring in stock? I wonder these things.)

And when he finally finds out she’s the one-night bride, he’s pretty not worried about it. He does drop the fact that he knows on her like a bomb when she’s Noble Idioting by not telling him she’s being blackmailed and thus quite epically illustrates how much better equipped he is to deal with all this intrigue and bullshit than she apparently imagines, but she doesn’t even react and continues to lie to him. Which is predictably a bad idea and would have resulted in her death a few episodes later if he weren’t so smart and resourceful that he figures everything out by himself. (Him being smart is so hot, why show, why do you give me glimpses of nirvana when you have no intention of being good the rest of the time. One of the best things about this show honestly is that almost all the characters are intelligent and they all get to be clever, with our two leads and the villain fairly evenly matched. I hate when the good guys have to be morons because the writers couldn’t be bothered to come up with organic conflict.)

Yool in general is… kinda thin as a character. She has a similar problem to Wang So in that she has pretty disparate ‘sides’ that don’t seem to fit into one personality, but for him it eventually coalesces and makes sense because he is, after all, pretending to be someone he’s not a lot of the time. There’s inconsistency between the earliest episodes and the latter half, but it’s not insurmountable; he is a complicated person. For her it’s feels less like she’s multifaceted or still deciding what she values most or putting on a facade and more like she’s just whoever she needs to be for the narrative tone we’re doing this week.

And the plot is generally inconvenienced by how high-ranking its main characters are, so instead of making the situation believable the writer(s) just cheat and pretend it’s not an issue. To the point where when shit goes down at the trading company they just… don’t ask Wang So for help and he randomly disappears for a while so the audience doesn’t question why he isn’t intervening. Like, he is essentially the heir apparent after winning the tournament and leads a strong military faction all the evil people already know about, he’s been empowered by the king in an official role overseeing this very business, and he was an eye witness to contrary evidence when the villain tries to frame Yool for embezzlement. It’s inconceivable that the personal eyewitness testimony of a crown prince would be literally ignored by government inspectors. And when they ignore him he immediately gives up and just goes to rescue her himself, never to use his position to address the trumped up legal charges again.

Now there’s a whole plot going on about how they’ve lost all their shit and he’s yet to suggest loaning them money or helping in any way. Because obviously there’s some contrived bullshit coming where Yool will make a deal with one of the villains. Ughjudhfjklsdhafk;dlfha;j!!!

But the brilliant sexy secret-identity-having prince badass, you guys! I want to watch him outsmart everyone and be awesome :(

ETA: Okay LITTerally no one cares, but I ended up watching all of it lmao hahahaha aha. ha. :( :( :(

And I’m almost not even mad because the ending is SUCH BULLSHIT?? Like, no attempt is made at any kind of justification whatsoever, it’s almost hilarious. Not only that, it’s so ABRUPT that it doesn’t feel real. It doesn’t really hit you because you’re sitting there going ‘are you shitting me? that’s it?’ and you can’t even have an emotion about it because it’s so sudden and inexplicable.

Like, first, my ongoing frustration at this show for having such TERRIBLE pacing and being SO ILL-CONCEIVED and yet having the most fucking awesome kick-ass moments come up right when you’re tempted to walk away. And I’ll be real with you, for me the good parts are mostly about Wang So as the Wise Prince who cares for the people and protects the downtrodden and avoids war with a speech because he’s just the best. I’m ABOUT THIS LIFE OKAY. But no seriously, they have a whole Return of the King moment for him and I have massive heart eyes. I’m dying. The thematic power, I'm telling you. The dreaminess. I want to MARRY. He averts the entire bloody civil war by being merciful and honourable and putting the people first. He doesn’t even plan it, the citizens rally to his side before he has to put his plans into action because they’ve seen him being so Good and Right and Suited to be King. I LIVE for this shit. He defeated the villain with the pure momentum of his righteousness because his unfeigned nobility has shown him to be a leader worth following!

The identity reveals, the speeches!! The people rallying unexpectedly to his side!! (the outfits! the watching him kick would-be assassins in the face!)

But everything else that isn’t Wang So being The Actual Best and Most Dreamy and Destined to Become King or about the side characters that I liked… YIKES.

Like the entire plot ratking which finally ends up in Yool declaring everyone has to tell Wang So that she’s dead for…… reasons……..????!!!!?

She doesn’t want him distracted or burdened by worrying about her, so she wants him to believe she’s been assassinated. Has she MET her husband/boyfriend/sworn brother? Has she ever paid the slightest attention to how he is? He’s not going to cope well with this, Yool. He’s going to be infinitely more distracted by thinking you’re dead than by wanting to keep you safe. This will make him MORE vulnerable and put the whole cause in danger. For FUCKS SAKE. And no duh, when he arrives and is told she’s dead he completely loses his shit and is so furious that he wants to immediately charge off and murder the bad guy by himself. Which would be very undesirable for him to do, since he’d probably get killed or arrested and then the whole country would be doomed.

