I’m reposting @Welmaris’ essay as a fine example of a cogent interpretation of drama and discussion I would like to have more of about this series. She wrote it in one of the password-protected threads.

I like it because she took information from an outside source material then related it to the characters in the drama. This enriches our understanding of the characters because we get to see them through a different lens, from a more analytical and objective (objective ≠ my feelings) perspective.

I also appreciate that she wasn’t throwing some esoteric factoid at me which had little or no relevance to the plot itself. I told you about practicing JOMO, right? Seriously, we need to declutter our minds of the pointless stuff we accumulate because of our fear of missing out. (Cough. Cough. Previews.) Less is more.

Thanks, @Welmaris.

Note: Don’t plagiarize this too and post @Welmaris’ words on Facebook, Instagram, soompi, and other drama forums as yours like what Rosa Mae Aguilar did. 🙄😡

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I came across a quote by Guillermo del Toro, an Academy-Award-winning director, about monsters. Many of del Toro’s movies feature monsters. The quote that got me thinking: “Since childhood I’ve been faithful to monsters. I’ve been saved and absolved by them because monsters are the patron saints of our blissful imperfections.” And another: “There is beauty and humility in imperfection.”

That got me researching Guillermo del Toro and his take on monsters:

“In fairy tales, monsters exist to be a manifestation of something that we need to understand, not only a problem we need to overcome, but also they need to represent, much like angels represent the beautiful, pure, eternal side of the human spirit, monsters need to represent a more tangible, more mortal side of being human: aging, decay, darkness and so forth. And I believe that monsters originally, when we were cavemen and you know, sitting around a fire, we needed to explain the birth of the sun and the death of the moon and the phases of the moon and rain and thunder. And we invented creatures that made sense of the world: a serpent that ate the sun, a creature that ate the moon, a man in the moon living there, things like that. And as we became more and more sophisticated and created sort of a social structure, the real enigmas started not to be outside. The rain and the thunder were logical now. But the real enigmas became social. All those impulses that we were repressing: cannibalism, murder, these things needed an explanation. The sex drive, the need to hunt, the need to kill, these things then became personified in monsters. Werewolves, vampires, ogres, this and that. I feel that monsters are here in our world to help us understand it. They are an essential part of a fable.”

Guillermo del Toro has done a lot of thinking about this subject, and there are a lot of quotes by him about monsters. A search for “del Toro monster quotes” will quickly find dozens.

In Alchemy of Souls, the Hong sisters raise the issue of monsters. Most of the characters inhabiting Daeho believe the world needs to be protected from monsters; Uk is unusual in believing that monsters (or at least one dear to him) deserve to be protected from the world.

In the Hong sisters’ world of Alchemy of Souls, who or what are monsters? The most obvious are soul shifters. Why? In their greed to prolong their lives, they kill others. Although they look and behave like normal humans for the most part, the soul shifters can be recognized by the blue marks left by the soul ejector process, and when they turn to stone after energy leaks from the bodies they’ve hijacked. To prevent such petrification, soul shifters feed on humans, turning them to stone when all their energy has been absorbed.

Is a soul shifter a monster even before they’ve run wild? Yes, if they’re the one who stole the body of another. The unfortunate souls ejected from their own bodies and inserted into others are victims until the point they, in turn, kill innocents. Such was the case for the young man who had been soul shifted by Jang Kang, whose mother conspired to sacrifice the energy of a poor woman and her child to keep her son alive. If monstrosity is sacrificing innocents for gain, then even the still-human mother of the soul shifter was also a monster because she was complicit in the plan to kill others for her son’s benefit.

It is a monstrous act to kill someone else for one’s own benefit. Greed. Depriving others of their life. Denying another’s humanity. If we follow this line of thinking, we can extrapolate:

–Jang Kang is a monster. In his year of experimentation he may have moved souls into dead bodies, but if those reanimated people ran wild and killed others, Jang Kang is complicit in the deaths of their victims.

–Jin Mu is a monster. He instigates the shifting of many souls for his purposes: spying, preserving the powers of dying mages and enlisting them in his cause, etc. He eliminates soul shifters who no longer serve his purpose. He considers humans to be disposable, valuable only to feed his loyal soul shifters.

–Shaman Choi is a monster. She took over the body of the Queen, switching the Queen’s soul into her discarded body. She creates the soul ejector balls from the ice stone, knowing that they’ll be used to take over the bodies of unwilling participants in the process. Those who willingly leave their bodies to inhabit another’s.

–Those who willingly participated in soul shifting with an unwilling participant are monsters.

–Soul shifters who kill others to absorb their energy are monsters.

–The socially powerful who, without remorse, send minions to their deaths. They are monsters if they consider members of their fighting forces expendable tools, not humans.

But there are some soul shifters whose status as monsters is less clear:

–Master Lee, who used hwansu to put his soul into the body of a dead boy after his meditating body was mistakenly burned by Heo Yeom. He is self-sustaining, not feeding from the energy of others.

–Naksu. Following orders in her role as an assassin, she killed many people; however, those she killed were souls unwillingly shifted into discarded bodies. They were, in essence, the walking dead on the path to petrification or becoming monsters. Naksu did make a monstrous decision to soul shift to an unwilling victim, but was outwitted by Bu Yeon, who participated willingly and co-inhabits “Mu Deok” with Naksu.

Are these our beautiful monsters, as Guillermo del Toro might call them? Are they blissfully imperfect? In this way of thinking, you could say Bu Yeon was a monster in her imperfection: blind, yet frightening others with her ability to see with her force. Others in Daeho might think Uk is a monster: imperfect while his energy gate was shut, yet unusually quick and powerful once it was opened.

We can ponder another Guillermo del Toro quote: “I knew that monsters were far more gentle and more desirable than the monsters living inside ‘nice people’. Accepting that you are a monster gives you the leeway to not behave like one. When you deny being a monster, you behave like one.” Humility is key, for del Toro. It may also be for the Hong sisters. Master Lee and Master Park wait, observing Uk as he becomes more powerful, to see if he uses his force to serve himself or the greater good of the community. Jin Mu, Sorceress Choi (in the Queen’s body), Jin Woo Tak (Madame Jin’s husband), and other members of the Choi clan deny that their thirst to crush other clans and wrest leadership of Daeho is a monstrous goal.