An excellent conclusion to what remains one of the best Canto (
although GODS is the competition ever stiff, it's Oops All Bangers from here on out folks), thank you Zerban for the work you put into interweaving the logs, lyrics, and letters that made these fights so great.
that realization is that CORPORATE BOOT POLISH TASTES YUMMY
The key thing to me is that Dongrang's realization was
not that he prefers to lick the boot, but that he needs do nothing for them, OR for anyone else. Consequences no longer matter to him, repercussions no longer matter. He is here to Do His Job and Change Da World (
my final message, goodby) and it doesn't matter what anyone thinks at that point, not even Alfonso. If he'd won this fight I don't doubt he would have taken the child-shard aspect of the Tearful Thing and gone out to create his own facility, pushing the absolute limits of his research with no concerns for medals
or morals.
Which is absolutely fitting for the first of two story dissections I have been waiting to do: That's right, I repeatedly baited my plan to talk about The Wings, but I had to wait to avoid spoilers because first up
LET'S TALK ABOUT THE FARMWATCH!
SO, we start with Dongrang, although not the one who just got shattered by a gentle breeze from Yi Sang's wings. The original inspiration for our Dongrang was the pen name of one
Yu Chi-Jin, fellow member of the real-life
Guinhoe (
or League of Nine, as we'd better recognize from repeat mentions), a sort of loose literary collective in the 1930s. Specifically '33-'37, a period of time that coincides with Japan's occupation of Korea up until the start of their next war with China. It's important to note that while the group was initially founded with a very strong anti-Imperial tone and goals, advocating for artistic freedom and pushing for reforms... This didn't always hold up on an individual level.
It may not surprise you which authors in this circle later turned over a shitty new leaf and started getting concerningly pro-Japanese!
Also I'll be getting back onto the topic of the Japanese occupation VERY MUCH when I talk about The Wings, because it's critical to a reading of the story I think a lot of people neglect.
OK, so,
Yu Chi-Jin, aka Dongrang. Author in the League of Nine alongside Kim Haegyŏng, aka Yi Sang. His most well-known and certainly his most well-regarded plays were a lot of grounded, realistic works about humanistic concerns that applied to the people: Rather than Yi Sang's poignant yet true-to-life metaphor and strange visualization, Dongrang's work leaned into telling simple stories of simple people in simple ways, to maximize its impact for as many viewers as possible. There's some scholarly writing out there about how this has a lineage dating back through (
of all things) the work of various Irish playwrights! Much like the Guinhoe trying to write from a Korean perspective during Japanese occupation, Yeats and his contemporaries were writing from an Irish perspective in a life dominated by the Brittanic English, and some think there's a direct line of inspiration: Although from what I found it was more focused on Yeats'
ambition and other authors' actual
tone, as we'll see.
Among these earthy human plays one of the big standouts was simply called
The Cow. The story follows an archetypal line a lot us are probably familiar with, from parables and Biblical stories among many other sources: Inheritance and the arguments over what shall be done with it.
The father of the family has a core prized possession (the titular cow), the sons of the family have differing views about what to do with said cow. One son thinks it's best used to stabilize the family and enrich himself once he inherits, using it to buy his future wife back from Japanese
debt internment, and the other thinks it's best used to get him the
hell out of the sticks and should be sold for loose cash so he can move to the city. What happens next is a little hard to cover, as I can't find a full English translation of the play proper and the summaries online which I planned to work from seem to be gone now... Suffice to say
shenanigans occur, if you've ever seen the middle act of most Shakespeare plays you're in the right ballpark, conflicts grow and spread, and the villain of the story gets involved: The local farmwatch.
The farmwatch takes the cow away from the family to pay for a variety of debts (incurred during the aforementioned shenanigans) and the father decides he'll push a legal challenge against the farmwatch. This fails to materialize because he's informed that even if he does, and even if it works, none of the benefits will ever actually make it to him as a tenant farmer. So the father spirals into despair, the eldest son's desired wife has her sale to the Japanese finalized, and said son says 'fuck all of this' and goes to burn down the entire region's grain storage, which is under the farmwatch's care. He's caught and arrested in the process, but the cow manages to break free of its confinement, and in all the chaos the farmwatch is gored / trampled to death by the creature.
In the end the cow returns home, innocent and unknowing, just an animal which has no clue all of this has happened, or that it all happened for its sake.
As for Dongrang the author, how does
his story continue? Well, once the League dissolved in 1937 he seems to have found new inspiration, because he took a leadership role in a staunchly pro-Japanese theater company. From that post he began churning out propaganda pieces, none of which were as respected as his previous work, and at least one of which is fully lost to history. To his credit, by the late 1940s he realized the error of his ways and began to repatriate, integrating himself back into Korean society and distancing himself from the past decade of his work. He spent the 50s writing works about the ongoing Korean War, the pain of separation, and the parallels to the times they had already just barely gotten past suffering through during the Occupation and WWII. These days he's widely considered a luminary in the field, and even his time doing Pro-JP agitprop writing is now seen in retrospect as a critical part of the legacy and texture that made up his career.
Keeping all of that very firmly in mind, we can look back over
the Limbus Company character Dongrang's life, his decisions, his transformation, and his battles. For now I'm going to leave this post as it is, and hopefully we can think about and discuss our second-favorite K Corp employee (
praise Samjo) in a new light.