But he’s brilliant and very observant so it only takes him like ten minutes to recover enough from his shock to realise something’s not right and nearly instantly figure out that she must be alive. Which was very, very sexy of him.

So that whole thing was pointless. Which of course it is. It was so clearly pointless and counterproductive that it beggars belief they went ahead with it as a plot point. It makes no sense. Why would Yool ever be so stupid and cruel to think that was a good idea? She wouldn’t.

Anyway, he puts down the uprising, wins over the nation, and his brother abdicates to make him king. He finds Yool and saves her from Soap Opera Disease (did I mention she has Soap Opera Disease? A particular strain known as ‘Plot Convenience Syndrome’ which makes her weak only when we need her to be and otherwise doesn’t affect her at all), he saves the country, he reluctantly accepts the crown, he and Yool meet up again once she’s recovered to finally consummate their marriage (only took you six years, great job guys), he tells her he’s going to be king (to which she has no reaction whatsoever), he says they can at last have a future together and he can at last help his nation, they have a romantic evening, she gets up to watch him sleep

(Sidebar: LORD HAVE MERCY OH MY GOD. He is so beautiful. He looks incredibly perfect when he sleeps, even more perfect than usual. I DIE. She tenderly caresses his cheek!! I diiiiiiiiiie. I want to write POETRY fsdjkldfsksld HOW??)

and she says that she loves him.... while he can’t hear her. For the first and last time, she says it, I might add.

And then in the morning she’s like ‘lol, I’m leaving, I’m not going to live at the palace with you despite you offering me total free reign of the place and asking me to sacrifice literally nothing. Daydream about me, that’ll keep you going in the hard life you have ahead of you, I’m out. I'm going to China or something.’

There literally isn’t a reason. She offers no explanation.

She leaves ‘her world’, which was the trading company and her adopted family, and she leaves the man who saved that world and whom she loves… the people she was willing to give anything for… the man she searched and longed for for five years… her whole life… for no reason….

lmao

why.

Why does THIS SHOW??????

And he barely even argues with her. He just looks baffled. And I don’t blame him. Like I said, I wasn’t even really angry because it was so stupid.

They both gave up SO MUCH and fought SO HARD, she pined for YEARS, their previous separations all sent her into bedridden depressions, it was implied losing him might literally kill her, and then there is nothing keeping them apart and it’s like… ‘well, never mind’.

THE WRITERS SHOULD BE IN JAIL????

I just assumed it would be about her freedom or her dreams or about not wanting to be a concubine, but there’s just NOTHING. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want her to be a concubine either, I have an ongoing dilemma with loving period drama but hating the affairs and mistresses and polygamy, but it doesn’t even come to that. And she did sleep with him at the end. They both declare their marriage as spiritually valid, their only true marriage, etc. so it’s not like she objects on legal principle or refuses to be with him unless she’s the official wife. They explicitly see themselves as still married and are okay with consummating it on that basis. He’s always treated her as his equal and respected her autonomy and doesn’t even ask her to quit her job, so it can’t be that she’s afraid of living in a gilded cage. He’s king now, he can pretty much do whatever he wants as far as their relationship is concerned.

The only thing that’s even vaguely suggested is that she doesn’t want to be a distraction which is again…….. just………. how is him being happy and secure and having her counsel (consistently shown to be very important to him) while he tries to reform the nation a BAD THING? He fucking needs support to do the things he wants to do. Emotional support, not just political allies! And it’s been established that no one else gives him that. He relies on her for it! The whole point of the shine or go crazy thing is that he needs her! He's in danger of flying off the handle and acting too passionately without her steadying influence! We've seen this throughout!

I just. I just…

There was so much potential and I’m SO ANGRY about how dumb the decisions made were. This could have been either a fun romcom or a great pseudo-history drama and it’s neither and both in this incredibly half-assed way that is just NOT TENABLE. The fact that they do sleep together is the biggest give away to me that this show knows it needs to have them end up together and needs to be a happy ending. This is kdrama land. If this were about the beautiful tragedy of them being separated for the Higher Cause, then they wouldn’t have gotten to have that consummation. Or she would have actually died when they did the elaborate Soap Opera Disease death setup. But she didn't. It knows what kind of show it is. That makes it all the more inexcusable they went ahead with this plot in this way with no plan on how to get to an appropriate ending. I have my very firm suspicions they went into this thing loosely adapting the webtoon having no idea what they would do with it past around the midway point. It certainly plays that way with all the aborted story arcs and big set ups that fizzle out.

We don’t even get into how she’s the princess of a defunct country and her long lost brother is a minor character working for the villains and it literally does not matter at all and never becomes relevant. The brother never reveals himself and is just a very, very sad character who becomes conflicted and then dies. WHAT WAS THE REASON???? There was a subplot about searching for her mother that randomly goes away. At the beginning it seemed like this was going to be important because she’s the Fated Princess Wang So was supposed to marry, but no, it doesn’t matter and hardly anyone ever finds out including the Seer who delivered the prophecy in the first place, so I guess she didn’t need to be royalty to be his Fated Partner? She has a special birth mark and that’s good enough. So why is she a princess? Why was this part of the story?? It seems like it'd be there so they could end up together, but they don't! SO???

