i have never posted about my BLs on this platform but I’m having a Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo crisis. I have made the mistake once again, as I did during TMS II and Blueming, of reading other people’s takes on the characters’ choices and before the plot has fully unfolded.
Hwang Da Seul has once again given us a grumpy/sunshine pairing where the temptation can be great to place the blame for the romantic obstacles of the plot on the cold character, whose perspective and reasoning for his actions is withheld (both by the character and the narrative). Very To My Star II, which turned many against my dear friend, Jiwoo.
Also, the more explicit and plot-integrated depictions of child abuse in LFCT (which have appeared in Hwang Da Seul’s narratives in the past! consistently!) adds a layer of complexity, while also priming some viewers to more immediately and decisively leap to assigning good/bad, right and wrong behavior to the characters.
Which is not really, I think, the most fun way to interpret media, and can be an obstacle to figuring out what this show is trying to say.
So let me just say: both Juyeong and Dohoe have issues. Profound ones. I’m not thrilled about all-or-nothing takes on or blame assignment with either of these characters. Neither of these men are doing great and how could they be, that’s the point. (But they will be fine, eventually—Da Seul is using tropes from romance and from BL to remind us of that.)
In queer stories and BL we sometimes talk about a narrative being healing or reparative because it represents queer joy, rather than queer pain—even if that narratively necessitates a suspension of disbelief, an element of escapism or fantasy, or comes at the expense of dramatically satisfying conflicts. The assumption here is that the wound is implied, so doesn’t need to be depicted. What makes Da Seul’s narratives so dramatically satisfying is her balance of joy and pain, social realism and generic convention. She uses tropes from BL and from romance to reassure viewers that a happy ending will come eventually—as it does in the genres she cites; this allows viewers to sustain hope even as she depicts suffering that her queer characters must endure, or creates conflicts which they must overcome. This is another kind of healing narrative, with a restorative, cathartic outcome. Like many Korean dramas, she also can shift quickly between comic, romantic, and tragic tones—there’s a good balance of sugar-to-medicine.
The first episode of this BL show begins with a series of scenes of corporal punishment, depicted somewhat comedically. The tone shifts as we hear Dohoe in voiceover, speaking from the vantage of the present, saying: “There was a time when it was common to beat up kids as discipline.”
This story, in particular, is a healing narrative about generational trauma in which the reconciliation of the lovers andtheir coming of age symbolically stands in for a kind of social healing and progress. But they can’t just move to Seoul and expect all that pain to go away, nor, I think the show is saying, can Korean society as a whole be expected to change without examining its generational traumas and their consequences--particularly on young men. The promise of the young lovers can only be kept, and their reconciliation earned, by contending with the curses they’ve inherited. (It’s not insignificant that Dohoe’s method of denial/hiding is to build “Little America”—in Juyeang’s neighborhood.)
BOTH Juyeong and Dohoe have issues with violence and anger and repression. They fight through these feelings in the first act of the show to access moments of joy and liberation—until violence and anger erupt, and repression wins, for 12 long years.
When we meet them again, in order to avoid the anger that leads to violence, both, in different ways, have chosen to feel less, avoid risk, avoid intense emotions, and avoid intimacy, which could lead to feelings that are Too Big—one by moving on, one by staying stuck. Neither approach is being presented as the “right” path.
But how is Juyeong, whose characterization is so effusive, whom Dohoe values for his truth to himself, avoidant or repressed?
It is romantic to think of Juyeong standing still so that Dohoe can make his way back to him, but I don’t think the depiction of Juyeong’s behavior over the past 12 years is meant to be seen as noble. I think there’s a message behind why everyone around Juyeong 12 years later seems to suck so hard, beyond piling on the pain. Juyeong’s never challenged himself to find anyone or anything better—and that’s his choice. He watches travel shows in his apartment, alone, and surrounds himself with people who won’t look past his smile and ask him how he’s really doing, and even if they do ask, he won’t tell them. He smiles when he’s taken advantage of; when his boss shows her annoyance, he tells her to breathe. When it snows and he lets himself feel sad, he drinks until he passes out. That’s emotional repression and bad boundaries and intimacy avoidance and risk avoidance, baby, and yes, it is fucked up that perhaps the person that wants more for him in his life is Dohoe’s father, who was both Dohoe’s abuser and his own. But it also makes sense for his character.
