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LEE_SOO_YEON

                                             July 19, 2024


It it suddenly dawned on me that the writer Lee Soo-Yeon
is female.  I've been using male pronouns for her,
unconsciously leaping to a conclusion for dumb reasons:
her scripts are logically intricate and emotionally cold
(or at least, muted) which is to say I think
"she writes like a man".


Lee Soo-Yeon wrote the scripts for a number of
Kdramas, some of which are really excellent:

She charged out of the gate with

   "Stranger" (2017) (literally,
   "The Secret Forest"):

This is a crime drama mystery that's          The male lead is handled very
remarkable because it doesn't have            well by Cho Sung-Woo (aka Jo
anything in it that's obviously dumb.         Seung-Woo-- you've got to love
                                              the flexibility in romanizing
There's no place where you roll your          korean names).
eyes, grit your teeth, and try to keep
going with it in spite of the problems.          He's supposed to be emotionally
                                                 damaged, incapable of feeling
This show actually earned a second-season,       much of anything-- or perhaps,
nearly unheard of in Kdrama's these days,        the things that he feels rarely
and it's also reasonably solid:                  become conscious.  A lesser
                                                 actor would play this like a
  "Stranger 2" (2020);                           boring robot: with Cho Sung-Woo
                                                 there's a constant sense of
                                                 something lurking beneath the
A number of her other efforts didn't work        surface.
quite this well, but none of them deserve
to be skipped (in some places I got the             And the female lead is
sense the production team messed her over,          handled quite well by
possibly requiring her to truncate the              Bae Doo-Na, who I've liked
story she wanted to tell):                          since I saw her in one
                                                    of her first roles,
"Life" (2018); "Zero" (2021); "The Grid" (2022);    the Japanese film
                                                    "Linda Linda".

An excellent production that came out recently:

  "Dominant Species" aka "Blood Free" (2023)

The point of this seems a little murky at first,
but it, uh, fleshes out well I think.  It's about
an innovative high tech company that's having
problems in part because their products are
literally "disruptive"-- initially it's a vat
grown fake meat that's so popular it's putting
conventional animal husbandry out-of-business.

And they've got some major players-- highly
placed politically and well-financed-- sniffing
around them for *some* reason.  And it turns
out that everyone suspects they've got a lead
on another breakthrough and they want to control
it.

      An example of the kind of thing I
      appreciate about Lee Soo-Yeon's writing         Another good bit:
      is that their next invention isn't some
      great surprise to everyone.  To people          The female lead
      who are paying attention, they realize          uses her bodyguards
      that if you can do *this*, then maybe           house as a safe
      you're on the way to doing *that*...            house sometimes
                                                      and some people
                                                      presume she must
                                                      be sleeping with
                                                      him, but really
                                                      she just likes
                                                      his cat.






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