the king of tears
I had been slowly working on a video essay about compassionate male leads and reversed gender-tropes when revelations about Kim Soo-hyun’s history of predation derailed my writing for weeks.
I don’t mean that Kim Soo-hyun played a starring role in my arguments. Despite his renown as a pretty crier on screen (oh, how ironic this is now), the actor hasn’t featured prominently in roles I would consider compassionate. His characters usually cry because he feels bad for himself.
The derailment happened because I needed to talk about his most recent success as the trophy husband of a rich heiress in Queen of Tears. The setup, which takes the very real struggles of married women dealing with demanding in-laws and straddles a man with it, was wildly interesting to me when it first aired. There was so much potential in this reversed dynamic to underscore the misery that’s normalised for everyday women. I have so many thoughts on how it actually panned out in the story.
There are so few examples of K-dramas that play with gender tropes, while sincerely trying to progress our conversations on expectations from men and women.
The recently completed Love Scout, however, is one rare example of a story written with broad reversal of tropes, which doesn’t end the discussion at a few laughs. It wants you to notice how the trope of a parent sacrificing their career growth for a daughter sits different when a man does it. It wants you to clock how you judge romantic chemistry when the male lead makes no move to dominate the female lead, either with words or by forcing his presence into her space. It wants you to recognise inherent biases when the woman is straightforward in love, while the man is diffident.
No matter where your enjoyment lies with either of these dramas, I’m sure you will agree that the writers attempted something interesting. And I wanted to talk about it. There are older examples that I wanted to bring forward. Some made in good faith, but with improperly understood politics, some garish, some cruel.
But it all screeched to a halt because the leading man of one of my main case studies was revealed to be a predator, and I had to take time off from the video to grapple with a question that has plagued me many times before.
It’s not — whether an artist can be separated from his art. I don’t believe he can be. It’s whether the work of many should be thrown away because of the actions of one.
There’s this 2012 drama I have loved for a long time — Moon Embracing the Sun. It’s known widely as a Kim Soo-hyun period drama, but for me, it’s always been a Kim Yoo-jung and Yeo Jin-goo drama. The two were very young actors at the time and portrayed the teen versions of the main leads in the first half of the drama.
Then yesterday, I saw a clip surfacing where a twenty-four year old Kim Soo-hyun is seen speaking of the thirteen year-old Kim Yoo-jung during a press conference, expressing his anticipation for her to grow up soon and play his romantic partner. There aren’t sufficient barf emojis…
I have just as much contempt for all the adults in the room behaving like this was a perfectly normal statement, as I have for the man saying the words.
And so, now, even my memories of those parts of the drama that didn’t have the actor in it are tarnished. Even though it is the work of many, this man’s actions have made it impossible for me to revisit it without wondering if he was making Kim Yoo-jung uncomfortable on set, while the adults around her saw nothing off in his behaviour.
Anyway. Those are just some of my jumbled thoughts. I can absolutely finish my essay to my satisfaction even if I entirely cut Queen of Tears out. I’m just coming to terms with the fact that Kim Soo-hyun’s presence makes a lot of really excellent dramas hard for me to go back to now. Which is not that big a deal after all. It just is.
P.S. On the bright side, a public petition titled the “Kim Soo-Hyun Prevention Act” gained 50,000 signatures yesterday and will now be brought before the Assembly. The petition asks law makers to raise the age ceiling in South Korea’s statutary rape law to 19. Currently that age of consent is at 16, but only five years ago, it was 13.
13?
The age of consent was 13 in in 202???
This one fact is so illustrative for me in terms of understanding what's going on with S. Korean gender and sexual issues.
I hope we'll be able to read your essay soon!
Speaking as a man, I do have some empathy for how the male mind can turn to useless mush when being aggressively romantically pursued (not saying that's what happened, just that I can SORT OF understand poor judgment in this hypothetical instance, depending on how emotionally immature the man in question is). But also speaking as a man, I am keenly aware of the duty of every man to make the world around them as safe as possible, most especially for children. So no matter how he may hypothetically have been treated or pursued, KSH owed it to himself and that child (those children? *insert further barf emojis*) to talk openly with about the issue with trusted adults in both their lives and take the opportunity to help teach her what healthy boundaries are and what healthy child/adult relationships look like. He did not, and instead it seems he used her monstrously to selfish ends (this is true whether he touched her or not).
As a public figure and role model, and as a man, he has earned every consequence received from this scandal. I hope that men who are aware of this scandal take this lesson from it: "what I think and feel in private matters just as much as what I say and do in public."
EDIT: great title for this post, but my email shortened it in the notification to "the king of tea" and then I was super confused when I started reading it, because tea isn't mentioned anywhere. Needless to say, I was a little disappointed.