Alchemy of Souls - Draggy AF

Just finished watching this K-Drama called Alchemy of Souls and it was such a drag. The only reason why I watched it in the first place was because it had the "weak but actually secretly super strong" main character trope that I am a sucker for.

The main premise of the story that they show from the trailer is about this main female lead who is an extremely skilled and powerful assassin who switched souls and got herself stuck in the body of a weak person, all that happens within the first 15 minutes of the series and so for the next 20 episodes of the show, I was just watching in anticipation for her to finally get her badassery back to kick some bad guy's ass, but the writers really dragged that shit out and she doesn't show any hint a her original powers until Episode 18, which doesn't last long and then after that, the next 2 episodes, she is back to her powerless self again, gets mind controlled by the main antagonist, reverts back to her powerful self again but under mind control this time, and ends up killing the Main Male Character and offing herself in a lake. Luckily I was bingeing the 1st Season because it was already fully released by the time I got into it, otherwise I think I would have been really annoyed at how the story was playing out if I had been waiting for it to be release at the glacial rate of 2 episodes per week.

Well, season 2 started a month back and I ended up experiencing the need to go through the glacial rate of 2 episodes per week and it was so fucking draggy. I guess because I had to wait for new episodes, I was able to really get  immerse into each episode and just catch every single draggy AF moments and moments that just felt like lazy writing, whereas with Season 1, I was just bingeing to get to the end, so certain issues that I might have had with the show escaped my radar a little.

So the premise of Season 2 is set 3 years later and the Main Female Lead is now an amnesiac after she was saved from drowning in the river, her appearance is completely different because I guess they had contractual issues with the first main actress, so they got the original actress who was playing the badass assassins' in the first 15 minutes of the first season to take on the lead role, and they were able to have a good reason to explain why she looks different in the storyline, so I was okay with it, and the Main Male Character resurrected and is now an emo-boy because of the shit he went through... or because of what went through him, the Main Female Lead's sword.

So what everyone was looking forward to in Season 2 is for the Main Female Character to get her memories back and fall back in love with the Main Male Character so he can stop being so emo, we were also expecting her to become the kickass assassin again just because she got her original appearance back and the show claims she has "divine powers" now. 

As with season 1 however, the writers really DRAGGED that shit out and they only gave the Main Female Characters short snippets of her memories back, which she mistakes for someone else, like for literally 6 to 7 episodes, they would tease the audience with 

"...oh, here is a core memory for her to remember, will she be flooded with her original memories after this?"

... spoiler alert, she fucking doesn't, she just keeps thinking they belong to someone else until episode 8 when she finally realizes it's hers, after which she doesn't tell the Main Male Lead she is who she is because she feels bad for killing him in Season 1, so they drag that shit out for the entire episode and the Main Male Lead only finds out about her true identity in Episode 9, literally with only 2 episodes left that is meant to have the 2 Main Characters get back together again and then also to fight off the main antagonist. 

They get all emo in Episoide 9, both feigning ignorance to her true identity, it's like so fucking stupid, all that built up that had been created for 8 fucking dragged out episode, and when it came to that moment, the both of them just agree to each other that they will pretend not to know who she is.

Like FUCK OFF! 

He had been emo-ing for her for so long and when she is finally there, instead of bursting with emotions, he is just repressing and telling her even though he knows, he will pretend he doesn't, and she also does the same shit, she knows he knows, but she pretends he doesn't, like fuck off.

It's like the writers were dangling that carrot in front of us the whole time for us to chase, only for us to finally bite into that carrot and then we find out it's just a turd that had been painted orange.

That's just one of many issues I had with the show. The pacing is just horrible, side characters were also making really odd decisions that I couldn't wrap my head around, like for example..

We have 3 characters in this scenario that I will explain..

Mommy Bitch - a powerful mage who is in charge of storing sentient artifacts in her magic cave.

Kim - the maidservant of the Main Male Character who is like a mother figure to him

Kim Husband - another powerful mage that is betrothed to Kim

So horrible pacing of the show has led to the main bad guy indirectly destroying the magic cave that Mommy Bitch has been guarding and now all the sentient artifacts are trying to escape, Kim happens to be there as well because she was visiting Mommy Bitch to ask about where the Main Male Character went to, and just to add on, Mommy Bitch and Kim have no friendship with one another whatsoever, they are acquaintances at best. 

