Stories can be about many things. There are stories about love, revolution, trauma, or all of these things at once. And then there are stories that are about, well, stories. Storyception, if you will. Often, these stories are about creators and their work, and they force us to think about the very process it takes to make the books, movies, and comics that we consume. Where do the ideas come from? What does it cost to bring them to life? What are the consequences? I really enjoy these kinds of meta stories, so of course I was immediately drawn to W: Two Worlds.
W: Two Worlds originally aired from July 2016 to September 2016. As the title suggests, it’s about two different worlds: the real world, where the main character Oh Yeon Joo lives, and the fictional world of a famous webtoon named W, where our other main character Kang Chul is the protagonist. W (the webtoon, not the drama), is written and drawn by Yeon Joo’s father and follows rich boy vigilante Chul as he attempts to find the culprit who murdered his family one fateful night.
Despite the webtoon’s popularity, Yeon Joo’s father, Seong Moo, plans to abruptly end it by having Chul killed off. He draws a scene where Chul is stabbed by a mysterious figure, but his plan is foiled when Yeon Joo is sucked into the webtoon world and rescues Chul in the nick of time. She disappears back into the real world before he regains consciousness, but keeps being sucked back into the webtoon world, always right on time to save Chul from another of her father’s murderous plans.
Yeon Joo, who’s a major Chul fangirl, can’t understand at first why her father would want to kill him off. Eventually, however, she learns the disturbing reason behind her father’s apparent irrationality: the webtoon, and Chul himself, have a life and will of their own and Seong Moo, who has been getting sucked into the fictional world ever more often, is terrified of being swallowed whole by it. Things become even more dangerous and complicated when Yeon Joo herself begins getting entangled in the fictional world.
Obviously, because this is a romance, Yeon Joo and Chul soon develop feelings for each other. And that’s where W: Two Worlds’ problems begin and end, because while the writer, Song Jae Jung, is excellent at plot and drama, she’s not very good at romance. But more on that later. First, I’d like to take some time to appreciate the things that W does do well.
Song, like I said, is excellent at plot and drama. She knows how to worldbuild, particularly when it comes to establishing the rules by which those worlds operate. Chul and Yeon Joo quickly figure out how time works in the fictional world (since Chul is the main character, any time that isn’t important to his plotline passes by at an accelerated rate), what will send Yeon Joo back to the real world (anything that shocks Chul and creates a cliffhanger, therefore ending the “chapter”), and even how to enter the fictional world at will.
W also asks fascinating questions about storytelling. Are you, the creator, god, or do characters truly take on a life of their own? Can a writer become consumed by their work? Later on in the series, after events take a dangerous turn that affects even people in the real world, one of the characters nervously asks how a comic could endanger real people. He’s talking about the fact that the webtoon’s antagonist shows up in the real world and tries to murder Yeon Joo, but the idea that a story can harm you isn’t just the stuff of fiction.
Stories can harm marginalized people by perpetuating racist, misogynistic, or generally oppressive ideas about them. They can also crawl under your skin in other ways: Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House, for example, put me in a dazed and depressive state for several days because its portrayal of mental illness hit so close to home. And on a physical level, it’s not uncommon for writers and artists to develop health problems from the strain of stooping over keyboards and tablets to complete the stories they are so devoted to.
When Chul realizes that he’s only a fictional character, the story reminds us of the ethics of storytelling. Chul is, of course, devastated by this realization, and even more so when he confronts Seong Moo and learns that the assailant who killed his family has no identity. He was just a faceless nemesis Seong Moo created to drive Chul’s storyline forward; the intention was for Chul to chase this nemesis endlessly, just like the protagonists in one of those series that never end. An aggrieved Chul tells Seong Moo: “You probably decided to kill me here, since after finally earning your taste of money, honor, and success, you didn’t need me anymore. You created me, abused me, and made my life a living rollercoaster. In return you succeeded and received recognition.”
Chul’s anger and devastation reminds us that while characters are fictional, we draw our knowledge of how to create them—from their personalities to their motivations and backgrounds—from our experiences with real people. We can consume any pain and grief characters suffer without guilt because they’re fictional. But that pain and grief are also experienced by real people, so when we take suffering—whether it’s death or murder or assault—and incorporate it into a story meant for entertainment, do we risk eliding their actual impact? And do we cause actual harm to the people who do experience those things?
I could talk at length about the meta nature of W: Two Worlds, but I think it’s also important to talk about where the story fails: namely, with its female characters. One gets the feeling that Song wanted this story to be a straight action melodrama, without any romance whatsoever. Yeon Joo feels like an afterthought: she has no interiority and no real significance to the plot other than as it relates to Chul. I will say that the writing treats her better than You Who Came from the Stars treated Cheon Song Yi. Yeon Joo, at the very least, is aware of the danger she’s in and gets swept up into the action.
But she reacts more than she acts: Chul and Seong Moo make all the important decisions, and have all the meta discussions about storytelling. It’s Seong Moo who makes the decision to kill Chul, which kickstarts the story, and Seong Moo who makes the ill-fated decision to finally grant Chul’s nemesis his own face, which leads to the nemesis gaining an almost god-like power to control the webtoon’s plotline. Yeon Joo is also never shown grappling with any difficult emotions, like how she feels about Chul shooting her dad (it’s a long story). Her motivations and emotions all revolve around Chul, to the point where she doesn’t even seem all that concerned about keeping her job as a cardiothoracic surgeon. It’s frustrating when a story has such a compelling plot but gives even its villain more drive and purpose than one of its purported main characters.
Overall, I would have enjoyed W a lot more if it had actually given its female characters more significance in the plot. In fact, the drama would have been improved if both Chul and Yeon Joo were women—the story would have resonated even more with me if they were queer women grappling with the suffering others impose on them and trying to determine their own fate. Unfortunately, a Korean drama with two women as the leads (and in a romantic relationship, no less!) doesn’t seem to be on the horizon. But if you like an action-packed series with a lot of fascinating meta about storytelling, then I would definitely recommend W: Two Worlds.
