dangermousie | Chuno ep 20

After watching ep 20 of Chuno, two things are official:

1. Song Tae Ha has just become my favorite drama character ever. (Well, actually he is tied for first place with Kim Hyun Joon from IRIS, another wounded good guy fighter. Clearly I have a type).

2. If they do not have him happy at the end, with Un Nyun as his loving wife and about a dozen little kids running around to teach weaponry and to spoil, I am going to fly to Korea to have...words...with the writer. Violent, painfully sharp words.

I totally have a huge thing for aristocrat/slave OTP and Chuno is like a smorgasbrod of this. Beside DG/UN, the whole thing with Tae Ha and Un Nyun hits that kink in about ten different ways because he is a former super-high aristocrat (Crown Prince's BFF and all) made into a slave and she is a runaway slave who became an aristocrat and it goes round and round and round and the sheer wonderfulness of it makes me incoherent.

When he tells her "Un Nyun or Hye Won, you are still my wife", I thought I was going to DIE!!!!! And look at the look on her face! And then he tells her if they have a son, they should name him Tae Won (for Tae Ha and Hye Won, like the name she came up with as little Prince's camouflage). OMGOMGOMG they are the most amazing sweetest darlings and no harm is allowed to come to them!

ARE YOU MELTING YET?????

OK, I still love you, Dae Gil. Sorry, sweetie!

This scene made me tear up.

This was wonderful and angsty too. I love the way DG loves Un Nyun - he'd die without a second thought if it would make her happy for a minute. And clearly despite her genuine love for Tae Ha, she is struggling with the duality of her feelings too - after all, she loved DG madly and the only way she was able to move on and fall in love again was because she believed he was dead. And now he's alive and her feelings are rekindling. But she loves her husband too! Argh, poor woman.

One of the things that both galls DG and brings him huge comfort at the same time is that the man Un Nyun has chosen is so manifestly a good, honorable, even heroic man - an idealist and a capable fighter and basically nothing that DG could look down on. I actually love DG and TH's interactions a lot. Because they are both learning - TH letting go of his ingrained class system beliefs. He may be an aristocratic ideal, but he is a 17th-century Confusian aristocratic ideal, a man of his time - he would have never thought about the basic injustice of a class system even despite his own slavery, if it wasn't for DG's telling him of UN's slave status and then those conversations they had. Because he never truly viewed himself as a slave - unjustly condemned to slavery for a crime he didn't commit but to fix his and his men's situation, you do not need the overhaul of the whole system - you can work within the system, to make it not corrupted - if the class system and slavery was used 'properly,' he and his men would have never been enslaved because they were framed not genuinely guilty. While for an average slave, for someone like UN, whether the class system was administered well or not didn't matter - she was born a slave and would die one under any version of it. (It's sort of like Iljimae v. Hong Gil Dong - in the former Iljimae was fine with the existing system, he just wasn't fine that it improperly killed his family, made him commoner etc. Because if the system was used the way it was intended, none of the wrongs to his family would have occurred. While in HGD, part of the reason HGD wanted to overturn the system itself as opposed to fix it was because no matter how justly administered, he'd still be a slave).

But DG is learning too - he is learning that it is possible to maintain your ideals despite being thrust into absolute hell. That you can be both an idealist and strong. That there is honor in the world. Etcetc. I love how he is stunned speechless when he asks TH why he didn't kill him earlier (during their combat) and TH matter-of-factly says because he's never killed one of 'our' citizens. (He is a soldier dedicated to protect and he will clearly uphold this - he's insanely incredible).

And of course TH asking DG to look after UN and the little Prince while he goes on a mission - wow. I love that he knows DG would die for UN but what I love most of all is that his desire to protect the woman he loves and his trust in her trump any jealousy or concern or anything - after all it's clear DG is still madly in love with UN and she still has some feelings for him.

Preview promises me this. Apparently he tells her this is the last time they will be separated. Uh-oh. Please don't let it be the last time they see each other. I will kill something! My pet nightmare is TH being forced to re-enact a scene from a decade ago - coming back from his duty only to find his wife dead and the (surrogate) son which she tried to protect still in her arms. Only this time alive. NOOOOO!