Unexpectedly, this year's winter Korean drama ushered in the "Double Song CP" air fight.
The former "low-level worker" Song Joong-ki was "reborn" in "The Little Son of the Chaebol Family", transforming into a member of a wealthy family, looking for murder while waiting for revenge.
Later, there was the "bullying victim" Song Huiqiao who lay dormant in "Dark Glory" for 18 years, living humiliatingly and burdenedly, just to carefully plan a perfect revenge victory.
The same plot of the bottom vs the giants, the same revenge drama of quick revenge, the audience will inevitably make a comparison.
"The Little Son of the Chaebol" dipped in word of mouth because of its suspicion of being rotten, but the rating of "Dark Glory" rose from 8.5 points to 8.9 points. For Song Huiqiao, who is inside and outside the play, this seems to be the most beautiful return battle in recent years.
01
18-year-old Wen Dongen lives in endless darkness, and she was selected as the new prey by the school's domineering bullying five, and neither the head teacher nor the parents could give a trace of help and care.
The small leader of the fivesome is Park Yeon-jin, who was born into a wealthy family, she is beautiful, arrogant, and vicious, and her beautiful eyes that are always smiling are twinkled by the pleasure of bullying.
Under her command, Sarah and Whiting repeatedly burned Don's skin with a hot curling iron until she was festering and completely skinless. The other two boys, Jae-joon and Myeong-go, look at Dong-eun's body with malice and often molest them wantonly.
Don soon couldn't support it and chose to drop out of school on his own. From that day on, her life continued with revenge. While working, studying, entering the university, taking the examination, entering the teaching position... It took more than ten years of hard work, but only a few blocks of stairs up slightly.
At that time, Yeonjin was a well-known weather anchor who married her chaebol husband and gave birth to a lovely daughter. Buying a Chinese house, wearing a beautiful shirt, being a good wife and mother, secretly hiding anger and malice under the professional smile.
Sarah, who was addicted to drugs, became a well-known female painter, using drugs to provide artistic inspiration and continue her life of empty pleasure; Rolling around in alcohol and sex, Jaejun inherited his parents' business, running golf courses and luxury stores.
Whiting and Mingwu, whose family environment is relatively poor, the former became a flight attendant who fished for golden turtles in the first class all day, and the latter was Jaejun's driver/bodyguard/assistant. Just like 18 years ago, they are willing to join the world of rich people in front of the above three people to earn some profit for themselves.
When the 36-year-old Dong Eun (played by Song Hye Kyo) becomes the homeroom teacher of Yeon-jin's daughter by various means, the revenge plan that has been preparing for several years is also slowly launched: starting from Mingwu and Whiting, dividing the bullying five, observing preferences and waiting for opportunities to get close to their closest people, and using contradictions to disintegrate the forces around them.
Eighteen years ago, she crouched or knelt in front of her abuser and allowed her dignity to suffer; After 18 years, she finally stood in front of them and officially declared, "I'm not here to ask for an apology, but to take you all to hell with you." ”
02
School violence and class revenge are almost the most common patterns in Korean dramas. Drawing a shallow "→" before them constitutes the causal relationship of "Dark Glory".
The terrier is old, the routine is vulgar, and how to turn over the tricks all depends on the control of the director and screenwriter.
director Angel Ho, representative work "Secret Forest"; Screenwriter Kim Eun-suk, representative works "Ghost", "Mr. Sunshine" and "Descendants of the Sun". Kim Eun-suk, who is very good at writing lines, steadily outputs golden sentences in "Dark Glory", with less sweetness of romance dramas and more melancholy of revenge dramas.
The image of "sword dance" is often mentioned in the play to symbolize Don'en's revenge. The sword dance is slow and elegant, like Dong'en's plan for several years; Dancers need to be highly skilled, and the slightest mistake can hurt, and Don En walks on the tip of the knife with every step.
"Dark Glory" is also like a sword dance, filmed with both pain and beauty.
Donne's campus memories are usually short, but the nuanced violent presentation makes the audience feel like pins and needles outside the theater. The memories of being bullied are like ghosts, haunting her day and night, shaping every choice in her life.
