Discuss

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    While I continue to really like Wok of Love and will miss it when it’s over, for some reason I found the whole take down of Giant Hotel and Dad’s release from jail oddly unsatisfying. Perhaps it’s because the final cooking contests just felt like one more in a long line of cookoffs and the show seemed to skip over the plotting that had to go into dad’s release (but when I think about it I would have been unhappy with having to watch any of the plotting scenes – so perhaps it was a lose-lose scenario with me). I do appreciate that the ex-spouses were have been given minimal screen time in this drama. I had hoped that Chil Sung was going to get his own romance with the vet but it doesn’t seem like that is going to happen (with just 2 episodes left) or it will be done in a rushed/unsatisfying manner.

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      I don’t know whether it was the hiatus or if something else happened? But when it came back it felt like a lesser show. I still enjoy it a lot, far more than anything else on actually, but it seems unfocussed. As messy as it was in the beginning, I felt the messiness was thematically on point. Now it seems like they didn’t quite know what to do with these episodes and filled them with a cooking competition. I was personally looking forward to them taking down Giant Hotel by everybody working together as a cohesive team. Having the “Fusion” part undermined by the Onion Princess and the disloyal staff derailed it a bit for me.

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        It was disappointing that the staff never really came together as a team with Sae Woo’s “family” showing zero loyalty to either the restaurant or Poong. Unfortunately, Sae Woo’s mom has shown no character growth, staying completely childish. The previews for next week don’t cast Seo Woo’s dad in a good light either.

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          I’d say Sae-woo’s Mum is the worst but I saw Pretty Noona so that makes her second worst. I agree that’s she’s childish. She’s one of those pretty women who’ve been pampered and infantilised her entire life.

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        I really like Poong and Sae-woo’s relationship though. It’s both cute and at the same time mature (not in the sexytimes sense, although that too I guess). I definitely agree that the plotting has been odd, and I only now feel like it’s in motion, and only because the main couple have sufficiently addressed the internally motivated conflicts in their relationship such that they have to now contend with the outside threats to their relationship.

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          I love their relationship. I think they’re one of my favourite ships. My only issue is that the whole thing seems rushed and since they’re only recently divorced I’m worried it’s rebound.

          Re the pace – I’m the other way around. I felt like the whole thing had a well-paced natural progression and now the writers have lost the threads. They’ve dealt with it by dropping a lot of them and concentrating on the OTP and in doing so I feel like they’re not bringing the themes to fruition.

          The funny thing is, when I solicited discussion it was around the reference to Nietzsche in this context. Especially after their conversation about being a “man”, which was less a gendered concept than a Nietzschian concept. Unfortunately, I don’t know Nietzsche very well because I mostly think he’s an erudite tosser.

          So I don’t know if they would have Nietzsche’s support in their endeavour but I suspect their writers think they would.

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    No, Nietzsche probably wouldn’t have been on their side. I don’t think he particularly liked under dogs.

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      Oh, Nietzsche was an over-privileged tosser. That’s one of the reasons I don’t know his philosophy very well. I kind of feel as though this show’s exploration of Nietzschian philosophy has been reduced to one almost random conversation about “being a man”. What do you think?

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        Here’s the passage which Chil-sung is fond of:

        “But there is something in me that I call courage; that has so far slain my every discouragement. This courage finally bade me stand still and speak: “Dwarf! It is I or you!”

        For courage is the best slayer, courage which attacks; for in every attack there is playing and brass.

        Man, however, is the most courageous animal: hence he overcame every animal. With playing and brass he has so far overcome every pain; but human pain is the deepest pain.

        Courage also slays dizziness at the edge of abysses: and where does man not stand at the edge of abysses? Is not seeing always — seeing abysses?

        Courage is the best slayer: courage slays even pity. But pity is the deepest abyss: as deeply as man sees into life, he also sees into suffering.

        Courage, however, is the best slayer — courage which attacks: which slays even death itself, for it says, “Was that life? Well then! Once more!””

