#Huisu I love you but GIRL

[chaosgremlim]

Can we talk about how Huisu Kim says that she “locked” siyeon out of her heart, Siyeon, the one homosexual character of the story.

Like, that stinks of repressed homosexuality to me. My conspiracy theory is that Huisu imposed all those demonized traits into her because she wanted to justify to herself why she couldn’t be “like” Siyeon at all; and I also think that could be why Siyeon is so wary on the new loop, because she realized she was created as just a denial fodder y’know? I may be just tripping

[onewholivesinloops]

Finished season 1 of Surviving Romance!

I think it’s awesome. I’m a sucker for a story inside of a story type things with time looping and meta stuff so this was right up my alley. I really loved when the meta elements came to a head towards the end. Meta horror is generally very hit-and-miss for me, but I thought it was done well here and I was genuinely unsettled by it. The whole thing also reads like a critique of the heterosexual romance ending = happy ending trope with Huisu rejecting that sort of thing when she’s given the option for it (original Chae-rin rejecting it by wanting out is also interesting if you read her as a self-insert of sorts for Huisu). Huisu also reads as very gay to me because of this and her fixation on the Unknown Extra (Mihui) who’s a girl.

I know Se-Yeong Jin is kind of written as a stereotypical possessive and predatory/yandere lesbian which certainly makes the story come off as though it’s demonizing gay people through “bad rep” on a first glance, but I think you can make a case for her being written this way intentionally by Huisu as a representation of her internalized homophobia/belief that attraction to women is inherently predatory, because the entire novel is something she wrote when she was miserable to cope and she put so much of herself into it such as her writing Chae-rin going through so many hardships before getting to be happy with Jeha as a message to herself that her suffering is just a trial before her eventual happy ending. You can read it as an asexual narrative too with all of the focus on strong female friendship, but the two aren’t mutually exclusive so it’s possible it’s going for a little bit of both?

I don’t know if any of this is intended and this might be my extremely charitable read with some projection so maybe I should temper my expectations a little but I think it’s promising? I’m tempted to go back and reread season 1 in case I missed some subtle details but I’ll probably read what’s out of season 2 first. I also want to think more about how the way Huisu wrote the others besides Se-Yeong informs her characterization, but she’s the one who got most of my attention other than original Chae-rin and Mihui because of what happened in the end.

[biggaybunny]

ranting to myself, also, heed the spoiler warning

I'm just so pissed off. I spent all day enthralled by Surviving Romance and its themes and loving its characters and then it just completely shits the bed. It's blatant homophobia, too. Like, there's an argument to be made that we don't know if Seyeong Jin actually is gay, because that's just the role she's been given, but she wants to play her given role, and it's no coincidence that that role happened to be that of the female admirer. Whenever it came up it was explicitly to further villainize her. It's not like it was romance that was the problem, Rina's affection for Minwoo was used to connect her to the others!

And she's the perfect foil to Huisu, more than Chaerin. Here you have someone who's also been tormented by "voices", who wants to give in, and she's probably suffered as much as Huisu and Chaerin have. And they almost confront Huisu with that! They almost have that conversation! Where Huisu is forced to confront the type of person she used to be and, oh I don't know, be the person to reach out this time. Because that was the whole fucking point. That she had no one, before she became Chaerin. And she nearly gave up again, inside the novel, before someone reached out to her. And now here's someone, in the same fucking situation, with no one but Huisu in the position to reach out to her, and what happens? She gets fucking popped by Jeha and they never spare another thought for her. Oh well! Sorry you've been suffering more than anyone else here! That's not important in this story about how everyone is important and about making it together! You filthy queer.

And in the end, when the devil wins, who saves them? Is it the girl who the devil forgot to deal with? The girl who's been aware something's wrong the longest, and noticed it even before the errors began, and logically would know what happened? The girl whose character arc was abruptly killed right at the climax? The girl who MOST CARED ABOUT THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN HUISU AND CHAERIN AND WOULD BE THE ONE IF ANY TO KNOW WHEN SHE'S REPLACED? NO IT'S FUCKING JEHA.

Jeha, who hasn't even been a person for the entire fucking story, because he was never a person, he was just a promise. He was a wish Huisu made for a happy life. Jeha, who was there so Huisu could learn to let go of him and everything he represented. Jeha, who couldn't recognize Chaerin when it mattered most, nor any other time up to that point. Jeha, the special one, in a story about how it was the "unimportant" characters that made the most impact. Was it Jeha that saved Huisu when she was about to give up? Was it even Minwoo? No, it was goddamn Mihui, because the point was an "unknown extra" could change her life every bit as, even more than, the one guy she'd pinned everyone on. But he gets to save the day, and not on any of his own merits. It was the special treatment he got from Chaerin last time around that got him in front of Huisu, and Huisu who got through to him. The plot used him exactly as the in-universe plot, the panacea to their problems. They fucked it up completely.

It was stupid enough that Huisu just.... gave the fuck up like that once they were outside the school. That everyone snapped at once all together, forget their situation, and Huisu decided rather than being strong for them, she was just gonna, you know, fucking do an about face on the last 90ish chapters of character development. I assume the author rushed the story for some reason. I mean, I have to assume that. Nothing else makes sense. They just dropped the story all over the floor. Also there were so many opportunities to have "Se-eun" enter into an innocuous little promise that comes back to bite her. Something less stupid than fucking roshambo.

Also as a matter of purely personal taste I don't like my meta-fiction stories going to "level 0". We've had stories of characters going in to stories since, I don't know, we started writing them down, probably. I don't think there's anything wrong with having them get "out" of the story and still be in what is to us a fictional world. I mean, come on. It's still a work of fiction, you just have to rely on crappy photos instead of the artstyle everyone knows and appreciates.