You won't like Hye Won; you're not supposed to. She doesn't like herself either.
It is obvious she is deeply traumatized by the society she tried to escape. It is a violently patriarchal one in which girls are raised to revere, obey, and subjugate themselves to males, and that patriarchy is maintained by teaching girls to despise their own gender. As a result, the girls on this island grow into women who hate other women, including themselves, and become participants in and perpetrators of their own victimisation. It's the type of aggressively internalized, cultish misogyny that is vital to maintaining the patriarchal power structure; it's exactly the type of sociopsychological manipulation that sees a mother sanctioning her daughter's honour killing for being raped, a grandmother ordering the murder of her daughter-in-law for wanting a divorce, entire villages of women upholding female genital mutilation as a sacred rite.
Hye Won knows that, she sees it clearly, and it's why she ran the first chance she got. However, she couldn't outrun the programming, and her character has been shaped by a conflicting set of issues: she's struggling against a taught morality she objectively understands to be destructive, and her own revulsion toward what she perceives as female weakness. Simultaneously, she knows that she, herself, is fundamentally a coward, and she is carrying a baggage cart's worth of guilt and shame (and possibly some latent homosexuality, depending on how closely one wishes to read the subtext in her relationship with Bok Nam).
Basically, the woman is thoroughly fucked up, just like all the others of her sex on that damn island, including the child, and she's not doing well in the battle she's waging to not become exactly like the female elders. Behind all the bluster is a lot of fear.
The only one here who deserves any sympathy, absolution, and reclamation is Bok Nam; that she doesn't receive it is entirely the point. Bok Nam defied the social order, attacked the patriarchial structure, and she paid the ultimate price. But, there is much to be valued in how it ended for her.
Hye Won is an unsympathetic coward, but she's alive—and she alone will have to grapple with what that's worth.
The cases aren't particularly interesting or complicated but the characters are various levels of engaging. As is fairly typical for too many K-dramas, most of the women are short-changed, existing purely to facilitate romances (the romance elements are presented in blocks with no real connection to either the cases or the overarching storyline, meaning they are, thankfully, completely skippable).
The exception to that is the female villain, because that's usually how it goes: they are evil/evil-adjacent, so they get to be multifaceted, interesting, deeply flawed, and endlessly complex, since their purpose for existing isn't being a male character's love interest. I would watch a prequel just about her. The snippets we got of what drove her, of how and why she fell so far from grace, were the most compelling pieces of the series.
As a product of its time, the show flirts a bit with queercoding in a prototypical bromance that we don't get enough of. Park Tae Il and Ji Gook stole my heart, and the way the show depicts their mid-season breakup was simultaneously heartbreaking, heartwarming, and hilarious. The show fumbled on Tae Il's primary trauma but, again, given its time, it wasn't too terribly handled.
The cast was excellent, every single one of them. The scripting let them down a little too often but they delivered in every single scene. Worth at least one watch.
The case-of-the-week stories are interesting and I might've stayed with the series if not for the unnecessary, insipid budding romance. Is South Korea allergic to the notion that colleagues of the opposite sex can just be colleagues? I'm definitely not checking out season two, as apparently the romance will be cranked all the way up and the FFW button likely won't save me the aggravation, and the series isn't really engaging enough to suffer through it.
Three stars for the acting and another for the humour elements. I did chuckle quite often.
Dew is so expressive, and his character seems fun while not being completely frivolous. I've liked Dew in the support roles he's played, nice to see him get a lead. Shame about the hair.
I don't like Nail. I know "sassy" is popular but I just detest catty, petty behaviour. I hate it when it's chicks, I hate it when it's guys, and I especially hate it when it's grown Adults behaving that way. It is neither endearing nor cute; leave that shite in puberty where it belongs.
The NC scene was fine. I caught only one badly angled shot where the underwear was visible, so it's got that going for it.
Well. That was certainly an episode of things happening in a sequence.
Look, if Rain's completely unthreatening self managed to talk all that smack while tied up and in arguably greater danger, surely Guy could've managed even a single "Fuck you" to Kenji. Watching him yelling for help like that was embarrassing for everyone involved. I wanted Kenji to just hurl him off that roof. Die with some dignity, Guy.