The proof of the villain’s treason which drives the entire plot for the majority of the show and is this explosive thing they constantly tease- this absolutely crucial thing all the characters struggle to get- this bomb waiting to go off from the first episode....... never blows up. They almost have the big scene with it a couple times and then ultimately it’s never used. Yet another anticlimax.

Honestly, it’s so much better at being a story about Wang So’s journey to the throne with Yool as as a catalyst caught in the crossfire than it is at being a romcom that it boggles the mind how much less time it spends on his arc than almost anything else. Not that it spends enough time on romance either, because it wants to spend ENDLESS time on scenes of the villains discussing what we’ve just seen happen and having tea with each other. Overwhelmingly it feels like the screen time is wasted, focussing on unnecessary exposition and antics surrounding their romance without properly centering the romance itself. And their romance was honestly great when it got a chance to be taken seriously! They are equals who have actual adult conversations with each other, they’re super cute once we get past the OTT antics, they even have palpable mutual sexual tension not diffused by shyness or comedy, which is very rare for kdrama. She wants him and she acts like it, she touches him and kisses him back, they are not suddenly devoid of passion after they officially get together and she doesn't become a wilting flower as soon as he openly returns her interest- I super appreciated all of that.

There are some episodes where this is one of the more mature, well-balanced romances I've seen in a romcom. They feel like they're in an equal relationship with emotional intimacy and that they truly enjoy each other's company. Too bad how she became a cheerful pod person at the end!

And, as much as I fucking ADORED that Wang So defeated the evil Consul with his goodness and the love of his people which he earned by being a genuinely compassionate leader, it was pretty anticlimactic that they built up the battle so much only to have it end so easily and so abruptly without any fighting. Again, pacing. When things actually happen they happen fast and are solidly dramatic, but usually things aren’t happening and we’re vamping for episodes at a time.

Every once and a while it will be fantastic at scale and epicness and really use its dramatic scenarios for all their worth, but the confused tone and overall messiness can’t be ignored no matter how fucking great some of those moments were. And it will always come back to that godawful ending. It’s not even just that the heroine randomly ups and leaves, it’s that the triumph we spent so much time building towards, the Destined Fate we spent the whole series striving to see fulfilled, the victory our characters finally won… it’s like three seconds. The triumph vanishes in a puff of smoke! When Wang So is crowned king there’s like this awkward ominous scene where he’s slouched darkly on the throne with his semi-evil political wife and he’s shot almost like a villain. …what the fuck is that? Everything leading up to that was so epic and so correct and then ptttthhhhhhhppp. Just like the love story! So much build up and he finally saves her from her Plot Convenience Syndrome and they finally say I love you and get to spend a night together and then it’s ptttthhhhppppp. Pissed away!

The whole show implies he will eventually go insane without her and then she leaves like it’s fine and no big deal any more despite the prophecy etc. and then we see he’s totally miserable as king. His accomplishments feel tainted by this pointless suffering he’s enduring, he looks hollow and bitter. Yool just consigned him to this half-life and alienation where he has nothing but his job and no one to be himself with and it was for NO REASON.

I am FLABBERGASTED BY THE CHOICES??? Like WHY did you construct a story this way where you CLEARLY understand the triumph and victory and love fulfilled it should end with and then just- not? Just utterly shit the bed??? This is the most confounding failure I’ve seen in a long time. It’s not an attempt to be deep by appealing to tragedy because they don’t play it as tragedy at all. It makes no sense. It’s nowhere near as bad as TRoS, but it’s more baffling.

Added random stupidity: There’s a whole thing about how the old king left a message on how to create the thousand year golden age of the new kingdom and instead of being a puzzle or a metaphor or about interpreting how he drew the characters (which was a whole thing earlier- Yool randomly becomes a fortune teller who can read your future in your penstrokes), it’s the dumbest thing ever. You’re watching, thinking for sure it’s going to be poetic and spiritual, maybe some kind of sage truism the older brother will suddenly understand, but no. Under the sign which reads ‘1000 years of Goryeo’ that the first king wrote, there’s literally just a second sheet of paper that says ‘abdicate the throne and let Wang So be king’. Honestly… fucking hilarious. What the actual fuck. Were the writers turning in scripts the night before?? I legit laughed at that.

Title: And Death Shall Have No Dominion
Fandom: Star Wars
Rating: pg-13
Words: 5368
Pairing: reylo, Luke & Ben
Genre: character study/drama

Story Summary:

Ben blinked hard, trying to clear his vision and maybe his head, but the shimmering apparition of his uncle remained casually seated in Rey's customary chair at his bedside.

