I’m still waiting for Viki subs. Meanwhile, I’m transferring my posts from soompi over here because one of these days, I’ll go nuclear and delete all my posts in soompi. (lol)

Another one of my good friend, @fikachuuu asked me these questions:

Ok here comes the questions:

1. What was the point of PJW asking Lady Reaper to see the memories of Sunny? I mean in the end she didn’t really do anything. She just kept quiet about the whole thing?

2. Why is it that Reaper was able to see in Sunny’s memory a memory that only Kim Shin and Kim Sun shared (the scene at the palanquin)? Was WY secretly following them in that scene?

3. And lastly, if Sunny and Reaper did not drink the tea of oblivion but still lost the memories of their past lives, then what was the point of the tea of oblivion in the first place? Come to think of it, why all the common knowledge that Grim Reapers’ were reborn from souls who had committed a million sins but Reaper in the end said that people who committed suicide were the ones who were reborn again as Grim Reapers.

PS: I hope I’m not bombarding you with too many questions. I don’t want to be depriving you of your sleep. I understand that it takes awhile for you to put together an answer so don’t worry and take your time. I don’t really mind waiting. (:

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No, I don’t mind you asking me questions.  To be honest, it didn’t take me long to think of the answers to your questions. What took me time was typing the response and searching for the right episodes to screenshot, and THEN uploading of pictures onto my photobucket. lol. I wish I had a secretary for soompi purposes.

My answer to Question 1: What was the point of PJW asking Lady Reaper to see the memories of Sunny? I mean in the end she didn’t really do anything. She just kept quiet about the whole thing?

The Eunuch asked the Lady Reaper because he himself didn’t know the truth about their identities. He wanted verification so he could lock onto the RIGHT target of his vengeance.

However, the information he received from the Lady Reaper (thank goodness!) was wrong. The Lady Reaper lied to the Eunuch and said that she only saw the Queen. She lied out of fear and guilt, because she was complicit in the death of the King. That was HER sin, not suicide.

And do you recall that confrontation in Episode 13 between the Reaper and the Eunuch in Sunny’s chicken shop? Grabbing the Eunuch by the throat (btw, note the mirror behind them), the Reaper told him that they met before, and 20 years ago, when they had first met each other, he had the same feeling of déjà vu.

I’ve screenshot both the dramafever and dramacool’s dialogues.

Dramafever is first, Dramanice second.

For me, his comment revealed that, in the deep recesses of his mind, he sensed another time when he had confronted the Eunuch. He was probably remembering this encounter:

Interestingly enough, the Eunuch gave the same spiel about the existence of evil in human hearts. Reaper accused him of surviving by feeding off the bad emotions in people. In response, the Eunuch questioned whether it was his fault that an individual was blind to evil or the individual’s fault for refusing to see evil by his own choice.  This whole confrontation between the Reaper and the Eunuch in Sunny’s restaurant was history repeating itself.

Another thing that didn’t change was the Eunuch’s lies. His REAL POWER was in his LIES.

And @maryofbethany, @romanov @CatWhiskers and the other Catholics and Christians would easily see the religious connection. Like the Eunuch, the devil’s primary strength was his lies.

An aside: In the bible, the Devil’s great lie was to Eve when told her that she wouldn’t die if she ate the forbidden fruit. God’s command was very clear: don’t eat the fruit or you’ll die. But the devil deceived her and Adam, and said that God didn’t want them to become godlike so He forbade them from eating the fruit.

For me, the Eunuch spread destruction through LIES. With his other victims, like the hit-and-run driver and the bad husband, he most likely deceived them into believing that evils acts were permissible because there was no cosmic repercussion or divine retribution.  With the Reaper’s case, however, the Eunuch lied by acting as if he had “inside knowledge” all along of the identity of the Reaper and Sunny.  The opposite of lies is truth.

Only the butterfly god and the Lady in Red knew the true identities of the Reaper and Sunny.  The Eunuch wasn’t privy to their conversation, and he could only make assumptions, which were the wrong ones. Moreover, even if he overheard the tiniest bit of the conversation between the butterfly god and the Lady in Red, he still wouldn’t know for certain who/what the gods were referring to, because the two gods were purposely ambiguous.  (That’s how the audience got fooled, too, when you think about it….)