And Wahl: why are you still here? People are getting drugged, kidnapped, blackmailed, knifed, shot, and terrorised by the people responsible for Thailand's epidemic of horrendous wigs. Nobody has time for you, Wahl. Go away, and please take Guy with you.
This didn't need to be made. It certainly should not have been made without the director and writers of the first movie.
The replacement actor for Rak is a poor casting choice (the actor simply lacks the sinister gravitas that made the role so engaging in the first movie); he looks, sounds, and behaves like a cherub-faced University kid in over his head. Not for one minute is he believable as a cool, calculating, dangerous mastermind effortlessly manipulating everyone around him. He never seemed like a man with a plan, as we know Rak to be. I legitimately expected him to piss his pants in his first encounter with Keunkal.
Speaking of Keunkal—I ultimately had to fast forward through her scenes. HHJ did a fine job, absolutely, I just find the character archetype irritating. This version of women narcotraffickers annoys me. I had the same issue with Ma-Ma in "Dredd" and Boss Yong in "Bad & Crazy". All three are compelling characters whose affectations were just downright distracting.
Is making them look like they shower once a month and don't wipe properly supposed to make them scary? Is the languid physicality meant to make them seem blasé and hardened? Is all the weird mouth/tongue/grody teeth stuff aimed at being intimidating? Why is everyone's hair so raggedy? It all just feels so try-hard. You can be a terrifying, powerful, unmitigated badass and also maintain decent hygiene. Everytime Big Knife got her tongue rolling about all I could think was, "She's poking at an open cavity, isn't she? Bet she can't chew on that side".
I find it aggravating when applied to male characters as well but it seems so much more egregious in these cases. Like you can hear the (generally male) directors just off-screen screaming, "Grimier! Grosser! Let your mouth hang open for no reason and do something pointlessly aggressive with your tongue!"
And what did they do to Jo Won Ho? Yes, in the first movie he was obsessed and reckless but in the sequel he's just outright stupid. He actually did learn from his tragic mistakes over the runtime of the first movie and tried to temper his zeal, but I guess the new director and writer decided that was entirely too much character development on their watch.
As for the story itself: well, in short, never before have I seen a sequel so thoroughly squander the potential of a previous movie's ending set-up. Just wow.
This should've been a limited series. As it is, it feels less like a movie and more like a pitch pilot for a TV drama. As a movie, it's rushed, underdeveloped, oddly edited, weirdly paced, and just outright disjointed.
The characters are barely defined but the acting is great; would expect no less from this cast. 10/10, even the supporting roles. Madame Kim had maybe 12 total minutes of screentime but she commanded every second of it.
The concept is decent, the action is ok, the story is almost engaging. However, the script just fails to deliver, and the production around the script tries but fails to hide it in a series of stylized and stylish choices.
"Kill Bok Soon" does this all much, much better, and is actually the movie "A Special Lady" wants to be. Just go watch that movie.
Nepal's Supreme Court handed down an interim ruling that sought to force the matter. De jure legalisation is not the same as actual legislation, so Nepal does not yet meet the criteria.
As long as Nepal's civil code continues to limit marriage to cis-het couples, allowing lower Courts to defy the interim ruling (as some have) then, no, same-sex marriage is not actually legal in Nepal.
As the "middle-school" actor looks at least 17, this did not translate well at all. A 30 y-o cannot have a 17…
And that is precisely why I deducted two stars from my rating. It's a shallow, unnecessary distortion of the story simply to attract a type of BL watcher, and absolutely undercuts the narrative's nuanced demonstrations of how many types of love—including the perceived absence of it—shape who and what we are.
I realize waiter Ren is meant to be an agitating character but the whole "OMG, two dudes on a date, do people accept that?!" thing was outright aggravating to see. You live in literally the only Asian country that has legalized same-sex marriage. No, that doesn't erase the stigmas from society, but you are simultaneously too old and too young to be either that naive, that bigoted, or that ridiculous. Reel it in, you snooty little gremlin.
This is not a BL. Harada, the author of this work, is a BL manga artist whose works are decidedly BL (and intense), with the exception of "One Room Angel", hence why it's labelled and categorized as a BL. However, "One Room Angel" is not a BL, and it was never intended to be.
