Red String of Fate Revisited

Have faith

Love is real. Which makes the Red String real too. No, Valentine's Day is just an invention.

Long before I knew there was such a thing as femdom, little Dutch watched the A-team. B.A. is the cool guy but Hannibal has the best tag line. I love it too when a plan comes together [1]. Today is Valentine's Day 2022, the most important one in recent history. So many break-ups due to Covid-19. What the world needs now is love and I have the plan.

I honestly have no idea about the position of women in Korean society. And by that I do mean South Korea, the North being an indiscriminate unisex gulag. Most Korean shows on Netflix are about government corruption. What previous governments did get right was to promote local movies and TV shows, sometimes with spectacular results.  

Promo's for My Sassy Girl and Hotel Del Luna

My Sassy Girl (엽기적인 그녀) (2001) tells the love story of a male engineering college student, Gyeon-woo, and "the Girl", whose name is never mentioned in the movie. Gyeon-woo just cannot seem to catch a romantic break. Their personalities stand opposite to the "characteristics traditionally associated with masculinity and femininity in Asian societies in general". Dutch is probably the first person ever to take My Sassy Girl into the realm of femdom but it really is about love, devotion and servitude. [11] Most most of the time we serve without even realizing. In 2019 Parasite won an Oscar. My Sassy Girl is so much better. It all starts with Gyeon-woo assisting a drunken girl he does not know. From thereon it's downhill all the way. Not all love stories are happy ones.

If movies are not your thing or if My Sassy Girl is hard to find, try Hotel Del Luna (호텔 델루나). It's on Netflix. It gets a bit weird at times but so does Squid Game. Besides why would weird scare you, after all you're into femdom just like me.

Let me tell you how good Hotel Del Luna is. After watching it by accident, I told a couple of female friends about it. A romantic show Dutch loves? That I gotta see.

Here's a summary from Wikipedia:

"Hotel del Luna" (previously known as "Guest House of the Moon") is not like any other hotel. A supernatural place, the hotel is not visible in its true form during the daytime and humans can only come across the hotel under special circumstances. Its staff and clients are all ghosts coming to terms with unfinished business in their former lives before they pass on to the afterlife and cycle of reincarnation; the staff, in particular, have been there for decades or centuries as they have not settled their grudges. The exception to this is the hotel's general manager, which has been filled by a succession of human "passersby" since they need to interact normally with the real world in certain instances, like paying bills or fulfilling ghosts' requests with still-living relatives/friends.

Jang Man-wol is the owner of this hotel, which is located in Myeong-dong, Seoul. Due to a huge sin committed more than a millennium ago, the hotel catering to the dead has been bound to her soul. As a result of manipulation by a deity Jang Man-wol meets Gu Chan-sung's father and makes a deal: in exchange for his life, his son will work for her when he returns 20.

Desperate to save his son, the father takes Gu Chan-sung abroad. The young man grows up to be a sincere, level-headed perfectionist with a soft heart. He comes back to South Korea after his father's death to be an assistant manager at a multi-national hotel corporation, only to face Jang Man-wol."

After reading this, you're probably not gonna watch it. That's on you. The highlight of the show is IU, a famous Korean singer who plays Jang Man-wol is the owner of this hotel. She's just awesome, so good in fact that it's only in hindsight you realize she is.

And yes the show is more about femdom than you can imagine. And of course love, lots of it. Once you take a step onto the Yudo bridge over the Samdocheon [river to the afterlife], you never return. The scene where people cross the bridge is my favourite. With every step their memories of the life that lies behind them fade further. But what if you promise to remember?

Shotgun wedding anyone? Kidding, this is from another episode.

Episode five deals with the red string of fate that says how two lovers are literally connected by a red, invisible string. Best approximation is perhaps soulmate. The bride is dead and the groom is in a coma. Despite that she's about to marry him. To him this is real, only the bride knows that if she pursues, he'll die too. The red string of fate is visible to her but not to him. Not all plans come together in the end. What is love anyway? 

PS:
Tonight I'm gonna watch season two of Re Zero ( Re:ゼロから始める異世界生活,), a Japanese anime show about starting life in another world, despite the fact that little demon girl Rem and protagonist Natsuki Subaru most likely are not connected by the red string of fate. Makes me sad. Or perhaps I'm gonna howl at the moon. Makes more sense than you think. According to Chinese legend, the deity in charge of "the red thread" is Yuè Lǎo (月老), the old lunar matchmaker god. 

Mecano - Hijo de la Luna (1986) Click to listen, but whatever you do, don't listen to those lyrics.

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[1] Let's just hope the OWK agrees when the time finally comes.

[2] If you're Dutch and want to watch Hotel Del Luna, change your Netflix settings to English: interface, default language, the lot. Hotel Del Luna is only translated into English and otherwise it won't show up. Same probably goes for other countries.

[11] You'll never know when you first cross paths with the love of your life but one day we'll all do. Now imagine she's in a mess. Does that make you love her any less? What really broke my heart was the tree scene. No matter how much you love someone, sometimes the universe interrupts and things don't work out. Just don't do that. It also reminded me very much of the story of Baucis and Philemon. It's what started this blog almost ten years ago. [12]

[12] If Baucis and Philemon teach us anything, it is, that no matter how hard, long or deep you love someone, the price for love is saying goodbye.

It's never just a tree.