Many cultures have that certain je ne sais quoi notion that, by virtue of belonging to each individual person, helps bind together a collective nation. The Danes have hygge, the hard-to-explain feeling of warmth and coziness. The Israelis have koev halev, the ache of identifying with another's suffering so intensely your heart literally hurts. The Portuguese have saudade, a yearning melancholy for something lost or never quite had. And in Korea, there are two: han and jeong. If han (한/恨) is the dark cloud that hangs over the country and the promise of clear skies on the horizon, then jeong (정/情) is the enormous umbrella everyone shares in the meantime. Han is the sorrow and the hope to overcome it, the injustice and the obsession to avenge it. Jeong is the love and the loyalty that keeps people tethered to each other through it. They're hard to pin down in their full complexity, and they're also the most basic things in the world; you'll know them when you see them. I've been thinking about it a lot since I found this K-drama called When Life Gives You Tangerines, and there's a track on its soundtrack called They Fell Down But Got Up Again. That title alone just gutted me. To me it's the purest expression of han and jeong you could distill into seven words: life beats you down and the world is unfair and the grief feels insurmountable, and we push through anyway, every single time, for the people we love. It reminds me of that Vision and Ultron exchange too - Ultron sees humanity as something doomed and flawed, and Vision agrees, but says the beauty is in the trying anyway. That's jeong refusing to let han have the last word. And look, I know how ridiculous it sounds to pivot from very detailed scenes about pumping our favorite idols full of cum to a reflection essay on Korean cultural philosophy. But this is the kind of lens that makes stories beautiful, and I wanted to share a little of that while we're here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1umTBJ76tj8