Wish Upon A Star: A Picspam
Apr. 12th, 2010 10:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quaggy
So here, we go. It's not my favorite Asian drama of all time (that would be Galileo) or even my favorite Korean drama (that would be Coffee Prince), but there's something about Wish Upon A Star that just sucked me in. The plot was totally over the top and often required to complete suspension of disbelief (Murder plots! Secret births! Blackmail! Kidnappings! Gangsters! Medical Scares! And that was all in just one episode!) But the characters were just a joy to watch. Even without all the crazy storylines (or maybe especially without), I could see the premise working as a regular multi-season series. Not to mention that WUAS is the first Asian drama I've wanted to write fic for. (Well, okay, I did want to write fic for Your Beautiful... but mostly that was because I wanted to rewrite the ending which sort of derailed towards the end.) I'm just not ready to let these characters go!
Meet our heroine, Pal-gang.
But heroine might be something of a misnomer. She's vain, selfish and flighty. She's 25 and works in an insurance company, but she rarely does anything worthwhile. She's that slacker at work that you wonder why they brother coming in at all. She more interested in shopping and looking her absolute best. As a result, she has accumulated a massive amount of credit card debt.
She has also a ridiculous crush on a lawyer at work. Ridiculous both both because he barely notices her existence and because he is a cold-hearted jerk.
She spends way too much time chasing after him. (But remember this guy, because he'll become important later on.)
Okay, maybe she's on to something, but still, what does the pretty package matter when the personality stinks?
Of course, Pal-gang's so superficial that she doesn't care about stuff like that. What she doesn't know is that she has a harsh wake-up call coming.
Pal-gang is the oldest of six kids. Her parents named each of kids after the color of the rainbow. It's as unusual as if someone over here named their kids Red (Pal-gang), Orange (Joo-hwang, the level headed oldest brother), Yellow (No-rang), Green (Cho-rok, the smartest one), Blue (Pa-rang, more on him later) and Indigo (Nam-yi, the baby who's regularly refereed to as Nami).
(No, they don't always dress in their color, but it sure helps for identification purposes.)
It's interesting to note, that in a country that's very aware of bloodlines and family ties, all of Pal-gang's younger siblings are adopted. While Pal-gang is the biological child of her mother, it turns out that her dad adopted her too when he married her mom.
(This is actually a fairly important plot point, but since I'm not going to get into the other-the-top plot stuff, mostly because I just don't care, it doesn't really matter.)
Tragedy strikes when Pal-gang's parents are killed in a car accident. (They were actually murdered, but that's more of the OTT stuff that we're ignoring.) Pal-gang takes her parents' death hard. Everything that she was concerned about before seems foolish and petty in the light of harsh reality. She realizes that she's been wasting her life until now and has nothing to show for herself.
And now she now has five people to worry about. So she throws away her vanity (symbolically by cutting her hair) as tells herself from now she's just a mom.
You have to give her credit for committing herself fully. She never moans and groans about how unfortunate she is to be saddled with a bunch of kids at such a young age. She accepts motherhood (as a single parent to five kids!) without so much as a flinch.
And she does it with her whole heart. She's all her siblings have and, in the case of Nami, the only parent he'll ever know.
It turns out, whatever Pal-gang sets her mind to do, she makes happens. She had a few bumps along the way, but she learns how to get what she wants. She starts improving at work in an incredibly short period of time. Putting in the extra hours to learn not only how to do her job well, but how to be the best.
She still makes mistakes, of course, but her rise is meteoric because has her family as her motivation.
Pal-gang's brothers and sisters are the most important love of her life. Whatever she does, she does for them. They deserve a better parent than who she was before, so she remakes herself into someone they can be proud of. Her selfish inclinations don't disappear, but she strong enough to fight against them.
She doesn't trust herself to live well for her own sake, but she can take the hard road and fight for a better life for her brothers and sisters.
Which is a very good thing, because things are pretty dire right after her parents pass away. They have no money and, to make matters worse, they've been thrown out of their house and have no place to go.
Fortunately, Kang-ha's brother has offered her a position as live-in maid. Before her parents died, she was excited to be close to her crush, but now it's a way out. She no longer cares about romance or getting married. She just wants to make sure she can take care of her family. In fact, being able to see Kang-ha clearly for the first time, she curses herself for wasting so much time chasing after him.
