Love Contract: the OTP levels are insane
Sep. 6th, 2006 12:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dangermousieTo say I am a little in love with Love Contract would be like saying I can get a little obsessive.
And I love love love the OST.
It's HYPERVENTILATION time.
By cost of brain-deadedness, I have finished through ep 8.
I am in love with it. I can take or leave supporting cast (except for two of XF's friends on whom more below) but I admit to ffing through their scenes just because I was so eager to get to Feng and Ken's scenes. Because? Oh. My. God. They are to die for.
(Brief rant on the two friends who came up with the Love Contract: I hate them. The hell is wrong with them? Did their mothers drop them on their heads? Some friends they are. They seem to be doing it for no good reason other than boredom and manipulating two people for amusement is horrible. Also, creepos, get a life of your own!)
But to get back to Ken and Feng. They both come from very messed up backgrounds which would seem to preclude their falling in love or at least believing in love as something good, happy, and attainable.
Ken's father left him and his mother and Ken carries a great deal of understandable anger about it and what bothers him the most is that his mother still keeps hoping for the man's return. Yet, scoff as he might, he still has that same bit of hope in him: there is one sad little scene when he comes home and sees a male silouette dimly in the kitchen and goes 'Dad?' (and it turns out to be his uncle who's decided to visit). And I think that is why he is so responsible (even overburdened): he's had to take on his Dad's role since early age.
And as for Feng, she is very abrasive, sometimes uncomfortably so (I really want to tell her a few times to ease up on her tricks on Ken, especially because for some bizarre reason I feel quite protective of his character, which is an irrational feeling that doesn't happen very often with me and dorama heroes. When she smacks his peace offering of little toy froggy I am all 'awwwwww' because I've lost my mind), but it's a defense mechanism. She is afraid of letting someone in and getting terribly hurt. These are her barriers. In a way, she is like a kid testing boundaries. It's a test of 'does he relly like me?' She wants to drive him (or any other guy) away before they leave her.
But she has plenty of reasons to be so defensive. Look at her family. The scars she has is because during one of their innumerable fights, her father threw some sort of a flaming candle at her mother and Feng happened to get in between. Her father! How is that for horrible. And her father drinks and cheats and her parents have terrible fights (there are images of her sticking her hands to her ears upstairs) and her elder sister is in an unhappy affair with a married man who is never going to leave his wife. And yet she so clearly wants to be a girl who is in love and has fun: when Ken asks her for a movie in ep 8 (or is it 7?) you see her try on various nice shirts before 'snapping' out of it.
They seem to be drawn to each other despite everything (and the fact that Mike He and Ariel Lin have crackling chemistry, doesn't hurt). I love the scene where he is driving by on his bike and he finds her drinking beer on the street (another family fight blah blah) and he sits there with her (he really is a good guy) and then she passes out, so he puts her on his bike and she is kinda flopping around and she spins into his shoulder and you can see this startled total awareness of her just flare up in him and there are close-ups of their faces and it's to die for. And he brings her over to his place and tucks her in and just sketches and there are blues everywhere and it's a beautiful scene.
And the morning after he wants to renew the contract because it's an excuse. He really likes her (btw, Mike He sucking his thumb (because it got pinpricked? Whoa HOT).
I also love the scene later where she is at the bleachers and he is running laps and she is mad at the world (like she generally is) and is yelling at him to shut up and ends up running after him and they both collapse in a heap exhaustedly and next thing we see is they are sitting there drinking beer and he attempts to cheer her up by demonstrating his head can be a beer can holder (ahhhh, college) and she can't do the same so she shows him 'hair in eyelashes' trick and they are both young and stupid and it's adorable and they almost kiss (whoa, chemistry!). Her barriers are relaxed when she is drunk...
And I love it when they go for more beer and she has her arms full so he just leans down and ties her untied shoelace that he noticed was loose. And then they end up having a beer spray fight and it's perfect. And they are (shock!) laughing. In fact, both of them are happier when together. He talks more than he normally does (he really is very isolated. He doesn't have any friends at all) and she actually smiles and enjoys life (that scene of his spinning her feet first during the club exercises and her laughing and them both grinning is startling in the amount of unused joy they have. I'd say it's my fave scene except for the one at the end of 8).
They both have plenty of reason to believe love is bad and not real, but hey...it's happening to them.
