![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livSo jack and I actually managed to watch two whole TV series all the way through. Couldn't be more different from each other; one is the fairly obscure Korean legal drama Extraordinary Attorney Woo, and the second is the mega-hit horror show Wednesday.
So Extraordinary Attorney Woo is specifically about an attorney who is autistic. She's not autistic-coded, she's not just weird or socially awkward, she's not a protagonist who happens to be autistic, that's the whole premise of the show. So I am not really best placed to comment on the portrayal as a neurotypical / allistic / non-autistic viewer, but I can't really leave it out because it's the whole point.
What I love about EAW is the amazing characters. Woo Young Woo herself is totally wonderful. And all the supporting characters are just really adorable; they're stock types in a way, the sweet and shy love interest, the best friend, the conniving rival, the supportive but workaholic boss etc, but they're just really well acted and I love all of them. I just really enjoyed following them as they solved cases, even if the cases themselves are a bit over-the-top. I don't know if it's actually normal for a prominent city law firm in Korea to cover such a complete mix of civil, commercial, criminal, constitutional and human rights cases like that, let alone to assign the same team to all these wildly divergent issues, but it makes for good TV. They also don't seem to have a barrister / solicitor distinction, but again, I don't know if that's really how the legal system works or just artistic licence. At several points the show made me misslegionseagle of blessed memory, I would have loved to hear her take on how the show handles legal culture.
I think the thing of it being Korean meant that I didn't have any real expectations, so I was prepared to accept whatever the show offered me, and that was a good mindset to watch it in. I was somewhat less keen on the larger scale plot arc; it veered into melodrama at times, with the whole thing about the mystery of Young Woo's parentage and the political ramifications. If it had been an American series I would have said that it was consciously reversing gender stereotypes; not only is the female lead in the typical male role of an eccentric genius, but the high-level CEOs with political ambitions (and the secret love child backstory) are female, the struggling single parent is a dad, and so on. Another thing which I think may be more normal in Korean shows than American ones is that everybody has actual facial expressions, including the characters coded masculine. Young Woo herself absolutely doesn't have the "flat affect" of stereotypical portrayals of autistic characters, on the contrary, she is incredibly emotionally expressive.
I think what really warmed me to the show is that the characters do foolish things, but always for reasonable reasons. Young-Woo sometimes behaves unexpectedly but it's never "because she's autistic" solely, she has actual motivations. The romance arc between her and Jun-Ho runs into obstacles and communication difficulties, but not because the couple pointlessly refuse to actually talk to each other. There are a few moments when it seems to head in the direction of cringe, but it stays the right side of the line for me, mainly because it never seems to invite the audience to laugh at the characters. I also like the moral consistency of the show; Young Woo is not morally pure just because she's autistic, but it's also not ok for her to do morally dubious things because her difference means she can't really understand right and wrong.
Also I kinda ship Young Woo with Su-yeon, but the tiny fandom I could find doesn't seem to agree with me; I found basically one story on AO3 which is tagged with the pairing but seems to be just a prose retelling of the plot of the series.
Wednesday, sigh, Wednesday. It's a great show, well acted and well written. But it isn't at all what I wanted it to be, which is a continuation of the tradition of the Addams Family. Also, it's actual horror whereas what I wanted was shlock. I was so excited when I saw they'd cast Catherine Zeta-Jones as Morticia and Luis Guzman as Gomez, but it turns out they're pretty much in one episode only, because as I should have guessed from the title, it's not a show about the family, it's a show about Wednesday. Specifically Wednesday-goes-to-monster-school, and I'm just not that interested in yet another high school drama.
If I try to evaluate the show on its own terms rather than being disappointed that it wasn't what I wanted it to be, well. Basically what kept me watching was that I cared about the characters. Ortega is just ridiculously good in the lead role, and the adults are all as good as you might expect major stars to be, and I loved Bianca and Enid. The mystery / monster plot is well done; I started to suspect the real culprit early on, and then was thrown off the trail with all the red herrings. There were some bits that I found a bit too scary, and some bits where I was annoyed with the show for falling back on the cliche of the characters go into creepy places alone and get picked off one-by-one.
Because of the strong acting I was prepared to put up with the very obvious stuff about the misfit girl who is more special than everybody else yet finds it hard to fit in, the Queen Bee who turns out to have troubles of her own, the nice roommate who just wants to be friends, the obvious high school romance tropes etc. I got really invested in the middle subplot where Wednesday uncovers her parents' past at the same school, and was almost disappointed to return to the main thread about who is the monster who is killing the students. And I was a little annoyed about how Wednesday is written; she's a bit one-note and sometimes the plot depends on her making choices that really make no sense in service of the single idea that she Doesn't Fit In. Particularly in the last few episodes, she solves the mystery by repeatedly confronting the person she theorizes is the suspect and delivering her theory as a solliloquy, and repeatedly gets into trouble because, surprisingly enough, accusing somebody of being a monstrous killer doesn't lead to good reactions, and doing so solo is just gratuitously careless, let alone multiple times. It felt like a really cheap way to infodump possible explanations for the mystery, at the expense of making a supposedly genius protagonist look really stupid.