We'll take a moment to meet Jun-ha (the brother) and Tae-gyu (the nephew, who's hiding behind his uncle), since they were important characters and I'm going to ignore them for the rest of the post. (Actually, the number of awesome secondary characters I have to ignore is criminal, but this post is way too long as it is!)
In the beginning, Jun-ha seems to be the perfect white knight. It turns out he's as messed up as his brother, but that's another story. As for Tae-gyu, supposedly, he grew up in America. I say supposedly, because no American-bred male would act like he does unless he was as out and proud as Jack from Will & Grace. Somehow I get the feeling that's not what the show's creators had in mind.
Tae-gyu has this problem of acting out and/or acting drunk and stupid. (And he's not exactly the brightest bulb to begin with.) Kang-ha has a solution for that:
Yes, that's Tae-gyu, he's hosing down. But back to Pal-gang...
So Pal-gang might have been hired as a live-in maid, but they weren't expecting her to bring five kids along with her. She's knowns that's not going to fly without even being told. Pal Gang's solution?
To sneak her brothers and sisters in as baggage and then try to have all five (including the baby!) hide when her employers are home so they're not found out. It's amazing that they didn't all get discovered right away.
But, of course, they do inevitably get found out. Jerk that he is, Kang-ha wants to throw them out on the street, but, with the support of his brother and nephew, Pal-gang convinces him to let them stay for a month until she gets her feet back under her. They even sign a contract.
What Kang-ha doesn't realize is that this is the beginning of the end for him.
It's a three front attack. First off, Pal-gang has a smart mouth. Since she no longer cares about making a good impression, she doesn't hesitate to argue with Kang-ha when she disagrees with him. They bicker constantly. This is extremely unusual behavior for Kang-ha, who's normally above such petty squabbling.
But he can't seem to help himself. Without even meaning to, she knows exactly which buttons to push and he falls for it every time. (He has more education, but she has a surprising amount common sense, so they're pretty evenly matched.) And the first cracks in the iceman appear.
For her part, Pal-gang knows she should be nicer to Kang-ha, if only out of gratitude for letting her stay, but she can't resist matching wits with him. She doesn't even know why she does it.
It isn't until much later in the series do we realize that Pal-gang likes to bicker with the people she loves. (Something she doesn't let herself do as a parent.) It's how she shows her affection.
The second thing that leads to his downfall is the kids. Though he seems to like all of the kids more than a misanthrope normally would, it's mainly Nami and Pa-rang who break through to him. You know, these two:
(Okay, yeah, I just wanted to use that .gif again.) Those two break down his defenses more than anything else could. But you can see how, can't you? Before he realizes what he's doing, he finds himself taking care of Nami.
Nobody forced him to, but it turns out that Kang-ha isn't cold-hearted enough to ignore the needs of a baby. So, he takes on the role of emergency babysitter.
He's really bad at it, by the way.
But he does get better at childcare in general as the series progresses.
In fact, he's the only adult in the house who tries to take on some of Pal-gang's parenting duties. Or even thinks to, which is surprising since, unlike Kang-ha, his brother and nephew had both officially proclaimed themselves as Pal-gang's suitors. (Oh, didn't I mention that part? My bad.)
And then there's Pa-rang. One morning, Kang-ha woke up to find something weird at the foot of his bed.
He pulled back the covers to discover:
A sleeping Pa-rang! The little boy has a history of sleepwalking and somehow would always wind up near Kang-ha.
Kang-ha pretended to be put out, but it was clear that he was growing attached to the kid. It got to the point that when Pal-gang figured out to keep Pa-rang from wandering, Kang-ha was disappointed. He was extremely relieved when that solution didn't last very long.
To be honest, Kang-ha never had a chance. He had a pretty horrific childhood and Pa-rang reminded him of himself at that age. So when it was clear that Pa-rang saw Kang-ha as his new father-figure, Kang-ha did his best to not disappoint him.
And then, as the final blow, there were the emotions that Pal-gang herself made him feel. When she wasn't bickering with him (and even sometimes when she was) Pal-gang would take care of him.
He didn't know what to make of it, but was hard for him not to be touched.
