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Enter the K-Hole: Athene's Korean media thread.

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Athene

Athene

Rise for the Shadow Queen
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Dream of The 90s
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She/Her
A brief note: As a tool of western imperialism I have the bad habit of referring to South Korea as just "Korea" because I am going to be talking about the Korean people, culture, language, 750 years of history, future history, alternate timelines, etc. This is complicated by the thousand to one ratios of exported media. My apologies in advance. You will find that I am very critical of South Korea as this goes on.

This has been a project I've been kicking around for a while due to the sheer volume of South Korean media that I watch and after some recent events, I've decided to push forward on the project. Of course, when you decide to create a thread people have questions. Like "Why?" and "How come?" or "Huh?". Like, justify your love of this media you poser. Or at least that's what I am imagining in a vacuum because its also hard to create an OP for this kind of general project that isn't "How about that Korea huh? What a peninsula. One of my top five really." Well, aside from my love of the super neat history and people of Korea, which to be blunt is amazing and its a real shame about how little people know about it, there's a lot aside from that for one to love about South Korean Cinema.

While I still love many American movies, there have been a lot of problems in the industry. One of the most famous is the decline of the mid budget movie. The American film industry has diverged into the small art house flick and the big budget movie. Many have lamented that its extremely difficult to make the kind of movies now that movies that filled theaters in the 80s, 90s and 00s. Big budget movies simply make more money and the more screens they have, the more they could theoretically make. And quite frankly, big studios are so risk averse that they focus test and finger fuck everything that comes out. Bold new direction? No thanks, we need to do a CGI remake of [spins wheel of classic Disney cartoons], Aristocats...what the f-.

I love a lot of Korean movies and shows because they are creative, entertaining and original. Even the most generic American concept focused through a Korean lens becomes interesting because did you know that other cultures exist? But here are just a few of the movies and shows you can find:

  • Roughneck Koreans vs Final Solution Elon Musk
  • Undercover Cops accidentally create hit chicken restaurant during stakeout
  • Cowboy Gunslingers vs Imperial Japanese Soldiers
  • Intelligence agent plays catch and release repeatedly with serial killer
  • Psychic Witch Super Soldier vs Government Conspiracy
  • Government Agent Got So High He Can Astral Project
  • Assassin Burned Out By Corporate World (Of Killing)
  • An action movie that helps explain why Korea dominates Olympic Archery for 26 years
  • Here come the Manchu again
  • Two Punch Wizards vs Capital One
  • Oh fuck, Demons have been Lifting
  • Is that Japanese guy a demon or are we just really fucking racist?
  • Your Dad vs ROKA Super Soldiers after the Mega-Quake
  • Many more
Also like 90 movies about former government assassins\agents\whatever because hoo boy does South Korea have history there! But please, join me on my Josean Bizzare Adv-No, that's terrible, just please join me as I share\review a bunch of Korean Media.
 
So a quick, uh, personal note here. One of the reasons I'm doing this thread is I recently found out my dad has extremely rapidly progressive dementia and in the two months since I last was able to speak to him...I can basically no longer speak to him. I took that pretty hard and missed a week of work that I really needed and because he's not passed I don't get any grievance pay and I am out of vacation time so I really need to get back to writing, often and frequently to earn extra income. There's a lot tied up emotionally in some of my other threads like my Simpsons thread and while I'm really sick today (as you can probably tell by how rambly I got) I needed to get started on this. I am posting this here at the start of the thread in case anyone wants to support this project from the start and of course I will be posting regularly here.

But just putting this at the top.

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Also to be clear about South Korea: Final Fantasy 7 is older than truly functional South Korean democracy and at least as late as 2012 its intelligence services interfered in its elections and the place is very corporate dystopia where a single megacorp makes up 22% of its GDP and some media requires you to at least know Korean racism to understand their plots. I do not uncritically like South Korea for all that I like the Koreas!
 
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Athene said:
Roughneck Koreans vs Final Solution Elon Musk

Psychic Witch Super Soldier vs Government Conspiracy

Government Agent Got So High He Can Astral Project

An action movie that helps explain why Korea dominates Olympic Archery for 26 years

Two Punch Wizards vs Capital One

Oh fuck, Demons have been Lifting

Your Dad vs ROKA Super Soldiers after the Mega-Quake
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
These sound interesting, would you mind elaborating?

