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khunppi · 4 months ago

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Welcome to another round of W2 Tells You What You Should See, where W2 (me) tries to sell you (you) on something you should be watching. Today's choice: D.P.

D.P. (which stands for Deserter Pursuit, not something else) is a two-season, twelve-episode Korean series about a young man doing his mandatory military service who finds himself -- alongside a slightly unhinged partner -- tasked with tracking down other young men who have skipped out on said mandatory military service.

This show gets a giant trigger warning for all kinds of harassment, both shown and implied. It is a bloody, bare-knuckled tale about violence, bullying, and the systems that not only protect but enable the violent bullies. It is a show about boys who beat the shit out of one another, but in ways that make you more sad than horny -- and in ways that make them more sad than horny. And yet, fujoshi hope springs eternal, as those main boys absolutely, 100% need to kiss.

I was just looking for a whatever show to put in my face, and I was surprised by how much D.P. impressed me. If you think you might be up for it, I've got five reasons to roll out for this one.

1. A shockingly critical take on toxic Korean masculinity and military culture!

...What, you thought I was going to start with the gay stuff? Just for that, I'm going to make you wait for that until selling point #5.

Anyway, I think the most notable part of this show is how absolutely brutal and unflinching its portrayal of the Korean military is. I had been given the impression that, sure, it had some points of critique. I did not expect it to be an indictment of the entire damn system. From the conscripts to the commanders to the civilians, damn near everyone either contributes to the cycle of abuse or passively allows a rotten institution to worsen at every turn.

D.P. starts out like it's going to be a deserter-of-the-week military police procedural, where a couple good soldiers go track down some naughty lads who have shirked their rightful duties! But no, the show presents you almost immediately with the idea that going AWOL isn't just a thing for bad lazy boys who'd rather spend their weekends partying. Instead, running away is often the only escape from brutal abuse suffered at the hands of their fellow soldiers. Our main pair's job is to find these deserters and bring them back -- but boy, do they very quickly start to feel not good about it.

Especially once you hit the second season, the villainy of the villains can reach almost comical levels -- like, the bad guys are so bad that they'd be twirling their moustaches if they were allowed to grow any. But comical doesn't mean unbelievable. I mean, anyone with half an inch of awareness right now knows that the Venn diagram of the evilest people in the world and the most absurd people in the world is pretty much just a circle.

Questioning the military is always a dicey prospect in fiction, because of how many people have such delicate feelings about ideas of patriotism and service. I think it helps that the major incident at the crux of the show is based on a real-life tragedy from 2014 (which is when the show is set), so you can't clutch your pearls and say that would never happen in our army! because, uh, it already did. Authoritarian pressure cookers with unquestionable hierarchies lead to horrific abuse! We've got the recent history to prove it!

And sure, yeah, I wish the show had been a little more explicit in its gender critique, but I always wish that. D.P. ain't special.

2. A solid supporting cast

I think this show does a good job overall of creating side characters that are only slightly larger than life. They're big enough to move the story along with occasional good comedic moments, so it's not just a complete litany of despair, but not so exaggerated they need you to suspend too much disbelief that they might exist in real life.

This network of characters is important, because it recognizes that our main characters are not in positions of power and cannot make substantive changes in the world. Especially in the second season, the plot widens out enough that they need allies who are empowered to pull of things that army grunts are not. I very much like that the show does not (overly) artificially insert its main characters into places they don't belong; rather, it keeps them where they (mostly) make sense to be, allowing them to serve as supports while more structurally appropriate people step up to the plate.

Now, I will admit that I had more than a little trouble telling some side characters apart. I mean, come on -- half the cast is a bunch of TV-handsome athletic Korean men around the same age, with the same haircut, wearing the same uniform. Combine that with my vague face-blindness, and I was struggling. Maybe keep a cast list open or something, just to help you kep track.

3. On Earth My Nina

Did you watch EVILIVE? (You should!) Did you adore that handsome cat-eyed boy who was Seo Doyeong's right-hand goon? Do you want to see him play a beautiful and tragic transfemme who is a morally complicated but ultimately incredibly sympathetic character?

Hell yeah you do.

Nina is a oneshot character -- season 2, episode 3 is all you get. Yet you could probably write an entire dissertation about how D.P. is a Manly Show For Manly Men that takes this episode to condemn homophobia and transphobia as unqualified evils, no nuance, no discussion. And you might think I'd be the one to do it, but no! I'm gonna talk about punchin' stuff.

4. Some kick-ass fight choreography!

If you're sick of fight scenes that are just a million quick cuts of shaky hand-held footage meant to cover how the actors couldn't punch their way out of a paper bag, I've got some great news for you!

As I said up top, this is a violent show. There's lots of people getting punched, kicked, shot, stabbed, burned, blown up, bludgeoned, strangled, hit by cars, tossed out windows, and generally roughed up pretty badly. I wouldn't call it gory or gross, necessarily, but it doesn't hold back on the damage that gets done. It understands just how many times you have to punch a trained soldier before that trained soldier finally goes down. The folk with the fake blood and bruise makeup definitely earned their paychecks.

It doesn't try to pretty up the violence either, so when I say I like the fight choreography, I don't mean that things get artsy or poetic. What this show has going for it is some very smart work that doesn't rely on jiggling the camera to build tension. A couple of the fights are one person against a group, and they're timed well enough that none of the extras look like they're just hovering in the background, checking their watch and waiting their turn.