In the manga, Kouki is a lonely, broken loser in his mid-30s. The Angel is a middle schooler (aged about 14). This age-gap is significant, I think, because Harada wanted to avoid entirely the idea that the relationship between these characters was a romantic one.
"One Room Angel" is a story about how the platonic love in a father-son relationship frees both parties to forgive, to feel, and to not move on but move forward. It's a warm story, equal parts humourous and tragic, and more than worth the watch.
The original synopsis about a serial killer and potential ghostly vengeance was intriguing. Obviously, that synopsis was wrong. The new synopsis is also wrong. I guess the "new horror" was having to endure another round of hotel chicken fingers and one final stilted, weirdly paced team convo.
If the version on iQIYI is "uncut", honestly, what's even the point of giving this an NC-17 rating? The NC scenes are awkwardly cut and not well-blocked, and really not all that different from the standard "miming about the sheets" that defines most BL.
If you're selling sex, commit to it. I'm having "Bed Friend" flashbacks and I ultimately had to skip those NC scenes for being tepidly dull and annoyingly repetitious in a series that billed itself as a sexy, sensual romp toward love.
They've taken that aspect out of the show for the most part apparently. But yeah, still keeping in the the talk…
It sounds like what they removed were aspects such as MPREG, heat, and knotting. Which actually makes it weirder to keep the Alpha commentary. They could've just given the character olfactophillia and it would've been the same basic idea.
I mean, it doesn't bother me, it just seems like such an arbitrary choice.
It is obvious she is deeply traumatized by the society she tried to escape. It is a violently patriarchal one in which girls are raised to revere, obey, and subjugate themselves to males, and that patriarchy is maintained by teaching girls to despise their own gender. As a result, the girls on this island grow into women who hate other women, including themselves, and become participants in and perpetrators of their own victimisation. It's the type of aggressively internalized, cultish misogyny that is vital to maintaining the patriarchal power structure; it's exactly the type of sociopsychological manipulation that sees a mother sanctioning her daughter's honour killing for being raped, a grandmother ordering the murder of her daughter-in-law for wanting a divorce, entire villages of women upholding female genital mutilation as a sacred rite.
Hye Won knows that, she sees it clearly, and it's why she ran the first chance she got. However, she couldn't outrun the programming, and her character has been shaped by a conflicting set of issues: she's struggling against a taught morality she objectively understands to be destructive, and her own revulsion toward what she perceives as female weakness. Simultaneously, she knows that she, herself, is fundamentally a coward, and she is carrying a baggage cart's worth of guilt and shame (and possibly some latent homosexuality, depending on how closely one wishes to read the subtext in her relationship with Bok Nam).
Basically, the woman is thoroughly fucked up, just like all the others of her sex on that damn island, including the child, and she's not doing well in the battle she's waging to not become exactly like the female elders. Behind all the bluster is a lot of fear.
The only one here who deserves any sympathy, absolution, and reclamation is Bok Nam; that she doesn't receive it is entirely the point. Bok Nam defied the social order, attacked the patriarchial structure, and she paid the ultimate price. But, there is much to be valued in how it ended for her.
Hye Won is an unsympathetic coward, but she's alive—and she alone will have to grapple with what that's worth.
The exception to that is the female villain, because that's usually how it goes: they are evil/evil-adjacent, so they get to be multifaceted, interesting, deeply flawed, and endlessly complex, since their purpose for existing isn't being a male character's love interest. I would watch a prequel just about her. The snippets we got of what drove her, of how and why she fell so far from grace, were the most compelling pieces of the series.
As a product of its time, the show flirts a bit with queercoding in a prototypical bromance that we don't get enough of. Park Tae Il and Ji Gook stole my heart, and the way the show depicts their mid-season breakup was simultaneously heartbreaking, heartwarming, and hilarious. The show fumbled on Tae Il's primary trauma but, again, given its time, it wasn't too terribly handled.
The cast was excellent, every single one of them. The scripting let them down a little too often but they delivered in every single scene. Worth at least one watch.
Three stars for the acting and another for the humour elements. I did chuckle quite often.
I don't like Nail. I know "sassy" is popular but I just detest catty, petty behaviour. I hate it when it's chicks, I hate it when it's guys, and I especially hate it when it's grown Adults behaving that way. It is neither endearing nor cute; leave that shite in puberty where it belongs.