Also, I'm given to understand that both North and South Korea are kind of hellish places to live, just in different ways.
 
Athene said:
  • Roughneck Koreans vs Final Solution Elon Musk
  • Undercover Cops accidentally create hit chicken restaurant during stakeout
  • Cowboy Gunslingers vs Imperial Japanese Soldiers
  • Intelligence agent plays catch and release repeatedly with serial killer
  • Psychic Witch Super Soldier vs Government Conspiracy
  • Government Agent Got So High He Can Astral Project
  • Assassin Burned Out By Corporate World (Of Killing)
  • An action movie that helps explain why Korea dominates Olympic Archery for 26 years
  • Here come the Manchu again
  • Two Punch Wizards vs Capital One
  • Oh fuck, Demons have been Lifting
  • Is that Japanese guy a demon or are we just really fucking racist?
  • Your Dad vs ROKA Super Soldiers after the Mega-Quake
  • Many more
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

So the ones I can get right are:

. Extreme Job
. The Witch series
. A Company Man

I hope your dad is OK, and I am eagerly awaiting for your reviews.
 
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Space Sweepers: Space Hitler Elon Musk vs Roughnecks
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    • The year is 2091 and mankind is divided into the haves, the have nots and the fucked. The planet has succumbed to extreme desertification, at some point we suffered full Kessler Syndrome and due to a botched attempt to fix the problem, immortal nanomachines control the Lagrange points and will disassemble anything that comes close. Microplastics and PFAs seem like quaint concerns as all of the space around the earth is suffused with nanomachines. Those left on earth live in a dust choked wasteland, where a bag of rice is your rainy day fund. Space is controlled by the UTS Megacorporation who allow the wealthy and "clean" few to live in luxury those left trapped on earth can only dream of. They are ruled over by a 152 year old CEO who dreams of leaving those on earth to die and terraforming mars for a cleaner, better and more moral humanity and will kill all those who get in his way.
    However, every rich person's utopian dreams require an underclass to maintain it and in UTS' future its the mass of independent contractors allowed into space to fight over the literal scraps. See, there's still plenty of debris in space and poorly paid, perpetually indebted Sweepers are paid to collect that errant debris that threatens the rich's crystal spires so that it can be taken to a disposal facility the size of the first death star and shot back at Earth with a mass driver. Yes, they don't even recycle all of it, some of it is extremely radioactive and thus compacted and shot back at the planet.


    Oh, and it has a Dominos pizza. Because Korea.

    ​
    Anyway, these Sweepers are necessary to maintain the orbital society that UTS manages but aren't given citizenship in UTS, are paid very little and are taxed\fined\etc as much as possible so most of them are barely above the level of being forced to live in the orbital shantytowns that UTS sets aside for the underclass. While they come from all over the world (Except Japan), there's one crew that stands above all others. One crew that the rest of the community envies and fears, for nobody can beat them to a salvage they have their eyes on. The crew of KOR SH 7901: The Victory.

    ​


    Due to a combination of spending way too much on upgrades and equipment and having a first rate crew, they're the best of the best at junking though they are close to financial ruin due to the miserly rates that UTS pays them and the high fees they have to pay. I'm going to get into mild to moderate spoiler territory as I describe the completely rad crew of the Victory.

