Heirs Gains Some Maturity

I’m going to be honest, I didn’t expect much out of Heirs because all the hype just blew through the whole thing like no tomorrow. The stills were dull, the chemistry middling, and most of the previews were just cheap and not at all engaging. I even refrained from posting about it due to my all around negative perceptions of the production.

That is, until this preview.

The thing is, with nearly everyone drawing parallels with Boys Before Flowers with the plethora of attractive, rich folk involved, I think most of us, myself included, passed a lot of judgment before we even had an inkling of what the story was about and the characters were like beyond a sentence or two of “catchy descriptors.” (No one talk about the written previews. After Empire of Gold, I have zero trust in them.)

What this third preview has done is give the characters life beyond their mundane descriptions. I now see that Kim Tan isn’t Gu Jun-pyo with a half-brother; he’s a broken man. LA isn’t used a fantasy location with sprawling beaches, cool ocean waves and glorious sun so we can get a ton of shirtless scenes; LA is Kim Tan’s prison disguised as Eden. What more, Korea is too a prison –just without disguise.

Likewise, for our heroine Eun-sang, the U.S. has become a wasteland. She came to make a better life for herself–and came back empty handed. She went from this:

From the beginning, my life was meant to be just as passerby that doesn’t leave a trace? I feel so wronged, that’s why I wanted to go to the U.S.

To this:

I said to eat well and live well so I came to the U.S., but this place ended up like a garbage can.

Edit: So, there’s been a lot of crap going on on KP about these translations, and I want to say that I’ve seen both the DF translations and KP’s before this post went up. I went with the mistranslated ones anyway because it conveyed to connotation I wanted. My argument still stands with both anyway, and I respect Ms.Koala’s work, so I still keep her translations. She doesn’t have to be perfect 100% of the time because she gets info out faster than most. Maybe Eun-sang isn’t as poetic and jaded as this implies, but I still feel that these developments have adequately improved Heirs.

—◊—

From the preview alone I can surmise that this girl is no Candy. She’s a staunch realist living among the poor.

The boy is no douche-bag, privileged, chaebol either. He’s crushed under the weight of his supposed crown.

Two broken people (broken in different ways) find each other.

They become friends…

…and find love in the process.

Now that’s a story I can get behind. I actively want to know how Eun-sang and Kim Tan grow as people and develop their relationship from friendship to lovers amidst all of their emotional baggage. Here’s to hoping that the entire series remains as thoughtful as this teaser seems to imply.

Preview:

(SBS, Dramafever, Translations and Image from A Koala’s Playground)