        [Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, On the Vision and the Riddle]

        I think the show does reflect the quote. Courage is a big theme. Courage to try again after divorces, after bankruptcies, after firings. And courage has paid off for all of these characters.

        But as I said before, I don’t think he would much like the idea of an underdog. I think he would regard this as a component of his so-called Slave morality; a celebration of the weak and meek against the strong, on the assumption that sometimes the meek (Hungry Wok) would sometime triumph over the strong (Giant Hotel) and that the victory of the weak would be enhanced by the disparity between the two, is something Nietzsche would likely have regarded as life denying or whatever.

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          I agree. In fact, I felt in this episode that the representation of Poong as courageous, hard-working, artistic and embracing of life and how this is driving him (and the Hungry Wok) to step out of the Shadow of Master Wang (and the Giant Hotel) and into The Light was somewhat at odds with Nietzche’s writings on the herd mentality, especially when Poong cannot do it alone. I doubt that Nietzsche would have believed that a Man is only propelled forward with support from a supportive team. I’m not entirely sure if this doesn’t contradict the theme of fusion in a fundamental way.

          Hey, maybe that’s why Fusion seems to have gotten a bit lost and instead we’re looking at Conquering.

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            I think you’re 1st paragraph is spot-on. One thing I’m constantly struck by in this drama is the fact that Poong’s capital G genius is always juxtaposed with his weaknesses. His wife cheated on him and totally disregarded his cooking; he got the crap kicked out of him by goons; he needed Chil-sung’s help to start the restaurant; he’s a bit of a scaredy-cat (hence all of his vacillating about whether or not he should confess to Sae-woo); he’s irascible, particularly in the kitchen; and now Sae-woo’s parents refuse to recognize him. It’s hard to think Nietzsche’s ubermensch would be so fallible or so reliant on others to be a source of strength and support. But that’s exactly what I like about this drama! For all his roaring, Poong’s just a pussycat. Imo, the really strong characters in this show are Chil-sung and especially Sae-woo.

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            @smaltwalt

            IT may seem reductive but Nietzche was an overprivileged douche whose entire wealth by dependent on the herd he so despised. The Ubermensch may be able to Do It Alone but only because he’s already on the top of everybody who put him there. He was like the world’s first libertarian and about as self-aware.

            I agree that Poong’s a sweetheart. It was the first thing I noticed about him. He’s also extremely kind. I liked the idea that everybody in the Hungry Wok was going to achieve greatness through cooperation and hard work. One conversation about Being A Man doesn’t change that.

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            Have you ever read “Demian” by Herman Hesse? It’s psychodramatic bildungsroman set in the late 19th to early 20th century. Herman Hesse was a weird dude, and his book is weird as well. I can’t say I understand all or even most of it, but I do know that Hesse was strongly influenced by the Gnostics as well as by Jung and Nietzsche.

            There’s a parable that the character Max Demian tells the protagonist, Emil Sinclair, while the two are attending Sunday school. It’s an inversion of the traditional parable of Cain and Abel. Basically, Demian posits that Cain and Abel may or may not have been brothers, but that Cain was a very strong person whom the people around him dezpised for being strong. Abel challenged Cain and was slain because Cain was stronger. Rather than God cursing Cain, Demian suggests that the people around Cain were shocked by the slaying of Abel and affixed a mark (I can’t recall if Demian’s version of the mark is literal or metaphoric) on Cain’s forehead as a way of banishing him.

            Basically, Demian’s version of the Cain and Abel story makes it so that the slaying was justified. Cain was superior to Abel rather than vice-versa and it was Abel who was jealous of Cain and who struck first rather than vice-versa.

            The Nietzschean theme is pretty obvious. Cain is the Great Man and the first victim of the hoi polloi, a victim in virtue only of his supposed greatness. Put in conjunction with Gnostic ideas about the evil world and the individual, introspective for a transcendental truth, and it’s clear that Hesse was toying around with themes about individuality, authenticity and transcendence (both in the sense of learning something deep about the universe but also in the sense of rising above the Juvenalian “rabble”).

