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TvN Drama ‘Hwayugi' Lee Seung Gi, Oh Yeon-Seo, Cha Seung-Won etc. *The END*


Bella D'Amour

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Re the end of hwayugi

 

Its been hard for me. I didnt realise I was so attached to sun mi and her death really shocked me, I even cried because its so unfair!! Mostly because I expected her to be alive by the end of episode 20.

 

Thats she's dead sucks big time... Granted OG is gonna fetch her, but after 20 episodes, the audience deserved more than a hint... Maybe OG entering the underworld, or sun mi already out and together.

 

The last scene would have been perfect with SM next to OG in the car after being rescued :'( the depth of my grief is too much. Ive erased all the pics and OST; and deleted Tumblr, Instagram, fb and viki app lol. I know with time ill understand, but I'm so busy rn :sigh: Idk if watching the episode properly subbed is gonna be better or worse but I guess I need at least 1 week without hwayugi contact. The last Kdrama I cried for was 49 days.... Why my OTPs don't have HEA??? I'm cursed (also happened in nine and heartless city) I womt watch any airing drama anymore. Sorry for venting but I have so much pent up frustration hahaha

 

Edited by krystalized
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Ep. 20?? What episode 20?? Hwayugi ended at episode 19 with Sunmi laying her head in Oh-Gong lap, that's it, that was the end!!!

 

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lmao i know that most of ppl cant accept the finale eps lol imstupid.png

Edited by FranCella
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  • Hwayugi: Episode 20 (Final)hwayugi20-01255.jpg

 

 

I know that our monsters in Hwayugi didn’t go on a pilgrimage like they did in Journey to the West, but it still felt like quite the journey, full of misadventures, great tales, and a couple of wrong turns. We’re finally at the end of the road and it’s time to put Monkey’s love to the test once and for all. Can the Great Sage, Equal to Heaven actually go up against heaven and live up to his name, or will Fate get the last laugh?

 

 

FINAL EPISODE RECAP

Oh-gong’s body lies prone in Patriarch’s glass room, surrounded by heaven’s minions. In voiceover, Mawang narrates as if telling a children’s fable: Long ago, a monkey was born so powerful and bad-tempered that he caused trouble everywhere he went, and in an effort to placate him, heaven made him into an immortal. The monkey named himself Great Sage, Equal to Heaven.

Mawang is telling this story to Han-joo’s kids, who ask if Monkey is living happily ever after in heaven now, but he says that Monkey was punished after he stole a staff to put out a great flame that the people begged him to protect them from.

The children think it’s unfair that he was locked up for so long when he was trying to save people, but Mawang says it’s because Monkey wasn’t doing it for humanity, and never truly loved humans. Mawang continues that Monkey was freed from his prison and suffered a cruel pain as his punishment, and is now alone.

 

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As he tells the story, we see glimpses of Oh-gong, who is alive but hardly living. He looks weary and defeated as he sits in his garden, staring off into space.

Mawang asks the kids if they don’t want to see the monkey, which of course they do, so he sends them to Oh-gong’s house via elevator portal in the hopes that they’ll coax him out of there. He even tasks them with retrieving the shiny gold bracelet on the monkey’s wrist in exchange for all the toys they want.

The children tiptoe into the garden and jump in fright at the sight of Oh-gong, who barks at them to get out. Do they not recognize each other? He used to babysit them!

 

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Oh-gong is cold and harsh as he shoos them away, but when one child drops a toy dinosaur, it gives him a sudden flashback to the day he first met little Sun-mi, and he clutches his heart in pain.

The boy asks if he’s okay, and Oh-gong asks if they know each other. Wait, does he have amnesia?

Mawang tells Patriarch that when Oh-gong’s body was broken, his memory was shattered into pieces as well, and now whenever a fragment of his memory returns, it sends a shooting pain to his heart. He says that Oh-gong refuses to take one step out of his house.

 

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Patriarch wonders why, when Sun-mi is no longer in this world and he has no memory of her. He asks if Oh-gong is still wearing the bracelet, and Mawang says the bracelet seems to still have hold of his heart. He explains that the bracelet is what saved Oh-gong when he battled the dragon, protecting his heart when it should have shattered like the rest of him. Ah. So it saved his life.

That’s what Patriarch finds odd, since according to heaven’s plan, the bracelet should have disappeared when Sun-mi died. Mawang just scoffs that heaven knows nothing and nothing goes according to its plan anyway.

