Wedding Impossible 11: Revenge Nobility

Dear Friends, this is the Noble Idiocy Festival week. First we had the noble absurdity in Queen of Tears, with Hyun-woo animating his beloved wife with revengeful energy in a successful hope of keeping up her fighting spirit.
And now, the continuation of Wedding Impossible, where everybody seem to insist on making everyone else unhappy by nobly sacrificing themselves. Or, especially Ji-han, our ML, seem to think it is central to his life to do stuff like that.
So after meticulously having dragged our FL out onto the thin ice that is Love, (not less under the circumstances), he heroically sacrifices her happiness for the sake of “the proper thing” and leaves her pining for him /b>without any possibility of embracing him or yelling at him, she only sends texts that he reads and doesn’t answer.
And then it’s Do-han’s turn to heroically sacrifice his fake wedding and the inheritance he never wanted. Here you can see him, heartbroken and poverty-stricken, unhappily on his way to New York. It just hurts your heart to see how he has lost everything, and especially himself, after coming out, right?
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Clearly, a huge sacrifice. I am being sarcastic if anyone should doubt it.

Finally, our OTP can be together without lying about it. But A-jeong says they can’t because Do-han’s huge sacrifice will give their life together a bitter taste. Someone is bitter, alright, but not because of Do-han’s sacrifice, I should think. I am getting back to that after a few gifs.

After Ji-han nervously has postponed the ominous “We need to talk” thing with dinner, they go to the beach to burn the sparklers they didn’t get round to doing last time they were here.
This is the sparkling mood of that scene:
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    Ji-han, H*llbent on not being entitled to even the Pursuit of Happiness, does not try to protest at all … of course they should suffer, whether they can be together or not.
    But his sparkler is demonstratively unhappy:

    Metaphorical Post-Coital Tristesse (It’s an actual diagnosis, look it up!)
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    This is clearly on purpose from the director’s side, not just me going Freudian Nuts. They must even have taken a sparkler, curled it up extra, and filmed it as if over the shoulder of Ji-han, because the actual sparkler he sits with is not that bent – try to compare:

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    Has our FL been contaminated with the sacrifice virus?
    I actually don’t think so. I actually think she is so angry that she cannot get back to Ji-han without taking revenge first. (A bit like in “Jealousy Incarnate”). So she inflicts meaningless longing and loneliness back on him, even at the cost of how she might feel about that herself, enjoying to finally have a bit of agency!
    Absurd? You bet!
    But consider this conversation:
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    “I hated you a lot after you left like that.
    I wasn’t sure what I was going to do about you.
    You know what they say:
    The best revenge after a breakup is to live happily.
    But I wanted to live as miserably as I could.
    Because you left while telling me to laugh, I should cry more.
    I should cry every single day as if to show you. I should bawl my eyes out and lose my voice.
    So we should live miserably ever after for a long time.
    That’s what I thought.
    But I’m going to quit it now.
    I realized they are all pointless acts.
    I think we’ll be miserable if we get back together.
    You heard the news about Do-han, right?
    The story is all over the TV and the internet.”
    – Yes.
    “Do-han denied it, but it’s all because of us.
    So how can we get back together?”
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    An obvious case of Revenge Nobility.
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    Ji-han should have objected wildly, but he doesn’t, because he is an idiot. (Yes, as you say, Owl, a smart idiot). If he had suffered more visibly and desperately, she probably would have given in after letting him fry for a month or so.
    Instead, he (and all of us) have to put up with the horrible “one year later” trope. Urgh!

    Well, at least, tonight they’ll all get their happy ending. I hope Do-han goes for a life with his Korean Ex, clearly a better man than him, and someone who could be part of a lovely in-law family for the four of them.

    Oh, and besides, with grandpa admitting to being mean – and knowing it – to Ji-han because he felt his own guilt too strongly?
    10 to 1 that goes for the way he scorns Do-han for coming out, too. Gr

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    Yeah, I just couldn’t with the noble idiocy. Do-han’s fine with it, just date, you two! And of course, the DREADED TIME SKIP.

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      “Just date you two” is right! Not wanting anymore pain is more painful!

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      I hated it … but if you think of it as her way of getting revenge for the previous meaningless suffering she was exposed to without having even an inch of a say, done all “for her sake”, and having no agency at all … then creating an equally dumb situation could be a way of actually venting her frustration. She couldn’t just jump back into his arms, because she was too angry, really, know what I mean?
      In that case, this is frustrating, but also really, deeply funny, a parody of noble idiocy.
      And thank god the “one year later” didn’t take more than 5 seconds at the most for us viewers.

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        Unfortunately I don’t think it was intended as parody. It was just really lazy writing, which I have even lower tolerance for when the writer has already established that they can, in fact, write. Argh, the disappointment.

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