The thread is now open for spoilers, comments, analyses, guesses, hypotheses and theories.
Thanks, @Growing_Beautifully, nrllee, welmaris, and all of you who dissected the fairy tales!
Let’s enjoy the show!
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Gifs from @kojiseok’s tumblr. Thanks!
credit: kojiseok’s tumblr
— Whoops! I almost forgot to include these gifs of Kim SooHyun. Gif credit: ohsehuns’ tumblr
Personally, I prefer more beef on my beefcake but…
credit: ohsehuns’ tumblr
…but at least his six pack was real. Not like these.
lol.
LOLOL! Real beefcake and false abs. Loved it!! Now to try to eat a quick lunch before another meeting while trying not to chortle over the 6 pack images that I can’t unsee!!!
Happy 4th of July (in advance) by the way!!!
Oh those two guys! Too much at breakfast time. But they’re having fun, aren’t they? –Quick scroll back to real abs. Haha, @packmule, he may not be VERY beefy, but he looks agile. Just saying.
This episode was interesting but also painful. I still stick with the theory that MYs mother is a killer of some sort. She may be the Blackbeard in the fairytale tommorow because she’s haunting both the father and Moon Young. Also in rapunzel when the witch found out the prince was with rapunzel she causes him to fall from the window after tricking him and he becomes blind when he falls on the thorns. This happened in Sleeping Witch as well the witch promises the girl that she will kill the prince. Moon Young is definitely protecting Gang Tae in the past and present and the butterflies were done to protect him from her mother. Is she a serial killer? Or does she also have a disorder. I hope not because that will make the message of the show become a bit skewed. I’m excited to know more and I hope people stop calling Moon Young names because when Jae Su did it this episode it didn’t sit well with me. Still the relationship is not balanced yet as well.
Wow i think @nrllee mentioned the bluebeard last thread and episode6 will mention the tale of bluebeard! Daebak! Are you songhwa the psychic? 😅
I’m really hoping that MY doesn’t turn out to have some menatl illness. Also it’s a weird thing I felt that maybe nurse juri has a split personality without her knowledge. And she is probably the ghost which people are talking about
I recognized the tune the “ghost” was humming as the American folk song “O My Darling Clementine.” This is a ballad about a miner mourning his lover, Clementine, who stubbed her toe, fell in a river and drowned. I did a quick search to see if there was a Korean connection to the song and sure enough, according to a site called mamalisa.com, there is a Korean children’s song, “ On a Vast Wide Open Seashore,” sung to the same tune. The literal translation of the lyrics is
“A long, long beach
A hut
A father fisherman
He doesn’t know his daughter
My love, my love,
My love Clementine,
You left your old father alone
And you left forever.“
So, the mystery continues. Is Ko Moon-Young’s mother alive or a ghost who drowned? Who does the father see when he looks on MY; his daughter’s face or his wife’s?
@Dlia, I also thought the father tried to (or maybe did) kill his wife, and he mistook his daughter for his wife when he tried to strangle MY both in the past and in the present.
It looks like MY’s mother threatened to harm GT if MY played with him. MY pushed GT away in order to protect him.
I loved every minute in this episode.
I wondered if MY’s mother is the female patient who was reading in bed (I wonder what the book is?), who accused the patient who saw a ‘ghost’ of having auditory hallucinations and then slapped Ju-ri. She is the right age and nice looking, as the book critic described the mother.
The same patient also asked ST to take a picture of her right before he saw the butterfly (episode 4).
@Snow Flower – “It looks like MY’s mother threatened to harm GT if MY played with him. MY pushed GT away in order to protect him.”
Totally agreed. The mother did say she was going to kill the Prince.
Did any of you start laughing at the scene w/ JR and JR’s mom (SD)–after the MY and JR fight?
JR: He only shouted her name. He glared at her without evening glancing at me. He always talks so politely to me, but he talked very casually to her.
SD: You’re crying out your eyes out because of that?
JR: He’s closer to me. Why does he call me “Ju-Ri” so politely and why is she … why does he call her “Ko Mun-yeong” like that? And those clothes too. We bought them together at a BOGO sale. I can’t believe he let her wear them. And she slept in his room … How could he let her sleep in his room?
.
.
.
SD: But I must say Mun-yeong has grown into such a pretty lady.
JR: Pretty, my ass!!
LOL.
After the scene in the love hotel lobby when MY smacked GT’s shoulder several times, that must’ve stung because of the wet tee shirt! His pride must’ve also been hurt by her expertly throwing his words back at him. I’ll refrain from discussing whether he may have experienced any other pain from that episode.
Mom I cried when young MY had to treat young GT like that when before she met her mom downstairs, she was all smiles and beaming, excited to meet GT 😭.
I think she is capable of feeling emotions before whatever her mother did to her 😭. Oh well, can’t wait to see what to unravel next.
Anyway, the 6th GIF clearly let me see the face profile of MY mom. She looks like the one who talked to GT who is arranging him to meet a girl that is “perfect match” with him. Waaah what if I’m right?
Although I’m not sure if the girl she’s talking about is Juri because she saw girl Juri secretly admiring GT from the distance. I’m thinking maybe the girl was actually MY. Maybe I’m reaching to this. Because after this scene, GT talked to Juri on the rooftop, eventually rejecting her feelings for him.
@John L, yes, the scene with Ju-ri’s mother was funny. Both Ju-ri and MY are angry at GT for calling MY’s name only. The hotel lobby scene was funny, too – that nosy clerk! 🤣 ‘Even my mom has to pay on the spot…’
@Snow Flower, yes, I thought that back in ep. 4, when the lady asked ST to take her photo, but she wasn’t wearing patient clothing, so I thought she might be a visitor or have some other admin job there. Did you see the scars on her wrists? Dear oh dear.
Is anyone else worried about ST? I think he will be used as a pawn by any number of people. Ju-ri tells GT that ST likes staying at her house. GT admits that he may be using ST as an excuse to run away, MY has taken him home and gotten him drunk, plus had him sign a contract for art. Mind you, she may pay him well since she knows he likes money, but still… If he is employed at the hospital, he will be exposed to MY’s mother, if that patient is indeed her, and she seems like the most dangerous character altogether.
Ju-ri asked the patient about whether the ghost was near room 203. It sounds like she thinks either the ghost or someone acting like a ghost attacked MY’s father. I thought it was funny when she told the caregiver about the head nurse communing with ghosts and being a shaman, the sound of bells could be heard.
I thought that the acting in this episode was superb. I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s episode.
Wondering if our musical ones, @Snow Flower and @WEnchanteur, noticed the background music during the scene where MY and GT are eating dinner up in GT’s room: it’s a variation on Chopsticks. (Ep. 5, 14:39)
Also I’ve been thinking since ep 2 about this. What is the timeline of the childhood MY, GT and JR?
Because if these three knew each other since then, why did JR ask how MY knew GT. MY met GT and JR since childhood, but JR met GT when they’re working at a hospital?
So JR is not aware that GT always followed MY? Or JR actually met and knew GT since they’re kids and liked him since then then she’s jealous of MY then that’s when she did something two-faced bitchy to MY…
Hahahaha I miss it here mom 😘
@011sn No not psychic. I just read PD notes and interviews 😂. At the press con, he said the drama would feature Red Shoes and BlueBeard as fairytales and other originals (the ones MY pens).
I am a bit behind. Just finished Ep3 and read the story about Zombie Boy above. I agree with @kurushio. It’s a story about how mentally ill people and their primary carers are treated. A few additional notes
1. OK hospital was built over a cemetery. So the mentally ill patients are like “the walking dead” (to the world who wants them locked up and kept out of sight, out of mind). In Asian cultures, nobody in their right mind would want to live near a cemetery. They would certainly not build their home on top of one. It just highlights how the society views people who are “different”. Giving them a plot of land which nobody wanted in the first place. It’s the same in China. When we went on a short term mission with our church to an Orphanage set up by Christians, the bulk of the children were ones abandoned by their parents because they will disabled or mentally ill. The Orphanage was bursting at the seams so the government allowed the organization to take over a disused building (the developer built it but went bust so it was never fully completed). There were no lifts in that 10 stores building – only stairs. ☹️. For wheelchair bound children, they lived the whole of their lives on one floor. But that was the grim reality.
2. The minister (?) promised to get rid of (Or move) the hospital as a campaign promise? The fact that he thought it would actually buy him votes just highlights the fear factor in society. People are fearful of what they don’t understand. They think mentally ill people are “dangerous”.
3. Whilst GT is the obvious person everyone thinks of (he’s the one who reads the story) when we read Zombie Boy. I think it’s broader than that and refers to all primary carers of people who are mentally challenged. Some lock them away for the safety of the child (having them stared at, made fun of, poked and prodded by strangers can be painful for the child – literally that was how it was when we took some of the orphans out for a walk outside the facility – people just stopped and stared with abandon. Some even walked right up to the children and stared. The children were curiosities to them. Like a circus freak show. They didn’t mean to be rude. They had just never seen children like that before because they had been hidden away). Asian societies are shame cultures. We feel shame acutely. So these Zombie children (walking dead) are hidden away. Cocooned. Ugly Duckling (by MY) was about only caring for your own children, the ones who fit the mold of what’s “normal”. You shun the ugly duckling and lock them away (and forget they exist).
4. Zombie children metaphorically devour your soul. A lot of them require a great amount of care. If you have no respite or support network, it’s akin to them eating you up…limb by limb…you lose your sense of identity because so much of your life is entwined in caring for their needs. The Zombie mother’s heart was warm though? It’s as if only when she finally stopped to care for his physical needs and gave him that emotional love that he was longing for, that he finally spoke. He wasn’t just a “thing”, he was a person.
5. I know it’s easy to “hate” GT’s mother for saying what she did to GT and lumbering him with the responsibility of caring for ST. But for me it just highlights her despair and desperation. I pity her. It’s like that movie “My Sister’s Keeper”. I think GT’s mother was relieved to have some respite from being the primary carer. And it “frees” her from the worry that when she passes, ST would have someone to look after him? It doesn’t sound fair but it is the plight of every family who has a child with a mental or physical disability. The other movie to watch is “Wonder”. It brilliantly portrayed what life was like not just for the child with the disability but also the mindset of the sibling whose life revolved around the child. That’s why MY calls GT a hypocrite. Because underneath that veneer of stoic resolve, there’s a deep resentment for his plight. He’s chained to his brother. It wasn’t his choice. And it’s not that he doesn’t love his brother. He feels trapped in a situation he can’t ever escape from but he’s too scared to admit it.
6. MY’s solution to GT’s plight? Face the resentment front on. Admit to your failings, your bitterness. Don’t let it fester. Admit that it’s hard going. That it sucks big time. That it’s totally unfair. Once you acknowledge your plight, you can then move towards acceptance and resolution. I think this is a situation where the concept of Han isn’t healthy. If you just sit back in resentment and hold it all inside letting it fester, lamenting your lot in life with a “woe is me” attitude, it’s not healthy, neither for yourself or your charge. If on the other hand, you deal with it as MY suggested, it liberates you to live a life of authenticity (not hypocrisy).
@nrllee, you explained the Zombie Boy concept so well. Your experience with the disabled orphans, the ugly ducklings, who were hidden away and unknown to the general public – it must have been heart-breaking.
MY’s reaction to ST is interesting. I don’t know if she was aware of him as a child. I think she doesn’t understand his autistic behaviours, but she isn’t shocked or alarmed by him and seems very comfortable with him. She probably has discussed things with ST that no one else has before, adult to adult.
GT asked MY to look at the emotion pictures. She responds that she is not autistic, but in the morning, she spends a lot of time staring at them, perhaps so she can read GT’s expressions better. BTW, I don’t believe that ST is always convinced by GT’s smile. ST seems to know a con when he sees one.
Speaking of GT’s smile – Jae-Su now says it’s not the Joker, but Chuckie. What next? And how long has GT known that she is the girl from his childhood?
@Welmaris, I had the AC running when I was watching the episode, so I could not hear the background music very well. I will rewatch and listen more carefully. I also felt bad for GT during the hotel scene.
@Fern, Was the lady who talked to GT in Episode 5 the same lady who posed for ST in the previous episode? I am not sure. I thought they were different. I did notice the scars on her wrist. If she is the mother of MY, how come she has never crossed paths with MY’s father in the same hospital? We are told that the father has lost his memory, and yet he recognized MY. Both MY’s father and this patient were sharing rooms with other patients, so it is not that they are in isolation.