Patriarch says that Sun-mi only had one request when she took on her heavenly calling—she’d asked him to keep Oh-gong away from her because she refused to let him be the one to kill her. Mawang says that the two of them broke their deadly fate by sacrificing themselves to save the other. But… she still died?

Oh-gong is due to return to heaven now that his punishment is over, but Patriarch worries what’ll happen if he takes Oh-gong up there in his current state. He says he came up with an idea to remove the bracelet, but he doesn’t know if it’ll fly: He requested that Sun-mi be allowed to return from the afterlife for just one day, to remove the bracelet.

With his liquor ban lifted, Oh-gong drinks and drinks and drinks in his cellar, though even that reminds him of little moments with Sun-mi, not that he recognizes the memories or understands why they make his heart hurt.

He begins to hear Sun-mi’s voice calling his name, and finally realizes that he’s not imagining it. He heads out to the garden, where she’s waiting for him on the bridge with a sad smile… but Oh-gong doesn’t recognize her.

 

hwayugi20-00160.jpg hwayugi20-00158.jpg

 

He goes up to her and sees that she’s not human, while Sun-mi looks down at his wrist and wonders why the bracelet is still there. She says lightly that his personality seems to have gotten worse, and tells him that she’s the one who put that bracelet on him and she’s here to remove it.

But Mawang tells Secretary Ma that there’s something heaven and Sun-mi don’t know—that once Oh-gong chose to put that bracelet back on, he became its master, not her. Mawang kept that little tidbit to himself since they never would’ve let Sun-mi come back if they’d known, and he’s hoping that seeing her will help Oh-gong piece together his memory. But they only have one day.

 

===Read more: http://www.dramabeans.com/2018/03/hwayugi-episode-20-final/

 

 

COMMENTS

Er? I mean, it was kind of an upbeat ending, but it doesn’t exactly feel happy because Sun-mi is still dead and Oh-gong is still alone. They had a whole hour in which to fix that problem, but instead of using all of the mystical plot devices at their disposal to bring Sun-mi back to life and give her immortality like she deserved, they gave her ONE DAY to revive Oh-gong’s memory? The whole episode felt like a really long epilogue where nothing fundamentally changed. Would it have killed them to just wave a magic wand and bring her back as an immortal? Or to have her new monkey eyeball give her the power to stay in the land of the living?

 

I do leave the series firmly believing that Oh-gong will turn the netherworld upside down to retrieve Sun-mi, no question about it. But I would’ve liked to see it with my own eyes and actually get a sense of closure about them sticking it to the gods and subverting that deadly fate. Because you can’t actually say they defied the death bell if one of them is still dead! Hello! I thought the whole point was that Monkey was such a rebel that he’d always find a way to circumvent heaven and make his own rules, but instead of changing heaven’s paradigm, he just mucked up their plans a little.

I don’t know about you, but I’m disappointed in Monkey’s uncharacteristic obedience to the laws of heaven and earth. I thought he’d do something radical in the finale to make up for Sun-mi’s death in the last episode (which by the way, missed its emotional target by a mile when they didn’t have her possessed by the dragon and killed by Oh-gong, WTF, thanks for nothing). I feel like Episode 20 was an interlude and the real action is all set to go down in Episode 21: The Eye of the Afterlife… except there is no Episode 21.

hwayugi20-01203.jpg

I didn’t mind the amnesia, even though it didn’t feel particularly clever, but at least we got emotional payoff when Oh-gong remembered his love and finally told Sun-mi the truth about the bracelet. I just expected a bigger reward from the heavens for saving the whole goddamn world from destruction than a star necklace with a 24-hour expiration date. And then I thought that Oh-gong would just keep pulling stars from the sky and filling her necklace to keep her there for one more day, and another day, until infinity, but that didn’t happen either.