But more than that, Kang-ha had a hard time watching Pal-gang work so hard for her family. Maybe if she had asked for help, or even accepted help when it was offered, he might have been able to ignore it. But other than her initial request for a chance to prove herself, she seemed determined to do everything on her own, even if it was too much for her to bear. It bothered him. SHE bothered him. Him, the cold-hearted guy who had closed himself off to all human emotions.
But he couldn't close himself off around her. It took him a while to figure out why.
In fact, it took an evening from hell...
In keeping with the saying "no good deed goes unpunished",Kang-ha uncharacteristically offered Pal-gang a ride home (well, actually, it's more accurate to say that he ordered her into the car, but that's Kang-ha for you) and that led to one misfortune after another.
And the evening kept on getting worse, even after this:
(At least, Pal-gang got a good laugh out of it.) But surprisingly, Kang-ha would look back on that night with fondness. Because that was the night he realized he was falling in love with Pal-gang. Yes, the night from hell. Never let it be said that Kang-ha was normal.
But then he had to deal with the fact that he fell in love with her too late. Her crush on him was long gone and he knew that she had decided that falling in love is a luxury she can't afford.
And, honestly, I think that there's a part of Kang-ha's so messed up that he doesn't believe he deserves to be happy. (There's a lot more of the OTT plot that comes into play here, but let's just leave it at that.)
As it turns out, Pal-gang's true feelings ran a lot deeper that anyone realized. When she let go of her crush, what she really did was let go of any hope or expectation and bury her feelings down deep. It worked fine when Kang-ha was still acting like an iceman, but the more he warmed up, the harder and harder for Pal-gang to keep her feeling under control.
He wasn't trying to court her like his brother and nephew, but that made his actions genuine and impossible to ignore. He wasn't just humoring Pa-rang because he was trying to score point with Pa-rang's big sister. He honestly like the little boy. What's more he seemed to know how to support Pal-gang without trying to fix everything for her, which she appreciated.
So what we have are two very stubborn people who can't admit that they need each other. In fact it took a medical crisis to make them realize how stupid they were being. (Spoilers here on out, by the way.)
They made the baby sick, the bastards!!
Fortunately, Nami was fine in the end, but during the worse of it, Kang-ha realized he didn't want to be anywhere expect by Pal-gang's side through all of this. And he was the only one that Pal-gang could let herself lean on.
The iceman had melted, never to return, and they got their act together.
Finally!
They made us wait a ridiculously long time for that kiss!
So what kind of man was Kang-ha really once the cold-as-ice facade was broken? Well, for one thing, it turns out that he's a wuss.
Make that a BIG wuss.
But he's also rock solid in a criss.
He was holding her like that, by the way, BEFORE they got together.
Both Pal-gang and her bother Joo-hwang pointed out at various times in the series, that it's unlikely that Pal-gang would be able to find a guy who would be welcome the extra financial burden of her five siblings. But Kang-ha wasn't just willing to help financially. He's ready to be a dad. Turns out all that ice was hiding a really big heart. He loves those kids almost as much as he does Pal-gang.
And when you're greeted with a smile like that every time you walk into the room, who can blame him?
Pa-rang, by the way, was delighted when he found out that Kang-ha had finally admitted that he was in love with Pal-gang.
Kang-ha looks pretty pleased with himself too.
He also found the prefect way to get Pal-gang to stop arguing with him.
The only thing that worked, as it turns out!
The lone bump in the road was that Pal-gang was didn't want to get married until she had succeeded on her own. She had long said that she didn't want to be Cinderella and it turns out she meant it! Kang-ha actually took that with pretty good grace and just stayed with her and supported her the best that he could. Eventually, Pal-gang realized that she was being unreasonably stubborn and proposed to HIM.
Kang-ha didn't seem to mind.
But even before they made things official, they had already become a family.
All in all, life was good...
...and it kept getting better. That's baby Bora (Violet) in Pal-gang's arms.
And they all lived happily ever after!
(This is an image heavy post! Be prepared! Most screencaps came from Dramabeans, but a few came from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
folderdropping.)
Meet our heroine, Pal-gang.
She has also a ridiculous crush on a lawyer at work. Ridiculous both both because he barely notices her existence and because he is a cold-hearted jerk.
Okay, maybe she's on to something, but still, what does the pretty package matter when the personality stinks?