I suspect that GT recognized MY the first time he saw her as an adult. I think he was pretty sure by the end of Episode 1. When did MY recognize him?
Also, how did GT and JR meet? We have never seen childhood scenes of GT and JR together so far. My impression is that JR is not from a super rich family, but she is not poor either. It is possible that she and MY went to the same school. GT was definitely very poor as a child, and probably went to a different school. But then, how did he meet MY?
Speaking of JR, I thought that the scene with her mom was hilarious. JR acted like a petty princess throwing a temper tantrum. I think that she redeemed herself in her conversation with GT. In a way, she is following MY’s advice about confronting one’s problems and feelings head on. I am rooting for her and Jae Soo to get together.
The way this drama switches between the hilarious, the poignant, and the disturbing even within a single scene is truly amazing.
@nrllee, thank you for sharing your personal experience and for your interpretation of Zombie Kid.
Bates motel, ha!
@Fern and @Snowflower. I don’t think the woman who posed for ST is MY’s mother. She participated in MY’s literature class. Surely, MY would have recognized her. The other woman who wanted to set up GT, didn’t give off the right vibe, though who knows. I picture MY’s mother as wanting to eat him herself, not set him up with her daughter. She too would be hiding in plain sight.
Good point, @Dlia!
The woman at OK Psychiatric Hospital who wears the kimono robe is a patient: she wears the kimono over her hospital-issue pajamas. She is not MY’s mother. She was sitting in the back row of MY’s first literature class at the hospital, and responded to the question MY asked, “What does Heungbu and Nolbu teach us?” That woman answered, “If you’re a good person, you’ll win the lottery.” (Ep. 3, 41:25) MY saw that woman but did not display any signs of recognition. I believe she was a stranger to MY.
The woman who is wearing a mink wrap and talks with GT on the bench is not the same woman who wears the kimono. Mink wrap lady has cheeks that are more round, and her eyebrows are shorter. Kimono lady’s eyebrows have more shape to them.
It was Director Oh who was holding the shaman’s bells behind his back in episode 3. Senior Nurse Park has her arms crossed in front of her as the two of them talk outside his office. She’s wearing a lavender-colored uniform. The bells are shown next to white cloth, and Director Oh is wearing a white medical coat.
JuRi tells her nervous male coworker that a patient, Ms. Yoo Seon Hae, told others she’d heard a ghost humming. JuRi then told her coworker that Ms. Yoo Seon Hae “has been making a living communicating with ghosts. She was a shaman.” There hasn’t been any reference to Senior Nurse Park being a shaman.
We are told MY and JuRi were in middle school together, before MY moved to a different school. We don’t know what school GT attended, but we see him in an early episode waiting for MY at the gate outside her school, which to me implies he wasn’t a student there, so likely wouldn’t know JuRi through school. It is plausible GT and JuRi met for the first time as adults when both worked at the same hospital. Until fate brought all three together at the same place at the same time, GT would not have had reason to mention MY to JuRi, nor JuRi have reason to mention she’d known MY in school.
We haven’t been clearly told or shown MY’s and GT’s timeline. The animated story at the beginning shows the girl pulling the boy out of the water, the boy following girl for a length of time, then the boy running away when he sees her pulling apart a butterfly. In the “real life” version, we haven’t been shown when and why GT fell through the ice and why MY was there to witness it, giving her opportunity to choose to save him or not. In ep. 5 GT tells MY he knows where the cursed castle is because he went there “That day when you saved me, and I ran away from you.” We see a flashback of child GT in the nighttime making a bouquet and going to the gate in front of MY’s house. GT’s words as he’s handing MY the bouquet are “Earlier I was too…” He stops speaking when she drops and steps on the bouquet, grinding it into the dirt with her toe. She tells him to get lost, turns, and walks away from him. He then turns and walks (not runs) away from the gate. During this flashback scene GT is wearing a white tee shirt with red horizontal stripes, and a blue hooded sweatshirt. MY is wearing a dress that is white underneath, has a dark princess collar, and dark fabric attached in a style similar to a pinafore. These are the same clothes we see them wearing during the butterfly-ripping scene, which takes place in the daytime in a field of flowers. In that scene GT drops the bouquet when he sees MY tear a butterfly, then runs away. GT’s explanation about knowing the location of the cursed castle is confusing because flashbacks of what we’ve seen as “that day when you saved me” appear to show a winter scene: MY is bundled in a coat and bonnet, ice is on the pond, it is snowing, and the flower from which MY pulls petals is frozen. The flashbacks we’ve seen that reflect “I ran away from you” appear to be in warmer weather, probably springtime because of the presence of many flowers and butterflies. But GT seems to be saying she saved his life and he ran away on the same day. Is it a translation problem?
The following are descriptions of what we’ve seen in flashbacks of GT and MY as children. I am going into detail about their surroundings and the look and weight their clothing because these give hints as to time of year. Different outfits probably indicate different days; same outfits may indicate events that happened on the same day.
-MY in warm lavender-color bonnet and wearing something with a white, high pleated collar. Her coat is medium blue with white fur cuffs. It is daytime. Trees are covered in ice, snow is on the ground. (Winter?)
-GT thrashing in water, having broken through ice. He’s wearing a white tee with horizontal red stripes, yellow and black knit sweater, covered with a jacket that’s purple on the outside, royal blue on the inside and has white fur around the hood. MY tosses him a block of styrofoam so he can save himself. It is daytime and snowing. (Winter?)
-MY walking out a gate with other students, a book bag on her back. She’s wearing a blue quilted coat with white fur collar and purple ribbon tied in a bow. It is daytime, and it is snowing. (Winter?)
-GT is standing by a gate pillar as MY walks out of the gate. GT is wearing a red and blue knit cap, colorful sweater over teal turtleneck, brown pants and a heavy hooded jacket in khaki and light brown. He has on red canvas shoes with white laces, and a backpack is on his back. It is daytime, and it is snowing. When MY looks at him, GT turns away from her as if he doesn’t want her to recognize him. (Winter?)
-GT walking in the rain, carrying a clear plastic umbrella. He’s wearing brown pants and a royal blue long-sleeve top with yellow graphics and yellow around the elbows. He’s following MY as they cross a rustic wooden footbridge over water. It is daytime. (Spring?)
-MY is walking on a rustic wooden footbridge over water. She’s carrying a dark colored umbrella and is wearing a pink coat. It is daytime and it is raining. Tall wooded hills are in the background. (Spring?)
-GT is walking in a field of flowers. He is holding a bouquet of white flowers with yellow centers. His clothing is a blue hooded sweatshirt, brown pants, a white pocket tee with red horizontal stripes, and a pair of red canvas shoes with white laces. He approaches MY. It is daytime. In the background are wooded hills. GT is appalled to see MY tear apart a butterfly, then see at her feet a pile of flower petals and torn butterflies. He drops the bouquet and runs away from MY. (Late spring or summer?)
-MY is in a field of flowers. She’s wearing a dress with white sleeves, dark princess collar, blocks of dark gauzy fabric on the front bodice and covering the skirt. It is daytime. In the background are wooded hills and a body of water. MY holds up a swallowtail butterfly to show GT, then pulls it apart. She asks GT, “Do you still like me?” (Late spring or summer?)
-MY on the balcony of her room, coming down the stairs inside her house, then at the gate of her house. She’s wearing a dress with white long sleeves, dark princess collar, blocks of dark fabric in a style similar to a pinafore. It is nighttime. (Late spring or summer?)
-GT at the gate in front of MY’s mansion, wearing a white tee with red stripes, blue hooded sweatshirt. He holds a bouquet of white, yellow, and purple flowers. It is nighttime. (Late spring or summer?)
-GT walking in the field of flowers. He’s wearing a long-sleeved tan tee with gold stripes. It is daytime. He is following MY. (Summer?)
-MY walking in the field of flowers. She’s wearing a white short-sleeved top. It is daytime. (Summer?)
-MY is walking through a field of dried tall grass or grain. She’s wearing a burgundy coat with a lavender ruffle and black ribbon bow at her neck. It is daytime. Tall wooded hills are in the distance, as well as a small body of water. (Fall?)
-GT is walking behind MY in a field of dried tall grass or grain. He’s wearing a turtleneck sweater with burgundy, pink, and brown stripes and brown pants. It is daytime. Tall wooded hills are in the distance, as well as a small body of water. (Fall?)
In the scene where MY and GT are eating instant ramen at the convenience store as it rains outside, when either MY imagines GT as a child or GT imagines himself as a child, the young GT is wearing the white tee with red horizontal stripes, and the blue hooded sweatshirt. That outfit ties together this scene, the butterfly-ripping scene, and the scene at the gate of MY’s mansion.
Going in detail through the flashbacks of GT and MY as children has made me question a few things. If MY saved GT’s life in winter, and GT ran away from MY in spring when butterflies were around, then why do we have scenes of GT following MY in what could possibly be summer and fall? Did he follow her for more than a year? If MY’s mother didn’t want her extraordinary daughter to mix with the common children outside her home, and MY felt imprisoned in the castle, how did MY manage to get away to go to the beautiful places we see in the flashbacks? If GT’s mother wanted him to watch and protect ST, how did GT manage to break away from that responsibility so he could tag along after MY?
@Packmule3, you recognize the child actor who plays the young version of the FL because she was in A Piece of Your Mind. She played Kim Ji Soo as a child, the friend from Norway with whom Moon Ha Won was obsessed.
This ep surely made room for more analysis and speculation! That scene between JR and her mom did crack me up, oh the way she and MY viewed GT’s reaction to their fight differently. It’s a matter of perspective 😂.
As for their stories being intertwined at childhood, I’m not sure if GT and JR met as children. Correct me if I’m wrong, but as far as I know, the way they use honorifics and formal speech with each other does not indicate a relationship that goes way back.
@nrllee I love your interpretation on Zombie Kid. Also yes, the way GT’s mother treated him reminds me a lot of My Sister’s Keeper. The novel made me cry as a little girl, and now the way this drama resembles that story is not exactly good for my sensitive heart 😂.
MY’s mother is still a huge mystery and a possible center of the whole mess imho. I don’t get why people are hating on JR (I find a lot of salty audience on the bluebird app). JR is still a grey character, I’ve grown wary and cautious of her but from what is shown, it’s not enough to spew strong hate towards her direction, just my two cents.
New stills cut for tonight 💕 both hugging tightly 😔 guess moon young missed him so much
https://twitter.com/lovebangwon/status/1279693201071173639?s=21
Idk if im biased or not,since i love soo hyun so much but the drama getting more and more intense 💞😱💞
Like it was really sweet, but funny.
Yet sometimes it feel sad, esp their childhoods memories.
The princess who was caged by her own mom.
The boy Who wanted to be loved 😔
Some of what I like about the series so far
– The allusions to other dark tales or characters in stories which are scary or tragic/depressing, that are so apt, and that give us a better idea of matters that are unsaid (ie, Bates Motel, Romeo and Juliet, Blue Beard, Joker, Chucky).
– We are rewarded for noticing clues dropped, as they return to give our guesswork more traction. We see the reference to Rapunzel, whose motif we noted before.
And the link of MY’s situation to Bleak House‘s Estella’s story, where she is forced to obey Miss Havisham in breaking men’s hearts, is reinforced. Seeing GT at her gate MY looked happy to meet him but her ultimate response of crushing the flowers he gave her and rejecting him, was likely schooled and engineered by her mum/Havisham who had intercepted her in the hall.
– MY’s life story in a fairy tale are not just a once or twice off thing but will continue to the last episode. We continue with:
Rapunzel and the Cursed Castle
Episode 5 (1:06:34)
A long time ago, deep inside the forest, there lived a little girl in a cursed castle. The little girl’s mother always told her daughter that she’s too special to live among everyone else outside the castle. The mother told her that she must live inside the castle. However the little girl felt like she was imprisoned. So she prayed to the moon every day. (We see a young GT picking flowers in the evening and making a bouquet.) ‘Please send me a handsome prince who can save me from here.’
(The girl stands on the balcony looking at the moon.) ‘Will he come today? Will he come tomorrow?’ The little girl waited every day for her prince to show up.