    • Kim Tae-ho: The helmsman of the ship and Main-ish character. He was raised by UTS's Genius Program to be a child soldier to lead their anti-immigrant death squads before he encountered a child for the first time and after adopting her realized life had value. This didn't fly with CEO James Sullivan and he was stripped of citizenship and forced to live in a shanty town until the death of his daughter from space debris depressurizing the area she was in. His goal is to raise enough money to recover her body and he's running out of time until she leaves orbit. Yeah...
    • Captain Jang Hyun-sook: Captain of the victory. Raised in the same program as Tae-Ho, she was a child genius engineer responsible for all the advanced systems the UTS uses until she was "brainwashed by Anti-UTS Propaganda" and became an anarchist pirate queen. She's the only survivor out of her entire organization.
    • "Tiger" Park: Works the engines (YES). Tiger Park loves kids so much he became the Crime Lord of Portland Oregon to take care of them while brutalizing everyone that would prey on them. He can't go back to Earth because he has a death sentence for being too rad (also collecting the hands of guys). God forbid a guy engage in some direction action (supporting kids through murder and gun running).
    • Bubs: Harpooner (YES) of the ship, Bubs is a combat robot who was built by UTS for assassinations, sabotage, generic wetwork and behind the lines terror campaigns. Like many special forces commandos, Bubs is of course a closeted transwoman who is saving up for a body replacement surgery. That's right, we have a transgender combat robot who experiences gender euphoria when someone realizes that they're secretly a girl.
    While breaking apart a ship destroyed by UTS, they find the fifth member of the crew: A girl named Kot-Nim that UTS says is a robot with a hydrogen bomb inside her but actually is so much more and the potential key to mankinds survival.

    I love this movie. I'm not going to say its the best movie, but it is a supremely entertaining movie laser focused on shit I like. This movie is G-Gundam mixed with Elysium and Hardspace Shipbreaker. All the other ships are themed after gentle, loving stereotypes of their respective nations where its enough to be funny but not too jarring and not offensive. I burst out laughing when I saw the bridges for the first time. The tone is light, the science loose but the movie is still thrilling and capable of generating some actual pathos. They made a fun, unique setting and knocked it out of the park for $20m. Like this is absolutely the kind of thing that is My Jam. The ships engine room is a hot, sweaty, steamy mess with a shirtless Park shoving cores into the reactor and having to manually pump the nuclear reactor to generate power. Does it make strict logical sense? Nope. Does it absolutely rule? Hell yeah. They maintain a competitive edge by having a combat robot throw tungsten harpoons at shit, and during an action scene someone straps themselves to a platform and shoots at other ships with a high powered assault rifle and that's cool. Its ok to just be cool. I'm talking to you weird guys on IMDB who reviewed this and criticized the scientific accuracy.

    The execution of everything is top notch. All the sets and world building are incredible and reinforce the themes perfectly. There's orbiting shanty towns with no defense against space debris, orbital shopping malls with clubs a decorative fusion reactor for the DJ and UTS suburban residential zones filled with people dressed like TradCaths who are all a bit suspiciously white. What we see of the Earth is a living hell with rampant dust storms and people forced to wear respirators all the time. The visual differences are stark and incredible. We can see how little UTS values the people of Earth and how much they value themselves and even how much they lie about what they are.

    As I mentioned, their residential areas are designed to look like the richest suburbs you've ever seen filled with bland, smiling trads but the military that enforces this separation is designed for brutal efficiency. UTS doesn't use drones but they've dehumanized their soldiers to the point that they might as well have.

    ​

    Space Sweepers is very much not subtle in its themes, with UTS being Silicon Valley Techno Fascism. They rely on a gig economy underclass of independent contractors who take all the risks and share none of the reward. The casualty rates for visa workers are incredibly high but UTS doesn't care, there are always more desperate people on Earth. UTS dreams of colonizing mars and killing the Earth, and god help you if you ask them why their mars terraforming technology can't be used on Earth. The rich will save themselves and leave you to die if you're lucky. UTS is led by a life extending trillionaire with rage issues who might have been raised by white supremacists. He has a modern Silicon Valley Eugenics outlook where he makes sure that the people granted citizenship in East Solano County Space are the right kind of people. A cleaner people. A superior people. A people who will find a new home on Mars and-Yeah, its fucking Elon Musk. We actually talked it over and decided it was most probably him though he contains elements of other SV types and UTS is more like Amazon. Its a rich and widely applicable metaphor here. By contrast the good guys just want to be able to get a fair wage for a fair days work and be financially secure enough and help other people.

    Solidarity forever, people.