(tros subtweet, the resolution with Luke that I absolutely could not live without but apparently no one else was ever going to write)

Title: Lamentations
Fandom: Star Wars
Rating: pg-13
Words: 2454
Pairing: background reylo, Leia & Ben
Genre: character study/drama

Story Summary:

Leia Organa hadn't really planned on getting old.

(tros subtweet, mother/son reunion)

Title: Like a lily amongst the thorns is my darling
Fandom: Star Wars
Rating: pg-13
Words: 2791
Pairing: reylo
Genre: romance/character study/humour

Story Summary:

Ben is passed out cold, but he's alive and she's going to get him home if she has to learn to fly.

(tros subtweet, slightly salty, pretty fluffy, mostly feelings)

Title: The Undiscovered Country
Fandom: My Country: The New Age (나의 나라)
Rating: pg-13 or soft R for minor sexual content
Words: 8727
Pairing: Hui Jae/Bang-won
Genre: romance/character study/female gaze

Story Summary:

Hui Jae experiments with Madame Seol’s more insidious methods for acquiring power, thinking it will help her predict the prince’s moves if she can make him vulnerable using the oldest trick in the book, but things don’t go as planned.

(Or: thirsting for Bang-won, a fic.)

People have started talking a lot about the female gaze, but we’re still in such weaksauce land with it. Mostly we’re just talking about men who are styled to appeal to women being shot with the sensitive camera to show off both how they look and how they feel. Like bare minimum signaling of a potential romantic interest for a female hero. I bring this up a lot but the essential of female gaze isn’t so much what is shown it’s how it is shown- just the camera looking at a sexy male body isn’t necessarily FG. The key thing imo is often emphasis on male vulnerability. And that’s something that is still pretty distant, compartmentalised between a single character and the viewer. It's not a pervasive female perspective comparable to the male gaze (and no shit bc most writers and directors of romance are still men). You know what we don’t have? The female touch. The romance I watch and fic I read is still so dominated by passive female bodies and concerned with male appreciation of that body. The tender love scene is always him touching her, undressing her, telling her she is beautiful; she is being acted upon and framed as reactor and observer.

We don’t have the active female subject featured even when we get the female pov. You just get the object’s pov.

I’m realising lately we seriously lack for depiction of emotive intimacy about women touching men. Seeing his body as something ponderous and full of wonder, something precious to be cherished and caressed. The kind of aesthetic awe that there’s so much of in romance novel scenes always going the other way. I want to push back hard against the modern popular notion that male bodies are ‘utilitarian’ and female bodies are ‘art’; that even straight women don’t actually desire male bodies and female bodies remain the only inherently sexual object. (Which is just another way of erasing female sexuality, really. And sadly I’ve heard women espouse this view repeatedly. Along with the nearly universal assumption that any sensual focus on a male body in art is somehow ‘homoerotic’ even if he’s alone- because the titillated viewer could only ever be male, right?)

I’ve been thinking about this more and more recently and then I was watching this scene:

And it just brings it home for me that we don’t get this kind of touching, even in stories for a female audience. We’re not really getting it here, it’s incidental. The context is that she’s his dance instructor and is correcting his posture and as soon as the sexual tension arises, he takes her hand and we switch to him touching her face. The sensual close ups don’t come until he is taking initiative. Which she then rejects, implying her touch never had intention in the first place. They don’t get together in this movie and I’m not entirely sure if the take away is supposed to be that she was never into him that way or what (it’s a very ambiguous emotional tone poem of a film). Maybe it was all purely about passion for dance?? Like, I’m just saying, the only women who get to actively desire or physically cherish male bodies are femme fatales and that’s because they’re bad.

Anyway, I'm writing a massively self-indulgent and plotless fic about Hui Jae wanting to touch Bang-won and no one can stop me.

Not being a fan of horror movies in general, it was on a bizarre whim (mostly driven by my desire to be literate in any cinema with such a unique imprint that it is both cult and mainstream and somewhat driven by depressive dissociation that makes me avoid doing productive things) that I decided to watch Hellraiser a couple days weeks ago (this post has been getting bigger in my drafts for a while- who is keeping time in quarantine dates are arbitrary). About which I knew nothing whatsoever except that it was the thing Pinhead was from and maaaaybe something vague about the existence of cenobites in general from having seen action figure packaging. As I gather is most non-horror people’s experience with the franchise.

Anyway, I watched it and because I am a strange obsessive person I did the thing I always do, which is compulsively seek out ways to stay with an interesting/significant film to grok it better and listen to people talk about why they think it’s good, so I learnt about the sequels without watching them. Finally relented and watched first II and then later III as I got more and more sucked in to having Opinions about this property which is so totally not my thing lmao.

Anyway, in my post-tros defiance I might have been even more primed than usual for this kind of deep commitment to my brand, but it is made shockingly easy by this series to not only root for and woobieise Pinhead, but to ship him with the main heroine/closest thing it has to a consistent protagonist and needless to say I’ve fallen into a bit of a rabbit hole.