I love when he asks her out to the movie (because he really wants to, this time) and she is flustered and he touches her hair and walks off and you see her quietly touch her hair where he's touched it (almost as cute is the scene where he flashes to her in her sister's show (what is with the hair?) and almost walks into a pole). I also love their discussion about their mothers who are scheming to get them together and he mentions 'what if I have feelings for you' and she tries to brush it off and she is petrified.
But my favorite is when she comes to visit him at the bar he works at with more beer. She really likes seeking him out, probably because he is so steady, but this scene just enters crazy amazingness times 11 because the lights go out and she is afraid of the dark, so he tells her when kids are afraid of the dark, adults tell them fairy tales and he starts telling her one, doing shadow puppets on the wall to illustrate the story, about a baby cow who used to bully others because it was unhappy so it went to look for happiness and the intercut between the shadows and their faces and the fact that this is a story either about her or him, really, and the best thing is that she starts falling asleep and she just folds onto his lap and OMGthe chemistry just goes to scary heights and there is all this confused tenderness and she asks him, almost asleep, 'what happened at the end' and he tells her that the cow met a girl and told her 'I like you' and it's in the context of the fairy tale but he is leaning in and then he repeats 'I like you' and the fairy tale has melted into reality and his saying this has nothing to do with the story he was telling any more and he leans in to kiss her and we cut to their shadows on the wall and before he completes the kiss, the credits and I SCREAM!!!!
ETA: GUUUUUUUUUH
OMG. That kissing scene. EEEEEEEE! It's one of my fave dorama kissing scenes and not just because I am a sucker for scenes shot in extreme close-up. I just love how tentative and tender he is, as if she is fragile and made of glass (but hey, he's pretty thorough too :P) and I am just a puddle of goo on the floor. And then the lights come on and she goes 'don't look at me' and he just cradles her as she hides her face. OMG OMG OMG OMG.
And I love how next morning she is touching her lips.
I am DEAD.
And I love love love the OST.
It's HYPERVENTILATION time.
By cost of brain-deadedness, I have finished through ep 8.
I am in love with it. I can take or leave supporting cast (except for two of XF's friends on whom more below) but I admit to ffing through their scenes just because I was so eager to get to Feng and Ken's scenes. Because? Oh. My. God. They are to die for.
(Brief rant on the two friends who came up with the Love Contract: I hate them. The hell is wrong with them? Did their mothers drop them on their heads? Some friends they are. They seem to be doing it for no good reason other than boredom and manipulating two people for amusement is horrible. Also, creepos, get a life of your own!)
But to get back to Ken and Feng. They both come from very messed up backgrounds which would seem to preclude their falling in love or at least believing in love as something good, happy, and attainable.
Ken's father left him and his mother and Ken carries a great deal of understandable anger about it and what bothers him the most is that his mother still keeps hoping for the man's return. Yet, scoff as he might, he still has that same bit of hope in him: there is one sad little scene when he comes home and sees a male silouette dimly in the kitchen and goes 'Dad?' (and it turns out to be his uncle who's decided to visit). And I think that is why he is so responsible (even overburdened): he's had to take on his Dad's role since early age.
And as for Feng, she is very abrasive, sometimes uncomfortably so (I really want to tell her a few times to ease up on her tricks on Ken, especially because for some bizarre reason I feel quite protective of his character, which is an irrational feeling that doesn't happen very often with me and dorama heroes. When she smacks his peace offering of little toy froggy I am all 'awwwwww' because I've lost my mind), but it's a defense mechanism. She is afraid of letting someone in and getting terribly hurt. These are her barriers. In a way, she is like a kid testing boundaries. It's a test of 'does he relly like me?' She wants to drive him (or any other guy) away before they leave her.
But she has plenty of reasons to be so defensive. Look at her family. The scars she has is because during one of their innumerable fights, her father threw some sort of a flaming candle at her mother and Feng happened to get in between. Her father! How is that for horrible. And her father drinks and cheats and her parents have terrible fights (there are images of her sticking her hands to her ears upstairs) and her elder sister is in an unhappy affair with a married man who is never going to leave his wife. And yet she so clearly wants to be a girl who is in love and has fun: when Ken asks her for a movie in ep 8 (or is it 7?) you see her try on various nice shirts before 'snapping' out of it.
They seem to be drawn to each other despite everything (and the fact that Mike He and Ariel Lin have crackling chemistry, doesn't hurt). I love the scene where he is driving by on his bike and he finds her drinking beer on the street (another family fight blah blah) and he sits there with her (he really is a good guy) and then she passes out, so he puts her on his bike and she is kinda flopping around and she spins into his shoulder and you can see this startled total awareness of her just flare up in him and there are close-ups of their faces and it's to die for. And he brings her over to his place and tucks her in and just sketches and there are blues everywhere and it's a beautiful scene.