(When she sees the boy GT at her gate, she runs down the stairs happily to meet him, but her smile fades when her mother accosts her in the hall.)”
Child GT holds out the flowers and says to Child MY : “Earlier I was too …” (She takes the flowers from him, drops them and tramples them into the ground.)
MY : “Get lost.” (The boy is shocked and dejected. He looks down at the flowers and walks away sadly.)
We do not hear what happens next in the story but if it follows what we see in the flashback, then the princess lost her chance to be rescued by the prince that night. This however is not the end of the story of ‘Rapunzel and the Cursed Castle.’ As a bookend to how the series began with the animation of MY and GT’s first meeting. We have now entered the live action version of the fairy tale. In fact it is the new fairy tale that MY is writing and whose conclusion we will see unfold, as we journey with MY to the end of the series: the end of the bookend.
@GB Ms Havisham and Estella was Great Expectations.
Thanks @nrllee! Yes Great Expectations.
I put my email address out a couple of times. One time is here. https://bitchesoverdramas.com/2020/06/22/the-king/
@Welmaris, @Snow Flower and @Dlia, Thank you for so much clarification on the kimono-wearing patient. I will assume, like you, that she isn’t MY’s mother. The only way she could be is if she were somehow unrecognisable to both MY and the hospital. I’m starting to feel a bit like Where’s Wally/MY’s mother? Who is the person watching the interactions through the window?
I don’t think the patient in the mink would be MY’s mother. She looks closely at GT’s name tag. If she recognised him as the childhood friend, why would she now be setting him up with her daughter? The mink lady seems too rational in the sense that she wants someone with a reliable character for her child. If MY’s mother thought GT wasn’t good enough for her back then, he wouldn’t be good enough for her now.
@GB, I wondered if MY trampled the flowers and rejected GT to protect him. In the same way, she might have wanted to scare him off with the butterflies. She may have saved him more often than the drowning. I am confused, too about the timeline of that day; as you say it doesn’t make sense with what we know. MY’s mother didn’t want her to interact with him and may have threatened to hurt GT, à la Rapunzel. I liked your comments about the allusions to other scary/tragic tales and I like your idea that we’re in the live action version.
I think GT and MY met for the first time when she saved him. The fairy tale at the beginning of Episode 1 suggests that. My heart broke for them. They must have cherished those few precious moments in each other’s company, free to be themselves, away from their suffocating home environments. I think they must have recognized each other instantly when they met as adults.
On Ju Ri and Jolene
I think the viewers who hate JR do so because MY dislikes her. We don’t know what happened between them as children. I think MY was envious of JR for having such a loving and kind-hearted mother.
I find JR a very relatable character. She can be petty, but she is aware of it. She reminds me of the desperate female protagonist in Dolly Parton’s song from the early 1970s, Jolene. The lyrics express the point of view of an unnamed woman who is begging the beautiful Jolene to “please don’t take my man just because you can.” It is a strikingly beautiful and poignant song, and in a minor key, too!
@Fern, Rapunzel Syndrome I feel that you may have a point there. MY may have rejected GT to keep him safe from her scary mother. You’re right about Rapunzel, I’d forgotten about the threat to the prince should he get into the tower. To keep him the boy away and safe, MY had to be repulsive. I felt that when she tore the butterfly, she was also testing him and when he left, she was disappointed in him. However when she trampled the flowers, it was deliberately to make him leave.
The knowledge that they probably knew who the other was for a long time already, and yet both had not acknowledged that, is very intriguing. This is similar to how Ju Ri had known MY, but did not want to acknowledge it, and had even told MY to pretend not to know her. Head Nurse Park immediately understood that this meant that they had not gotten along. It was not a relationship to be proud of.
In the same way, it is possible that MY did not come out to tell GT that he was indeed the boy she had scared away with the butterflies, because actually although she had appeared to reject him, she had actually wanted to keep his friendship. And now as adults, she does not want him to hold her childhood rejection against her. Also, if it was her mother who was the puppet master/Miss Havisham who made her lose his friendship, then it’s likely she would not want to admit that she’d been controlled. She might be too proud to admit to being her mother’s puppet. So the image of the witch as puppet master in the first book “The Boy Who Fed on Nightmares”, could have represented MY’s mum.
In Ep 5 we find that GT also had known who they had been as children, but he had behaved as if he did not know for sure. This might have been because he was embarrassed that he had run away as a child.
This means that when GT said that he wanted to forget Child MY, not because she’d been a ‘bitch’ but because he’d been a jerk, he’d once again self-immolated. This also totally excused MY’s bad behaviour. He knew he was telling MY about how he felt about himself with her as a child. He was taking the blame, making himself vulnerable and being very sweet towards her. He didn’t want her to think it was her bad behavior that was driving him away, but his own shame. I hope that now MY knows that he knew who she was when he confessed his shame, she will appreciate him more.
About GT’s Getting Hurt Jae Su has mentioned this at least twice, that GT too frequently accepts being physically hurt or accepts blame even if unfair. We see in this episode that he even does that with his brother. He engineered the situation where his brother would look at him, find fault with him and beat him so that the tension would diffuse. His allowing himself to be hurt by others seems to be his default method of ending a sticky situation.
The Hypocrisy of MY
In the transition from Episode 4 after GT’s reading of the Zombie Kid to Episode 5, MY is the Zombie Kid, who had been walking mindlessly and starving, and saying that GT felt so warm.
But later in his rooftop room, GT says that she is NOT a zombie, and this touches a nerve.
GT shows her the ’emotional face’ cards on the wall.
GT : “Take a good look at their faces and try to read their emotions. Learn, even if you’re not interested. If you don’t like to feel the emotions, just memorize them. At least make an effort unless you’ll live by yourself forever.”
MY : “I don’t want to. Why should I?”
GT : “Do it even if you don’t want to.”
MY : “I’m not autistic. I’m just a little …”
GT : “You’re not the Zombie Kid either. (We see the Zombie Kid book on the floor) The kid who had no emotions. All he had was the desire to eat. But what do you think he really wanted? Satiating his hunger? Or feeling someone’s warmth? What do you think the answer is? Food? Was satisfying his desire to eat all that mattered?”
(He takes her hand and brings it up to her face, touching her face with the back of his hand.)
“Warmth. This is what he truly wanted. He didn’t want to be just fed. You wanted to impart that message.”
(MY had been staring at him and suddenly throws his hand off.)
MY : “You’re wrong.” (I feel this is a lie. She knows he is right.)
GT : “I’m wrong?”
MY : “That’s right. You’re wrong. Food was all that mattered. He’s a zombie, so he has no emotions. (Something her mother had been telling her?)
“He wanted to fill himself up even if it was with his mum’s limbs. ‘Warmth’? Bullshit. That’s just the sickening pity of sentimentalists like yourself.”
“Don’t put words in my mouth. I’m hungry. Give me something to eat. Before I start chewing off your limbs.”
Getting into argumentative combat mode was MY feeling threatened I believe that she felt vulnerable. She was not comfortable that GT had cottoned on that she was not a zombie, and that she was capable of being hurt. She also seemed to think that he pitied her, which she would never want. She keeps to the façade of being the zombie, without feelings, which is familiar and safe.
Alone in the bathroom, she remembers his warmth. She says to herself: “Who’s pitying whom?” she sees herself in the mirror and says, “Hypocrite.” This time the word is applied to herself, whereas previously she’d used it on GT.
I like this as 1 among a few instances of how elements are balanced out between MY and GT.
@Snow Flower, Ju Ri I like that song, ‘Jolene’. The version I listened to more often was the Olivier Newton John one in my youth.
More about Ju Ri. I agree that viewers may mindlessly (zombie-like) follow the lead of the main characters in liking or disliking the 2nd leads. I find her a flawed by likable character and very relatable. Since she is brought up to exhibit behaviour that is acceptable and as she’s not on the ASPD spectrum herself, she appears to be ‘nice’ and ‘sweet’ regardless of her feelings. But she is not bland and she does not go all out to deceive or pretend except as to be polite or professional.
I liked that among the little twists and reverses this show gives us, there was this relatively sedate conversation she had with GT on the hospital rooftop, in which she accepted his rejection with a good grace. She was not the flat scheming 2nd lead character who’d would do everything out of jealousy to get the ML here (at least not yet!). She’s shown to be a little wicked herself in how she scared the male caregiver with the ghost story. She may have been genuinely concerned that Ko Dae Hwan exhibited such great fear at the mention of MY’s name, and she had enough spirit in her to strike MY first for her mean taunts that JR had no friends. I liked her more in Ep 5.
Mun Yeong
I felt that MY was really asking for it before that cat fight on the rooftop, and I was glad that GT got rid of her at least temporarily. She was being heartily unpleasant and skimmed the truth when she asserted that she’d given GT what he wanted. She might have meant something as innocuous as giving him her autograph, but she deliberately made it sound like something illicit.
She can be truly unpleasant and remorseless in her attacks when she knows a person’s weak spots. In her childhood, she had obviously done something that had caused JR, who’d wanted to be friends at first, to change her mind, and desperately tell her to ‘Please go away!’. MY had toyed with JR, using a joke about exchanging parents to discomfit her, before she would sign the approval papers to let her father get surgery She caused the calamity that fell upon CEO Lee and refuses to alleviate his suffering. She is overly and wrongly entitled.
In Ep 5 and 6 she knows that GT’s weak spot is ST and so she reacts against GT’s and JR’s friendship by taking ST away. We worry that ST will be a ‘toy’, used by MY to get GT, but at the same time, (I hope) the three of them might be able to sort each other out.
If MY takes the responsibility for ST, might she grow up a little more, be more giving and less entitled? Without ST as his excuse, will GT stop being overly self-sacrificing and actualise some of his own needs? ST too may develop more, without GT as his crutch.
Ep 5 Ad hoc Notes
– In TK: EM we have the beheading kiss, with Tae Eul offering her neck to be slashed, here we have Dir Oh offering his neck to be strangled. LOL.
– It’s interesting that people tell GT not to smile because he looks like the Joker or Chucky, but MY wants him to smile at her. And perhaps they are trying to say that he smiles so seldom that it looks bizarre on him, or something, but I felt it was really not nice that Jae Su keeps telling him not to smile, when he really should. And how looking like the Joker can square with how handsome everyone says he is, beats me!
– MY is fine with a cat fight, but while she grabs the mil carton, she does not bash Ju Ri over the head with I, which I thought showed unexpected restraint.
Funny Tit-for-Tat
Balancing out the give and take or give as good as you get. The biggie is how GT ran away from MYas a child, but he ran towards her as an adult.
I like how show has GT doing something with/to MY and then shows her giving back as good as she got. The ones that come to mind are how GT once had her against the wall to tell her off, how he berated her for not knowing how she felt when she was upset he’d been slapped and when he chided her for not bringing her wallet or phone with her. She threw the words he had said to her, back into his face and even had him pushed up against the Motel vending machine for good measure while doing this. LOL.
Pairing up
In the way of romance, where we try to pair everyone off for a ‘fairy tale’ happy ending: …CEO Lee returns to Seongjin City and I hope he gets another chance with the rejected Ju Ri.
Also, might the downtrodden Seung Jae get a chance with Jae Su?
@GB, your analysis of the scene in GT’s apartment brought tears to my eyes. My favorite moment of this excellent episode was when MY asked GT to smile for her.
And yes, I am all for the pairing-up you propose! JR and Jae Su deserve their happy endings with Editor Lee and Art Assistant Seung Jae respectively.
@GB, one other thing that I took away from the roof top fight was that MY believes that Ju-Ri is two-faced. She said it during the fight and afterwards as well. MY may well have caused Ju-ri to reject her friendship, but I believe that MY is sincere in her perception of Ju-ri’s character. We don’t know yet what happened between the two girls. MY may be wrong or mistaken in her judgement, but her feeling is real to her. (I may not be saying this well.)
Ju-ri did manage to make GT say that he will stay at her house as long as he’s in Seongjin city. He seemed reluctant to promise but he nodded. I felt like he was maneuvered into that. Ju-ri’s mother suggested that she be open and persistent to succeed with GT and that is what she is doing. It’s not necessarily a bad or evil thing, but there are so many women (mothers and peers) in this drama trying to shift him into place for a relationship.