    Anyway, this is an incredibly fun movie and after a lot of thought, probably one of the best intros (something I agonized over for a while) because its fun, its got emotion, it doesn't pull punches and it has a Trans combat robot which we need now more than ever. Also it has an incredibly good English dub in case you're not willing to jump into Subtitle Land just yet.
     
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    • Sorry if that first one is a bit wonky, still finding my groove again after The Apea Dumbening but god I love that movie. I couldn't quite fit it in but if you love Gundam or Macross level controls, this movie has you covered because its got a great helmsman set with Space HOTAS and a billion buttons.





    All the sets rule and this movie looks incredible with its special effects.
     
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    And yes, we have no clue if Japan even exists in the universe of this movie lol

    PPS: Thinking of a content rating system that indicates how much Korean Content there is such as "KCIA", "Corporate Dystopia", "Brand Integration", "Gangsters", "Corrupt\Incompetent Cops" and "Racism".
     
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    I really did love Space Sweepers and it's one of the most fun + cheesy modern sci fi, which is a nice taste given how much indie sci fi tends to be philosophical stuff and blockbuster sci fi tends to be like, Disney crap now.
     


    I need y'all to understand how cool Bubs is. She's everything we ever wanted to be.
     
    Space Sweepers looks very rad, seems like I have something to watch tonight.

    (Also I'm assuming Cowboy Gunslingers vs Imperial Japanese Soldiers might be The Good, The Bad, and the Weird? Super good western if so.)
     
    So, having now watched it: Space Sweepers is indeed super rad. Kickass aesthetic, great villain, probably my favourite space combat sequence I've ever seen (fuck you if you think it's unrealistic, harpoons for life). It's also very funny to realise that the villain was played by Richard Armitage (Thorin Oakenshield or Trevor Belmont, for a couple of his most famous roles), who seemed to be having the time of his life playing some kind of vampire/cyborg/Lex Luthor/Elon Musk hybrid and chewing as much scenery as he could get his teeth around.
     
    ooo, I've heard great things about Space Sweepers from a bunch of friends, still need to get around to it
    also, yes!! I'm delighted to see this thread get made. Looking forward to reading the posts as they happen
     
    Clicked on this thread and thought there was a bunch of pages. Now I am sad. Buuut. Because this is still new I can suggest that the reason the antagonist of Space Sweepers doesn't line up with Musk perfectly is because in this timeline he actually launched X as an anything app.
     
    Going to have a new one up tomorrow, current schedule I am going for is 1-2 a weekend with a mid week stuff depending on how work is going.
     
    Resident Evil: Seoul Survivors (Movie: Badland Hunters)
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    • Dr Yang Gi-su has just completed the project he believes can save his save his mostly dead daughter when the authorities burst in to put a stop to his mad science. Aside from the coworker he just beat to death with a microscope, he's also killed over 100 young girls for...material in his experiments. Sometimes you have to break a little over 8 dozen eggs to make an omelet, that's just the way the science cookie crumbles. Unfortunately, before either he can inject his daughter with his immortality treatment in addition to himself or the South Korean authorities can arrest him, the world suffers global catastrophe as global earthquakes level the entire world or at minimum, Seoul. Whoops.

    Three years later, ragtag groups of survivors survive in the wasteland enduring a shattered world and frequent droughts, but surviving none the less. Among these survivors are the hunting duo of Nam-san (played by human Jaeger and brutal war machine Ma Dong-seok aka Don Lee) and Choi Ji-wan who hunt dangerous prey and sell the meat back in their home of Bus Town. Choi Ji-Wan pines for Han Su-na, who lives just outside of town with her grandmother. Things are rough but generally happy in Bus Town despite the hardships like cannibal attacks or guys claiming to be (or even worse, could be) the police who try to abduct people.

    One day some sharp dressed people show up and say that they're rebuilding society but only people with daughters under the age of 20 need apply. They've got a secure compound with loads of fresh water, produce, electricity, and the best civil service exam prep the post apocalypse has to offer. Su-Na and her grandmother accept and they meet up with a large group of other families with girls under 20 but all the guys wearing Tactical Turtlenecks split off the old people to ensure they get "special medical attention". Nam-San and Ji-Wan run into her being executed and attack the guys responsible but no matter how many times or how awesomely they kill the guys, they seem to keep coming back to life. Its starting to turn into an endurance battle when Special Forces medic Lee Eun-ho steps in and executes the old zombie headshot and catches them up to speed.

