They Don't Kiss Until Episode 16

I am in episode five of Gyeongseong Creature 2, so technically, we are at episode 15 in the show overall.

So much was left unanswered in season 1. Let’s do a quick recap of season 1 and the unanswered questions.

1. Chae-Ok’s mother accidentally kills Chae-Ok and, in her grief, abandons her parasite and gives it to Chae-Ok. Chae-Ok wakes up as her human self and not as the deformed creature-feature her mother was. How?
2. Myeong-Ja escaped the hospital only to be brought back. She dies in the dungeon of the hospital while giving birth, or rather, Kato callously gives Myeong-Ja a cesarean to get the baby he knows has the parasite inside of him. What happens to Kato and the baby?
3. The townsfolk of Gyeongseong blow up Commissioner Ishikawa’s funeral in an attempt to execute Lady Maeda for all her wrongs, but she escapes, not unscathed. Colonel Kato offers her the parasite to heal her wounds and become greater than she already is. Really, he needs her money to continue the experiments.

All in all, we learn that all the chaos of season one leads back to Lady Maeda, who has a weird thing with Joseon people. That is the crux of what I want to talk about in this post: The weird and complex contradictory emotions that come into play when you are part of an oppressor’s group and have access to money and power, as seen in Lady Maeda.

The complexity of Lady Maeda

If this show is going in this direction, it is trying to show that first, dehumanization starts in the mind; you have to strip a person down to nothing in your mind, and then you can enact violence and other forms of physical and legal oppression. So, in the show, you don’t just start experimenting on Joseon people because you know they aren’t human; you make them inhuman first, and then, naturally, experimentation follows.

And you dehumanize people in your mind by not allowing them to have any kind of human emotions. In the case of the show, Joseon people aren’t supposed to feel angry, have joy, feel love or lust, pain or pleasure. Their families aren’t families, etc. At least not in the ways that the Japanese believe it should be. You must find any difference, make it stranger than what it is, and boom. A person is not a person.

Without making this a sociological post, when you are part of an oppressive group, you have to constantly create different rules and loopholes to justify dehumanizing the group you are attempting to oppress, and this creates a worldview full of contradictions that you are trying to manage and untangle. And this creates frustration and exhaustion.

And that is Lady Maeda. You want to believe that Lady Maeda is just evil for evil sake, and she kind of is, but she is a scorned woman. This whole thing is because Lady Maeda is in love with Tae-Sang and Chae-Ok’s mother and can’t comprehend several things:

1. Why she is in love with him

Lady Maeda is not just Japanese. She is the daughter of a very high-ranking general. She has been embedded in a worldview of dehumanizing Joseon people all her life. Yet, she finds herself in love with a man who she believes she is better than. Not only that, but she is also wealthy and powerful, which adds to this concept because she thinks she is better than a good portion of Japanese people. So how can she, Lady Maeda, be in love with a Joseon man who runs a pawn shop when she is the daughter of a top Japanese military official? She shouldn’t have these emotions, but she does.

2. How come he isn’t in love with her

I think this is the driving point of the show. Lady Maeda had what she thought was a relationship with Tae-Sang by purchasing his wares and, in short, letting him and his business exist. But when he chose Chae-Ok over her, she couldn’t reconcile this. And she decides to try to kill him and destroy everything he has, and she does. She feels she is better than him, even though she loves him or thinks she is in love. And it is even worse when she sees her husband, whose Joseon mistress seems entirely devoted. She is Lady Maeda; how can he not want her like she wants him? But her lowly husband (remember her husband is of lower status, and it’s a marriage of convenience) gets the “love of his life.”

Because she has to maintain the worldview that Joseon people are less than while holding emotions for Tae-Sang she has to bring Tae-Sang to a level that can be loved without making him a human being. Because if she makes Tae-Sang a human being, then the whole system falls apart,

But here is the part she doesn’t get. Because she has to maintain the worldview that Joseon people are less than while holding emotions for Tae-Sang she has to bring Tae-Sang to a level that can be loved without making him a human being. Because if she makes Tae-Sang a human being, then the whole system falls apart, and that can’t happen, so Tae-Sang becomes a pet. We love our pets but create clear boundaries of where they can and cannot be in our human world. Lady Maeda attempts to do that with Tae-Sang (and Ishikawa does it to Myeong-Ja, but we aren’t talking about them). Tae-Sang rightfully resists this.  And Lady Maeda continues to act out in a way that recognizes her money, power, and idea that these Joseon people she “loves” are her pets that need to be brought to heel.

Which brings us to Seishin, Chae-Ok’s mother.

3. How can Seishin reject her for her own daughter?

The show has not yet discussed this, but it was hinted at in season one. Lady Maeda is responsible for kidnapping Chae-Ok’s mother and putting her in the hospital where the experiments took place. Lady Maeda hints that she knew Chae-Ok’s mother before the kidnapping. If the situation is anything like the racial dynamics of the US, most likely Chae-Ok’s mother was a caregiver to Lady Maeda, and Lady Maeda grew to love Seishin as a mother figure even though she is also simultaneously growing up surrounded by the idea that Joseon people aren’t people. Somewhere along the way, Lady Maeda figured out that Seishin had a life and a family of her own whom she loved, and the “love” she gave to Lady Maeda was due to her having to. I think this discovery impacted Lady Maeda. Lady Maeda operates like this in the show; she creates a context where she forces the person to love/acknowledge her.  Realizing that her “pet” didn’t love her the way she loved, Seishin infuriated Lady Maeda, and she exacted her revenge.

Now, here we are with only two episodes left, and we have to see how this show is wrapped up. But I think the show is trying not just to create villains but also to show how oppressive ideologies oppress the people who make the rules. It strips everyone of their humanity.  And that is where Lady Maeda is. She has completely lost her humanity and doesn’t know how to get it back, so she continues on a path of destruction and hate.

Let me know your thoughts about love, hate, and humanity and if you are enjoying season two of Gyeongseong Creature.