As to when GT and MY realised about each other: I thought at first that GT recognised her immediately, while she was cutting his hand. I began to doubt it when he asked her ‘Do you know me?’ in response to her words that he grew up well. I thought MY realised once she had his address from Yoo Seung-Jae, but that may have been a confirmation, and she may have suspected at their 1st encounter in the hospital garden.
I have just to mention that the Seung Jae character cracks me up😂
Also, there’s someone(who we don’t see) in Ep 4 who’s watching MY after GT told MY she’ll never understand him. The same person also says “It serves you right, you shouldn’t have come here” after MY’s father tried to strangle her. I think this is the person pretending to be a ghost & is probably the same mean patient that slapped Ju Ri.
Episode 6 – do not miss the Blue Beard extras at the end. Such a hoot!
Another good episode.
The childhood backstory of the boys and MY is another eye-opener.
At first GT’s presence kept MY’s nightmare away, just as in the animation it did.
I’m wondering if GT is going to end up being ‘mum’ to more than 1 person now. Fortunately, at least for a while, he has JR’s mum to mother him.
Wow, am still trying to keep up with all the comments for the open threads, so many insights coming in! (@nrllee I really liked your observations about the zombie kid.) Just finished Ep 3 and lots to catch up. I noticed a trend and am wondering if this will continue through the show: just as each episode uses a fairytale to tell part of the story, I think each episode also takes a keyword from the fairytale and expands upon it.
Episode 1: The key word was TRAP. The opening credits introduce us to the red shoes, and beauty and the beast. Both have elements where the protagonist is trapped. The animation at the start gives us the idea of Rapunzel, where we see her hair grow and becomes the shadow. Again, Rapunzel was trapped in her tower. We see the girl trapping fish, then she hooks the boy and in a sense, he is trapped by her and has no choice but to follow her because he was hooked. The act of tearing butterfly wings traps the creatures, because they are never able to fly again. There is mention of setting a honey trap by MY, and there’s even a literal honey trap, where the bribe money is placed inside a honey drink box lol.
MY is shown to be trapped too, both by her past, as well as the perception of those around her who view her as a psycho (but I wonder if she really has antisocial personality disorder, or are those just her coping mechanisms to protect herself?). GT is also trapped, because of his circumstances and his role as the only caregiver of his brother. ST is in a sense trapped, because of the way society perceives him. (I liked that they showed how he coped when he had a meltdown or got upset, by going into an enclosed space. In a way, what normal folks would perceive as a space that feels confining, ie like a trap, is actually soothing and calming for some whose brains are wired differently. Things like weighted blankets, cocoon-like blankets, quiet corners… )
Finally, the tale of the boy who fed on nightmares seems to imply that true growth is only possible through pushing through pain, and not avoiding it. (The boy in the story was trapped, and shown to be tied up like a marionette.) The butterfly can also be a metaphor for the idea of growth through pain: Metamorphosis is actually a drastic process (or if we could anthropomorphise, a painful process). In order for a butterfly to turn from a creepy crawly caterpillar and transform into a winged creature involves the entire caterpillar being digested by enzymes and being turned into cellular soup, while being trapped within the chrysalis. Everything gets rearranged to form a totally different creature, and the trap is where the transformation takes place. We could even say the trap is part of the transformation, since the process of the butterfly squeezing out of the chrysalis helps to pump fluid into the wings of the butterfly.
Episode 2: The key word is given to us by MY through her interpretation of the tale The Red Shoes. It’s about OBSESSION. The episode starts off with GT admitting that he liked the girl he was following, and the flashback scenes show him following her. I think @GB pointed out he was wearing red shoes, so back in the past, the one following his obsession was GT, and his obsession then was MY. In fact, if not for the animation in Ep 1 explaining that he was hooked, I would have thought the behaviour of the child GT was really almost like that of a stalker!
We see other aspects of obsession: ST’s obsessive nature wrt various routines etc, as well as his obsession with MY, with dinos, and with butterflies that haunts his dreams. GT now seems to be almost obsessed with making his Hyung happy, while his friend JS also seems obsessed with his friendship with GT, to the point that he moves when the brothers move. Finally the episode closes with MY now wearing the red shoes (its a full circle since it was GT who was wearing red shoes at the start of the episode), telling the story of the red shoes, and linking it with following your obsession.
Episode 3: I think the key word was AWAKENING. The episode shows us MY walking into the hospital at the stroke of midnight with the ominous chiming of the grandfather clock. It’s the witching hour, where other things awake and come and play. This scene seems to show her awakening desire for GT. There are many references to sleep and rest to contrast with the idea of waking: We are told OK hospital is built on a cemetery, which is a final resting place. There’s talk about insomnia, sleep paralysis, and of course, the tale of the sleeping witch. MY has her nightmare about her mother saying she would kill the prince, but she wakes up and uses the butterfly hug to cope. She gives her lit lecture and mentions that they all need to wake up to see reality, and that fairy tales are wake up drugs about the real world, and not hallucinative drugs that give us dreams. GT’s talent for art is awakened in this episode, since he is now given opportunities to exercise that talent aside of drawing on MY’s books. Finally, the whole incident with GiDo might be to awaken the crowd’s understanding of mental health, as well as to wake GT to the idea that perhaps the way to go… is to just let it go.
Need to watch Ep 4-6 soon and see if any keywords pop up!
Episode 6 fills in many blanks. @GB, for all the trauma, I was left laughing at the final bits!
When I saw the name of the mental facility in this drama—OK Psychiatric Hospital—I was mildly amused. In today’s culture, okay can be interchangeable with meh, or can even be a put-down (“Okay, boomer”). Why would a psychiatric hospital go with such a name? Then a memory clawed its way out of the depths of my brain: there is a book called “I’m OK—You’re OK” that has been influential.
Thomas A. Harris MD started writing “I’m OK—You’re OK” in 1967, and the book was published in April 1969. In June 1972 it hit the #1 spot on the New York Times Best Seller list for non-fiction books, and eventually spent 70 weeks on the Best Seller List. It has sold over 15 million copies to date and been translated into more than a dozen languages.
Here’s a link to the Wikipedia article about the book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_OK_%E2%80%93_You%27re_OK
Here are some quotes from the article that seem to me to apply to PBIO.
“…the brain records past experiences like a tape recorder, in such a manner that it is possible subsequently to relive past experiences with all their original emotional intensity.”
“…emotionally intense memories from childhood are ever-present in adults. Their influence can be understood by carefully analysing the verbal and non-verbal interchanges (‘transactions’) between people…”
“…a person’s psychological state seems to change in response to different situations. The question is, from what and to what does it change?…there are three states into which a person can switch: the Parent, the Adult and the Child.”
“…Parent…a collection of “tape recordings” of external influences that a child observed adults doing and saying. The recording is a long list of rules and admonitions about the way the world is that the child was expected to believe unquestioningly. Many of these rules…are useful and valid all through life; others…are opinions that may be less helpful.” [I think of MY being told by her mother that she’s a monster and will always be alone; that she’s an exceptional child and her mother’s greatest creation. I also think of GT being told by his mother that she gave birth to him to take care of his older brother.]
“…the Child is a simultaneous recording of internal events—how life felt as a child….as adults, when we feel discouraged, it is as if we are re-living those Child memories yet the stimulus for re-living them may no longer be relevant or helpful in our lives.”
“…humans start developing a third mental state, the Adult, about the time children start to walk and begin to achieve some measure of control over their environment. Instead of learning ideas directly from parents into the Parent, or experiencing simple emotion as the Child, children begin to be able to explore and examine the world and form their own opinions. They test the assertions of the Parent and Child and either update them or learn to suppress them. Thus the Adult inside us all develops over time, but it is very fragile and can be readily overwhelmed by stressful situations. Its strength is also tested through conflict between the simplistic ideas of the Parent and reality. Sometimes…it is safer for a person to believe a lie than to acknowledge the evidence in front of them. This is called Contamination of the Adult.”
“The phrase I’m OK, You’re OK is one of four “life positions” that each of us may take. The four positions are:
1) I’m Not OK, You’re OK
2) I’m Not OK, You’re Not OK
3) I’m OK, You’re Not OK
4) I’m OK, You’re OK”
[The motto of OK Psychiatric Hospital, per the sign in Director Oh’s office, is “It’s Okay to Not Be Okay.”]
“…verbal cues…Parent ego…evaluative words that imply judgment…words like ‘stupid, naughty, ridiculous, disgusting, should or ought’…” [Think of all the scenes in PBIO where one person speaks in judgment of another’s character, as if they’re an authority on the matter.]
“…two classes of communication between individuals: complementary transactions, which can continue indefinitely, and crossed transactions, which cause a cessation of communication…crossed transactions are problematic because they ‘hook’ the Child ego state of one of the participants, resulting in negative feelings.” [The animated boy in PBIO’s opening story was caught by the fishhook of the angry girl. He stayed hooked and attached to her until he ran away, horrified at her destruction of the butterfly. He broke free of her hook. But GT was emotionally hooked to MY because he ran away from her in that situation, never forgetting her or forgiving himself for being “a jerk.”]
“…insights can be gained by examining the degree to which an individual’s Adult ego state is contaminated by the other ego states…contamination of the Adult by the Parent as ‘prejudice’ and contamination of the Adult by the Child as ‘delusion’. A healthy individual is able to separate these states…a functioning person does need all three ego states to be present in their psyche in order for them to be complete. Someone who excludes…their Child completely cannot play and enjoy life; while someone who excludes their Parent ego state can be a danger to society…” [GT was born to take care of his brother, according to their mother: GT was expected to be Parent, sacrificing his Child. MY was tormented by her parents, so out of self-preservation considers herself an orphan and resists the badly modeled Parent in herself.]
Although this book was written half a century ago, and some parts may no longer be directly relevant in today’s world, I highly suspect it influenced the writer of PBIO.
Finally three of them living together in cursed castle, it was full of dust And feel empty before but now its feel cozy and colorful 😆
https://twitter.com/lovebangwon/status/1279799359589122049?s=21
And it seems after he confessed to her about he alr know her from beginning. He is change now, he looks sweet toward her and caring.. esp his voice became more soft 💕 *fangirl like me, obviously dead by hearing his soft voice lol. Oh im sorry 🤣
And i love the idea if sangtae living with moonyoung, so far i feel like moonyoung really observant person, she understand ppl very well? (I think)
She is really care for ST, not only bcs he is kangtae bro.
She told only the truth but most ppl cant accept the fact. Just like woman patient who lose her daughter, she told her the truth until that woman passed out🥴
& when she talk with juri. She told juri as two face person that why no one wanted to be friend with her and cat fight happened lol
My favorite scene is the last scene
https://twitter.com/lovebangwon/status/1279772536029409280?s=21
@snowflower @gb I agree about JR. Many dislike her because she’s seen as a competitor for MY. This is her character brief
“Nam Joo-ri (30-year-old mental health nurse)
Park Kyu Young
A nurse who has worked for 7 years at the OK Psychiatric Hospital. For 1 year, she worked closely with Kang Tae at a hospital in Seoul, and because they were from the same hometown, they became close. Nobody knows much effort she put into having a beer after work with Kang Tae who everyone had said was very hard to get close to.
Kang Tae was so defensive by nature all the time, so she didn’t dare show how much she liked him, but then one day. Moon Young showed up in front of Kang Tae and her heart chilled. For a very brief time during their elementary school days, she had been in the same class with her, so Joo Ri knew well. How creepy and scary a child that girl had been. Whatever she had to do, she has to tear Moon Young away from Kang Tae’s side… However, nothing is happening the way she wanted.
In the fairy tales, the nice protagonist defeats the witch and wins the prince, however, reality isn’t happening like the fairy tales. What makes this woman who is so timid change from being “Jekyll to Hyde” is alcohol! As soon as she has some alcohol, reason gets completely cut off, and that woman’s hidden other personality appears.”
Like what you suggested, JR is trying to be the “nice protagonist” (princess – all goodness and light). As a mother I would tell GT, “for goodness sake pick her! You’ll save yourself so much angst in future!” So I can actually see where she’s coming from when she seems to be trying to divert GT from MY. She’s honest and acknowledges that she’s petty. I like that about her. But ultimately it’s about GT’s choice. And he looks for all intensive purposes to be the “fated”/chosen one for MY, right from the beginning.
