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Reply 1988: Thoughts that may bleed into future writing?
I just finished watching Reply 1988 and I feel shaken up and new. I've spent the last four days being moved to tears by episode after episode, so much heart does this show hold in every second and the very thought of trying to put down those feelings into words is daunting.
I remember watching very short glimpses of the show back when I was just starting to properly dive into kdramas, kpop and the like and it was just one of the many that I put at the back of my mind and didn't put a lot of thought to. The friend who really brought me into this world begged me time and again, especially in the last couple of months to watch it and only now did I get myself to do it. But this is that rare instance, where instead of cursing myself for depriving myself of this show for so long I am instead glad that I watched it now and not when I was 18. I'm not sure this show would've meant as much to me then, that I would've been able to appreciate much of the beautiful writing that has gone into the making of this show and the nuances that make it one of the best things I have watched so far.
Do you ever come across something that feels so specifically made for you, even though it isn't? It's a show set in 1988-89 in Seoul, a fair distance and time away from my own upbringing and yet within the first fifteen minutes of the first episode I was made to feel at home. The small neighborhood the show is set in evokes my own tiny little hometown so vividly, from the fixed hangouts, shared tiffin boxes, private lives scattered across open streets and really just growing up in a tight-knit world, where every change felt monumental and life-changing. I have never come across a piece of fiction that depicted motifs of my childhood in such an achingly familiar manner, that captured the very specific nature of growing pains you have living in a small yet complex, mostly analog world.
That's another thing: the nostalgia this show evokes for the 80s- and the 90s, just a little bit- shouldn't be this powerful for someone who didn't experience it and to an extent it's the result of great production. And yet again it gets personal, I grew up on my parents' music and movies and interests which was almost entirely 80s nostalgia. Then there's the fact that most things came late, very very late to my town. So, the experience of getting a computer for the first time, PCOs, the unwinding landlines amongst several other details and the evolution from that in the last couple episodes are fresh in my mind even though they're probably not what people my age experienced in other parts of the world, even those living in cities nearby.
The soundtrack plays a huge part in why this show was so irresistible to me from the get-go. I haven't heard a lot of 80's Korean music, maybe just a little bit of Lee Moon-sae, from those that I know the names of anyway. But the sound is distinct no matter what part of the world its produced in and it really made for that giddy harking back to things you unknowingly yearn for. And it wasn't just the original soundtrack too, every track featured in a scene has been chosen so carefully and aids so, so much to developing the atmosphere and to build subtext for the plot. I'm someone who loves music so much that many times OSTs make or break tv shows for me and this one was so beautiful that I'm sure I'll be listening to it for a long, long time, despite knowing that it will plunge me back into those very emotions I felt while watching the show.
It's also one of those rare shows where I really loved the ending; and this is another thing I feel might have gone a little differently had I watched it back when I first had the chance to. Maybe I would've been hung upon on the romantic triangle angle too, hated it even. I've seen all the disgruntled posts about canon and I remember reading about it back then even (hard to avoid as a Ryu Junyeol fan /and/ a Girls Day fan) but the show was so very human and flawed and any ending with perfectly tied ends and without the barest hint of a regret would have probably done a disservice to what the it had built until the end- a world so beautiful and characters so easy to fall in love with because of how very difficult and real they were.
I started out writing this calling it something that I can look over for my own writing but all I did was gush over the show itself. Perhaps I'll write more in detail after a rewatch someday, maybe even now soon. A part of me was just writing this as an attempt to move on before I spend another week here, in Ssangmundong, crying over the little things that got to me, that spoke so stirringly to my own experiences and thoughts of growing pains, family, sacrifice and life in retrospect.
Do you ever come across something that feels so specifically made for you, even though it isn't? It's a show set in 1988-89 in Seoul, a fair distance and time away from my own upbringing and yet within the first fifteen minutes of the first episode I was made to feel at home. The small neighborhood the show is set in evokes my own tiny little hometown so vividly, from the fixed hangouts, shared tiffin boxes, private lives scattered across open streets and really just growing up in a tight-knit world, where every change felt monumental and life-changing. I have never come across a piece of fiction that depicted motifs of my childhood in such an achingly familiar manner, that captured the very specific nature of growing pains you have living in a small yet complex, mostly analog world.
That's another thing: the nostalgia this show evokes for the 80s- and the 90s, just a little bit- shouldn't be this powerful for someone who didn't experience it and to an extent it's the result of great production. And yet again it gets personal, I grew up on my parents' music and movies and interests which was almost entirely 80s nostalgia. Then there's the fact that most things came late, very very late to my town. So, the experience of getting a computer for the first time, PCOs, the unwinding landlines amongst several other details and the evolution from that in the last couple episodes are fresh in my mind even though they're probably not what people my age experienced in other parts of the world, even those living in cities nearby.
The soundtrack plays a huge part in why this show was so irresistible to me from the get-go. I haven't heard a lot of 80's Korean music, maybe just a little bit of Lee Moon-sae, from those that I know the names of anyway. But the sound is distinct no matter what part of the world its produced in and it really made for that giddy harking back to things you unknowingly yearn for. And it wasn't just the original soundtrack too, every track featured in a scene has been chosen so carefully and aids so, so much to developing the atmosphere and to build subtext for the plot. I'm someone who loves music so much that many times OSTs make or break tv shows for me and this one was so beautiful that I'm sure I'll be listening to it for a long, long time, despite knowing that it will plunge me back into those very emotions I felt while watching the show.
It's also one of those rare shows where I really loved the ending; and this is another thing I feel might have gone a little differently had I watched it back when I first had the chance to. Maybe I would've been hung upon on the romantic triangle angle too, hated it even. I've seen all the disgruntled posts about canon and I remember reading about it back then even (hard to avoid as a Ryu Junyeol fan /and/ a Girls Day fan) but the show was so very human and flawed and any ending with perfectly tied ends and without the barest hint of a regret would have probably done a disservice to what the it had built until the end- a world so beautiful and characters so easy to fall in love with because of how very difficult and real they were.
I started out writing this calling it something that I can look over for my own writing but all I did was gush over the show itself. Perhaps I'll write more in detail after a rewatch someday, maybe even now soon. A part of me was just writing this as an attempt to move on before I spend another week here, in Ssangmundong, crying over the little things that got to me, that spoke so stirringly to my own experiences and thoughts of growing pains, family, sacrifice and life in retrospect.