An aside, here, to address the take that Juyeong is Most Fucked Up because he’s forgiven Dohoe’s abuser--not necessarily to refute it but to look for some nuance.
I’ll say it again: this man was also Juyeong’s abuser. Remember that deft little cut to the wound on Juyeong’s ankle when he was smiling into Dohoe’s eyes in ep. 3? Yeah. So if we’re talking about a show that deals with complexity about abuse and abusive relationships, let’s consider Juyeong’s probably mired in many conflicting emotions about the guy who beat him and trained him, gave him his livelihood, and, unlike his own parents, took him back in after he did something exactly like what got him kicked out of his folks’s house to that guy. Not to mention someone who seems to want Juyeong as a son. I think this show has more to show and tell us about why Juyeong feeds the dog that bit him.
Oh, yeah, and it’s the guy who raised the boy he loves, and reminds him of that boy, and it looks like he’ll very likely drink himself to death if Juyeong doesn’t check on him (because no one else will). Woof. I also wonder, given that encounter with that terrifying church member who says he never wants to see Juyeong’s face again, if Juyeong wanted to make sure Dohoe had a home/family to come back to, no matter how shitty. Juyeong knows from painful experience what it’s like to be abandoned, because it’s happened to him over and over, AND he holds himself responsible for Dohoe abandoning his father. And Juyeong doesn’t abandon people, no matter who they are. He will pick up your kid and drop him off at lessons he doesn’t get paid to teach.
Now, all of this would still be troubling if it felt as if the narrative was on the road to neatly absolving all its abusers but I don’t see that happening. Dohoe’s in these streets refusing to pay lip service to his father’s memory, no matter what the whole town has to say about it, and I’m willing to bet Juyeong has some feelings about Hyeonho slipping back into Dohoe’s life he’s yet to share. Many shoes are yet to drop—we’ll see. We only have Juyeong’s side of the story so far.
So does Dohoe have any right to stay mad at Juyeong? Yeah. Yeah he does. Absolutely. For maintaining a relationship with the man that made his own upbringing miserable, which Juyeong witnessed first-hand? I’d say so. And maybe even a right to be angry at the audacity of Juyeong looking shocked and hurt and offended that Dohoe would cut ties so completely, too, because Juyeong knew and acted like he understood Dohoe’s bone-deep hatred of violence.
But did Dohoe have a right to cut out Juyeong out back then? Was Juyeong violent? Is there some justification for Dohoe to avoid his father AND him, beyond guilt by association? Was it just cruel sacrifice so Dohoe could escape on his own?
Well, no. Juyeong already had his ticket out, actually. And yeah, Juyeong was violent, so yeah, there’s at least some justification in Dohoe’s mind.
In the montage of Juyeong’s fight with Dohoe’s dad, there’s a cut back to Juyeong in a school uniform, watching someone else get beaten with a stick. It’s clearly the incident that got him kicked out, and the cut lets us know that this is an emotional trigger for Juyeong that will lead him to outburst violently again, despite his better judgment. He reacts violently when he feels someone needs to be protected, even if that’s not the best way to protect them, or, in Dohoe’s case, exactly the opposite of what Dohoe would want him to do. In fact, Juyeong’s been threatening to beat up people on Dohoe’s behalf throughout the episode, and maybe Juyeong might’ve tried it if Dohoe hadn’t been there to stop him, which is exactly what happened later that night.
I can see why that would scare Dohoe. He hates that in Juyeong. He hates that in himself. And I bet seeing Juyeong out there in a dobok (not knowing that his man’s teaching forms to seven-year-olds) is not fun either. Better burn it all down rather than risk, by forgiving Juyeong, forgiving his father—or worse, forgiving the glimpse of his father he saw in himself.
Dohoe’s very black-and-white in his thinking (he made an exception, once, and was disappointed). But it’s called Let Free the Curse of Taekwondo, which is something Dohoe also needs to do within himself. He says he’s free, but is he? Fuck no.