GT and ST discussing the Bluebeard story …
ST: But why were the villagers afraid of Bluebeard?
GT: Because he was different from them. His beard was blue.
ST: Is being different something to be afraid of?
GT: I guess so.
ST: Do you have to live alone in a castle when you’re different?
GT: No. He will eventually find his true love …
GT: … who isn’t afraid of his blue beard …
GT: … and tells him it’s okay to be different. Someone who understands him for who he is.
Isn’t this this story of mental illness? We shouldn’t be afraid of those that have mental illness. We shouldn’t lock them away hidden from our view and the world. We should tell them “it’s okay to be different” and understand them for who they are.
“You’ll never understand me until the day you die?” MY seems relieved that GT understands her intentions and for chasing him.
**Sorry for the repost. It seems WP removed some of my text.**
GT and ST discussing the Bluebeard story …
ST: But why were the villagers afraid of Bluebeard?
GT: Because he was different from them. His beard was blue.
ST: Is being different something to be afraid of?
GT: I guess so.
ST: Do you have to live alone in a castle when you’re different?
GT: No. He will eventually find his true love …
[Shot of GT staring at MY as she stands on her balcony at the Cursed Castle]
GT: … who isn’t afraid of his blue beard …
[Shot of MY staring back at GT from balcony]
GT: … and tells him it’s okay to be different. Someone who understands him for who he is.
[Shot of MY eavesdropping behind the closed door. She turns around and smiles.]
Isn’t this this story of mental illness? We shouldn’t be afraid of those that have mental illness. We shouldn’t lock them away hidden from our view and the world. We should tell them “it’s okay to be different” and understand them for who they are.
“You’ll never understand me until the day you die?” MY seems relieved that GT understands her now.
Great analysis, @JT7!
I loved the childhood scenes in Episode 6.
@Feyi, I agree with you about Seung Jae. I hope she and ST make a great art team!
Soooo, MY’s mom is really dead. I was wrong to think the woman who talked to GT at the garden is MY’s mom.
But my wish came true hahaha. The mom introduced MY to GT hihi.
But that was a sad and intense scene. Mom realizing her daughter is dead and MY reliving the scene of her mom lying on the basement floor with blood all around her.
Now that GT and MY have come to a better understanding of each other and their vulnerable sides, I hope there won’t be unnecessary external angst factors thrown upon the two. It seems to me that JR is not going to do something petty like the typical second lead.. or at least I hope so.
Nearing the end when MY told GT to go away while clutching onto his shirt desperately surely made GT realize that she did not exactly want him to leave. It showed parallelism? to their childhood scene when MY had pushed him away at the gate, but adult GT realized something that child GT failed to: that MY actually wanted him around.
I’m still very curious about Jaesu! He barely made an appearance in these two episodes but the fact that he has always followed GT whenever he moves is interesting. What made him such a loyal friend? What’s his background story with GT? Is he just loyal, or is he indebted to GT? He might not know MY during their childhood since he recalled GT and MY’s first encounter being in the book reading. So many questions 😅.
I didn’t fully read @Welmaris comment with the outfits and seasons because t’was too long hihi. But after realizing and rewatching, yeah the butterfly ripping scene and the gate scene happened on the same day. I immediately came here and look for that comment after rewatching the scenes to confirm them.
After the ripping scene, young GT went to the castle to see young MY and give her the flowers he was not able to give earlier that day because he was too shocked with the butterfly I guess.
And we see young MY all smiles and beaming while coming down the stairs until she met her mom. That means she’s actually glad and happy cuz GT still wants to see her after what she did to the butterfly. Then MY’s mom is downstairs and thus MY dropped and stepped on the bouquet for GT to get away there.
GT probably thought that because he ran away from her earlier that day, she’s disappointed or angry(?) of him thus she does not want to be friends with him anymore or she does not want him to follow her anymore; But actually MY was happy he came to see her that night. Then her mom happened that’s why she did what she did in front of GT.
Truly so heartbreaking. I really cried when that scene panned out on ep 5.
I wished I posted my comment earlier than @lighthouse26’s comment hahaha. Part of the comment summarizes my thought in my comment hihi
I don’t think we can be sure as yet that MY’s mom is dead. We’ve seen her embellish on the truth–heck, she’s a writer–and I believe she was laying it on thick when talking to the delusional woman because she wanted to leave no doubt that she was not that woman’s daughter.
What we know about MY’s mom: she disappeared the day after she finished writing her crime novel “The Murder of the Witch of the West”; JR believed MY’s mom was still alive; MY said she’d registered her mother’s death a long time ago; MY asked the woman, “Have you come back?” and looked like she could’ve believed this woman was her mom until she started referring to her daughter as a musician. The situation shook MY, and caused yet another nightmare, because it raised the possibility in MY’s mind that her mother could come back.
@Welmaris, I agree that we have conflicting clues about whether MY’s mother is alive or not. Even if she’s not alive, her presence is still felt. I was thinking that MY would have been better off with the patient in mink as a mother. She wants someone her daughter can rely upon (as well as good looking, ha). I felt very bad for both of them in their scenes together.
Speaking of mothers, I really liked the way Ju-ri’s mother consoled GT on the rooftop. Clearly, she has a strongly practical and maternal heart. I think the casting director was genius in this drama. I haven’t wondered about any of his or her choices.
I am not entirely comfortable with how the Director and staff are being portrayed? Mainly the Director. I get that he’s eccentric but I am feeling he’s impersonating Kim SaBu from Dr Romantic? The fact that OK Hospital is the same site for Doldam doesn’t help. His methods are unconventional…but I am not sure they are legitimate realistic treatment options? Maybe it’s intentional. And OK Hospital is not meant to be a realistic portrayal of how a mental facility is supposed to function. I am not sure using hyperbole so often is doing the drama any favors. I will reserve judgement till we get to the half way point.
I agree with you there @nrllee. I find Dr. Director and his head nurse to be like puppet masters. They seem to know more than they show outwardly and are like holding the strings to tug the people around them to awaken them or enlighten them if you get what I am saying..Don’t know if that is the correct way to deal with psychiatric patients though.
I didn’t realise that Ok hospital is the same site area as Doldam?! Really? I did read on soompi that the building is actually a cafe though!
I haven’t read diligently all the detailed posts here yet but I finished ep 5 and 6 last night and my heart was lightened by some happy and funny moments of Juri and her tantrum in bed and Juri’s mom berating herself for pushing out her prospective Son in Law to MY! That was hilarious 🤣 And GT being a ‘househusband’ for a bit when he cooked breakfast!
I was freaked out by MY’s constant nightmares of seeing a floating body and flying hair hovering over her. I usually watch k dramas during the 11pm to 1am hours so this will be the last time I watch PBIO at night😱 I was pretty spooked. It was disturbing.
I do see all the many elements of different Fairy tales coming together and yes if it is a good old fashion fairy tale then all will end well for our two mains who did not receive Love’s True Warmth.
Thank goodness for that Bluebeard epilogue! It helped tell me to take it easy its just a show don’t fret over it, especially over that creepy eerie floating thing😡
I came to this blog because of TKEM, but those discussions about Psycho are so good that I decided to stay.
Again, I’m watching a FL that threw away all my conceptions of what a FL in a k-drama can be. MY is just so much into her personality, that makes me see her be herself more. Also the relationship between the brothers is just really touching to no to be noticed.
I’m still gathering my thoughts about this show and the interpretations that it could have. I didn’t watch episode 6 yet, but from the comments it seems it clarifies more details about MY and GT relationship.
Thinking back on the way MY spoke of the supposed death of her mother to the delusional woman, I think she may have been describing something she actually saw, but not her own mother’s death.
My prediction is that MY was with her mother when her mother stabbed GT’s mom in the neck. MY didn’t specify the death was traffic related; we got that idea because of sound in the background. I did find her story confusing if taken literally, because why would her mother have bled out on the floor in her house if she’d been hit by a car?
If MY witnessed a stabbing when she was a child, it would explain her obsession with sharp objects and urge to stab those who anger her. She may be replaying a scene that traumatized her as a child. She may have repressed this memory, but it may bubble up into her subconscious mind.
MY has nightmares of her mother promising to kill her prince. MY’s mom may have instead killed the prince’s mom. ST was also a witness. Maybe MY and her mom were in clothing with butterfly patterns, or wore butterfly jewelry, or just overall looked like butterflies to ST. We’ve been shown that he sometimes interacts with his environment in an almost hallucinatory manner (NOT a characteristic of autism spectrum disorder, as far as I’m aware).
Having murdered someone may have been the reason MY’s mom suddenly disappeared. She went into hiding to escape arrest and prosecution.
This is just my theory. But if it does come true, this will throw another impediment between MY and GT and their relationship.
@Welmaris, I was thinking the same thing.
@Welmaris – The 2nd interaction w/ MY and fake mom (near OK Hospital food hall) was confusing. I had to watch it a 2nd time to understand. The memories of the car accident was the fake mom’s; not MY’s. MY describing the truth to fake mom about the death of her real daughter (I believe the head nurse told GT that her daughter died of a traffic accident). She got overwhelmed by the truth she passed out. I got fooled the first time thinking those were MY’s flashback memories as well. The editing did not make it clear … or maybe that was done on purpose.
@John L, interesting. I shall have to re-watch. I thought MY was speaking to the deluded patient about her mother although not necessarily a car accident.
@John L, I watched again. There was the sound effect of car breaks and a thud and a child crying out Mom, but the sound effects could have been in either MY’s or the patient’s imaginations. It made me wonder if MY’s mother fell/was pushed from the balcony and was perhaps placed in the cellar room. Or it was partly or entirely a story made up on the spot by MY to distance herself from this patient.
Okay this is my speculation. MY’s dad was besotted by MY’s mother. Married her only to find out that she’s very disturbed. They have MY. His character description says he adored MY but was also fearful of her (probably because of her ASPD). MY’s mother is controlling and obsesses over MY. No one is allowed to “steal her away” from her (GT posed this threat). She warns MY to send him away or she would kill him. So MY obeys. I am not sure how or why she kills GT’s mom (again wild speculation). I wonder if MY’s mother mistook ST for GT and was going to kill him (fearful of GT stealing her MY away from her) but his mother stepped in and was killed in the process. ST runs for it. MY’s mom may have worn something with butterflies on it or something? Is this a nod to Madame Butterfly? There’s a tragic story there as well? She kills herself because MY’s dad (Pinkerton) threatens to leave her? Or does BlueBeard (MY’s dad) decide that his wife has become so deranged (for killing someone) that he kills her? He thinks MY is her, which is why he strangles her. He hides her body in the basement and tells MY that she’s gone away. Everybody thinks that’s what happened to her. MY out of curiosity (just like in BlueBeard) opens the basement door and finds her mother dead. I am not sure what the scene with her watching her mother drowning is about? Perhaps her father finds her with her mother and decides to get rid of the remnants of the body by throwing it into a lake.
I hope for a reconciliation scene between MY and her father. If it happens, I will be crying like a baby…
@nrlle – “He thinks MY is her, which is why he strangles her …”
That’s what I was starting to believe as well. If you remember the shady book reviewer that MY pushed down the stairs, he said that MY and her mom have similar physical features.
I’m going to take it a step further w/ your speculation. MY’s father started seeing GT/ST’s mom which his wife figures out. This infuriates her not only b/c of the affair, but the GT/MY connection. MY’s mom kills GT/ST’s mom (in the presence of ST). MY’s father discover’s his wife killed his lover and kills her.
Episode 16 : Bluebeard’s Secret – Wife Replacement
When looking for solutions are there benefits in the replacing of one thing with something else?
Bluebeard kept replacing wives but always ended up alone because he kept killing them. It wasn’t his blue beard that was the real problem since women married him for his money. He had not addressed the real issue: his propensity to lure wives to himself while desiring at the same time to exert capital punishment for disobedience and curiosity, ie for being independent thinkers who would not just accept what he said.
Dir Oh tried to trick/bribe Patient Kan Pil Wong with packets of soju which had been replaced with soda. As long as he believed it was soju, it tasted like soju to him. Dir Oh called it the placebo effect, but a placebo is supposed to show that a benefit can sometimes be gained by belief in a ‘drug’s properties’ and not by the properties themselves. If we believe in the placebo, will that be enough to cure us or solve our traumas?
