dangermousie | Making the "Bad Guy" the Protagonist? (Kingdom of the Winds)

I just watched episode 11 of Kingdom of the Winds and I am struck by how dark this drama is.

Because in any other drama, Muhyul would not be the protagonist, the hero of the story. He would be the sympathetic bad guy, the one whose motives you could understand and one you could even sympathize with to a degree, but who would be the antagonist to the noble good guy, the one who needed to be defeated. He is much much closer to Ho Gae than Dam Duk, if we are talking in Legend terms.

Because he is falling further and further into darkness and his humanity is hanging on by a shred. The whole kidnapping Yeojin and taking him to make King Yuri come alone is...borderline awful. I don't know why it strikes me so much. Part of it is a purely emotional visceral reaction: they are half-brothers even if they do not know about it. I know that is illogical, but there it is. But I think more than that, it's because Yeojin is still a kid, really. What is he? 14? 15? And whatever Muhyul does to/with grown-up people does not bother me much, but it's not an even playing field at all. And of course also the fact he is so caught in revenge for Haemyeong's death, he doesn't even stop to think Haemyeong, who was the soul of goodness and kidness, wouldn't have wanted his innocent baby brother hurt and would have been horrified if he found out this happened. Muhyul is pretty much out of control: I find it significant that when that royal attendant asks Maro to make sure Yeojin isn't killed, Maro who is probably Muhyul's closest friend in the world and the one who knows him the longest, can only say he will try, looking pretty uncertain.

I think something in Muhyul basically snapped after Haemyeong's death, what with the death itself, the supposed deaths of his friends, and his awful, awful time in the Black Shadow camp, which lasted what? 2 years? He must have some form of PTSD for one. I hope it's not irretrievably gone, but I honestly don't know. He's gone to some pretty dark places.

I wonder if Muhyul's reaction to Yuri's supposed betrayal of Haemyeong and Muhyul putting Yuri to the test of paternal love by ordering him to come alone if he wants Yeojin alive (while looking pretty sure he won't come) are in part motivated by his own feelings of abandonment and betrayal by his own parents, who after all, as he thinks (not wrongly) threw him out the moment he was born and never bothered to even give him their identities. He is not very sold on family institutions. I bet he glommed onto Haemyeong so much in part because it was a brief glimpse of something that contradicted his gloomy world-view: yes there are people who will care and love in a familial way. As he told Yeojin: he had no parents, no siblings and Heymeyong was all he had. Somebody who has only one treasured thing would hold on to it and grieve for its loss a lot more than someone who has a full and loving family to counterbalance any loss.

And I think the feeling of class resentment must be in there somewhere too. All his life he's been a slave and most of the time people in power haven't treated him very well. This is, indirectly, getting a bit of his own back.

Anyway, I love KotW with a mad passion. My favorite in ep 11 was this scene between Muhyul and Yeojin: http://www.viikii.net/videos/watch/2592

(start at 6 minutes in).