I also had a bit of a problem with the race-blind casting. Like normally I am fine with race-blind casting, there doesn't have to be a "reason" for a particular character not to be white. But in this case, some of the horror is explicitly tied to American colonialism and genocide against indigenous peoples, and how it shapes the kind of small town societies that are terrifyingly hostile to outsiders or anyone who doesn't fit in. And yet, somehow, there is no skin-colour based racism? Which only highlights the laziness of the cliche of prejudices against cryptids (outcasts, in the terminology of the film) being a stand-in for real world racism. There's a similar thing about "conversion therapy" where there is a clumsy analogy drawn between being a werewolf and being a lesbian, but actually, in the actual show, all the pairings are relentlessly het.
I have a theory that some of the show is directly alluding to The Worst witch; giving Wednesday a frenemy called Enid is the start of it, but also the two teachers we see are principal Weems who is very tall and skinny with her hair in an updo and a habit of unnervingly appearing just behind you at the most awkward moment, and Ms Thornhill who is short and chubby and maternal and ever so nice to her charges.
Anyway, I can see why this show has been so successful, it pretty much combines all the ingredients of a successful streaming series in exactly the right proportions. It isn't really for me, though. The best thing I can say about it is that I really hope Ortega gets all the roles now, she is just amazing.
jack and I actually managed to watch two whole TV series all the way through. Couldn't be more different from each other; one is the fairly obscure Korean legal drama Extraordinary Attorney Woo, and the second is the mega-hit horror show Wednesday.So Extraordinary Attorney Woo is specifically about an attorney who is autistic. She's not autistic-coded, she's not just weird or socially awkward, she's not a protagonist who happens to be autistic, that's the whole premise of the show. So I am not really best placed to comment on the portrayal as a neurotypical / allistic / non-autistic viewer, but I can't really leave it out because it's the whole point.
What I love about EAW is the amazing characters. Woo Young Woo herself is totally wonderful. And all the supporting characters are just really adorable; they're stock types in a way, the sweet and shy love interest, the best friend, the conniving rival, the supportive but workaholic boss etc, but they're just really well acted and I love all of them. I just really enjoyed following them as they solved cases, even if the cases themselves are a bit over-the-top. I don't know if it's actually normal for a prominent city law firm in Korea to cover such a complete mix of civil, commercial, criminal, constitutional and human rights cases like that, let alone to assign the same team to all these wildly divergent issues, but it makes for good TV. They also don't seem to have a barrister / solicitor distinction, but again, I don't know if that's really how the legal system works or just artistic licence. At several points the show made me miss
legionseagle of blessed memory, I would have loved to hear her take on how the show handles legal culture.I think the thing of it being Korean meant that I didn't have any real expectations, so I was prepared to accept whatever the show offered me, and that was a good mindset to watch it in. I was somewhat less keen on the larger scale plot arc; it veered into melodrama at times, with the whole thing about the mystery of Young Woo's parentage and the political ramifications. If it had been an American series I would have said that it was consciously reversing gender stereotypes; not only is the female lead in the typical male role of an eccentric genius, but the high-level CEOs with political ambitions (and the secret love child backstory) are female, the struggling single parent is a dad, and so on. Another thing which I think may be more normal in Korean shows than American ones is that everybody has actual facial expressions, including the characters coded masculine. Young Woo herself absolutely doesn't have the "flat affect" of stereotypical portrayals of autistic characters, on the contrary, she is incredibly emotionally expressive.
I think what really warmed me to the show is that the characters do foolish things, but always for reasonable reasons. Young-Woo sometimes behaves unexpectedly but it's never "because she's autistic" solely, she has actual motivations. The romance arc between her and Jun-Ho runs into obstacles and communication difficulties, but not because the couple pointlessly refuse to actually talk to each other. There are a few moments when it seems to head in the direction of cringe, but it stays the right side of the line for me, mainly because it never seems to invite the audience to laugh at the characters. I also like the moral consistency of the show; Young Woo is not morally pure just because she's autistic, but it's also not ok for her to do morally dubious things because her difference means she can't really understand right and wrong.
Also I kinda ship Young Woo with Su-yeon, but the tiny fandom I could find doesn't seem to agree with me; I found basically one story on AO3 which is tagged with the pairing but seems to be just a prose retelling of the plot of the series.
Wednesday, sigh, Wednesday. It's a great show, well acted and well written. But it isn't at all what I wanted it to be, which is a continuation of the tradition of the Addams Family. Also, it's actual horror whereas what I wanted was shlock. I was so excited when I saw they'd cast Catherine Zeta-Jones as Morticia and Luis Guzman as Gomez, but it turns out they're pretty much in one episode only, because as I should have guessed from the title, it's not a show about the family, it's a show about Wednesday. Specifically Wednesday-goes-to-monster-school, and I'm just not that interested in yet another high school drama.
