Friday 21 November 2014

My New Obesession Is... Boys Over Flowers

Seriously, this is half the reason my post is so late today, I've been watching the crap out of this.

 I'm loving it, partially because the antagonist is a dork, adorable, incredibly socially awkward and stops being the antagonist at some point in episode two or three when he falls head over heels for the heroine after she kicks him in the face.

 Seriously, she roundhouse kicks him, it was sheer poetry in motion.

"Atta girl."
 Our story begins with a teenage boy being repeatedly beaten and bullied because he found a red card in his locker. It ends up with him being forced onto the edge of a roof and attempting suicide before our plucky heroine Guem Jan Di, who was there on a delivery of dry cleaning, catches him and ends up in the public eye as a populist figure.

 I'm sorry, did I say that's how our story begins?

 Because that's not how it begins, it begins with two minutes of exposition about some conglomerate called Shin Hwa which also owns a school for some initially sentimental but now rather inexplicable reason.

 The prestigious school is uber elite and ultra expensive and students just go through it without ever having to take entrance exams. Including all the way into university.

 I'm not joking, one of the students is twenty three years old.

 The stuff about the bullying comes afterwards.

 The public lose their rag at the conglomerate because such awful stuff is happening at this school (probably because the teaching staff appears to consist of one normal teacher and a white university lecturer). In order to placate them, the evil president (she has a villain collar in her first scene, that's how you know she's evil) of the Shin Hwa group arranges for Jan Di to go to the school and here start her romantic problems, friendship problems, being bullied (seriously, two teachers) and swimming in a pool no one but her ever seems to use.

 The first three all relate to the Flower Four, a gang of guys who have a lot of money and enough sense for two guys. Which happens to be in two of them, leaving nothing for the other two.

 The leader of the group is Goo Joon Pyo, who starts off as an antagonist before falling in love with Jan Di, and much to my dismay it took me a startingly long time to figure out that he was Mr Darcy.

 -Cough- Ji Hoo is the Mr Bingley/Mr Wickham (he has the personality of one and the plot purpose of the other) of the proceedings. He plays the violin, moons over the aforementioned twenty three year old and has bad hair.

 -Cough- Yi Jung, who is a potter and seems relatively nice apears to have a thing for Jan Di's friend Ga Eul.

 And then there's -fake coughing fit- who's something of a ladies' man and really grew on me as the series went on.

 The latter two are the one's who managed to retain the sense they were born with.

 The other two were in car accidents, so presumably vehicle related trauma robs you of your ability to use common sense.

 Okay, okay.

 I'll look their names up.

 Yoon Ji Hoo, So Yi Jung and Song Woo Bin.

 I'm really bad with names! Especially names from cultures whose names I'm almost entirely unfamilar with.

 Could they not throw a few Achmeds in there? I know where I stand with an Achmed.

 Joon Pyo (although transliterations do vary on that) initially serves as an antagonist because he basically holds the whole school in his thrall and they do what he tells them to.

 The red card business is his doing.

 Jan Di ends up butting heads with him and he pulls the red card trick on her. She manages to hold out pretty well for a while.

 There's a scene where she's had eggs and flour thrown at her and Joon Pyo expects her to show up, but she doesn't because she has no intention of capitulating to him.

 He looked a little heart broken when she didn't, so I think he probably started liking her by then.

 However, he takes it too far by spreading a rumour (or more accurately, getting other people to spread a rumour) about her being pregnant. This is what prompts her to roundhouse kick him.

 Somehow, from her yelling at him about how she hasn't even had her first kiss and kicking him in the face, he concludes that she must be madly in love with him.

 Yi Jung and Woo Bin tried to let him know that he was wrong, but he was so sure that they just let it go for the lulz. This is what I mean by them having all the sense in that group.

 After that, everything he instigates towards her is pigtail pulling.

 All of it.

 Even half his attempts to be nice or romantic.

 It's adorable.

 Meanwhile, Jan Di has a crush on Ji Hoo, and I've just got to the point where that's caused a huge problem.

 I shan't tell you more, just that you should watch it yourself if it tickles your fancy.

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