weak hero
part 2 promises more heartache, brace yourselves mom-boys
(This blog is turning into quite the k-drama review. Apologies.)
Not since “Stand By Me” has a (k-) drama paid brutally honest homage to coming-of-age boys in the savage world of school bullies. A week or so ago, I watched the first season of “Weak Hero,” a webtoon adaptation, with much trepidation.
Anyone who’s ever been bullied in school will have the same flashback trepidation, triggering and replaying over and over and over again.
It took a few episodes before I found/latched onto the same friendship loner Yeon Si-eun did, and the reason to fight. I don’t like watching bullying depicted on television, least of all Korean bullying, which takes graphic to a whole other, visceral level. But I do like watching fight scenes, from my Bruce Lee martial arts period as a young girl who never got to take karate.
I used to binge Chinese martial arts films all the time whenever I could. When I was seven, I’d play with Godzilla and other monsters for fun.
I’m a grown-up now, and a mother of an only child, a son, so watching k-dramas like this is especially heart-breaking.
I don’t know anything about the main character, only that he’s liable to take his fear, fury, and frustration too far. When a seemingly dispassionate bystander, An Soo-ho, intervened before Si-eun delivered the final, fatal blow to a bully, I felt the frequency shift in the room and in my heart, as I’m sure the actors did.
Park Ji-hoon (Si-eun) and Choi Hyun-wook (Soo-ho) are close off-screen, probably as a result of filming. Understandable.
Understanding boys has proven to be quite a challenge for me. I still don’t completely get them. But I respect them a lot. Always have. Watching my own son growing up and having to deal with bullies — children and adults — of his own deepened that respect tremendously. How he’s handled them all without losing himself…I could never be that cool.
In his junior or senior year, James was invited by his school counselor to join a bunch of other boys his age under the loosely defined umbrella of fostering leadership, under the radar. Nobody really knows about this group. That’s the kind of kid he and his friends are. The meetings were designed to coax out a leadership that was always there.
I wonder how they’d react under similar circumstances to Si-eun’s.
If Si-eun never met Soo-ho, “Weak Hero: Class 1” would’ve become a different k-drama altogether, with a quicker, bloodier ending. But Soo-ho’s influence, that of a real man dealing with real adult problems, and one helluva fighter, cracked open Si-eun’s hard heart.
Without getting into spoilers, Si-eun suffers at the hands of the adult and student bullies a great deal for his friends.
The final episode, where he is chased by the questionable adults in authority, at the behest of the school and Oh Beom-seok’s abusive, adoptive, assemblyman father, will crack your heart open and tear bits of it into pieces. You feel for him when he finally has enough and releases all that pent-up rage, guilt, and helpless love for his friends, by putting his fist through a window.
He speaks for countless bullying victims, good boys, who never get to be real men with loves of their own and families. Cut down by not only bullies, but a system that churns out graduates like a money-laundering mill.
Season two is going to be even more brutal, judging by the teaser.
Si-eun transfers to another school, the only school that will have him, instead of juvie. The bullies are much worse, they belong to a union comprised of the worst bullies from several other schools. The stakes are higher.
He doesn’t want to, but he makes friends with more than two boys. They give him the courage to fight back and put everything on the line.
Si-eun fights for his friends. His friends are his glory, his saving grace.
If the friendships didn’t resonate, if the actors playing the friends didn’t click — even one iota, if the interaction isn’t 100 percent genuine, the whole k-drama would’ve failed. Everything hinges on chemistry in a limited amount of time.
But that spark of a friendship (you don’t see them bonding much, which is amazing in itself) carries the heart of the show through to its terribly lonely conclusion. It works. They work.
They’re phenomenal young actors who managed to tap into what it must be like to be a boy living in this fucked-up world…in Korea of all places, where oftentimes, there is no mercy.
“The fight scenes are over-the-top and a well-choreographed punctuation mark to the non-stop bullying. But one of the things this Korean show does extremely well is depicting how tenuous friendships can be when you’re young and impressionable — and how something as innocuous as not being followed back on social media can break a teenager’s heart.” — “Weak Hero Class 1 (약한영웅 Class 1),” “The kids aren't alright,” K-Culture with Jae-Ha Kim, March 15, 2023
Poor Si-eun is gonna have to fight for his friends again. The stakes are gonna be higher. He’s gonna have to use his brain a lot more, too. (Si-eun, or Gray in the webtoon, leans on his academic know-how — math, spatial geometry, Newton’s Physics, etc. — to orchestrate his beat-downs.)
I can’t wait, and yet, I’m afraid for him.
Go watch and be patient. “Weak Hero: Class 1” grows on you with one small, kind gesture, an imperceptible glance, and a steady resolve that will break you down bit by bit, until you’re fighting tears, hands rolled into fists.
If you have a heart, you will feel exactly what he and every boy like him is feeling when they are staring down a bully…
Part 2 airs starting April 25.