If I try to evaluate the show on its own terms rather than being disappointed that it wasn't what I wanted it to be, well. Basically what kept me watching was that I cared about the characters. Ortega is just ridiculously good in the lead role, and the adults are all as good as you might expect major stars to be, and I loved Bianca and Enid. The mystery / monster plot is well done; I started to suspect the real culprit early on, and then was thrown off the trail with all the red herrings. There were some bits that I found a bit too scary, and some bits where I was annoyed with the show for falling back on the cliche of the characters go into creepy places alone and get picked off one-by-one.
Because of the strong acting I was prepared to put up with the very obvious stuff about the misfit girl who is more special than everybody else yet finds it hard to fit in, the Queen Bee who turns out to have troubles of her own, the nice roommate who just wants to be friends, the obvious high school romance tropes etc. I got really invested in the middle subplot where Wednesday uncovers her parents' past at the same school, and was almost disappointed to return to the main thread about who is the monster who is killing the students. And I was a little annoyed about how Wednesday is written; she's a bit one-note and sometimes the plot depends on her making choices that really make no sense in service of the single idea that she Doesn't Fit In. Particularly in the last few episodes, she solves the mystery by repeatedly confronting the person she theorizes is the suspect and delivering her theory as a solliloquy, and repeatedly gets into trouble because, surprisingly enough, accusing somebody of being a monstrous killer doesn't lead to good reactions, and doing so solo is just gratuitously careless, let alone multiple times. It felt like a really cheap way to infodump possible explanations for the mystery, at the expense of making a supposedly genius protagonist look really stupid.
I also had a bit of a problem with the race-blind casting. Like normally I am fine with race-blind casting, there doesn't have to be a "reason" for a particular character not to be white. But in this case, some of the horror is explicitly tied to American colonialism and genocide against indigenous peoples, and how it shapes the kind of small town societies that are terrifyingly hostile to outsiders or anyone who doesn't fit in. And yet, somehow, there is no skin-colour based racism? Which only highlights the laziness of the cliche of prejudices against cryptids (outcasts, in the terminology of the film) being a stand-in for real world racism. There's a similar thing about "conversion therapy" where there is a clumsy analogy drawn between being a werewolf and being a lesbian, but actually, in the actual show, all the pairings are relentlessly het.
I have a theory that some of the show is directly alluding to The Worst witch; giving Wednesday a frenemy called Enid is the start of it, but also the two teachers we see are principal Weems who is very tall and skinny with her hair in an updo and a habit of unnervingly appearing just behind you at the most awkward moment, and Ms Thornhill who is short and chubby and maternal and ever so nice to her charges.
Anyway, I can see why this show has been so successful, it pretty much combines all the ingredients of a successful streaming series in exactly the right proportions. It isn't really for me, though. The best thing I can say about it is that I really hope Ortega gets all the roles now, she is just amazing.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-01-21 05:20 pm (UTC)obscure
Date: 2023-01-22 12:08 am (UTC)What I really want to know: How is Chef Hairy (?) managing to run a restaurant with only one regular customer, and how does Dong Geurami afford even a tiny Seoul apartment working part time?
(no subject)
Date: 2023-01-22 12:20 am (UTC)I had been wondering about Extraordinary Attorney Woo... I may give it a shot!
(no subject)
Date: 2023-01-22 01:01 pm (UTC)I also felt like they had missed the entire point of the Addams family, which is to show this loving weirdo family in contrast to the "normal" culture which is both less weird and less loving. It is literally social critique. So if you put Wednesday Addams in a very standard teen show box...you need some room to critique that teen show box with it, and they didn't do that, they replicated it.
The worldbuilding was also frankly such shit. The Addamses are vaguely weirdos...in a world where literal vampires are running around. The normies decide to prank the school by spraying its dance with fake blood...because if there's one thing vampires and werewolves hate, it's blood. Nobody was even like "YAY BLOOD OH SHIT IT'S FAKE NOW I'M MAD." They just all went with the scream and run thing except Wednesday. How does that make the least bit of sense with the worldbuilding? Answer: it doesn't, it is a set piece.
I also don't think it's neutral or harmless to take the position that ALL teenage girls hate their mothers. When you are a loving weirdo family your self-actualization is a lot more complicated than "I hate you mom wait I am you mom okay we're done here." (Ask me how I know.) So yeah. This was 100% not for me either.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-01-22 05:16 pm (UTC)(In the case of Lucifer it's so weak that you wonder why they bothered - presumably they could have done "she's a cop, he's the devil, together they solve crimes" without licensing anything from anyone.)
(no subject)
Date: 2023-01-26 04:04 pm (UTC)DC seem to be embracing a multiverse approach to many of their other properties, and the Dead Boy Detectives did show up in Season 3 of Doom Patrol so they are not averse to doing that with characters originating from Sandman, so maybe it's not impossible that we could see Gwendolyn Christie's Lucifer from the Sandman TV series getting something closer to the Mike Carey run, in time.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-01-26 04:45 pm (UTC)