The NC scene was fine. I caught only one badly angled shot where the underwear was visible, so it's got that going for it.
Generally, a decent first episode.
Look, if Rain's completely unthreatening self managed to talk all that smack while tied up and in arguably greater danger, surely Guy could've managed even a single "Fuck you" to Kenji. Watching him yelling for help like that was embarrassing for everyone involved. I wanted Kenji to just hurl him off that roof. Die with some dignity, Guy.
And Wahl: why are you still here? People are getting drugged, kidnapped, blackmailed, knifed, shot, and terrorised by the people responsible for Thailand's epidemic of horrendous wigs. Nobody has time for you, Wahl. Go away, and please take Guy with you.
The replacement actor for Rak is a poor casting choice (the actor simply lacks the sinister gravitas that made the role so engaging in the first movie); he looks, sounds, and behaves like a cherub-faced University kid in over his head. Not for one minute is he believable as a cool, calculating, dangerous mastermind effortlessly manipulating everyone around him. He never seemed like a man with a plan, as we know Rak to be. I legitimately expected him to piss his pants in his first encounter with Keunkal.
Speaking of Keunkal—I ultimately had to fast forward through her scenes. HHJ did a fine job, absolutely, I just find the character archetype irritating. This version of women narcotraffickers annoys me. I had the same issue with Ma-Ma in "Dredd" and Boss Yong in "Bad & Crazy". All three are compelling characters whose affectations were just downright distracting.
Is making them look like they shower once a month and don't wipe properly supposed to make them scary? Is the languid physicality meant to make them seem blasé and hardened? Is all the weird mouth/tongue/grody teeth stuff aimed at being intimidating? Why is everyone's hair so raggedy? It all just feels so try-hard. You can be a terrifying, powerful, unmitigated badass and also maintain decent hygiene. Everytime Big Knife got her tongue rolling about all I could think was, "She's poking at an open cavity, isn't she? Bet she can't chew on that side".
I find it aggravating when applied to male characters as well but it seems so much more egregious in these cases. Like you can hear the (generally male) directors just off-screen screaming, "Grimier! Grosser! Let your mouth hang open for no reason and do something pointlessly aggressive with your tongue!"
And what did they do to Jo Won Ho? Yes, in the first movie he was obsessed and reckless but in the sequel he's just outright stupid. He actually did learn from his tragic mistakes over the runtime of the first movie and tried to temper his zeal, but I guess the new director and writer decided that was entirely too much character development on their watch.
As for the story itself: well, in short, never before have I seen a sequel so thoroughly squander the potential of a previous movie's ending set-up. Just wow.
The characters are barely defined but the acting is great; would expect no less from this cast. 10/10, even the supporting roles. Madame Kim had maybe 12 total minutes of screentime but she commanded every second of it.
The concept is decent, the action is ok, the story is almost engaging. However, the script just fails to deliver, and the production around the script tries but fails to hide it in a series of stylized and stylish choices.
"Kill Bok Soon" does this all much, much better, and is actually the movie "A Special Lady" wants to be. Just go watch that movie.
As long as Nepal's civil code continues to limit marriage to cis-het couples, allowing lower Courts to defy the interim ruling (as some have) then, no, same-sex marriage is not actually legal in Nepal.
In the manga, Kouki is a lonely, broken loser in his mid-30s. The Angel is a middle schooler (aged about 14). This age-gap is significant, I think, because Harada wanted to avoid entirely the idea that the relationship between these characters was a romantic one.
"One Room Angel" is a story about how the platonic love in a father-son relationship frees both parties to forgive, to feel, and to not move on but move forward. It's a warm story, equal parts humourous and tragic, and more than worth the watch.
The original synopsis about a serial killer and potential ghostly vengeance was intriguing. Obviously, that synopsis was wrong. The new synopsis is also wrong. I guess the "new horror" was having to endure another round of hotel chicken fingers and one final stilted, weirdly paced team convo.
If you're selling sex, commit to it. I'm having "Bed Friend" flashbacks and I ultimately had to skip those NC scenes for being tepidly dull and annoyingly repetitious in a series that billed itself as a sexy, sensual romp toward love.
I mean, it doesn't bother me, it just seems like such an arbitrary choice.