The knife scene and 12 years of silence makes Dohoe’s avoidance easier to see and how it’s connected explicitly to violence. But it’s also connected to any and all forms of anger. Which, doctors and therapists will tell you, is both impossible to fully repress and bad for you to try.
Because of those issues both beautiful boys have chosen different forms of repression and avoidance that, if they don’t sort them out, will result in heartbreak for them, heartbreak for me, for you, for everybody, fuck, I hope not. Obviously, they come by their issues honestly. But given how much, especially Dohoe, loathes and detests violence and anger, and Juyeong fears abandonment, how will either of them learn to deal with dangerous and intense and unpleasant emotions when they arise, much less communicate them?
This show has given us quite explicit cues, in theme, setting, cinematography, that this is about a complex and generational problem that is hard to heal,represented by these specific parents and children. The shot of the young men of Haseong following the older generation (who has shown absolutely no empathy for Dohoe or their own children), carrying the casket of the most abusive figure IN THE WHOLE TOWN reminded me of this. How will these children keep from becoming their parents, or from dying a little themselves in order to survive? Parents who only expressed their emotions through discipline and violence raised broken boys who then had to figure out how to love themselves and other people while only equipped with the barest models for doing so. How are they supposed to know how to feel, much less how to express their feelings?
That’s a lot to resolve before we get another kiss. AND before we get into queerness, and how internalized homophobia operates in each of these characters (or religious trauma). And maybe this BL story is overburdened by its themes, by its plot, or by audience expectations. (I don't think so, yet; I'm having a great time.)
So how do we get to a happy ending? Not without struggle. Do we want a happy ending, however? Would a “happy ending” mean unearned forgiveness of either these characters or their parents?
I certainly want a happy ending, and I think I’ll get one, but perhaps not without more suffering and some uneven remainders, people left behind or left out. Hahyeon, our second male lead, is particularly interesting in that regard. The first shot of the show begins with him already left out, sitting on the sidelines. An uneven remainder character like this isn’t that unusual in comedy or romance—Shakespeare has a lot of examples, too, like Jacques at the end of As You Like It; K-dramas are of full of them. Often these uneven remainders can function symbolically as a marker of the complexity of the theme behind the love story—the impossibility of perfect happiness, the injustice and arbitrariness of love or fate, the ongoing, forever-incomplete struggle for social justice.
In many theories of the rom/com structure, the story of a central couple that gets together, despite obstacles set before them by their parents, and gets married in the end is simply a way of healing or repressing generational conflict. The happy ending restores a kind of social order symbolically by implying that when this fine young couple becomes parents, they’ll do a better job; the parents have learned their lesson, there’s no need for us to fight, happy ever after. Uneven remainders gesture to the idea that full reconciliation isn’t really possible, but at the end of the day, the world goes on much like it was before the conflict began.
Even without procreation as a foregone conclusion for the leads, BLs and queer comedies with a familial conflict often do something similar, depicting or holding out the promise of reconciliation with the family, or substituting an adoptive/found family that promises a new or healed social order (Kang Gook is basically adopted into another family at the end of Where Your Eyes Linger; neglected boys in Blueming and TSM I find a family in their partners—although this is sometimes a bad move; in TMS II they find another family and start sort-of co-parenting). I’m interested to see what happens here—how much filial reconciliation will be offered, or how much withheld, or substituted with something else outside of their relationship.
The question is, as these men confront their past, pain, and trauma, what will be let go and what will be retained?
To ask this question in some other ways, what is Taekwondo when it’s free of its curse—of its disciplinary violence, of its origins in martial combat, of its toxic masculinity? (Juyeong’s new dojo is certainly different, but far from perfect--less disciplinary and less disciplined, it's at risk of closing in part due to the erosion of cultural values around it.) What remains when the curse of Taekwondo is lifted? What remains of what was good, beautiful, and true about Taekwondo for these characters, what made it joyful, what made Juyeong refuse to give it up? What parts of our inheritance must be owned and admitted, cast aside, or even treasured and kept? How do you know the difference?
Other questions: Will we ever see Juyeong’s parents faces? Or see that scary man they ran into in the park ever again? How was it for Juyeong, coming back to the neighborhood? Can I get a better translation of that phone call? Also: if anyone has any deep thoughts on layers of chicken symbolism, I’d like to hear them.