I’m complaining, but it wasn’t a complete disaster of a finale, because it didn’t go against its own story logic or give characters sudden lobotomies—everything was in keeping with the rest of the series and we got sendoffs for most of the major relationships in the show. I even think the promise of what’s to come in our characters’ futures is in line with how I want the story to end. Wouldn’t it be nice to be shown that ending instead of told to imagine it, though? The only ending I thought was satisfying was Mawang finding his son, and having to protect him at a distance without revealing who he is—perfectly bittersweet because there’s story logic to back it up.

hwayugi20-01314.jpg

As a whole, Hwayugi was a clever adaptation that spun a fanciful world full of monsters and magic into a believable contemporary fantasy drama. The world felt full and the mythology was layered, thanks to the wealth of its source material in Journey to the West. And the casting was so spot-on that it took very little to buy into the fiction whole hog. There’s so much to like about the drama, which is why I’m disappointed that the series didn’t really deliver on its own doomsday plot to satisfaction, with weeks spent building up to one dragon battle, which consisted of swinging a sword at it a few times from a distance (seriously, he couldn’t have made contact like, once?). I blame the director for that.

I loved the ingenious use of the bracelet to bind Monkey with love as a twist on the contract relationship trope, and how it ceased to have a hold over him the moment his love became real. The trajectory of his character was satisfying to watch, as he went from selfish trickster to an actual hero and learned how to love for the first time in his life. I wish the heroine had gotten the same treatment, because in comparison she really got the short end of the stick, what with the static character arc and the death. The one upside I can find is that Oh-gong isn’t planning to wait around for a century till Sun-mi gets reincarnated, and is planning an afterlife jailbreak instead. He’ll probably burn the afterlife to the ground in order to save her and they’ll have to spend another lifetime with him living out some form of punishment, but at least they’ll be together. It’s a breadcrumb, but right now I’ll take that breadcrumb. It’s all I have! Don’t take it away from me!

 

hwayugi20-01191.jpg

 

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Ha. So it was the peddler's grandson. Until ep 18 it looked like weird idea but after that ajusshi scene... It was quite nice touch.

 

Still wonder when exactly BuJa died. Poor kid.

 

It ended more happily then I expected.

 

The whole drama was so great. Rarely great even.

 

I kinda hated cgi in the ep 19 though.

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I felt like the finale was suuuuch a let down. The whole showdown with the black dragon thing was boring and so anti-climatic and I felt like I invested all this time into watching the drama for no closure by the last episode. I'll just pretend this drama ended at episode 18 LOL laugh.png I was sad to see Buja/ASN go though...Lee Seyoung gave a good performance. 

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“Hwayugi†Finale Offers Bittersweet But Fitting Ending

 

It’s been a fun and wild ride with our motley crew of supernatural characters, but we’ve finally arrived at the end of tvN’s “Hwayugi†— and if we thought we could finish this drama without heartbreak or tragedy, the finale proved us wrong. But along with some puzzling and heart-rending outcomes, the ending of “Hwayugi†also offered us notes of hope, so let’s review our thoughts on the finale!

 

Warning: this article contains spoilers for “Hwayugi†Episodes 19 and 20.

 

That being said, our disappointments with the finale stem from the fact that “Hwayugi†was so successful in making us care so deeply about its characters in the first place. If we hadn’t ardently hoped that Oh Gong and Sun Mi would get the glorious moments they deserved, we wouldn’t have been let down when they did not. And if we hadn’t loved Bu Ja (Lee Se Young) so much, we wouldn’t be so outraged that “Hwayugi†spent weeks tricking us into believing there was a chance that the sweet zombie was still alive, only to unceremoniously inform us in the finale that she has been gone ever since Asanyeo took over her body.

 

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Shouldn’t someone have mentioned this earlier?

 

Most importantly, it’s a sign of how invested we were in Sun Mi and Oh Gong’s relationship that we felt so empty after the final episode: it broke our hearts to watch these two go through so much together, only to see them essentially back at square one for the majority of Episode 20 because Oh Gong lost his memories. Despite our gripes with the amnesia trope, it at least served as an excuse to bring Sun Mi back so she could finally see that Oh Gong’s feelings were real without the Geumganggo.

 

We still wish he had shown her this while she was alive, but communication was never his strong suit.

But for the sake of closure, we would have liked for Oh Gong and Sun Mi to have more than a few short moments together at the end after the Great Sage regained his memories.

 

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Because “Hwayugi†was never really about the battle to save the world, and after watching a drama that focused on developing characters through weekly story arcs and subplots rather than emphasizing the impending fight for humanity, it felt odd to have this reversed in the final episodes. That’s not to say that the finale was entirely disappointing, because while it missed the mark with the plot devices it used, it found its strength in the wonderfully poignant, if short, moments between characters. It’s not every show that can take viewers from such blissful tenderness…

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To such devastating heartbreak, all in the span of a single episode.