Anyways, the cave starts to collapse and Mommy Bitch has to go stabilize it, so she ask Kim to assist her to enter the cave together because she had been injured after she got wrecked by the main antagonist, so Kim assists her in and then the Cave starts getting really unstable, Kim Husband then pops into the scene and realizes that Kim is in the cave with Mommy Bitch, he then panics at the entrance of the cave and calls for her to get out.

We switch scenes to the inside of the Cave and Mommy Bitch is doing her magic to prevent the Sentient artifacts from escaping, but what is Kim doing? Well, she is just propping Mommy Bitch up like a tripod, that is literally all she is contributing to the situation, so Mommy Bitch ask her to leave the cave otherwise she will die as well.

Kim then thinks for a while and ask Husband Kim to use his magic to seal off the cave while both her and Mommy Bitch are inside, everyone is crying in the scene and it is suppose to be heart wrenching but all I am wondering is...

"Why the fuck are you staying in the cave with Mommy Bitch, you have literally no relationship with one another, you guys are acquittances at best, like what is the justification of you being willing to die with her in the cave? The entrance to the cave is literally still wide open, just leave!"

It makes zero fucking sense, I mean one can argue that it's in her character's personality to do that, but that is the kind of lie you will tell yourself to hide the fact that the writers just wanted to make things sad for the viewers, so they lazily wrote this scene in to evoke that emotion. Well, it feels badly thought out and makes zero sense to me, that scene was what made me realize that this show's ending was going to be like what the final season of Game of Thrones did for the entire franchise, ruined it, the only difference is that Game of Thrones was good for the earlier season, what this final episodes did for me for Alchemy of Souls is highlight all the deux ex machina issues that I had with the show since the first season.

What would make sense for that scene is that Kim assisted Mommy Bitch into the Cave, but the main entrance ends up collapsing, so they both get stuck inside with no way out and without any chance of escaping, Kim then decides to help Mommy Bitch as much as she can by becoming her fucking tripod. Husband Kim isn't able to do shit while he is stuck outside and all he can do at that point is seal the cave with his magic to prevent the Sentient Artifacts from seeping out, Kim then tells him to do it since she had zero chance of getting out anyway, so he does it and everyone gets sad. 

Like that chain of events would make sense to me because there is no fucking reason for Kim to stay in the cave with Mommy Bitch at all unless she was literally stuck in there with her. Like why would you make the decision of choosing to stay with Mommy Bitch so she won't die alone over your Husband's grief from losing you, it makes no fucking sense! 

Anyway, they didn't actually die, turns out they were saved last minute and the show had a happy ending, they actually rushed the fight scene at the end as well, which was also fucking stupid. The show was talking about how the bad guy was going to release this fire bird that will cause massive damage to the lands, but then that fire bird gets killed within 5 minutes by the main character after it gets released, the main character just shoots an arrow "filled with magic from some mystical lake" in it's neck and it dies, talk about anti-climatic. 

Overall, I will rate this show a 4/10, had a promising premise and likeable characters, but the show was just completely bogged down by pacing issues. Season 1 aside because I was bingeing that so I don't really want to comment to much, but with Season 2, you had 10 episodes to play with, and you drag out the first 8 episodes with meaningless back and forth between the 2 leads playing hard to get with one another, and then squeeze all the main overarching storyline progression into the final 2 episodes,  I guess my expectation for the show was way too high because when I went to reddit to check everyone else's reaction, they were all happily eating that shit up because the writers gave them a happy ending.

Really, are our standards for K-Drama really that low?

Upcoming 9th Cycle again....

In about 2 weeks time, I will be going for my 9th Reservist Cycle, which is a make-up for the one I had missed out a few months ago because I got Covid.

Car rental payment has been made and my the documents required to apply for a Temporary Vehicle pass with my condo has been submitted, now all I need to do is make sure I don't catch Covid again because I am also expected to go for my very last Cycle at the end of the year with my Reservist Buddy.

My Reservist Buddy got the call up for his last cycle first and asked around in our group chat if anyone else will be joining him, I figured since I haven't even started my Make Up Training yet, it is unlikely that I will be joining him, which I was a little bumped out about, but then 30 minutes later, I get the call up and I was actually quite happy about it. I think my camp is really putting me on the fast track to clearing my NS duties once and for all.