(Yes, friends, I am now going so hard that I am woobieising and shipping an edgelord icon with pins stuck in his face. I who am not even a villain fucker. Allow me to reiterate that it is STARTLING how easy they make it and there’s an entirely plausible leg to stand on that both are well-founded in canon. I don’t know what I expected from these movies or the character but it definitely wasn’t this. Did not anticipate, would not have imagined.)

But it never really was or became the thing I think the biggest fans saw or remember seeing in it. I’ve run across a couple people mentioning that they went back to watch them again after years and it was a very different experience than they expected. The aspects with the greatest popularity/longevity were very minor, almost incidental elements of the original. More hints than anything fully formed. Really, I feel like this becoming a franchise was built on two things:

1. impressive SFX, originally used to serve resonant themes and well supported by everything around it (especially the score)- the original being just a solid little movie with a very effective hook (lol, see what I did there- hooks, cenobites, get it?)

2. Pinhead. (Well, to be completely fair, it’s the incredibly memorable and instantly timeless character designs of the cenobites in general, with Pinhead just being by far the most compelling and the only one who’s really a character rather than a prop.)

He’s an extremely arresting and visually interesting figure who also had all the best lines, played by an actor with more charisma in his part than anyone else in the film, and he had an enormous weight of intrigue about him. People really wanted to see something come of that character, something to make good on the strange gravitas he has, but then it never happened. I really think that frustration is what kept this thing going for thirty years- audiences kept saying ‘more Pinhead’ and neither they nor the filmmakers seemed to know what they wanted from that ‘more’ or how to do it. Other than the tragedy of their humanity in Hellbound (almost completely wasted- the moment of connection with Kirsty is brilliant and seems so promising, then nothing comes of it but a staggering anti-climax where they all die in seconds to beef up a new villain), the vaguely suggested idea of what the cenobites are in the original film is infinitely better than any subsequent expansion on them. Although the third movie at least leans into the pathos and nuance of the character by expanding on Elliot Spenser (the human who became Pinhead) even while eroding it by having ‘Unbound’ (aka cut off from his humanity) Pinhead become a slasher villain.

It’s all a fortuitous accident that no one ever figured out how to respond to, since Pinhead only got the lines and became so prominent in the first place because two of the other four cenobites couldn’t speak in their makeup. He wasn’t even conceived as the focus among the group, he became ‘Lead Cenobite’ (his official name) because he could talk. They didn’t anticipate the way the audience latched on to him at all and didn’t plan the things which caused it. He is so striking because his look is the most uncanny (his form is most recognisably human, his mutilations are most subtle, but that makes it all the more unsettling to see this obviously living person who has quite a soft countenance and carries himself with a sort of melancholic, kingly dignity have a bunch of nails driven into his skull) and he’s so interesting because the dichotomy of that creates an immediate implication of pathos.

And I’m now experiencing enormous frustration with something that should be fucking predictable at this point, which is the mostly male, mostly power levels orientated online fanbase completely missing the boat on who this character is. Totally failing to pick up what was actually compelling about him or why they think he’s awesome besides his general aura of dangerous majesty, which is basically entirely a product of the actor’s stage presence and comportment in synergy with the costume. It’s not what he does because he barely does anything until the third film (which a lot of these fans don’t like anyway). Diving into various reviews and retrospectives about the franchise, I heard so many times a dude saying he hated that Pinhead was given a backstory and especially that it was implied to be the tragic downfall of a sympathetic character. They all had the same reasoning- it’s bad because ‘humanising the monster’ is bad, as it removes their threat.

Oi yoy yoooooy.

1. Pinhead (and the cenobites in general because they are a unit in the first film) was not the villain of the story, he’s not even a villain. Frank and Julia are the villains. When the sequel was greenlit, it was intended to be Julia’s villain origin story and she was to go on to be the big bad of the series. The cenobites are neutral and operate according to rules by which no one who faces them is wholly innocent or unwilling. The only time someone opens the box with a true absence of desire (Tiffany, who solves puzzles by compulsion not conscious will), Pinhead orders she be spared without any stipulations or exchange and leaves her to wander around the labyrinth as she pleases. But you can make a deal with the cenobites even if you’re not wholly innocent as long as you are extremely careful, because they can be reasoned with. They are like very dark Gothic faeries (or maybe genies) in the original film. They are amoral rather than being evil. It’s a very ‘careful what you wish for’ kind of situation. They are repugnant in their extremity but terrifyingly recognisable, holding up a mirror to fundamentally human vice.

The cenobites actually stand between Frank and Julia and victory over good. Pinhead saves Kirsty’s life in both the original and the sequel. These movies aren’t ever the most coherent even at their best, so it’s fuzzy, but he even says ‘this is not for your eyes’ to Kirsty before they reclaim Frank. Which implies he actually values her remaining innocence and wouldn’t have her traumatised (yes, they then go after her, I did say this movie isn’t super consistent- but one could argue they think she reneged on her deal by saying she won’t give them ‘the man who did this’- which she still thinks is her father at that point, and also that they never actually promised her anything). The cenobites aren’t here to rip up innocent victims, they expand the awareness of consenting burn outs for whom there are no other thrills left. I understand in the original novella there’s a much stronger element of ‘are you sure you want this?’ before the chains come out. Either way, the overall momentum is that they don’t do anything to people who don’t summon them or call to them in some way. Kirsty was curious and knew the box was dangerous, so there was both knowledge and desire involved in her solving it.

