Got distracted from my planned watching, and veered into Heirs. I thought the first few episodes were pretty good, aside from the awful American actors. Sometimes I feel like Korean drama producers hire all their foreign actors from some skeevy Eurotrash nightclub. They line up all the barmen-cum-coke-dealers, and pick the ones that look the stupidest. (See also Descended from the Sun.)

Anyways, there’s LMH, living the languid and lost life in LA, until a distressed candy girl from back home wakes him out of his torpor. Once they’re back in Korea, and once we’ve got past the exciting fact that she’s LIVING IN HIS HOUSE, I’m afraid I got a bit bored. Even LMH started to look bored too. I skipped to the end and that wasn’t terribly thrilling either.

I quite liked Kim Mi-kyung as the mute mother, but she kept morphing in my mind into Healer’s ahjumma, and I kept seeing her hurling abuse in sign language and smacking stupid people about the head.

Getting back to LMH, I like him best when he’s hilariously stupid and petty and dumb, undercutting all that heroic screen god thing. There’s a decent amount of that in Legend of the Blue Sea, which I’m very fond of, and of course Jun Ji-hyun keeps him on his toes, and I love her.

It’s of course as Gu Jun-pyo where he excels in this department, combining massive hilarious dorkiness with dark insane swooniness. I keep going back to Boys Before Flowers, wanting to define exactly what I think of it. I feel a bit obsessive about it, and despise it at the same time. But what’s wrong with it is definitely not LMH. Just to untangle that double-negative, he’s a lot of what’s right.

I’d like to just pluck out all the great scenes and run them together, and consign the rest to…..

Anyway, the swooniest scene that keeps jumping into my mind is where Madame the Witch has just ruined Jan-di’s family and they’re reduced to hocking rice cakes in the rush-hour traffic. Jun-pyo’s in the back seat with Mummy Dearest, who makes sure Jan-di comes to their car window to sell her sad goods. Our girl and our boy lock eyes – she’s embarrassed, he’s enraged and ashamed. He’s about to leap out of the car, but Mummy holds his hand down hard with her talons.

But our hero shows his spine, breaks her grip and strides down between the cars to kiss his girl in the middle of the traffic. Yess!! Then they go off and have an Actual Conversation. You could count the number of these they have on one hand. We the viewers are instead supposed to be satisfied with interminable scenes of her pouring her heart out to her languid “soul mate”. Lord give me patience.

I’m starting to think, too, that the kidnapping thing has a certain logic to it. The “proper” reaction to His Nibs having Jan-di picked up, drugged and made over into a doll for him is that he’s a horrific, insanely entitled chaebol with zero morals or scruples.

But for Jun-pyo, it’s what he knows. His mother has him kidnapped all the time. And usually there’s nothing pleasant at the end of it.

Anyway, I was a bit obsessed with BBF a couple of months ago, which led me to track down a couple of surprisingly well written fics. One is set at school – Jan-di spies a girl putting a love letter in Jun-pyo’s locker so she steals it and throws it in the trash. How one small crime can wreck your life. It’s actually very funny, the dialogue is sharp, and even Woobin gets a whole scene! Ji-hoo spends most of the time asleep – haha. Amidst the laughs, the writer really gets to the nub of Jan-di’s and Jun-pyo’s relationship, which is quite an achievement.

The other is a rather passionate reunion fic, set five years after Jun-pyo actually goes through with his marriage. Let’s just say I found it emotionally satisfying.

I had to do a lot of digging to find these – digging through huge mountains of stories about the beautiful love between Jan-di and Ji-hoo. (This has brought me to a new appreciation of how much Angel fans must have hated Spuffy. And probably still do…)