Ju Ri was angry with her mother for encouraging GT to live with MY to support ST, but she took it out on the cars on the road. The cars replaced her mother as she cursed at them. That’s better than if she’d stapled her mother’s lips together, but again it did not solve the issue which was JR’s self-centred jealousy. (She thought more about herself than of the brothers’ needs.)
Director Oh talked to Head Nurse about getting MY to meet her father one-on-one and suggested that when he strangled MY, he had had a delusion ie he had replaced her with someone else, in his mind. That was well and good, but he remained dangerous.
CEO Lee wanted to replace GT, whom he felt had usurped his place. Unknown to him, GT had already got a firm hold not only in MY’s home but also in her heart. After 10 years of working for and with MY, CEO Lee still did not know MY, and was either lying or deluded about himself being her man.
MY almost believed that Patient Kang Eun Ja was her mum. KEJ did perhaps remind her of her mum in reverse. Her dead mother had insisted MY kept GT away or she’d kill him, while KEJ insisted on the opposite. In the end MY did not want to replace her dead mum with a depressed and deluded one or any mother at all. As per the 1st animation, it was already too much that the shadow of her mother continued to cast its shade on her.
When MY experienced her nightmare and sleep paralysis and GT came to comfort her with his version of the calming ‘Butterfly Hug’, we see a reflection of him holding MY in the oval mirror, replacing in the same mirror, the horrible image of her mother demoralising her repeatedly in her nightmares. We finally see the only replacement therapy that could work for both MY and GT.
I’m only halfway through Ep 4, but it seems like the link between butterflies and GT’s mum’s death is still not revealed, going by the comments here. Anyway, just recalled something about butterflies: they are known to engage in a behaviour known as mud-puddling, where groups of them aggregate on dead bodies/dung/soil etc to suck up the fluids to obtain nutrients. (You can read more about this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mud-puddling ) The butterflies are attracted to sweat, tears and sometimes, even blood.
I’m wondering if that may have been the case here? That after GT’s mum was killed, the butterflies were attracted by her blood, and that may be why ST literally found butterflies on his mother’s body. The trauma of finding his mother dead, with all the butterflies on her, would have naturally driven him to conclude that the butterflies were the ones that caused her death, although it was actually just a natural phenomenon. I thought this was more probable than a tattoo or print on clothing on a person, since ST takes everything literally, like the way he remembers dino facts. If he had seen the murderer, he would said it was a person. Since he only remembers butterflies, then it’s likely that he did see real butterflies.
If this is so, then perhaps MY’s act of tearing the wings off the butterflies when she was a child may actually hold prophetic significance? It was like she was taking “revenge” on the butterflies that were associated with GT’s mum’s death.
Bluebeard’s Last Wife
In her re-telling of the tale of Bluebeard, we are shown a scene of her dad in hospital: indicating that she thinks of him as Bluebeard. This raises questions. Did she think he lured her mother, his wife to that cursed castle or were both her parents the epitome of Bluebeard to MY? She knew that they had secrets like Bluebeard. In that castle, it seemed it was MY rather than her mother who was being beheaded – her father did try to kill her, and her mother consistently negated MY’s will and independent thinking (beheading her) by insisting that she always listened to and obeyed her. In the end, the last wife was the one who survived in that house ie MY.
I was looking at a girl with blue hair today, and thinking that she’d match well with a boyfriend with a blue beard. LOL What’s with Bluebeard anyway and why should curiosity or disobedience elicit the death penalty?
He was a serial killer but needed his victims to make the same error of disobeying his command in order to justify killing them. So he piqued their curiosity in a way that was hard to resist. It always bothered me that more emphasis of wrongdoing was placed on the women for curiosity (and disobedience), than on Bluebeard who repeatedly got away with murder. A horrible imbalance in justice. Although I’m glad Perrault’s tale ends with Bluebeard getting killed, I feel that was too simple and insufficient. Also the question of why is never satisfactorily answered. Why did he kill his wives – because they didn’t listen. Why should they listen to him – because in marriage he was supposed to be their master. But this presupposes that he should also protect them. By failing in this trust, he nullified the right he had to demand obedience. This tale leaves me discontented.
Thanks to @John L, we have written out for us a nicer alternative ending where the emphasis here is not on the wife, but on Bluebeard. This is fine as long as we’re talking about something like the relationship of GT and MY and not a real serial killer. Trust the childlike ST to question the first part of the story.
ST speaks to GT
I agree with @John L that this can also refer to mental illness. This is the happier ending for all the Bluebeards who are otherwise merely tolerated or at the worst, treated as if they are serial killers! This is the ending I believe the show is offering us. 😀
@GB and others Thank you for the info on the Bluebeard fairy tale. In my experience this is not a fairy tale that is well known in mainstream USA. I knew he was a pirate, but I didn’t know the story at all, until I saw “Strong Woman Bong Soon,” which also incorporated it in its plot.
@GB I wonder if GT’s mother was intended to be “Bluebeard’s” next replacement bride. Perhaps, her body never made it to the locked room, because the murderer was scared off by ST’s presence. It would be even worse, if the mother was killed as a replacement for GT, the prince. That would be a horrible thought for GT to have to live with, if he ever found out. It did solve the problem of keeping GT and MY apart for almost 20 years.
More total speculation along the replacement theme… We’ve heard and seen some of MY’s writing, but not her mother’s. Could MY have replaced her mother and written the posthumous novel “The Death of the Wicked Witch?”
@JT7, mud-puddling behaviour is something I haven’t heard of before and it will be interesting if that is the reason for ST’s fear. There did seem to be a cloud of butterflies in his dream. But ST does say, during his questioning by the police, that the butterfly would kill him if he said anything, so I still think that some butterfly symbol was on the murderer or butterfly was something the murderer told ST.
Here is some more very wild speculation: if MY’s mother killed GT’s mother and MY saw or knew, could MY have killed her mother (balcony? car? – thinking of the sound effects with Mrs Kang) during an argument or by accident? Could MY’s father then have tried to strangle her saying that it’s for the best? I mean, I hope not.
@Dlia, the tale of Bluebeard is poorly known in the U.S. but I heard of it referenced there. Blackbeard is the pirate and he was a real person. Wiki says: “Edward Teach (alternatively spelled Edward Thatch, c. 1680 – 22 November 1718), better known as Blackbeard, was an English pirate who operated around the West Indies and the eastern coast of Britain’s North American colonies.”
The director gives us a shot of MY’s father when MY starts telling the Bluebeard story. The person who opens the door changes from being his bride to his daughter which is creepy on many levels and also gives some credence to the Head nurse’s idea that he may not be seeing MY but someone else.
In this episode MY is the one luring ST and GT to the castle. She shows them riches: stuffed deer head, books and (best yet) a real bed to sleep on. When GT lifted the dust sheet, lay on the bed and agreed that he never slept on a bed before, I thought he and ST were hooked, rather like in the animation. Then the first night they both slept on the single bed so they could both experience it. I loved that.
@Fern I agree about the butterfly being something on the murderer (clothes? Jewelry?Tattoo? Weapon?) So I have been trying see if there are any butterflies in amongst the articles amongst MY’s things at the Castle.
@JohnL the other possibility is that MY’s dad found out about the murder, locked MY’s mother in the basement (like Zombie Kid) and she took her own life (ala Madame Butterfly). And MY was the one to find her body (out of curiosity).
Other notes – I have taken some interesting screenshots (it’s easier to have them on a doc so I have attached it with thoughts).
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1B3Vi1jgz8kCeo4rjTlQSz5v19DlJl-sUaxb_KHxEd_w/
@nrllee Thanks for the character brief on MY’s dad and for your shared screenshots and thoughts. I was freeze framing those scenes as well, to try to see if there was anything noteworthy. I even changed the colour / brightness / contrast on my screen to try to see more details in the dark scenes.
The MY Whisperer
A repeated motif with MYmum is that she stands behind MY, seeming to caress her while she brushes her hair, but accompanies what should be those loving actions with words to assert her authority, remind MY who owns her and ensure MY’s unreserved obedience. She even ends off at times saying she loves her daughter, but she has given an impressionable child a warped idea of what love is. She reminds me of a horse whisperer who trains the horse and breaks it… she literally speaks softly, continually working on breaking MY’s spirit.
According to Merriam-Webster, (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/whisperer) a whisperer is “a person who excels at calming or training usually hard-to-manage animals using noncoercive methods based especially on an understanding of the animals’ natural instincts” – Did MYmum, knowing MY was on some spectrum or other (we still assume it was ASPD), instead of balancing out MY’s natural instinct to hurt without remorse, deliberately made matters worse by her whispering.
I’d like to see some backstory of how MYdad was supposed to have loved MY. If not for that character brief/summary, I’d have no clue. All we ever see are her memories of him strangling her or being happy with her mum. I need to see evidence that he really did care for MY, although he was afraid of her at the same time. Did he ever try to counteract the kind of twisted love that his wife inflicted on their child.
The idea that MYmum took her own life is plausible. Show has done a super job of confusing us as to what method of dying was adopted (or if she’s even really dead!!). Generally we see her lying on her back, hair and body drenched, water (or blood? as well?) pooling around her. When ghostly footsteps climbed the stairs to MY’s room that first nightmare we saw, they were wet footprints. All this tells us is that in MY’s memory, she associated her mother’s death with being very wet. So wet that the water even came flowing from her corpse to touch MY (Yukky!)
The other tale she tells about her mother lying twisted on the ground with skull cracked open and her blood stains still on the floor, only hold some credence, because in her own dream, MY stared at the big stain on the wooden floor at the bottom of the stairs. It might, of course, not be a blood stain or even if it is, may not be MYmum’s blood.
We look forward to GT stepping forward now to be the real MY Whisperer. I kind of find it unfair that he’s the caregiver of more than one person, over and over again, but that seems his lot in life. Since Ep 2 he’s forced to be her Safety Pin and by the end of Ep 6, he has to take care of MY literally, feeding her, and being there for her in her nightmares. I trust that being her Whisperer will give him not more burden but more freedom: that in being able to let go of ST while caring for MY, he will actualise his own needs.
Little Mysteries
Why did GT NOT want ST to mention butterflies in front of MY – My guess is that he did not want her to know of ST’s vulnerability. She had already guessed that the back of ST’s head or that his hair was very sensitive. He probably did not want her to have more ‘ammunition’ to use against him or ST if every he crossed her.
Why is Jae Su so attached to GT? – He’s so good at starting his own business wherever he goes, he’s independent and ST says he’s rich. But emotionally, he seems to be dependent on GT. We still do not know if JS felt so touched by GT’s situation that he decided to be his support, but surely he should not want to be stuck to GT for life. I was uncomfortably struck by JS’s words when he found that GT had moved into MY’s home.
He sounded like a nagging wife/betrayed lover or mother… I can’t tell which.
“Hey, do you have a death wish? Do you want to be stabbed again or what? I’ve warned you not to go anywhere near that bitch. (Tsk tsk, he is being derogatory here, and it is uncalled for.)
I can’t believe you packed up and moved in with her. Have you lost your mind? Are you insane? You’d better get back here before it’s too late.
(Then he jumps up on a little concrete seat on the roof and screams into the phone.) Come back to me, please!”
I’m beginning to feel that it might be good for GT to put some distance between himself and JS. JS’s neediness is disturbing. I recall that GT did tell JS that he did not need to keep following them each time they moved. Obviously he was unable to let go and came along to Seongjin City, still clinging to GT. Instead of wanting GT ‘to come back to him’, he should have been happy to be free, and be interested in starting his own family.
And another mystery – why does he dislike GT’s smile so much when it looks perfectly ok and GT looks so much better when he smiles. GT has to put others first so often already, as a friend, JS should not be clamping down on GT’s natural desire to smile when a situation calls for it. I feel that JS is the ‘caring’ friend who’s overstepping the boundaries, but that GT is too sweet to tell him off.
How Sick is Ko Dae Hwan? – He does not seem like a true blue dementia patient. perhaps the dementia was brought on by the brain tumours and treatment. He seems to have been a bit too crazy over his wife. She looked like an angel to him and he built the castle for her. Husband and wife had at least 1 photo taken of them together, looking happy. However, perhaps that changed.
