King 2 Hearts why can’t I quit you? There’s only two weeks
left and you’ll be over. What will I
obsess over when you are gone?
So I was watching Game of Thrones. During the scene where
Margaery Tyrell was navigating the logistics of trying to get pregnant when your
husband the king is gay (and I guess turkey basters don’t exist) I had a
lightbulb moment. That’s the job of a queen, to have an heir. That encapsulates
it.
Yeah, so now you’re saying “Well, duh, Captain Obvious”.
And then I started thinking about King2Hearts. As one does.
Or at least I do. All the time.
Spoilers after the jump...
Spoilers after the jump...
I wanted to go a little bit into why I think they brought a
miscarriage into the storyline and why I think it served the plot.
Now, in speaking
about miscarriage I want to make it clear that I am approaching this from a
purely symbolic, literary point of view.
This is only about miscarriage in a work of fiction and not anything to
do with real life.
Okay, so in my previous post I talked a little about Jae-ha
fulfilling the role of The Fool. The
Fool archetype has many child-like or childish qualities and we have seen this
over and over with Jae-ha.
When Jae-ha and Hang-ah slept together, though Jae-ha was
beginning to grow and taking the first steps on his way to becoming an adult,
he certainly was nowhere near the finish line.
The fight with Hang-ah where he orders her back to North Korea is the
prime example of this. Another, more subtle example is the way that he is
relying on Secretary Eun. Secretary Eun
is something of a crutch for Jae-ha. He
will not be truly King until he no longer needs him (and this goes hand-in-hand
with the ultimate exposure of Secretary Eun’s perfidy, but that’s another
subject.)
When Hang-ah and Jae-ha fought, she had been awake all
night. The memories of all the times he
had tricked her, all the times he had played her, twisted around in her mind,
souring and fermenting. By the time he
entered the room she was coiled like a snake waiting to strike. The sadness, the stress of the situation had
become a poison in her heart that she sought to alleviate by taking the poison
from herself and putting it into him.
At that moment in time we now know that Hang-ah was already
pregnant, she just didn’t know it yet.
Who has a baby? Well,
in the real world anyone with the right plumbing who is sexually mature. The
ideal is that a parent is a fully adult person who has a child as a result of
much thought and planning. Jae-ha and Hang-ah conceived their baby because of
impulse, an attempt to comfort one another, pulled along on a sea of
emotion.
Fertility brings to mind a farmer carefully tending his
crops. There is a lot that goes into
bring a crop to harvest. First you have
to start with the soil. For Hang-ah this
ground had already been poisoned by Jae-ha’s actions. He had played around with her emotions with
very little in the way of consequences. Rather than approaching each other as
equals, he always seemed to get the upper hand in the end.
Also critical to the harvest is the time that the seed is
planted. The timing for Hang-ah and
Jae-ha is all wrong. They aren’t married
yet, she’s not the queen yet. The timing
for Jae-ha’s heir is all wrong. How can
he have an heir when he hasn’t truly become the King yet? As Secretary Eun keeps telling him, Jae-ha
came to the throne with a bad reputation.
The people have not accepted him yet. If a King reigns through the will
of the people, then that legitimacy must be earned before his throne will be secure.
Another point I wanted to bring up was the conversation
Jae-ha had with his mother. Have I
mentioned how much I love the way the parents are being portrayed in this
series? I love how Jae-ha’s mom is so
loving. I also love how real it is that when
she criticizes it’s because she’s worried about them, not because she is the
evil K-drama Mama.
Where was I? Oh, yeah the Queen Mother and Jae-ha’s
Dad. There are a lot of mirrors between
the relationships and it makes me wonder how much the old king was like Jae-ha
when he was young.
- He married a commoner. Jae-ha’s mother has brought this up several times, which makes me think that this was an ISSUE with capital letters for her back in the day.
- The Queen fulfilled her duty: She produced an heir, a spare and a daughter. Pretty much the perfect royal family. Was her fecundity tied to her common roots? Hang-ah is also a commoner and her fertility was at least proven by the miscarriage: we know she can get pregnant. Contrast this with Jae-kang and his wife who were struggling to conceive which seems an interesting counterpoint.
- The Bed-Wetting: ( According to the subs that I saw Jae-ha’s mom said that her husband wet the bed until he was 40 and she helped him hide it. Dramabeans translated it as “using a bedpan” but that doesn’t make sense to me as the people who use bedpans are usually very ill. Since it doesn’t make sense in this context, I’m going with bed-wetting) Now, I find it very interesting that the sore spot for the king was his bed-wetting not say, having to wear a truss for his hernia or something else that I can’t think of that might be embarrassing to some people. The fact that the writer picked a condition that is associated with children and the King did it until he was 40. The implication being that something made him stop, grow beyond it. Also, the argument she describes when she tried to tease him about it sounds an awful lot like a certain King who’s name starts with J and ends with A.
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