When his whole body was burned by curling irons and there was no medicine to take, Donn lay in the snow to cool his skin. Since then, she has only eaten cold food: cold rice balls and sandwiches at convenience stores, cold rice sausages from Korean restaurants... Just hearing the sound of roasting meat made her fall to the ground with PTSD.
In order to cover the scars all over his body, Donn always wrapped himself tightly. The newborn ugly skin often itched, and she gently scratched through her clothes, and accepted the gift from Yeon-jin with a normal expression.
"The pharmacy doesn't open until 9 o'clock, but it only takes 20 minutes to get to the Han River." Donn often thinks this on nights when he can't sleep in pain or itching. But after all, she did not jump into the river, but rose and fell in the more turbid ocean of life.
On the day he left school, 18-year-old Don asked the abuser about his dreams. Yeonjin says she doesn't have a dream because it's enough to hire someone with a dream to work for herself. Dong Eun firmly said the other party's incomprehensible words, "My dream is Yeonjin." ”
In the next 18 years, what supported her to live was indeed her hatred for Yeonjin, and hatred was always longer than love, and it was more memorable.
"It's great that I got admitted to the teacher editor, and you became a mother, Yeonjin."
"I think every day, Yeonjin, where will I meet you?"
"Let's die slowly, Yeonjin."
For 18 years, every monologue of Dong Eun has been like a letterhead to Yeonjin. She pronounced the other person's name gently and coldly, as if she was talking to a close friend. For Don, who has no sustenance, this long hatred is indeed the only sustenance.
Co-workers envy her for joining friendships and having boyfriends after college, but this is not Don's life trajectory, and college is only for decent work, and then convenient revenge. In the small rented room, there was no furniture except for a bed. The walls are full of character networks, screenshots of social platforms of enemies, world observations and breakthrough research. Her life, as she puts it, was "in ruins."
There are almost no emotional scenes in "Dark Glory", but the screenwriter still arranged some romantic, heartwarming, and fiery moments for Don. Perhaps nourished by hatred, she did not notice the germ of the man's feelings, but the audience has quietly fallen in a glance of ten thousand years.
Doctor Zhou (played by Li Zhixi), who was born in the middle and upper class, is a person from another world, and he accidentally became Don'en's Go teacher. Spring and autumn, the two have been quietly playing chess. After Dong Eun left the school, he no longer took the initiative to contact him, but did not cut off his feelings.
A few years later, Dr. Zhou dropped everything and came to Don'en's city. After listening to her long history of pain, he decided to help her get revenge. "I'll be the executioner, I'll dance the sword." When such words come out of the simple lips and teeth, they still sparkle with momentum.
Dong Eun learns Go in order to get close to Yeon-jin's chaebol husband, President Ha (Jung Sung-il). The serious and black-bellied President Ha likes to play chess, and will also fall in love with the beautiful mysterious woman who is skilled in chess. But he didn't know that the encounter full of atmosphere was carefully designed by Donn armed to the hair strands.
Dr. Zhou and President Ha are obviously two types of men, just as the 41-year-old Song Hye Kyo is very suitable for playing a tired revenge woman, Li Zhixi plays the sunny puppy male protagonist with trauma inside, and Zheng Sung-il plays the indifferent middle-aged man with an undercurrent.
03
Dark Glory isn't a perfect episode without any bugs.
If you dig deeper, you will find that Dong'en's revenge is smooth, the bullying group is disconnected, and all luck is on the side of the big heroine with full aura.
Like the Korean dramas with class antagonism as the core in recent years, "Dark Glory" also interrogates the shadow under the huge gap between the rich and the poor. Yeon-jin's lines also openly mock Dong-eun's original sin: "That kind of parents are your perpetrators."
If "Burning" and "Parasite" crush the dream bubbles coveted by the bottom with devastating endings, Korean dramas such as "Dark Glory" deal with the class issue more ambiguously and idealized.
In a sense, "Dark Glory" is also a placebo for ordinary audiences.
We all believe that Dong Eun will be the winner of this chess game of gambling on life, and believe that evil is rewarded with evil, and good is rewarded with good, because no matter how cruel the trend in Korean dramas is, it will usher in a happy ending.
At the end of the episode, the moment of the black screen, you will withdraw from the pleasure and suddenly realize that this is just a dream of light and shadow, not life.
lemon