Pal-gang is the oldest of six kids. Her parents named each of kids after the color of the rainbow. It's as unusual as if someone over here named their kids Red (Pal-gang), Orange (Joo-hwang, the level headed oldest brother), Yellow (No-rang), Green (Cho-rok, the smartest one), Blue (Pa-rang, more on him later) and Indigo (Nam-yi, the baby who's regularly refereed to as Nami).
It's interesting to note, that in a country that's very aware of bloodlines and family ties, all of Pal-gang's younger siblings are adopted. While Pal-gang is the biological child of her mother, it turns out that her dad adopted her too when he married her mom.
Tragedy strikes when Pal-gang's parents are killed in a car accident. (They were actually murdered, but that's more of the OTT stuff that we're ignoring.) Pal-gang takes her parents' death hard. Everything that she was concerned about before seems foolish and petty in the light of harsh reality. She realizes that she's been wasting her life until now and has nothing to show for herself.
You have to give her credit for committing herself fully. She never moans and groans about how unfortunate she is to be saddled with a bunch of kids at such a young age. She accepts motherhood (as a single parent to five kids!) without so much as a flinch.
It turns out, whatever Pal-gang sets her mind to do, she makes happens. She had a few bumps along the way, but she learns how to get what she wants. She starts improving at work in an incredibly short period of time. Putting in the extra hours to learn not only how to do her job well, but how to be the best.
Pal-gang's brothers and sisters are the most important love of her life. Whatever she does, she does for them. They deserve a better parent than who she was before, so she remakes herself into someone they can be proud of. Her selfish inclinations don't disappear, but she strong enough to fight against them.
Which is a very good thing, because things are pretty dire right after her parents pass away. They have no money and, to make matters worse, they've been thrown out of their house and have no place to go.
We'll take a moment to meet Jun-ha (the brother) and Tae-gyu (the nephew, who's hiding behind his uncle), since they were important characters and I'm going to ignore them for the rest of the post. (Actually, the number of awesome secondary characters I have to ignore is criminal, but this post is way too long as it is!)
Tae-gyu has this problem of acting out and/or acting drunk and stupid. (And he's not exactly the brightest bulb to begin with.) Kang-ha has a solution for that:
So Pal-gang might have been hired as a live-in maid, but they weren't expecting her to bring five kids along with her. She's knowns that's not going to fly without even being told. Pal Gang's solution?
But, of course, they do inevitably get found out. Jerk that he is, Kang-ha wants to throw them out on the street, but, with the support of his brother and nephew, Pal-gang convinces him to let them stay for a month until she gets her feet back under her. They even sign a contract.
It's a three front attack. First off, Pal-gang has a smart mouth. Since she no longer cares about making a good impression, she doesn't hesitate to argue with Kang-ha when she disagrees with him. They bicker constantly. This is extremely unusual behavior for Kang-ha, who's normally above such petty squabbling.
For her part, Pal-gang knows she should be nicer to Kang-ha, if only out of gratitude for letting her stay, but she can't resist matching wits with him. She doesn't even know why she does it.
The second thing that leads to his downfall is the kids. Though he seems to like all of the kids more than a misanthrope normally would, it's mainly Nami and Pa-rang who break through to him. You know, these two:
He's really bad at it, by the way.
But he does get better at childcare in general as the series progresses.
And then there's Pa-rang. One morning, Kang-ha woke up to find something weird at the foot of his bed.
He pulled back the covers to discover:
Kang-ha pretended to be put out, but it was clear that he was growing attached to the kid. It got to the point that when Pal-gang figured out to keep Pa-rang from wandering, Kang-ha was disappointed. He was extremely relieved when that solution didn't last very long.
And then, as the final blow, there were the emotions that Pal-gang herself made him feel. When she wasn't bickering with him (and even sometimes when she was) Pal-gang would take care of him.
But more than that, Kang-ha had a hard time watching Pal-gang work so hard for her family. Maybe if she had asked for help, or even accepted help when it was offered, he might have been able to ignore it. But other than her initial request for a chance to prove herself, she seemed determined to do everything on her own, even if it was too much for her to bear. It bothered him. SHE bothered him. Him, the cold-hearted guy who had closed himself off to all human emotions.
In fact, it took an evening from hell...