Character Brief courtesy of @nrllee who shared the translation:
“Go Dae-hwan (Father of MoonYoung)
Diagnosis name: dementia
A well-known architect who has won several architectural and cultural awards He was originally a gruff/blunt person, but he wasn’t indifferent like her mother. He loved his only daughter, Moon-young very much. He fretted about her and feared her just as much.
After that day, the tumor developed in my head as if something had broken down due to extreme stress and insomnia. After several repeated surgeries and relapses, both body and mind became weak, and so came dementia.”
I don’t know if the show will ever give us as much info as this brief does, but now I want to know about ‘that day’ – is he referring to the day his wife disappeared? Who does he see when he sees MY? The brief says he was afraid of her, and we see that when Ju Ri mentioned MY to him. He had recognised MY when she passed him along the corridor as well. However, we do not know if he meant to strangle the adult MY (or someone else) the same way he had attempted to strangle her as a child. In fact, his role as father becomes questionable by virtue of his absence in MY’s childhood memories. Let’s see if there are any happy father-daughter memories to bear up what the character brief tells us.
@GB I agree it’s a bit hard to figure out what MY’s dad was BEFORE the dementia. We see fragments of it but it’s hard to tell if it’s his mental illness that’s “talking” or if it’s reality and he’s giving us snippets of the real past? Certainly MY doesn’t hold any affection towards him now? Did she ever? Or did the events of “that day” ruin it all forevermore? When MY told GT she preferred flowers that just dropped all their petals at once (like magnolias) and not cherry blossoms (petal by petal), I had the impression that she was talking about her parents. She wished they would just die and leave her alone? Her father is a shell of a man, still living but soulless. Dying bit by bit. Her mother (who I assume to be dead) died but still lives in her dreams and persists in haunting her. Neither are letting her go. I guess in some way GT is also fettered by his family. In this case it’s ST.
And yes to JaeSu. I felt uncomfortable with his attachment to GT. It felt obsessive? Initially the thought did cross my mind that he was gay but then he seemed to “like” JuRi? So I just assumed he was just a very good friend who felt like he was part of their family.
PS I like the Whisperer concept. 🙂
@GB and @nrllee, I agree with you about Jae-su. I wonder what his backstory is. I can’t find it now, but in an earlier episode, Jae-su was speaking in his sleep (I think) and said something about ‘Don’t look down on me.’ He seems jealous of MY and protective of GT. I wondered if after GT and ST ran away they were all street kids together for a while or if GT and ST were accepted into Jae-su’s house, like foster children. I think Jae-su has seen GT and ST at their lowest points and perhaps visa-versa.
I agree that he’s over-stepping, especially the teasing about the smile. But I also think, from Jae-su’s point of view, GT and MY both have too much trouble in their pasts to have a healthy relationship. I’m not sure I disagree with that at this point. GT accepts punishment and injury too easily – as though it lets him get through or solve bad situations. MY is too ready to react in a punishing, bullying way. If it were real life, I would want them far from each other until more stable, or forever. It’s a drama and I’m fascinated, so I’m willing watch them potentially heal each other in a beautiful way.
I’m sorry, I can’t find the link where I read the character descriptions. The character description of Jae-su said that he and GT met years ago, when they both had jobs making deliveries. Jae-su is a “chicken brain” who grew up on a chicken farm. He was touched by the plight of GT and ST, who sometimes had nothing to eat. He made it his mission to help them.
A chicken farmer doesn’t scream rich, but maybe Jae-su’s father is the Frank Perdue of S. Korea. Maybe he’s a chicken chaebol ! It has to be expensive to keep opening new restaurants. We haven’t seen him do much business.
@Fern I agree that Jae-su seems overly attached, but I would also be concerned if a friend of mine was involved with a person who had violent tendencies.
I’m sorry that I can’t find the link to the character descriptions. I remember that Jae-s was described as a “chicken brain” who grew up on a chicken farm. He met GT years ago , when they both worked making deliveries. He saw that GT and ST sometimes went without food. He made it his mission to help them.
A chicken farm doesn’t sound rich, but maybe Jae-su’s father is the Frank Perdue of S. Korea. Maybe he’s a Chicken Chaebol! (Then again, maybe ST saw money in the cash register and assumes that makes Jae-su rich. However, it has to be expensive to keep moving restaurants, and we have’s seen him do much business.)
@Fern I agree that Jae-su seems overly attached. However, I would also worry if a friend of mine became involved with a person who had shown violent tendencies.
Character briefs
https://docs.google.com/document/d/17ykmEOlf-4saUIv2GHgIbUQdhsFziWGMlUppjNNXiZs/
Heh! I’m going down the list of comments with a bit of time to spare.
@Snow Flower – reconciliation between MY and her father – yes, I was wanting this from the time he evinced such fear of her. The fact that she did not tear off her father from the family photo, the way (I assume) she had torn off the part with her mum gave me some hope. It will go towards her healing at least.
@JT7 Informative stuff on mud puddling. I read up to the part on insects feeding on carrion and thought of how horrific it would have been had there really been corpses just left as in Bluebeard’s tale. Not that there’d be butterflies but I kept thinking that in RL, the stench alone should have warned all future wives to stay away from that room!!!
@Dlia I guess at this stage we have to wait to find out if MY’s mum is really dead. If so, was she murdered. If so, was it by the same person who killed GT’s mother. Since show has not enabled us to even prove the first premise, our guess work is in the air….so we continue to wonder. This is the time that we can let our imaginations run wild since the information given us is insufficient! 😉 My sedate speculations are below. 😁
@Fern I like your idea of MY being the Bluebeard who lured the brothers over with a nice soft bed LOL. Yes the transition from mother/bride to daughter was disturbing. We wonder if in his mind, he saw MY or his wife at the hospital.
@Fern and @nrllee About MY’s dad before the dementia.
Has someone come up with this speculation before? Ko Dae Hwan’s words at the hospital – “Why are you still alive?” – imply that the person he sees in his mind, should be dead. MY is obviously alive, and he was afraid of her when her name was mentioned by JR, but his wife is missing. Between the 2, it’s more likely he is speaking to his wife.
We assume he knows his wife is dead. Either he killed her, she committed suicide, had an accident or someone else killed her. If it had been suicide, an accident or someone else unrelated to him who had killed her, he would have reported a murder and not just a missing person.
Therefore he was protecting either himself or someone close to him. If he wasn’t the murderer, then it’s likely he thinks that his beloved MY is the killer (as in for eg, he thought she’d pushed mum down the stairs? Since we’ve seen her actually do that with the slimy book critic, it’s totally plausible!) (Just recalled, we can add to that there were 2 other times people almost fall down the stairs … CEO Lee and MY herself! A repeated motif is something that alerts us!! LOL.)
Let’s go with: his belief that MY killed her mum.
MY’s memories show us his attempt to strangle her. He had failed. He might have thought he was saving a ‘monster’ from herself but perhaps he didn’t have the aptitude to really commit murder (does that make it more unlikely that he is the killer? Ie if he could kill the mother, why not the daughter?) Anyway, MY survives and he has to hide the ‘crime/accident’. Maybe he hides the body in the water?
Protecting the ‘monster’ and hiding what he thinks is the truth, gives him dementia due to stress induced tumours. 🤔
Motive, weapon, location, actual time of death and where the body is are all unknowns. We can speculate to our heart’s content! 😁
Falling Flowers
About those magnolias vs cherry blossoms – one thought I had was that she hates vacillation. She always goes all in. She approves the flower that drops at one shot, and not one that holds back some petals. So too when she observed how GT as a child was cowardly enough to run away and then changed his mind, and was brave enough to return to save ST in the water, she found his indecision ‘boring’.
She refers to this event when she warned him as an adult to make up his mind over sticking with ST or leaving him: “Your brother abandoned you. Now it’s your turn to choose. Will you also abandon your brother, or will you let him lock you down your entire life? Don’t end up being fickle about it like you were back then.” She wanted him to be decisive.
The other thing she does with petals is that she pulls them off one by one, ostensibly to make up her mind. When she makes her decision, she goes all in. Hence when she stepped in at the book signing event, it didn’t matter to her that she would lose money, she just gave back to the family according to their justifications and excuses. 😃
What a terrific discussion thread. I was wondering if there was a Korean connection to the melody of “My Darling Clementine”; now I know there is. I loved the reference to the silent movie era in the Bluebeard story scene. A brilliant piece of the film maker’s art.
Thank you to everyone who contributed. I feel enriched.
@GB I agree about MY hating vacillation too (broader context). Which points also to why she disliked her father neither being alive or dead (she would rather he just died rather than just drag it out). I think it’s easy for her to be decisive because she doesn’t overthink the consequences or ramifications when it comes to others around her. She just goes with it. She has no moral compass. No regrets? So whilst I do see her version of decision making liberating, it is also totally self-centered. There is no consideration for the “other” in her paradigm. She does whatever she feels like.
I have to put this drama “on-hold” after episode five.
Seeing it on air, I easily forget, and I don’t have time to review the episodes or comment on them, because my professional activity has become more intense. At the moment, I find it easier to concentrate on one drama at a time than I can binge-watch.
The drama is rather good, but probably not enough to make me an addict, and feel the urge to follow it every week.
Good luck with the drama everyone here. 😉
@nrllee, thank you for reposting the character briefs. I noticed that God and Creator was mentioned a couple of times. I wonder what is the religiius background of writer Jo.
I was just rewatching the breakfast scene on youtube (just to see GT smile, so shallow of me) and one of the commenters mentioned that ST was the first person we saw MY bow to. Such a nice little detail.
This show is touching upon issues that hit close to home (in a good way, so far), so I will sit back and watch before analyzing and then do a second run and return here for dissection of the episodes. Thank you all in advance for your input and thoughts. The fact we can see another drama (I liked APOY for that to an extent) that portrays the unspoken inner battles many of us fight on a daily basis, and also address unfair social stigmas to mental health issues.
@Growing Beautifully,yes, I agree that MY’s dad believes or knows that MY’s mother is dead. I’m going back and forth about whether he sees MY as her mother or not, since he tried to strangle MY as a child. Could he have thought that he succeeded back then and so tried again?
I was theorizing that the father strangling MY was part of a chain. As you wrote, he believes or knows that MY was involved in her mother’s death, so thinks that he must kill her to save her from her own future. Somehow he doesn’t succeed in killing her or himself.
It’s possible that MY’s mother tried to kill herself (if she IS dead) but the father thought it was MY who did it. OR it was a triple murder/suicide as happens sometimes. Suicide Bomber alluded to taking people down with him and that seemed to strike a nerve with MY, as did the father in the Seoul hospital who tried to kill the little girl. There was also the allusion to Romeo and Juliette. MY says that if they had both drunk the potion they would both have lived and the tragedy wouldn’t have happened. I wonder if that has some importance.
Speaking of the father that tried murder-suicide with his little daughter: his death is a loose thread. All we know is that he died by stabbing while being held in isolation, and we saw on the TV news the knife MY took from the restaurant being bagged as evidence. I’d think MY’s fingerprints would be on that knife after all the times she held it. Why hasn’t she been called in for questioning? She did refuse the ride home with Publisher Lee after her disrupted reading at the hospital, saying there was something she needed to take care of. Hmmm… But we do see later that the little girl has a specially autographed copy of The Boy Who Fed on Nightmares, so that could be the task MY spoke of needing to complete.
@WEnchanteur We’ll catch up with you later then! See you when we see you.
@Snow Flower do you mean that MY bowed to ST at breakfast? I thought she bows before no one LOL. Not even as a greeting.
@IcedFireAngel Which show is APOY?
@Fern
Hmm…yes I had forgotten about the filicide dad. Good pick up. The police aren’t doing a very good job if they didn’t suspect foul play and just assumed suicide?
I had a feeling you’d be watching this show also, so I came here to see if you had done any analyses. Hard to resist dissecting every scene. I’m in the minority everywhere it seems but I’m still not convinced that the FL has ASPD. I know it’s written in most, if not all, of the show synopses but it wouldn’t be the first time a show has put something in the synopses that turned out not to be 100% true.
I know this scene has probably been dissected a lot [I couldn’t read every single comment on here but I did see it mentioned a few times] but the butterfly scene and the flowers at the gate scene had to take place the same day because they were both in the same clothes. Which means GT was ready to accept MY with all her faults when he came to the gate to give her flowers.
