#e.e.c. watches vincenzo

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they had hanseo literally walk into jipuragi wearing rose-colored glasses and i accepted that this was the narrative telling us he has an overly optimistic outlook of the situation w/jipuragi & that he isn’t aware of what’ll happen to him once they get rid of his brother (this is still likely)

but i also realized that hanseo is the only one that really knows how dangerous both vincenzo and hanseok are and his warnings made to both of them are ignored

he tells vincenzo that his brother is the type to launch a missile into a building to look for the gold/guillotine. they dismiss him and it costs vincenzo his mother.

hanseo warned hanseok about vincenzo and chayoung from the start and ignoring that warning is going to cost hanseok everything.

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i really love hanseo. like so much. he's such a great character and i love him and seunghyeok scheming together and apart.

and to think seunghyeok was able to make hanseo chairman as he promised. talk about impressive. i didn't think much of him and that was my mistake. he's good. he's really good.

and now things are back to a status quo like end but with roles somewhat reversed with hanseo and seunghyeok in better positions. i wonder how long that'll last.

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me, earlier: there’s no point in going through the tags looking for gifsets, there was nothing good in the finale that’s worth reblogging

my sister: *reblogs jang brother stuff that made my heart love the tragedy of their relationship and fill me with a dire need to write fic for them*

me: so, you see, i clowned myself

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i really like vincenzo but episode 8...

vincenzo’s gay panic? out of character. i mean, the man who is capable of flirting with people to win a case & naturally charms other men would not have panicked about having to seduce a man for the sake of taking down babel and hurting the people who hurt his mother.

the above point is doubly insulting to me bc the writers later show that they know how to properly motivate vincenzo into doing this by having minsung tell vincenzo about the way they pinned the death of minsung’s father on vincenzo’s mother. once he’s reminded of this, he flirts without needing chayoung’s guidance & has no qualms about manipulating and flirting with another man. which made the previous scenes with him being nervous around minsung and him freaking out about having to flirt with minsung moot.

making the (so far) only gay character on the show evil is obviously bad, but they didn’t even lean into it as the story went on. they showed minsung was capable of violence and hurt a lot of other partners he had, but once he met vincenzo he was like a puppy dog in love. yes, he might have seen vincenzo as his soulmate and that might’ve accounted for him not being violent with vincenzo, but they didn’t even bring up a hint of the violence he’s capable of. there was no flash of anger the way we see with the jang brothers. for me, it felt as if they forgot the reason minsung was a villain until they needed to send him to jail and to give the audience a reason to root for his downfall.

the show is about getting justice for victims when the system is set up to fail them—we see everyone taking bribes and working to help the babel conglomerate rather than the victims, and we know vincenzo and chayoung are trying to turn the tables on them. so, why couldn’t they bring up one of the victims when it comes to taking down the banker who assaults gay men? chayoung says the violence is bad, regardless of the victim’s gender, so why didn’t they make seeking justice for the victim part of their motivation? personally, i would have been ok with the evil gay man trope if they had at least had us meet one of the victims to show why it’s important to take minsung down.

(there was a post i saw where someone was upset with the ending where they terrorize and publicly humiliate minsung, but he’s the villain and as much as i hate the evil gay man trope, that was one of the rather more satisfying scenes to watch bc he deserved it.)

back to the point about the victims—in the final scene with minsung, we see that he’s has been accused of assault and blackmail and the first thought i had was, will his victims be outed and hurt as a result? that was one of the reasons they didn’t speak out against him earlier, after all. so, if i were writing the story, i would have at least introduced one of the victims and have them be the face of those who are speaking out against minsung. it could have been done via flashback and they could have been someone someone who sought out jipuragi or someone jipuragi reached out to and helped convince to take a stand against minsung. that would’ve still accomplished the goal vincenzo & chayoung had by chipping away at the sterling reputation of the bank so they can hurt babel, while still honoring the victims and helping them find justice. but alas...