    Her special forces unit found an intact apartment complex and created an aquifer and were starting to rebuild society. Why, they even got a doctor to start treating patients. Dr Yang Gi-su and....shit, yeah, that immediately went bad. He started back up his experiments and peoples daughters started going missing. When Eun-Ho confronted him about it, it turned out that he had subverted everyone else in the unit by giving them his Adrenochrome Lizard DNA Super Soldier serum (take once daily to avoid monsterism), that gave the entire Special Forces unit superior strength and regenerative healing abilities. She barely escapes with her life and since then, Dr Yang has turned the place into his own Lizardman K-Anon Fiefdom. He controls the largest source of water and guns, and his death squads make him untouchable so he's subsidizing the raider community in exchange for them kidnapping people they find to be used in experiments, especially young girls.

    He has virtually all the remaining under 20 Korean girls in walking distance in his compound, where their families toil away in the water treatment plant or on the farms while the girls are educated in his classroom. There they give thanks to the picture of him hanging on the wall, learn his half-baked home grown ideology (surrounded by armed soldiers and true believers) where an (even more superior) Korean race is beset by barbarians on all sides and only their great leader will show them the way forward. This of course, is naturally based on that Korean dictatorship we all know: Park Chung Hee. Sorry, I'm going to be doing that bit a lot.

    Anyway, Dr Yang will soon find he has met his match: Ma Dong-seok aka Don Lee, Korea's answer to the Kaiju menace based on studying Cherno Alpha's design and building it out of meat. Most Americans who have heard of him will know him from his breakout role in the refreshing Train to Busan and about 7 people will recognize him from Marvel's The Eternals where he played Gilgamesh, which demonstrated his range by showing he can play a character much weaker than himself. Will I stop playing this guy up? Fuck no! This guy is like South Korea has been cooking up an answer to the prototypical American action hero and by god they've Won. He manages to both be an incredible physical presence that you absolutely believe could punch out anything with a face but he also is the avatar of Dadness.


    [𝆔 Steely Dan's 1972 hit 'Do it Again' 𝆔 begins playing]
    ​
    I'll cover it in more detail when I start doing Roundup movies but this is basically who the average Dad thinks he could be under the right circumstances. No martial arts, no cardio, for the love of god no stairs (knees can't take it) just using some old boxing moves to annihilate guys. Just like your dad after a couple beers, he knows the way to victory is just punching a guy once. He's the official mascot of "If I was there, it wouldn't have gone down like that". If he was in Aliens, he would have been in the hallway instead of the sentry guns and he would have just been punching anything that looks like Gigerish in the head. Maybe he would have pulled out the trusty pump action, who knows. Predator? Oh yeah, punched in the face. I'm only only half joking here, his movies since he became an ultra bankable star have leaned into this with editing them for maximum impact and foleying them like its a gun safe falling onto a sleeping bag filled with steak. His agent is "Big Punch Entertainment". His fashion sense is gloriously lame, with him switching out his Midnight Dancing hat ("Take me a chance") for a grey bomber jacket with a bunch of patches sewn on, including a USS Enterprise Commanding Officer and Resident Evil STARS patch.

    Which is appropriate because this is spiritually a Resident Evil movie. Someone at Umbrella is slapping their head and going "Of course, Adrenochrome Lizardmen! It was so simple!". I would of course say this is casually superior to any of the actual RE movies but its schlocky fun none-the-less. Its about a mad scientist who carries his mostly dead daughter around in his luggage and monologs like crazy. Its got gangs fighting over who controls Spaland and a whole bunch of genetic monsters for the heroes to plow through in gory action scenes. Your special forces super soldiers are nothing compared to your dad getting the Remington 870 he got from Cabela's out of the closet. He would simply shoot every zombie in the head! Or use his harbor freight machete! Or you know, fist fight them.

    Because if he was in the post apocalyptic wasteland fighting lizard super soldiers, it wouldn't go down like that.
     
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