#bc yeah. exactly that. people are criticising this show for having plot holes

[goyurim]

if you're into horror, don't watch hellbound. it's not for you.

it's being marketed towards audiences who loved of us are dead or sweet home which... makes sense i guess given the netflix logo, multiple seasons, bingeworthy amount of episodes etc. but at it's essence it is such a Korean drama i think it would have done so much better on a national cable tv channel like jtbc or something.

western audiences are trashing so much on the second season especially but also the whole show in general bc they're so used to being spoon-fed answers. western media doesn't trust their audience to understand implicit ideas and concepts. stories that are more open-ended and push viewers to fill in gaps themselves instead of relying on the storytellers to justify everything are way too complex apparently. but mainly i think a lot of people don't understand how korean psychological thrillers work. it's not about the monsters. it's about the people.

hellbound, to me, since the first season has always been a character study more than anything. it's about love, life, death, and sacrifice. what these things mean to different people, and how they find meaning through them. the monsters are merely a plot device, how does the existence of them affect your understanding of the world around you? the world within yourself? does it change anything? would you have been the same in a world that wasn't hellbound?

korean fanatasy dramas tend to do this a lot, like in the golden spoon where it was never revealed who the old grandma selling these golden spoons was or where she even got them from, or even in rom-coms like lovely runner, where it's never explicitly stated why this random watch allows our main lead to time-travel. we make sense of it ourselves though - it was the character's motivations, their passions, their ambitions, their love - that made their ordinary worlds extraordinary. and that extraordinariness (?? is that even a word?) is depicted through symbols, like a spoon, or a watch, or even supernatural monsters that appear to steal your soul and send you to hell. but the story was never about the symbols, it's about the people affected by them, and how they sometimes end up influencing the symbols too.

hellbound is an excellent show that explores all these different themes while never removing the spotlight from individual people and their humanity. personally, i loved the first season, and the second season even more. the cast is incredible, the acting is superb, the cinematography is amazing, and the writing is very intentional and well thought out. i wish it was appreciated more bc it really doesn't deserve all of the negative reviews it's been getting.