I like how scrappy the brawls can get, too. Han Hoyeol (more on him in a moment) will just fling himself bodily at people, knocking them down in ways that aren't graceful, but get the job done. These aren't graceful battles between honorable masters. They're mostly one guy who's trying to get away versus another guy who's trying to subdue him. Those can be very interesting stakes.

Most of the actors are clearly well-trained in stage combat. Every now and then, though, you get someone who's clearly a martial artist, and they just let him at it. The one chest kick that Lego Grandpa gets off? Damn.

But a lot of times, the fights are just sad.

The main boys realize very quickly that their job is returning abuse victims to their abusers. Sometimes they can feel good about bringing in some dangerous shithead or chasing a thug! Mostly, though, they're approaching their quarries with the attitude of, you should really come with us, because the next guys coming for you won't be nearly as gentle. You as the viewer wind up rooting against our guys as often as not, because you want to see the deserters get away. That's a level of moral complication I was not expecting when I started out!

I hope you are ready for some man-tears, because this show is at least 30% man-tears by volume. Crying while punching someone you care about? It doesn't get manlier than that.

5. The aforementioned gay stuff

Okay, I made you wait for it, so here we go.

This is love.

The tall, quiet, buff one is An Junho, the main character of the show. The lanky, scrappy, crazy one is Han Hoyeol, his eventual partner.

It goes a little bit like this: Junho is a completely emotionally unavailable young man from a terribly abusive family situation. He gets paired up with Hoyeol, who actively and openly cares about Junho's well-being. Junho reacts to this like someone who has never been cared for in his whole life. Hoyeol reacts to that like someone who has never had someone actually let him care for them.

They then enter into a buddy-cop dynamic that's great because they genuinely like one another. They get close pretty quick because they go through some incredibly traumatic things together. Junho starts to learn how to care, and Hoyeol starts to learn to stop hiding his own trauma behind his jokester personality. And they do this just in time to get traumatized even more! That's kind of how the show goes.

I want to talk for a second about Han Hoyeol.

I must at this moment confess that I don't speak Korean gay-coding enough to know if that's what's happening with him. We are introduced to him by a loving and surprisingly long shot of his ass in a pair of panties with his name written on the butt. His mannerisms are exaggerated and his whole personality is extra. He's comfortable around drag queens. Homophobic insults roll off his back. And that's all without even getting into what he says in front of Junho's mom and little sister. What I'm saying is: In a show full of Manly Man-Type Men, honestly, he reads kind of like a fag.

Which means one of two things: either he's actually meant to come across as a (nominally) closeted gay man, or he's supposed to be a straight man so comfortable in his straightness that he doesn't care if he seems like a fruit. Both make me happy to consider.

Hoyeol is by far my favorite character in the show. He's great because he's definitely kind of a wacky loose cannon, but believably so. He's defiant and gleefully irritating, but he reins it in juuuuust enough that you can imagine he'd be tolerable even by Korean military standards. So it's not one of those situations where you're wondering why the hell the straitlaced establishment puts up with this completely insubordinate fictional guy. Hoyeol will do what he's supposed to; he just reserves the right to be annoying as heck while he does it.

This is not a drama like Beyond Evil or EVILIVE, where the main character of the show is the relationship between the two leads. This is An Junho's tale, where Han Hoyeol is merely a supporting character. But he is an extremely important supporting character, and their interactions form the core of Junho's protagonist arc. They are the only people who can see one another for what they truly are: vulnerable and traumatized and badly in need of love. Whether you read that love as romantic or not, it is love.

They totally should kiss, though. Not during the time period covered in the show, mind you; those boys have way too much damage to work through first. They're gonna need a slow post-canon burn. Somebody get on that for me. There's a mere 78 works on AO3 for this show. We can do better. Support our troops.

...Hold on a damn minute, is this another one of those things that doesn't have an actual ending?

I saw a lot of people saying that before I started watching, so that was what I was prepared for, and you know what? They're wrong!

Season 2 aired in July 2023, and as far as I can tell, there has to been no noise made about a season 3. More to that, I don't think there's going to be one. While I think the series could support one, sure, I absolutely, 100% think it doesn't need one.

I understand where the "season 3 when?" people are coming from. Not all the conflicts of the show get all wrapped up with a neat bow, and not everybody ends clearly on the path to a stable happily ever after. Honestly, though, that's better, because it's at least an acknowledgment that the issues at play here are not subject to a quick solution. Cycles of abuse don't stop quickly or easily. There is still more work to be done to get the toxicity out of the masculinity at the heart of Korean military culture.

And that's if you can get the toxicity out at all. It may be too much of a feature, not a bug. The show isn't quite willing to say it outright, but you really have to consider if this kind of corruption and abuse is just too endemic to the system as it is structured now, where everyone buys into the lie that the military is such a noble and unqualified good that it is above question. D.P. portrays a badly broken institution that permanently damages not only the people forced by law to endure it, but the country at large. After all, as long as you're sending every young man in your culture through an intense multi-year experience that demands he violently hate femmes, fags, fatties, freaks, and feelings, you are going to see those attitudes continue to ripple out through Korean society for a long, long time.

Ready to watch?

It's a Netflix series, so off to Netflix you go! Heck, if you're already there, you've probably seen it recommended for you already -- I know that's how I found it. Click that little banner and start watching!

Real talk: I don't think this show could have gotten made today in the U.S., given the stranglehold the military-industrial complex has over big-studio productions, to say nothing of U.S. public opinion. Supporting our troops also means never questioning what kind of godawful meat grinder we're throwing them into, I guess.

And you definitely couldn't have made here, because deserters would've just gotten shot in the first ten minutes! Ha ha anyway.