Reposting my MLN thoughts here for the sake of having it on my wall and for ease of bookmarking.

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My Liberation Notes Final Essay/Review:

… 👀

ah, screw it…

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I have struggled and continue to struggle personally with some of the concepts brought up in this show; the feeling of being stuck in a deep mental pit and unable to get out, the fact that getting out is an excruciatingly slow process with many ups and downs and backtracks that make it feel like any forward or upward progression is non-existent. I understand that theme and that feeling very, very well.

But only a few times throughout the show, and increasingly less and less as it went on, did the show’s attempt at this subject matter actually resonate with me, or make me genuinely feel something.

I did not feel comforted or seen or emotionally connected to the show. I did not enjoy it as any exploration of anything otherwise. I did not get anything out of it. I did not truly relate to the characters I on paper have much in common with.

I felt alienated, unnerved, disconcerted even, consistently for 16 episodes. I found the characters immensely inaccessible. And frequently, I wondered what this show was actually about or trying to say because it too often seemed to be saying nothing at all, despite all attempts at otherwise.

Because you see, those pieces that did or could have resonated with me, and those lines that every so often were said that at very least were almost true, were just that; pieces. Moments. Slices. Out of context and out of place, floating ideas, individual and independent impressions.

They were not pieces in a collective and cohesive whole, woven together to form an intricate narrative or induce an emotional catharsis in resolution. In fact, they had no resolution because they were not a whole.

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The final idea that liberation is an ongoing process, that seeking and finding happiness or a contentment to carry on, is made of tiny, miniscule attempts every day- sir, I cannot express to you how much I understand this concept, I KNOW this idea very deeply in my soul- though I would not describe it in those words, thus probably altering or expanding their meaning- but nonetheless I KNOW this idea. The statement in and of itself is not bad either.

But I did not feel a… a release when this idea was announced in the final episode.
For 16 episodes I was constantly asking myself “what is happening, and why? Where is it going?.”
But when we got to the end, I did not feel that this statement had actually ANSWERED that.
Or rather, I didn’t feel that this conclusionary statement was actually a satisfying result of everything that had gone before.
There was no “ah yes so THAT’S what this was all about”. Instead, I felt a contempt for how that result was played out, and, more importantly, for how we got there.

I don’t think this show truly justified that being its final statement, in its execution and in how it told any of its story.

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A fantastic example of this and why it bothers me so much, is Changhee’s narrative “conclusion.”

Changhee starts monologuing (out of nowhere and with no prior contextual set up) about a movie he’s watched that he somehow relates to or finds a particular sense of profoundness in.
The only reason this monologue is in here is to set up Hyeon Ah’s ex’s final moments and death, wherein Changhee once again plays the Last Post Angel for the Nearly Departed.

Changhee’s connection to the dead, this… ability as it were, to show up at the exact right moment to be there for someone at the end of their life, is introduced to us for the first time, in episode 14, after his mother’s death, where he tells us that this actually happened with his grandmother too. In Episode 16, we also learn that it happened with his grandfather as well, along with now his Hyung.
The show then ends his arc by him mistaking lecture rooms, ending up in an introductory course for funeral directors and deciding to stay, content that this is finally “where he is supposed to be”.

– I kid you not, I called that. As soon as he said “why does this keep happening”, I went “maybe you should go into funeral services then.” And then the show actually did … that.

My issue with this is- why is that a thing that he has to tell us HIMSELF, in EPISODE 14, and tacked onto the end of the show, the last four episodes even?
If we want to learn that that is a quality he has, and you want to make it INTO something, to juxtapose it against him always ending up magnetically attached to convenience stores or going bankrupt, or even to his sisters’ conversations about death, why isn’t that WOVEN into the story throughout the whole show? And instead of us just being told, show it instead so that we put the pieces together ourselves and therefore the payoff is actually satisfying and makes sense, instead of it just being a cluster of disjointed events and dialogues.

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Another such example is, Why does the Liberation Club only have like 4 scenes in 16 hrs?
Why did we not see them for what felt like half the show, and then jump forward two years, and then get preached the supposed final message of the show? Why isn’t that slowly explored and integrated better into everything else. Or, why wasn’t the club used as a background point to structure the whole show off? To draw more parallels between the familial relationships that had the most screen time and explore their personal journeys?

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Or yet another example:
The dialogue is frequently just a string of expositionary and often nonsensical monologues and voice overs.
Instead of exploring the ideas espoused in these monologues within the context of the show- characters just say stuff, and often- although not always- at random. And if *when* they say it is not random, then the thread that parses out within the dialogue itself, the *what* is random; starting off with a decent point perhaps, a point I would agree with, only to contradict itself twice within the next few sentences, and then unravelling to an illogical conclusion that I genuinely don’t know how was reached by where we started from, and leaving me with an unpleasant taste of half truth in my mouth.

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And I feel like this really sums up the show in its entirety, and the incompleteness I talked about at the beginning.

The characters are just pieces floating through a series of ambiguous philosophical ideas, and then they themselves are only made up of vague thought pieces as well.

The story threads are not tied to each other or to the characters.

Nobody and nothing is part of a whole, or connected in a way that both makes sense and is satisfying narratively.

The worldview behind this show is scattered, inconsistent, and so the product itself is incohesive.

The effect that this has is that everything feels faux deep, wannabe deep, without actually saying anything at all.

This show thinks it is justified in its story, however, in what it says and how it says it, in its form. But for me… it has no true form. It is just a vague collection of philosophical musings, that do not in fact make up a story just by stringing them all together.

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Ah- maybe this isn’t a story. Maybe this is just an arbitrary collection of thoughts and feelings and philosophies. Maybe that is what it is supposed to be, and thus maybe it is just that I am unsympathetic to this approach to media.

But you see. I am.
I am very unsympathetic to this quite clearly intentional approach to the medium. That’s the problem.

Because I want genuine stories, intricately and heartfeltly crafted to engage in ideas and emotions through that wonderful and powerful and ancient tradition and medium of storytelling. Where all the pieces are properly CONNECTED and work together, and you can see the weave and the pattern, and the reasoning behind the pattern.

I don’t want just a list of contradictory thoughts and feelings, oblique, ersatz and tumblr-esque attempts at depth and character writing.
I don’t want nothings and nobodies, and no discernible pattern.
Anyone, and I’m not joking about this, anyone can make a collection of vague philosophical musings.

That is not storytelling. That is not craft.

You haven’t crafted anything!
You just went “oh look dissociative Ghibli-but-oh-so-definitely-not-Ghibli aesthetics (that WEREN’T my doing because I’m not the director) slapped on post-modernist enlightenment theatre student’s footnotes! Behold! A Play!”
What am I, Diogenes? (Well… actually…)
Kill me now.

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*ANNNNNND now I shall run away before I get lynched BYE*

Word Count: 1446 gasp so smol for a sicarius essaius lel