 

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In fact, some of the most emotionally impactful scenes of the finale were not with the main couple, but rather the supporting characters. Like P.K (Lee Hong Ki) and his sorrow over lost friends:

 

Lee-Hong-Ki-Sung-Hyuk-Lee-Se-Young-Bora.

 

Or loyal Lee Han Joo (Kim Sung Oh) and his earnest sadness over Sun Mi’s death:

 

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Because at the end of the day, the phenomenal cast of capable actors carried this drama, and we’ll remember â€œHwayugi†most for its delightfully eccentric characters who we spent a lot of time laughing with, but who also had the power to make us feel all kinds of emotions. And for that, we can forgive the drama for ultimately delivering an underwhelming doomsday plot.

 

 

 

“Hwayugi†finishes in an admittedly unsatisfying way, with not a single on-screen happy ending to be found. And while not particularly gratifying, these open endings are fitting for a drama full of immortal characters: life is a journey of constant growth and learning, and for them, that journey doesn’t have an endpoint. Ma Wang (Cha Seung Won) and Oh Gong do not emerge from “Hwayugi†having arrived at a destination. But they have gained a new sense of purpose going forward and, perhaps most touchingly, a newfound appreciation for each other and the hardships that both have endured.

 

But that’s not to say that the finale didn’t give us some form of closure: we know that everything will be resolved in time. Ma Wang will become a deity so that he can safely reveal himself to his son, parenting from very close by in the meantime.

 

 

And Oh Gong will find Sun Mi so that they can be together.

 

Lee-Seung-Gi-6-e1520358832788.jpgOh-Yeon-Seo-21-1-e1520358841208.jpgLee-Seung-Gi-7-e1520358853776.jpg

 

 

Because while the heavens have been unrelenting and cruel throughout “Hwayugi,†these characters have shown that they are not entirely beholden to heaven’s plan. With a little cleverness and determination, they can shape their own futures in spite of what fate has ordained for them. And it’s in this that we find our happy ending — because if there’s one thing we can be certain of, it’s that Oh Gong is going to raise hell in the Underworld until he gets Sun Mi back!

 

 

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Give ’em hell, nut job!

 

 

Edited by FranCella
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Oh Yeon Seo Describes What It Was Like Working With Lee Seung Gi On “Hwayugiâ€

 

 

During a recent interview, Oh Yeon Seo shared her experience filming tvN’s “Hwayugi†and working with co-star Lee Seung Gi.

 

In the drama, Oh Yeon Seo and Lee Seung Gi played a loving couple as Jin Sun Mi and Son Oh Gong respectively. Comparatively, the two actors interact in a strange manner in real life, according to Oh Yeon Seo. She revealed, “I was born in 1987 and Seung Gi was born at the beginning of 1987. We probably would have been more comfortable had we met at school, but because we met in a business setting, we have a peculiar relationship where we refer to each other formally and use a mix of casual and formal speech.â€

 

“He’s a passionate and zealous person. He works really hard on set,†Oh Yeon Seo complimented. “Oh Gong from ‘Hwayugi’ really isn’t an easy character to play. However, he always kept a smile on his face and tried to make things fun. Even though he had a lot of things he was doing in his schedule, he tried to create a bright and positive atmosphere on set.†She also explained how he was very considerate of everyone, especially the actresses, adding, “I received a lot of Oh Gong’s love while filming.â€

 

Oh Yeon Seo shared what it was like working in such cold conditions as well. She commented, “This past winter was just so, so, so cold. Seung Gi wears a fur coat [in ‘Hwayugi’] but it’s not warm at all even though it looks huge. It also became smaller as time went on.†The actress recalled how Lee Seung Gi would say that the cold was nothing compared to what he experienced in the military, but he later acknowledged that it was still pretty cold.

 

“He didn’t even wear long underwear. I would layer clothing even if I looked larger because it was so cold,†Oh Yeon Seo commented. “When I asked Seung Gi how he could withstand the cold, he told me, ‘I went to the army.’ On rare days, he did wear some [long underwear] saying it was too cold, but you can count the number of times he did on one hand. I think he’s really amazing.â€

 

 

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  • love changed the title to TvN Drama ‘Hwayugi' Lee Seung Gi, Oh Yeon-Seo, Cha Seung-Won etc. *The END*

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