Yay! The Idiot Brothers Are Back And Working Together!

Yay! The Idiot Brothers are back and working together!

hey! so sorry to bother you about this, but i want to say i ALSO saw ur posts on reddit (only knew it was you cause i checked the icon just now!) and i loved ur posts about the episodes there too, lol! just letting you know!!! thanks for providing beautiful, in depth reviews of the episodes. i genuinely want to know your thoughts on other things in the series, but only if thats okay!

Aww thank you so much 💙 Blushing over here like Duke Su.

Please ask away! It's been a while since I finished The Double (so my memory might be a bit spotty) but I'm always down for nerding out about Cdramas!

Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

Look buddy, i’m just trying to make it to Friday.

One of my fave Cdrama production teams so I'll need to check Be Your Knight out! (Although I do miss the dreamy visuals of Director Zeng Qingjie.)

To @renewedmotionforjudgment's point about maximizing the creative potential of the short drama format, I think something A Familiar Stranger also does well is it picks a theme and unpacks it not only in the writing but in the visual storytelling. It's a very layered but efficient approach to communicating the show's main ideas.

I talk about this a little in my visual analysis here, but it's incredibly striking how Director Zeng uses camera close-ups, parallelism, fourth wall breaks, and other techniques to illustrate the theme of trusting our intuition versus what we see on the surface. The visual storytelling gives insight into things like the ML's character (e.g., all those direct stares into the camera) and the sister's relationship with the prince (e.g., the difference in intimacy with how the sex scenes between the two couples are shot) without needing to spend time on exposition. We can feel (and therefore know) all this through our eyes instead.

was just telling @renewedmotionforjudgment I'm 2 episodes into Be Your Knight and I love this short drama production team (Familiar Stranger, Provoke, Hard to Find, Butterflied Lover). They GET IT.

Republican drama?

Dark, wet streets! Grimy alley ways! Close-up on high heels stepping out of a glossy black car.

Waking up tied to a chair. Flipping coins to decide your fate. Secret twins. Snow falling over the slow-mo princess carry of a woman he knocked out.

Suits suits suits! Fighting a gang of men with a bat. Mysterious gangsters. Burning a secret file in a room lit by candles.

Pose as my fake husband or one of us will DIE

Did you kill the real one? ... ominious vague flashback so the viewer is unsure

This is exactly what I want. 100% dream logic.

Question: Am I missing something or does the FL from Something in the Rain only exist to torture this man? Because my goodness she is so frustrating and I only have three more episodes to go.

So, after breaking up with the ML in probably the most spectacularly humiliating way possible, the FL shows up at his door oh so casually as if nothing is wrong.

"You're really angry, aren't you? I miss you."

She doesn't acknowledge anything that has happened in the past 72 hours like how she:

Demeaned their relationship by going on a blind date with another man;

Went behind the ML's back to meet with his birth father who he had gone no contact with for years because the man had abandoned him and his sister shortly after their mother died, moving to another country to start his "real" family;

Invalidated his feelings by suggesting he is immature for not wanting to connect with his father who, again, is a dead beat who left his older sister to raise him alone;

Disrespected his wishes once again by allowing said dead beat to get so shit faced drunk at her house that she was “forced” to ask the ML to come and pick him up;

Subjected him to even more verbal abuse from her vicious social-climbing mother who just a few weeks earlier had beat him and told him he wasn't good enough for her daughter...

And instead asks if he has tea in the house.

My face exactly, Joon-hee.

She somehow spontaneously gains a shred of empathy and FINALLY apologizes, explaining that she just wanted to "end a hectic situation". The ML, who must be a saint, acknowledges the situation and tries to share his feelings about what happened:

ML: I told you I understand that. FL: You are mad at me. ML: Even if things were difficult, you shouldn't have said that we should break-up. FL: At that moment I was angry. ML: I get it. Fine. FL: You're not fine. (pouts like a child)

Emphasis on the "tries" because when he starts sharing his frustrations and how worried he was about her during that fight with her mother, she skirts the issue:

ML: Do you know how I felt just now? FL: (Nods) I do. ML: Sure you do. FL: It was my mistake. I won't do it again. (smiles coquettishly) ML: Don't try to end the conversation. FL: When people get angry, they tend to say things they shouldn't. It's not like you don't make mistakes.

And then cuts him off because the "kettle started boiling".

Once she moves her emotional manipulation to the kitchen, she asks:

FL: Since the water is boiling, can we have ramyeon? ML: Why are you acting like this? FL: I'm too hungry. I don't have the energy to get scolded.

He picks out a pack of ramyeon, which she petulantly rejects and signals for him to pick another flavor. He does, shaking his head in disbelief, before heading to the closet to create some distance.

She then calls to him from the kitchen, "am I going to eat ramyeon by myself?"

This is the image of a man defeated.

Sir, I really don't understand how you're justifying to yourself that she's worth it. She has the emotional intelligence of a gnat.

FL: I said I'm sorry. I want to make it up to you, but I don't know how. That's why I'm being like this. ML: I'm trying to talk it out with you. Why do you take it so lightly?

So of course she moves to the bed for more emotional manipulation.

She needs therapy and he needs to grow a spine.

On one hand, I’m impressed that Something in the Rain actually has a complex (and occasionally unlikable) female lead who really illustrates how childhood trauma manifests in unhealthy behavior and thinking well into adulthood.

But I also have never wanted two characters to break up so badly as I do here so that she can work on herself and heal without hurting him so much in the process.

She exhausts me.

Side Note: The ridiculous amount of pouting this grown ass woman does makes my eye twitch.