And the evening kept on getting worse, even after this:
But then he had to deal with the fact that he fell in love with her too late. Her crush on him was long gone and he knew that she had decided that falling in love is a luxury she can't afford.
As it turns out, Pal-gang's true feelings ran a lot deeper that anyone realized. When she let go of her crush, what she really did was let go of any hope or expectation and bury her feelings down deep. It worked fine when Kang-ha was still acting like an iceman, but the more he warmed up, the harder and harder for Pal-gang to keep her feeling under control.
So what we have are two very stubborn people who can't admit that they need each other. In fact it took a medical crisis to make them realize how stupid they were being. (Spoilers here on out, by the way.)
Fortunately, Nami was fine in the end, but during the worse of it, Kang-ha realized he didn't want to be anywhere expect by Pal-gang's side through all of this. And he was the only one that Pal-gang could let herself lean on.
Finally!
So what kind of man was Kang-ha really once the cold-as-ice facade was broken? Well, for one thing, it turns out that he's a wuss.
But he's also rock solid in a criss.
Both Pal-gang and her bother Joo-hwang pointed out at various times in the series, that it's unlikely that Pal-gang would be able to find a guy who would be welcome the extra financial burden of her five siblings. But Kang-ha wasn't just willing to help financially. He's ready to be a dad. Turns out all that ice was hiding a really big heart. He loves those kids almost as much as he does Pal-gang.
Pa-rang, by the way, was delighted when he found out that Kang-ha had finally admitted that he was in love with Pal-gang.
He also found the prefect way to get Pal-gang to stop arguing with him.
The lone bump in the road was that Pal-gang was didn't want to get married until she had succeeded on her own. She had long said that she didn't want to be Cinderella and it turns out she meant it! Kang-ha actually took that with pretty good grace and just stayed with her and supported her the best that he could. Eventually, Pal-gang realized that she was being unreasonably stubborn and proposed to HIM.
But even before they made things official, they had already become a family.
...and it kept getting better. That's baby Bora (Violet) in Pal-gang's arms.
(This is an image heavy post! Be prepared! Most screencaps came from Dramabeans, but a few came from
folderdropping.)
no subject
Date: 2010-04-16 01:02 pm (UTC)I can see the appeal of the Asian dramas, though. So much pretty...and OTT plots?
Not to mention short with clear, well-thought out endings. And with a heavy shot of romance too!
no subject
Date: 2010-04-16 09:10 pm (UTC)Ha! Well, I go through spates of watching series, and then droughts of not watching anything. Also, I'm a putterer - I like to watch stuff while I'm doing other things...but that didn't work with The Wallflower, because I needed all my concentration to follow the subtitles! :)
Not to mention short with clear, well-thought out endings. And with a heavy shot of romance too!
Sold! I hate series that drag out forever - I like to know there's a definite destination when I start watching a series :). (This is why I'm just now considering watching Ugly Betty - because now there's a definite ending!)
Okay! Now on to episode two of The Wallflower!
no subject
Date: 2010-04-19 02:57 am (UTC)Yeah, same here. Though I've been watching a lot on my computer, which isn't very conductive to doing other things.
This is why I'm just now considering watching Ugly Betty - because now there's a definite ending!
And it's a good one! Plus, it would lead very naturally to your Press Gang/Ugly Betty crossover! :-)
no subject
Date: 2010-04-19 09:48 pm (UTC)The funny thing was, I had already padded around the edges of the show, and fallen for characters and a ship, so I was semi-invested already. Then I read about the second last episode and had to watch it, and then the finale kind of completely converted me. Such a fantastic and generous ending - everybody wins! I love that! So now, yes, I think I have to watch all the other episodes :)
Okay - episode two of The Wallflower has MAGIC MUSHROOMS! That make Sunako into a lady! And Kyohei just keeps getting beaten up! Also - he spends so much time being sad and staring at the skull she gave him as a thank you present! I kind of love it :)
no subject
Date: 2010-04-21 02:40 pm (UTC)Yeay! That's excellent! It's a great show. And the end was simply wonderful!
Also - he spends so much time being sad and staring at the skull she gave him as a thank you present! I kind of love it :)
Yeah, the skull practically becomes another cast member. It's absolutely adorable. :-) I'm so glad you're enjoying the show!