(BDSM is icky icky nope, one of my biggest squicks, but this movie has nothing to do with real life subcultures or the practice of real fetishes- it’s a fable about vice and how it can consume us. Frank is a sociopathic hedonist in pursuit of ultimate pleasure, Julia so self-absorbed and bored with her life she’ll do anything to get back the thrill she got from Frank, Elliot was a soldier traumatised by WWI who turned to novel corporeal experiences in attempt to feel anything- to believe he was alive [this is implied, not fully spelled out but I am inclined to read Elliot as tragic because even Julia is a nuanced character with whom we can empathise during her downfall and because he is infinitely more interesting that way]. The attractive quality of the cenobites is their representation of taboo in abstract, of liminal experience and arcane knowledge, not any expectation that one would actually enjoy having hooks through one’s face and find that appealing. To me it’s obviously not about anything so literal as something you might actually do in real life. Which is why it was silly for ‘lifestyle’ people to be offended by it or say it’s a negative portrayal. It’s not a portrayal, it has nothing to do with them. It’s not a condemnation of your gimp outfit, it’s dealing with universal primal themes with heightened stakes. One of the writers and the actress who played Julia both said the same thing.)

2. Literal monsters are never as scary or as evil as humans. It’s not the cenobites and their strangeness you have to fear most, but the very familiar and mundane sins of humanity- lust, greed, selfishness, gluttony, etc. Again, Frank and Julia are the villains. Julia is the really horrifying element of the film because she is a normal person who becomes so profoundly corrupted that she starts enjoying hammer murders for their own sake, and what makes it scary is that she is at first somewhat sympathetic. We’re with her for quite a bit of the film. This is the effectiveness of well-written horror (horror which creates an atmosphere of dread around a story we’re invested in rather than just throwing out cheap jumpscares and gore), it puts you in an emotionally uncomfortable position as a viewer, so that you are in a state of constant tension.

3. One of the most unique and fascinating things about these films is their surprising empathy and indulgence in romanticism. Humanising monsters and monsterising humans is the DNA of this universe and that’s exactly why the first two films stood out so much. It’s not a flaw! It’s why we’re still talking about it! If not for romanticism and pathos, it would be a boring little cautionary tale about obsession. Gothic romance and tragic monsters, grotesques, the B&tB element??? it’s all part of the backbone and is strongest in the original two films! for real!!!! all the human villains are in love. they all wax poetic about the beauty in ugliness. the heroine shows the monsters their lost humanity!! Pinhead elects to save her even before being stripped of his supernatural powers and turned physically human- meaning it’s not as simple as him being split into two halves (where only the entirely human version of him would care about her) or just human solidarity on his part. There is something personal and special in how he treats her compared to any other character who solves the box. He has always liked her.

Then these grim, bloody horror movies throw me the weirdest bone in the second and third films. So I was just interested in the first film as a notable moment in cinema and had a vague curiosity about its concepts. No actual emotions about it except as noted. I was general audience and my thoughts were basically that, although it was a fun little British horror movie with fairly strong character work, the popular appeal was almost entirely based on how cool the cenobites look. Everyone being most attracted to Pinhead because he both looked coolest and spoke and had this tremendous presence. That was where I was at as well. But my love of BTS info got me watching sequels and BRO- Kirsty, the heroine, discovers a picture of Elliot in his uniform in Channard’s collection of Box Research Material. She finds him familiar, pockets the picture, and at some point either then or later realises that he is Pinhead. Already my ears have perked up because the fact that she can recognise him is indicative of unexpected attention to his face on her part (because he is not easily recognisable as the same person at all).

And, armed with this picture and this knowledge eventually tells him who he is (the cenobites were not even aware they were once mortal and didn’t remember their human lives). He then fights on her behalf before being gradually depowered to human, sharing a moment with her as the man she freed, and then sacrificing himself to allow her to escape.

Hell on Earth has the entire plot being about his humanity as essential to balancing the power/appetite of the thing he became. So now his worst instincts/pure appetite is walking free without his conscious mind to control or temper it. The ‘ordered’ part of him which followed rules and just had a job to do came from him being human. Not sure what the implications are on that, that’s the opposite to how things usually work- humans are free will/chaos and the supernatural entities are bound by rules. Anyway. Tragically, Kirsty is not in this movie and thus not the one who gets to meet his ghost (which, interestingly, seems to be the complete person Elliot was in life- apparently nothing in the cenobite part of him is essential to his personality or being, it’s just his physical body animated by accumulated bad juju), talk to him, and eventually restore him to one piece, but I’m still into it as a concept (and I like Joey from Hell on Earth, she’s a decent character, it would just mean so much more if it were Kirsty). Despite the rejoining scene being quite awful and then undermined as pointless because he just keeps on being evil (or maybe they haven’t fused yet and both wills are battling it out in there temporarily- did I mention these movies aren’t super coherent a few times already?).