            At first, I thought this show might play with some of these themes. After all Poong, is the Great Man whose position is usurped and whose accomplishments are claimed by Lesser Men (Chef Wang and Seung-ryong). Ditto for Chil-sung; the dignified martial artist abased into becoming a thug. Even Sae-woo’s story started off seeming like this kind of story; an heiress dispossessed of her wealth and disgorged from the cream of society because of what’s very clearly some kind of stratagem targeting her family. The David vs. Goliath stuff was the first indication to me that this wasn’t supposed to be a humorous Nitzschean story of how the Best Men reclaim their rightful places, since the framing makes it clear that Poong, Chil-sung and Sae-woo are actually now weak rather than strong. Coupled with the repeated set-backs and the fact that all of the victories Hungry Wok and our trio enjoy come from working together rather than letting their inner Greatness shine, and it became kinda clear to me that the Nietzsche stuff was just a gimmick. A nice gimmick – I like some parts of Nietzsche, and I think there’s a way of reading him which makes him sound less elitist and misanthropic – but a gimmick nonetheless.

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            it’s a psychodramatic bildungsroman**
            despise***
            individual, introspective search**

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            As a side note, the parable of Cain and Abel in Demian reminds me of this apocryphal story:

            ” The threat ostracism was meant to combat could also come from a man’s great personal prominence, if he became so prominent that he could appear to overshadow all others on the political scene and thus threaten the egalitarian principles of Athenian democracy, in which no one man was supposed to dominate the making of policy. This point is illustrated by a famous anecdote concerning Aristides,1 who set the dues for the Delian League. This Aristides had the nickname “The Just” because he was reputed to be so fair-minded. On the balloting day for an ostracism, an illiterate man from the countryside handed Aristides a potsherd, asking him to scratch on it the name of the man’s choice for ostracism. “Certainly,” said Aristides; “Which name shall I write?” “Aristides,” replied the countryman. “Very well,” remarked Aristides as he proceeded to inscribe his own name. “But tell me, why do you want to ostracize Aristides? What has he done to you?” “Oh, nothing; I don’t even know him,” sputtered the man. “I’m just sick and tired of hearing everybody refer to him as ‘The Just.’” ”

            [taken from here: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0009%3Achapter%3D9%3Asection%3D2%3Asubsection%3D5%5D

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            @smaltwalt
            I haven’t read it and maybe I don’t want to. I’ve gotten less and less patient with these philosophical concepts as the world has lurched back toward fascism. It would probably just make me angry, like reading anything by Sartre who was using philosophy to disguise a fundamental misogyny. Really, de Beauvoir could have done better.

            I agree the show was using it as a gimmick. I felt as though the references to Nietzsche were used more to indicate that the destruction of the first few episodes should not be an excuse to embrace nihilism. I found the contrast of the philosophy with the food to be more of a signifier that in defeat you should embrace life rather than give up.

            But nothing was more gimmicky than in this last episode where it was seemingly reduced to Chil-sung asking Poong if he was “a man” in the Shadow of the Giant Hotel.

            I’ve just found out the show did get a new writer so it’s possible this writer just wasn’t capable of handling the chaotic elements of the original writer.

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            No, now there’s some confusion over whether there was a new writer or not. Oh, well.

            Now you’ve framed that story with the Aristides one it gives it a whole new perspective to it. In fact, it almost seems analogous to the anti-intellectualism of modern society. So maybe I will read Hesse. Thanks!

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            It’s a good book and worth reading! I do agree, though, that the re-emergence of fascist ideas of late makes all of these books seem rarified, if not outright bloviations. I agree about Sartre!

            One thing I will say about this drama is that it introduced me to Jang-hyuk and Jung Ryeo-won. I’m still a bit of a k-drama toddler (about a year since I watched my first drama), so I’m always looking for good actors and actresses. I’m especially impressed by Jung Ryeo-won. I don’t think I know any other actresses who who could pull of this character (maybe Jung Hye-san? She’s played lots of zany but cool female characters). And of course, watching my TV BF Junho is always a treat.

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