Poor MY, having to turn him away even though his acceptance of her is everything she’s been hoping for. Her prince truly did come for her; it’s just too bad that he was too young at the time to confront the dragon.
Hey @phikyl! Welcome. Well spotted about the clothes. So you think he came back for her? This writer is a bit of an unknown to me. She’s only ever written one other drama (Jugglers) and I am not sure she is as meticulous as some other Writers. But assuming you’re right, he must’ve run away when she rebuffed him by stomping on the flowers.
And I agree about the possibility of a misdiagnosis. There was that scene where she didn’t squish the bug? That was deliberately put in there. If she tore wings off butterflies why wouldn’t she squish the bug? Instead, she diverted its path towards her. And for her to actually fear for GT’s life after her mother’s threat (hence her stomping on the flowers to get him to leave), that alludes to her being able to empathize? It may well be her mom with the ASPD and MY’s just adopted her persona because that was how she was raised?
@SnowFlower I just noticed your comment. I am not sure if Writer Jo has a Christian world view. There’s certainly hints of it. Accepting people as they are. Learning to love them as they are. I guess as the drama unfolds further and wraps up, we can get further hints.
@nrllee Kdrama police run the gamut of complete incompetence to having practically super powers LOL. I’d think in this show, they might make the police a little more effective but since they are not the ‘mainstay’ of the plot, they’ve been put aside.
@phykyl Yes, you are not alone here. There was a comment that got me thinking that her ‘symptoms’ are not entirely typical of ASPD, or she is nearer the end of the spectrum that presents less of the more obvious signs of the disorder. And as for children’s clothes, @Welmaris did an extremely meticulous breakdown of the clothes MY and GT had worn during the different childhood scenes that had been shown to us.
They had spent enough time together to cover more than 1.5 – 2 seasons maybe, starting from some time in Winter (where there had been ice) and into Spring or later (since there were flowers).
Even until the end of this idyllic time, I feel that they must have hardly spoken to each other because neither of them knew the other’s name. If they’d known, then immediately GT would have recognised that the author his brother was crazy about, was his childhood crush.
The butterfly scene, I felt, had been a ‘test’ by MY. When GT dropped the flowers and ran away, MY looked disappointed. Then that same evening when she saw that he’d returned with another bunch of flowers, she had been delighted. … Until she ran up against her mum.
The other thought we had here was that MY may have had more than 1 reason for rejecting GT. One was obviously to obey her mother, whom she’d promised to always listen to. The other might have been to keep GT away so as to protect him from that mother.
While on the one hand I commiserate with Child MY who grew up lonely and misguided in what love means, and who was the emotionally abused victim of one obsessive parent and another incompetent one, I also distance myself to observe how much harm she might be causing others. Her willingness to stab the filicide father and push the slimy book critic down the stairs gives me pause in freely approving her.
@nrllee Thanks! Yes, I think that both the butterfly scene and the flowers at the gate one took place on the same day. When he starts to apologize, he says “I was startled….” and then she cuts him off [or so the subs say] so I was already thinking that they were the same day but then I went back and saw that the clothes they both are wearing are the same!
I think when he says he was startled, he was referring to seeing her rip the wings off the butterflies and that once he thought about it, he decided it wasn’t as horrifying as he thought at first. I also think there’s a reason behind the ripped butterfly wings that we don’t know about yet. Maybe MY’s mother loves butterflies or wears a butterfly broach a lot and MY ripping the wings off is her way of rebelling against being stuck under her mother’s thumb.
Going along with that, I’m pretty certain it was MY’s mother who had something to do with GT’s mother’s death. If I’m right about the butterfly broach theory, it would also explain why ST is terrified of butterflies. He would have focused on that because it would be unique/colorful and with his near perfect memory, it would have stuck with him; as would any scene that was going on around him at the time the memory was formed.
As for a possible misdiagnosis, I think it’s highly probable. There’s always the debate between nature vs nurture and I think here it’s really evident. Is it in MY’s nature to be antisocial or is it because she was brought up in a house in the middle of the forest with a crazy mother who treats her like a living doll instead of a person?
During her socially formative years, she was a prisoner in her own house. She says so herself and refers to herself as “Rapunzel” in voice overs; commenting about how she was just waiting for a prince to come and save her. How could she have learned how to be social under that kind of setting?
I also think that some of her nightmares/sleep paralysis have roots in her memories. Some of the scenes that preface her waking up under the sleep paralysis are extremely vivid and if her mother is as crazy as she seems, she could easily have been verbally abusing and manipulating MY. Especially since it seems her father was not around much. Aside from the scenes where he brought his new wife to the house and the one where he attempts to strangle MY, we don’t actually see him in scenes with MY and her mother at all.
Hi everyone I just wanted to chime in to say the hard work you all put in here is well appreciated. Thank you! There is a lot of deep analysis going on and I am still chewing on them.
I will never see butterflies the same innocent way again @GB! I guess butterflies need a gruesome nutritious feast now and then 😬
@Welmaris I totally forgot about that dad who died in confinement in hospital! That surely should come back to haunt them especially if it was shown that the knife MY took was the same knife bagged by forensics! That story arc is not over!
But I don’t think the writer would have made MY’s character be a secret murderer that would be overboard and we cannot have a romantic couple story then.
Though I do find MY to be pretty disturbing.
I remembered the past memory scene where the young MY was looking at the two brothers playing on the icy pond and when ST fell into the hole and GT ran away at first she was talking to herself and egging GT to walk away and not help his brother! Even at that young age she wasn’t thinking good thoughts already. And there was no mother near her to influence her that day too. So I was disturbed by that. And the fact that I think GT grew up feeling really guilty about that day when he told his mother that he wished his Hyung gone! And he did walk away for a bit but bless his good heart he came back running to jump into the hole to save his brother but his Hyung ran away from GT after getting out of that hole!
GT understood though that his brother was frightened out of his wits and ran away. I guess being a special needs person ST didn’t understand his younger brother was drowning too like him? Or he was mad with his bother for leaving him at first? Hmm…so that scene was spoke volumes for me as to how the adults are today.
I just want to share to you here guys, according to tvn drama post on instagram that the frozen river incident was GT and MY’s first meeting. If so this means GT been following MY for 1 year? Because we saw in the flashbacks that GT also MY around autumn time.
Aaahh I just want to make sure, what do you think guys?
*GT also followed MY around autumn time
@Growing Beautifully, yes, thinking back to MY’s comments about vermin, her decisiveness and her lack of remorse when the critic was injured but not dead – I could see her being murderous, especially in circumstances where an adult male is threatening, due to her past experiences. This is an ambiguity that the director wants us to see, isn’t it? If she later gets accused of murder, we and the characters in the drama will be wondering, did she or didn’t she? It will be devastating whether or not she is guilty, since she isn’t altogether trusted.
@phikyl, I re-watched ST’s nightmare scene very slowly. At one point there is a butterfly shaped metallic thing, but it’s very fast and out of focus. I think you might be correct about a brooch or hair ornament, which would point to a woman.
@Carolstar, the whole scene about the near-drowning is traumatic. MY is mentally saying ‘Let him drown’ – did she even know them yet? It’s really not a normal reaction. GT almost does that and must still be feeling guilty about it. ST runs away from GT – cold water shock is a recognised and deadly reaction. I was amazed that he could even run away, but I think ST was in self-preservation mode. Also I’m not sure that ST would have understood how to help even if he hadn’t been in the water himself.
@Growing Beautifully, I was shocked too when GT formally thanked MY for saving him, then said that the result was him living a f*cked up life. (Giving with one hand and taking away with the other.) I think he has never expressed that before and it’s MY’s observations that have made him say it. He wanted her to take some responsibility for his life. Looking back at young GT slipping underwater, I had the feeling that he was almost accepting his death as one way of escaping his burden.
@welmaris @nrllee @carolstar regarding the knife having MY’s fingerprints, there wouldn’t be any. GT had used a hankerchief to hold the handle and that would have wiped off her fingerprints. I noticed that as MY asked GT why he was wrapping the knife, as if it was the knife that was hurt and not him. She then took the handkerchief to wrap his hand.
@phikyl same here I am not convinced MY has ASPD!
Ref the knife, one thing I recall in MY’s (murder) defense is that after taking it and the handkerchief from GT, she chucked it across the room rather dramatically. She didn’t just put it aside or drop it in place – it was like she was ‘done’ with it; had no further use for it.
@GB, When MY goes downstairs after a good night’s sleep, she is greeted with a bow by ST, and she gives him a little bow too! It is more like a head nod, but it is there (around minute 43 of Episode 6). She has never been mean to ST. I understand that part of it is MY trying to manipulate GT, but I also think that she has a genuine and friendly interest in ST too. She calmed him down rather quickly after the brothers had a confrontation in the front yard.
@GB- APOYM (I missed the last letter) “A Piece of Your Mind”, which dealt very delicately, from my POV, with depression and other unsolved traumas, and slow, personal healing.
@JT7 and @Fern thank you! I wasn’t going to rewatch it as am not as invested as I was with TKEM to rewatch and pick up clues from all the contributors here.
That’s good to knew about the knife being free of prints and MY threw it away. That means she won’t be a suspect! That still leaves us with a murder by someone else or a self suicide then. And @Fern that’s possible that ST was in self preservation mode and thus ran away.
@Snowflower I agree MY is good with ST but that’s because she’s pretty perceptive when dealing with special needs people like for example the Congressman’son. She gets them instinctively. Even the lady who lost her daughter and hasn’t faced up to it. Though that was done pretty harshly.
ST adores MY and MY thrives on it probably. And she knows what drives ST its his drawings! And she acknowledged that by making him her sole illustrator for her future books. In ST’s eyes MY can do no wrong now.
Just finished with composing and typesetting a new piece. Recording coming soon. Stay tuned!
@Packmule, I’m asking please, pretty please for the creation of two separate threads:
1) Fairy Tales and Stories. A thread to gather the texts of MY’s books and the drama’s ep. 1 opening animation, quotes from MY’s lit class at the hospital, and references to other stories such as Red Shoes, Bluebeard, King’s Donkey Ears, etc.
2) Developmental and Psycholocical Disorders. A place to gather comments on autism, etc.
And, of course, it is time to launch another open thread for episodes 7 & 8.
Thanks, @Packmule. Many if us are thinking of you, suspecting work is keeping you busier than usual. One word from us to you: Fighting!
In an earlier comment I mentioned that Dolly Parton’s song Jolene sums up Ju Ri’s feelings. Here is the song performed in the style of medieval ballad:
Just saw this!
Will do!
Ah, @Snow Flower, one of my French friends was in a group with instruments like this in Burgundy. It was good fun.
@packmule3, Hello! I hope that you are well and thriving.
@Fern, I sang in my college’s early music ensemble during my student days.
@packmule3, Thank you for everything you are doing. Stay healthy and cool!
@Snow Flower Wow! I just played the medieval version of Jolene and that was great!! Thanks for the link. 😁
The drums sort of sounded like the drums of Indian music, I felt that there was a bit of fusion going on, however I found it fit in with a bit of whimsy and I liked the syncopated beat.
The medieval costumes of the artwork hearken to the anachronistic dressing of MY and her mother. They looked like they belonged truly in Perrault’s Bluebeard time with their high wasted long skirts and ruffled sleeves.
Now I’m caught in listening to more Bardcore medieval style renditions of modern tunes! LOL. Another rabbit hole!! 😅 😜 😬 😂
When the BlueBeard B&W story played out in the epilogue of Ep6, the names of the “wives” that were beheaded were Celine, Allie, Mary, Anna and Esmeralda.
Mary – Queen of Scots?
Anna – I presume they meant Anne Boleyn
Esmeralda – Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Who are Celine and Allie? 🤔
This pic makes it clearer
https://www.instagram.com/p/CCVRVxcl5kW/?igshid=1v8ncldk9fyi
I don’t know who Celine or Allie are either! LOL… is the one who’s Allie one of the nurses btw?
@GB I think so. 🤣. Is Quasimodo the male nurse?
Who? The hunchback? That’s KSH / GT isn’t it??? 😳 😬 🤔 😜
@GB It probably is. 😂. He looked different for some reason. All slouched. But it would make sense. Quasimodo and Esmerelda.