I do feel like the vibe of Gothic Romance was pretty blatant and intentional in Hellbound when she reminds him of his humanity. He fights and then dies for her, after all. They give him a real Hero Shot both when fights as a cenobite and especially when he’s human deciding to go down with a weapon in his hand. And the look between Elliott and Kirsty before he’s killed contains novels imo. That five seconds is the most interesting thing in this entire franchise for me, I would absolutely not have watched more of the films or spent however long rambling here about it if not for that moment. The latest sequel which shouldn’t exist did do one great thing for the world (the world in this example is me) and that’s have him end up human again at the end. Which led to this fanfic, which is the spectacular domestic angst hurt/comfort I needed and need right now.

Hell on Earth seems to be very much romanticising him deliberately as well. I’ve seen someone claim it was originally written for Kirsty and there would have been a ~vibe between she and Elliot, possibly a kiss. I do not know if any part of that is at all true, but I wouldn’t be super shocked if it was. It’s not implausible. That’s the size of the B&tB monstershipping bone this franchise has unexpectedly thrown me. I could believe it of them to go there. (Apparently they do kiss in a vision or something in one of the comics but the plot and characterisation of the comic continuity also sounds completely off the rails awful so I will not be reading those.)

(Sidebar: The funniest shit I’ve ever heard was from a video about the Kirsty/Pinhead(and/or Elliot) ship wherein it was noted some people object to it because of the age difference.

The age difference.

So, we live in a world where purity wankers can watch and enjoy a Hellraiser movie but are worried about an age difference being problematic. Not his being an amoral genie from the pain dimension covered in mutilations and in the habit of torturing people, but being older than her. Hellraiser has multiple skinless people, flesh vampirism, dudes getting torn apart by chains, a super molesty uncle who wants to rape his niece, murder, sadism, etc. But an age difference is problematic. And which age difference? Because I bet you three million dollars they don’t give a fuck that Elliot/Pinhead is over a hundred years old in the context of the story (he is a WWI solider who became immortal, I remind you). It’ll be about the physical age difference between the actors. Anyone who brings this shit up is always completely predictable and completely shallow. I don’t know what their age difference actually is (it doesn’t look that big lmao, it never even occurred to me to wonder), but she’s definitely an adult so there is no possible scenario in which it matters.

Honestly though. Imagine being okay with this franchise in general and then trying to play the ~problematic age difference~ card. Kirsty feeds her douche husband and four other people to Pinhead in one of the latter day DTV sequels (not literally- he does not eat people. Feel like I should note that for anyone who isn’t familiar still reading this out of morbid fascination with my descent into madness).

Okay, I looked it up- it’s only 12 years LMAO who cares. Weak.)

Speaking of which (his popularity). Why are people so down on Hellraiser 3 (Hell on Earth)? Pinhead’s OOC behaviour is explained (to the extent than anything is ever explained in this universe) and his character is actually deepened (which people complain about more than the fact that he’s unhinged and Evil McEvilface? which thing actually bothers you, I’m confused? either you like that he’s not a monster or you don’t- everyone says the first two are the only good ones but Pinhead was humanised and made tragic in the second one, he also sacrificed his life to save Kirsty and they ALSO say the third one is lame because he’s made into a slasher villain without nuance??), but I see so much complaining about the less serious tone and wisecracks etc. Meanwhile. Hellbound has even more puns/dumb villain wisecracks than Hell on Earth.

Channard is non-stop ludicrous as soon as the tentacle attaches to his head. And Hellbound also has not one, but two big floppy anti-climaxes and is narratively entirely pointless. 3 is a much better movie. Yes, Hellbound had tonnes of interesting ideas and evocative visuals, but it doesn’t actually make any sense and there’s no arc for anyone. There’s no plot, there’s no conflict which gets resolved unless you count the brief moment Channard enjoyed being a classic cenobite before he was taken over by the giant prehensile penis. What the fuck was that anyway? Who knows. Nothing about it is ever explained. The tentacles were also shown pounding the nails into Elliot’s head in Pinhead’s origin montage, so one imagines it must be Leviathan. But why would Leviathan take over Channard directly and why would it cause him to become an Austin Powers villain? When the original cenobites fight him, does this mean they are rebelling against Leviathan itself?

Like, someone who thinks this movie is a masterpiece should really try to make an outline for what the fuck it’s about, because it makes no sense even on a solely thematic or symbolic level.