[driftbending]

show: here’s some morally grey characters that are both extremely attractive and in a slow burn romance that plan on destroying an evil conglomerate. enjoy.

me: yeah they’re nice & you picked excellent tropes to work with, but can i have more of the chaotic killer boy, his favorite lady lawyer that’s just as murdery, his puppet brother, his “boss,” and the tenants, please?

[driftbending]

me, a few weeks ago: *starts watching vincenzo bc vincenzo and the tenants are really hilarious*

me, now: *only thinks about how i want more chaotic scenes with junwoo*

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i keep writing and rewriting my reaction to vincenzo because there are a lot but also i'm not certain i articulate everything i hated about the ending.

i will say that i knew no matter what that i wouldn't like the ending because murdering a character as punishment for their misdeeds is not something that appeals to me. i grew up watching kirikou et la sorcière, avatar: the last airbender, lilo and stitch, and (more recently) moana. all of these are stories that say "here is an evil character that we'll stop in a way that doesn't involve jail/murder," and the only exception i make for this is light yagami's death in death note and that's because ryuk killed him as a way to end their relationship, not as a punishment for his crimes. (and gothic lit is exempt bc they have to be resolved with murder.) so, whatever happened, regardless of how much violence the babel four did, none of their deaths would have held any emotional satisfaction for me. yet i prepared myself to be unimpressed by the finale since this is what the set up has always been: vincenzo will kill hanseok, and maybe myunghee, seunghyeok, and hanseo.

i knew this from the beginning. the narrative repeated it so often i got annoyed. there were so many close calls with vincenzo pulling a gun on hanseok that that got boring. by the time ep. 20 rolled around i was just fed up and wanted someone to die because this show had already failed me so many other times with their set ups that i wanted at least one good payoff.

lo and behold, they did end up killing the four characters i thought would die. hanseo died, and though he was my favorite character, and though i felt sad he didn't get any funeral scene or help while he was fending off his brother and that his death served as a sacrifice for vincenzo instead of literally anything else, i didn't cry or even get mad about it. he died and i felt free to stop caring about the rest of the story. yay me! i do understand the fans who hated that he was killed and that he should've survived bc abuse victims don't deserve the storyline hanseo got, but this is not a show i expected to actually care about victims. despite what it says, i knew i wouldn't get this for hanseo waaaaay back in ep 8 when they brought up the victims of that gay banker and just used it as a way for us to root against the banker. they didn't treat those victims with any respect at all and so i was already prepared for them to do it all over again. and they did and it sucks, but again for me i couldn’t get as angry as i normally would about this bc i always knew that the deaths from this show would never mean anything to me bc there was just so much of it it became meaningless.

another thing i knew that was going to let me down about this show is that it didn’t have a single “good” character for me to root for. mr. hong existed, but he was murdered early on. every other character on the show is too corrupt to be the ones i would want handling a reconstruction project for a more ethical world. yes, they made hanseo go through a redemption arc, but they didn’t let him stay did they? they focused so much on deconstruction they never cared about reconstruction. so when they got to the ending where vincenzo just leaves, chayoung and the tenants are thrown into a familiar cycle of court cases and defending their plaza from it being redeveloped, vincenzo just goes on to be a mafia boss again, and the guillotine file is back in the hands of the corrupt intelligence agency that created it on the orders of their president. the only thing that changed was babel group was destroyed bc their two ceos were murdered and the lawyers of their legal rep. were also murdered.

and yet, despite my expectations being so low they were basically non-existent, i was still disappointed. they didn't let chayoung do anything (which i knew would happen because i knew something about her characterization never felt fully fledged to me the way it did to fandom, so i wasn't surprised when they delegated her as a damsel-in-distress/love interest.), they killed myunghee the way we used to burn witches (which how fitting for a female character that is cunning and cruel), and the way they killed hanseok literally made me feel faint and nauseous (i wish this was an exaggeration; the second i saw the drill pointed at him i started feeling this way and i couldn't listen/watch his death scene because it was so brutal).

so, the ending satisfied nothing for me. if people who shipped the main characters were satisfied, whatever. i was never interested in them as a ship (i tend to ship vincenzo and chayoung with other characters), so the ending was even more disappointing bc it really held nothing that mattered to me.