For me, there was NO real danger of the correct identities of the Reaper and Sunny falling into the wrong hands, like the Eunuch’s hands, and messing up “heaven’s plans.”  The butterfly god/DH would have intervened had he thought that that his divine plans were being thwarted, like when he lied about Sunny’s identity in Episode 11. He was ensuring that a “happy ending” or the pathway to salvation would be attained — eventually — by Reaper, Sunny, Goblin and ET.  As I said, the butterfly god was being cruel…to be kind.

t’s this simple, @fikachuuu —

If the Eunuch knew who the real Queen was during that fateful encounter in Sunny’s chicken restaurant in Episode 13, then he would have killed the Reaper right there and then. Conversely, if Reaper knew his real identity, i.e., that he was actually Kim Sun, then he would have betrayed himself to the Eunuch, and Eunuch would have killed him anyway.  Ignorance was best for the Reaper. lol

The Eunuch was already thinking of killing Sunny right before the Reaper appeared out of nowhere. If the Eunuch discovered the truth from the Lady Reaper, then Reaper would have been his target and the Reaper was no match to the Eunuch. He had no defense against the Eunuch. Nor could he kill the Eunuch even if he knew the Eunuch’s real name because he himself had no power of death over him.

The Eunuch was able to roam the earth for 900 years with impunity, because ONLY Shin’s sword could slay him.  So, what spared the Reaper/Queen from death that day was the misinformation or ambiguity about the Reaper’s identity. The Eunuch believed the Reaper to his protégé and “son,” Wang Yeo, and Reaper knew no better, so he was spared.  

Unlike those people outside the building who weren’t spared.

See how that worked out for the good? 😀

Question 2. Why is it that Reaper was able to see in Sunny’s memory a memory that only Kim Shin and Kim Sun shared (the scene at the palanquin)? Was WY secretly following them in that scene?

The Reaper was able to see Sunny’s memory (the scene at the palanquin) because when they accidentally touched hands in Episode 9, Sunny was wearing that cursed ring which belonged to the Queen. The Reaper was seeing HIS own memories as the Queen. Not Sunny’s.

Remember? The shaman warned Sunny not to wear the ring because it contained “all the grudge, resentment and loneliness” of the original owner. These bad feelings would transfer onto the wearer of the ring, Sunny.

The original owner of the ring was Kim Sun, the Queen. The ring was forcibly placed on her finger during that acrimonious confrontation with the King. As I explained with the body/actor switch, the Queen also had her own pent-up anger, resentment and grudge, because of the King’s irrational and jealous demand on her to choose loyalties: to be the King’s woman or the traitor’s sister. Moreover, the Queen felt betrayed that the King always chose to side with the Eunuch, instead of taking up her side for once.

If you reverse their whole dialogue in that Episode 12, and look at LDW as the Queen, and YIN as the King, you’ll see that the Queen was wondering whether the King had loved her all along. In her mind, if he truly loved her, he wouldn’t be giving her this terrible ultimatum.

🙂 Seriously. I thought that whole scene – how they switched actors — was genius. Again, the young actors could have easily played the King/Queen roles. But FOR ME, switching LDW (who I’ve already seen as the female Queen) and YIN (who I’ve also come to see as the King) made me realize that both the Queen and King had the exact same grievances (grudge, resentment and loneliness) but in REVERSE. Indeed, it was like looking at mirror, darkly.

Question 3: 3. And lastly, if Sunny and Reaper did not drink the tea of oblivion but still lost the memories of their past lives, then what was the point of the tea of oblivion in the first place? Come to think of it, why all the common knowledge that Grim Reapers’ were reborn from souls who had committed a million sins but Reaper in the end said that people who committed suicide were the ones who were reborn again as Grim Reapers.

As for Sunny and Reaper losing their memories in their reincarnation despite forgoing the tea of oblivion, I simply assumed that the  butterfly god was upset because Reaper willfully broke another rule so he enforced the “memory obliteration” anyway. (Like the Reaper’s boss punished him for abuse of powers.) However, since the butterfly god had pledged to be always on Reaper’s side, he was lenient about the couple meeting up with each other in the next reincarnation. He allowed them that grace and mercy because they were able to atone for their past sins in this lifetime.  But this is speculation, of course, because we don’t have a scene of Reaper/Sunny talking to the butterfly god.

BTW, do you really think that the Reaper and Sunny swapped genders again in her fourth reincarnation? I would so approve of that.   To be honest, I’ve been skipping their reunion scene so I haven’t gone over their dialogues.  I don’t get that whole clandestine hotel hook-up. It appeared so brazen.

As for the Reaper’s comment that “people who committed suicide were the ones who were reborn again as Grim Reapers,” I think this was his FALSE perception of a reaper’s job description BASED on his own personal experience.