And the morning after he wants to renew the contract because it's an excuse. He really likes her (btw, Mike He sucking his thumb (because it got pinpricked? Whoa HOT).
I also love the scene later where she is at the bleachers and he is running laps and she is mad at the world (like she generally is) and is yelling at him to shut up and ends up running after him and they both collapse in a heap exhaustedly and next thing we see is they are sitting there drinking beer and he attempts to cheer her up by demonstrating his head can be a beer can holder (ahhhh, college) and she can't do the same so she shows him 'hair in eyelashes' trick and they are both young and stupid and it's adorable and they almost kiss (whoa, chemistry!). Her barriers are relaxed when she is drunk...
And I love it when they go for more beer and she has her arms full so he just leans down and ties her untied shoelace that he noticed was loose. And then they end up having a beer spray fight and it's perfect. And they are (shock!) laughing. In fact, both of them are happier when together. He talks more than he normally does (he really is very isolated. He doesn't have any friends at all) and she actually smiles and enjoys life (that scene of his spinning her feet first during the club exercises and her laughing and them both grinning is startling in the amount of unused joy they have. I'd say it's my fave scene except for the one at the end of 8).
They both have plenty of reason to believe love is bad and not real, but hey...it's happening to them.
I love when he asks her out to the movie (because he really wants to, this time) and she is flustered and he touches her hair and walks off and you see her quietly touch her hair where he's touched it (almost as cute is the scene where he flashes to her in her sister's show (what is with the hair?) and almost walks into a pole). I also love their discussion about their mothers who are scheming to get them together and he mentions 'what if I have feelings for you' and she tries to brush it off and she is petrified.
But my favorite is when she comes to visit him at the bar he works at with more beer. She really likes seeking him out, probably because he is so steady, but this scene just enters crazy amazingness times 11 because the lights go out and she is afraid of the dark, so he tells her when kids are afraid of the dark, adults tell them fairy tales and he starts telling her one, doing shadow puppets on the wall to illustrate the story, about a baby cow who used to bully others because it was unhappy so it went to look for happiness and the intercut between the shadows and their faces and the fact that this is a story either about her or him, really, and the best thing is that she starts falling asleep and she just folds onto his lap and OMGthe chemistry just goes to scary heights and there is all this confused tenderness and she asks him, almost asleep, 'what happened at the end' and he tells her that the cow met a girl and told her 'I like you' and it's in the context of the fairy tale but he is leaning in and then he repeats 'I like you' and the fairy tale has melted into reality and his saying this has nothing to do with the story he was telling any more and he leans in to kiss her and we cut to their shadows on the wall and before he completes the kiss, the credits and I SCREAM!!!!
ETA: GUUUUUUUUUH
OMG. That kissing scene. EEEEEEEE! It's one of my fave dorama kissing scenes and not just because I am a sucker for scenes shot in extreme close-up. I just love how tentative and tender he is, as if she is fragile and made of glass (but hey, he's pretty thorough too :P) and I am just a puddle of goo on the floor. And then the lights come on and she goes 'don't look at me' and he just cradles her as she hides her face. OMG OMG OMG OMG.
And I love how next morning she is touching her lips.
I am DEAD.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-09-06 11:04 pm (UTC)Before that, I was all "meh, this drama seems rather slow-moving" but then that scene fried my brain and I was addicted and hyperventilated waiting for the YouTube vids I found to load (because my torrents were taking too long and I needed more RIGHT AWAY).
I really do hate her friends, but I'm willing to cut them a tiny bit of slack about the love contract, because at the start, their reason for doing it was because she wished to fall in love and they felt that was the only way... but because it's drama-land, things become infinitely more complicated.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-06 11:42 pm (UTC)I just love the next day when he comes by and they are both skittish and he is waiting for her to set the tone but he clearly wants her to reciprocate her feelings but of course she is petrified.
Re: her friends. They are very very awful. But I have a special pieace of loathing for Mu Tou, the quiet one with glasses who doesn't want to make a move himself but keeps stalking her. I have no idea if we are supposed to find him likeable, but he makes me think of people who keep heads in freezers.
But Ken/Feng are beyond OTP. I love how crazy skittish she is and how he is so reserved but still quietly persistent and OMG, the scene on the beach? Killed me.
I am going to do a write-up about all the eps I finish tonight separately, but I just love love love the slow progression of her trust and their feelings!