i was also not a person that liked the way each character idolized vincenzo because i preferred his relationships with other characters to be filled with more tension* and the narrative just told me that the writers didn't, that vincenzo's word was what mattered, that the other character's conflicting needs were meant to be eclipsed by vincenzo's needs. so when the characters were all looking into the horizon hoping that vincenzo would some day come back (for what, i ask you?) i was just like :|

(*what do i mean by tension? i mean my favorite version of chayoung/vincenzo was the early eps when she hated him for being liked so much by her father that her flaws as a daughter were highlighted more and chayoung's own hesitancy with murder bumping up against vincenzo’s lack of hesitancy. mr. cho/vincenzo were most interesting when mr. cho wanted the guillotine file to use for his own purposes. the tenants/vincenzo were the most interesting when the tenants wanted to take the gold and vincenzo was trying to stop them. even hanseo/vincenzo was the most interesting when they had the "will you kill me? will you betray me?" tension as they worked together to get rid of hanseok. these dynamics added layers to the characters and reminded us they had their own motivations that were as equally important as vincenzo’s, but not enough of these tensions lasted past a few episodes and almost always would vincenzo's needs prevail with most of the other characters going along with his plans in the end.)

and this is all without mentioning how fandom sort of ruined a lot of the show for me, too. they took the characteristics that made the myunghee/hanseok dynamic one of my favorites and gave it to chayoung/vincenzo to the point where i was always left baffled and feeling like i was watching a different show. (a good point about the end for me is that i feel vindicated watching the scene where chayoung was basically like "i don't like your methods, vincenzo, but i needed to use them as the lesser of two evils to destroy hanseok," bc it did sort of reinforce for me my own reading of chayoung which was that she doesn't mind being corrupt and blackmailing people or scaring them into compliance, but that she was not going to get her hands covered in blood or dance over the corpses of her enemy. those traits belong to myunghee who accepts her role as a villain in a way that is as cool and collected as vincenzo. and lord, imagine what a show it would've been if the writers had made the kings chayoung/hanseok, the last ones that should ever be taken, while the queens were vincenzo/myunghee who would be the ones that would make all the moves, kill all their enemies pieces, and try to destroy one another first as the two most powerful players in the game? imagine if fandom had been able to read chayoung and myunghee accurately enough that i wouldn’t have to read post after post talking about how they needed to see myunghee brutally murdered/tortured by chayoung because they would understand chayoung’s character isn’t going to do that, posts which i hated seeing bc, as i said before, violence for violence’s sake means nothing to me? imagine if the writers cared enough about chayoung/myunghee to develop them more fully? sigh.)

i feel like i'm going nowhere with this and that i'm repeating myself a lot or not making much sense. but i'll end with this: i knew the last two episodes were going to be garbage when they all gathered at toto's restaurant post-fight in ep 19 and all they were talking about was vincenzo this and vincenzo that instead of worrying after the ones that were momentarily kidnapped/injured. like thanks show, for instead of pushing the narrative along we get a vincenzo fan club meeting and another round of "i never had anything to fight for until you came along" which is a convo we've had plenty of times before.

(footnote: i edited this on may 6, 2021 for clarity.)

[driftbending]

most fandom posts i see are like “wtf were myunghee & hanseok thinking, going after vincenzo’s mom like there wouldn’t be repercussions, that was a bad move on their part bc they should’ve known better”

meanwhile i’m like, “vincenzo and chayoung knew they were poking the hornet's nest by going after babel and they knew myunghee killed mr. hong, why did vincenzo only put one guard to protect his mom from a bank we hadn’t heard from since ep 8 when babel is right there gunning for them and clearly the bigger threat”

[driftbending]

i didn’t watch vincenzo bc i didn’t feel well and couldn’t focus so i avoided tumblr to avoid getting spoiled and now that i’m looking through the tag i’m just like....ah, it’s almost all about the romance and not much about the actual plot or with major spoilers. i should’ve looked earlier.