I think ET’s description of the Grim Reaper’s job in Ep 13 came closest to what the butterfly god/DH said to Shin in Ep 3. Because death was lonely, the Reapers were there to guide.  (I’ll have to look for those screenshots again and edit this post later.)  If you asked ME, I’d say that Reapers were people who had gravely sinned in the past. But they were also sinners with great understanding, empathy and compassion for other sinners. Like Kim Sun. Based on what we saw of her and the Lady Reaper in their previous lives, I’d say reapers were originally gentle, not malevolent, people who found themselves caught in untenable situations for which they had to atone.

At any rate, the Lady Reaper KNEW what her real sin was, but she hesitated to reveal the truth to Reaper.  If you watch that scene carefully, (I wish I knew how to make a gif.) you can tell that she was conflicted. When Reaper asked her for forgiveness, she moved and leaned forward as if to correct him. She was about to say something. Then, she changed her mind and looked down.

The Lady Reaper knew that she administered poison to the king. That was the reason SHE became a reaper. However, because the Reaper only saw the Lady Reaper in “his” fake memories, he jumped to conclusion that 1) SHE didn’t know what her sin was, and that 2) she committed suicide like him. He didn’t know that the Lady Reaper had touched Sunny’s hand – but without the ring so she knew more about their past history than he did.

Also, you spotted another plot-hole that I’ve been wanting to mention.  You said, “If Sunny was queen, she wouldn’t have figured out what her sins were since the queen died before Lady Reaper gave king his poisoned medicine.”

That’s spot on!

Also, the Lady Reaper wouldn’t have seen this image in Sunny’s memories had she been truly the Queen. It wouldn’t be part of the Queen’s memories because this was the KING holding his drawing of the Queen AFTER THE DEATH of the Queen. This was one of the plot-holes I mentioned earlier. These inconsistencies or plot-holes wouldn’t exist if the Sunny was Wang Yeo.

That’s the King’s white sleeve, and the King’s portrait of the queen in Sunny’s memory.  The Lady Reaper could NOT have seen this image when she touched Sunny’s hand if she was the Queen. Right? 

Anyway, that’s one of the issues I have with the reincarnation belief. Because of the erasure of memory, people COULD end up atoning or paying for somebody else’s sin, and NOT knowing any better. The Reaper thought he was Wang Yeo and felt guilty for the pain he caused to others, when he wasn’t Wang Yeo at all. However, through the intervention of the “cruel” gods, their just punishment was still tempered to fit their actual sins. That is, the real Wang Yeo/Sunny ended up alone in exile like the King had ordered Shin to do in the previous lifetime. And the real Kim Sun/Reaper ended up with her/his beloved brother Shin and they were able to comfort each other like the real siblings they were, when the “loves” of their lives were gone. I think it would have been worse had the Reaper/Queen gone on exile leaving Sunny/King with Shin. Wouldn’t you agree? 🙂

Lastly, (or firstly? this was part of our question #1 :)), you asked what was the whole point of the Lady Reaper’s silence in the end. For me, it was just right, befitting, that the Lady Reaper remained silent because the whole cycle had to come to an end. It was the God’s way of saying, “That’s enough. You’ve done enough.”

Remember I told you that God listened to Shin, even in silence? Even when he didn’t think God was there, He was. Well, in the scene previous to this meeting of the Reaper and Lady Reaper, Shin was consoling the Reaper with bunny fruits. Shin told the Reaper that it would be nice if the gods were to tell them that enough is enough. “You’ve done enough.”

Well, God heeded Shin again, and He showed clemency to his sister. Just as the Reaper was telling the Lady Reaper to forgive and move on, the Lady Reaper was also doing exactly that. Her silence meant that finally everything could be laid to rest. Had she spoken up, then the whole Pandora’s box of guilt, anger, sad love, and vengeance would be reopened. Sunny and the Reaper had already settled their peace with each other in this lifetime, even if that was meant to be separate peace.

I realized too that this was part of the theme of redemption. It was useless whipping themselves forever over an event that happened almost a millennium ago. They’ve done enough and they’ve been redeemed.

Tagging a few ladies:

@salz @phikyl @bebe1989 @nearsea  @vivvianne22  @Athenaries @kokodus @crazyoverkdrama @annnchan @romanov @rnia93 @sakurayukihime  @violetpetal  @Sarang21 @maryofbethany @staygold @violetpetal @dramu51ch0c10ve @CatWhiskers @rrmski @fikachuuu @ceressi, @frankreich @am420 @emilydark  @Nerdy Mina   @CatchMine_ID  @salz

source: https://forums.soompi.com/en/topic/396037-drama-2016-2017-guardian-the-lonely-and-great-goblin-%EB%8F%84%EA%B9%A8%EB%B9%84/?do=findComment&comment=20367698