I think that while Hell on Earth is far, far more pedestrian than the first two films and much less thoughtful, it’s pretty much on par in regard to execution. The rich atmosphere and striking novelty of the original hugely elevated it, but it’s rough in a lot of ways. The bad dubbing, the weird pacing, characters behaving bizarrely to make the plot work, massive logic holes you actually notice while you’re watching (if you don’t notice them until the third time, then they don’t matter- but if you’re asking ‘wait what?’ and thinking about that instead of being engaged in the story then it does matter), some cheesy dialogue, some weak blocking of scenes, how blasé the cinematography sometimes is, etc. What was brilliant about it was its ideas and its visuals, what made it stand out was that it was doing something radically different than its contemporaries. Hell on Earth abandons the serious dramatic tone and becomes more bog standard horror schlock with bog standard set pieces, but its plot and mythology makes just as much sense and the production aspects are just as good or better if less ambitious and less inventive.

I don’t find it worse as a piece of entertainment, just commercialised and gentrified to the original’s organic auteur flavour. Clunky, creaky creative vision from an artist is preferable to a sleeker, more soulless product, but Hell on Earth isn’t a soulless product imo. It legitimately tries to do something cogent and worthwhile which shows a love of the material, it makes an effort with its characters, it just lacks in execution. It lacks finesse, strangeness, and subtlety in a really big way.

You know, the super try hard ‘I’m so edgy’ church scene (which is dumb on numerous levels), the lametastic and instantly dated ‘modern’ cenobites, the heavy metal club, the crassness of it in comparison to the more elegant, seductive qualities of the first two. etc. etc. Those things drag it down. The bungled writing and terrible visuals of the final showdown with Unbound Pinhead drag it down (I’d argue the original suffers similarly and Hellbound even more so from illogical, dorky climatic showdowns- honestly what bothers me about Hell on Earth is the goofiness of the visual more than anything else- the climaxes of the first two were dramatically empty added action where this one actually had a lot going for it, but they shot it so badly and the special effects are both badly conceived and badly executed. Why shoot Pinhead in an extreme close-up fish eye lens?? Why make a horrible blob morph?? looking regal and dignified is at least 75% of his effectiveness as a character?). But it hangs together and flows well. It doesn’t bore me and only left me asking ‘what?’ once or twice instead of fairly regularly. In Hellbound you ask ‘what?’ approx once every other scene if you pay too much attention.

There’s no consistency to this shit. Whatever. Anyway. They’re still trying to do a remake and I’ve never heard anything so ill-advised and utterly pointless. What worked and created something special wasn’t the raw material from the story, people don’t remember the film for its plot and don’t want to see that story executed better or with ‘better’ modern effects (not that it would be better, it’ll be all CGI and have infinitely less impact- the original works because it’s visceral, tangible, fleshy). There’s only one icon from this franchise and he can’t be replaced because it was the marriage of actor and image which created him. The scripts never really understood the character’s final form and it’s already been demonstrated that anyone else in the costume looks like they’re playing dress up and is instantly rendered ridiculous when they speak.

What was needed was a better sequel with a meaningful story that did the character justice so the audience could feel satisfied the opportunity was seized and the most was made of him, and that tragically never happened. II and III make some efforts, but the scripts just aren’t there. Then, no one after that ever considered trying to create closure for Kirsty or giving some kind of emotional throughline to the actual Hellraiser narrative with the only other remaining OG- the one who has the special relationship with Pinhead. Instead they just threw him into unrelated horror scripts haphazardly because people wanted to see him.

There’s absolutely no profit in going back to the beginning and starting over now, the thing that had so much potential and deserved to be explored won’t be there.

And in meaningless observations I must put somewhere lest I continue to think about them for the rest of my natural life: it’s weird that the most popular official art of Pinhead is apparently from early proof of concept photos they did when they were still figuring out the make up. I know this because he has blue eyes in it instead of the black sclera contact lenses he has in the movie. Those pictures were used for the sequel promo as well! The cover of the sequel OST is a different photo also without contacts, at least three notable posters are therefore from those concept pictures. No one who shows those photos in their videos about the series has ever mentioned this, so I feel compelled to mention it.

(I would guess it must be because they had no idea he was going to become the face of the franchise and so didn’t have other promo pics prepared/money to do a new shoot when the audience decided who the poster boy should always be. They were making the sequel before the first film even came out, so they didn’t know the reaction until production was well underway. Still, you’d think in making the film’s main theatrical poster they would have rectified this jarring inconsistency. It’s wild to me it was used not only for the original, but the sequel. It’s so noticeable! Those black lenses aren’t subtle!

Actually wait, I was going to add images here to show the nobody who will read this wall of insanity how noticeable it is and discovered a sequel promo pic without contacts that was definitely shot for the sequel because it has the female cenobite played by a different actress. The plot thickens on this completely trivial and uninteresting mystery no one but me will ever care about. So idk, maybe they lost the contacts? Why do I want to know? I want to know.)

Anyway look:

Really noticeable, right? His real eyes are such a pale blue, it stands out even more than it otherwise would. I was like ‘why does that famous poster image look so strange now that I’ve seen the film…? oh!’ and then became desperate for someone else to point it out lmao. Yes, I am crazy, why do you ask.