Our last cycle will be 3 weeks long, the last time we had to go through a 3 week cycle was due to an Airshow back in 2020, that cycle was one of the most relaxing, but also extremely stressful cycle I had to go through, relaxing because I got to spend 95% of my time in the air-conditioned bunk with a bunch of reservist buddies, either sleeping or playing Mobile Legends together, and stressful because the renovation project I was managing during that cycle had so many issues, my anxiety levels during those 3 weeks were probably at the highest they had ever been, I really wanted to just throw in the towel and quit then because it was really that fucking bad, and I really had my tiler's worker to thank for doing such a shit job, that worker who was assigned to that job was the same one who was assigned to Sly Fox's project, which was also another anxiety inducing project back in 2018.

When I think back to my Interior Design days, all the projects that gave me the biggest headaches have 1 thing in common, they are projects that are riddled with tiling issues. Those problems are not always the most straightforward to rectify. So many of my anxiety back then could have been reduced significantly if I had just engaged a more competent tiler instead.

Anyways, speaking of career related things, my Manager has just officially tendered her resignation earlier this week, she has had it with the company giving her so many shit to do that is outside of her job scope and I think being assigned to that delivery project that we had been working on together was really the straw that broke the camel's back. 

A lot of us front of house staff will most likely not take her resignation very well because she has really been a very vocal voice for us during her stint as the store manager to the upper management, she has played an important role in making sure that our welfare is taken care of, she throws small birthday parties for everyone when their birthdays are around the corner, makes sure we get funding for our year end Christmas gathering, and when the store hit our sales target 2 times in a row, she made sure that the company rewarded us by treating us to an expensive dinner instead of just dropping us a "good job guys!" text message in the company group chat, gestures like the one she has done really does make a huge difference in the way the employee will feel and when she leaves, I am very sure all this will disappear with her, upper management will probably step in once again to give us all those useless sales training that is rooted in theory, and those training will once again be given by unqualified individuals from Upper Management who have zero sales and front of house experience . 

After having experience this job with a proper store manager around, I'm not sure how I feel returning back to working in an environment that didn't have one. It's like back at ID4 when a group of my colleagues got relocated to the new outlet, the office suddenly got so quiet because everyone who were left weren't sociable, it wasn't until months later when another rowdy bunch join the company did the office start to feel fun to be in again, sadly the rowdy bunch all left the company to join a different one together, so based on what my ex-manager has told me, the office is back to it's quiet period again. 

I am very tempted to return back to Interior Design again, but the one thing that is really pulling me back is the financial instability that the job carries, hopefully the perfect job opening will appear in front of me soon.

Anyways, I digress.

So my last cycle will be happening this year, it will be 3 weeks long, I am very happy to be able to complete my National Service duties so quickly, I have friends who have barely even completed half their cycles.

The car rental for that last cycle is gonna be expensive, I might just consider renting it for an entire month if that is the case, who knows, maybe by then I would have returned back to ID and will be in dire need of a car to travel to my project site.

Kio Sai.

Woke up feeling like absolute shit today, had a very bad night sleep after I decided to slap a copious amount of body butter on myself to "moisturize" and "soften" my skin. 

The problem with putting too much body butter on your arms and legs before you sleep is that your skin won't be able to absorb the excess, and what ended up happening was my legs and arms just felt really sticky the whole night from it, it was really gross. I actually really liked the smell of the body butter, but after last night's fisaco, I have come to associate that feeling of stickiness with it, and it doesn't help that the body butter smells really sweet, which adds on to that feeling of stickiness even more.

I got the body butter from a local business on TikTok, the creator actually sells sugar scrub balls, which I was really fascinated with, so I got one bottle of her sugar scrub balls and added in the body butter as well since I figured why not. Been using the body butter daily ever since, but I just went a bit overboard last night.

Anyways, sleep was horrible last night, kept waking up because my legs felt so sticky when they were rubbing against one another, and so did my hands, I had to get up multiple times to go wash my arms and legs and then towel dry them after just to get rid of the stickiness, which was really surprising to me because of how long the body butter just lingered on my skin the entire night without being absorbed.

I went to work feeling like crap, it wasn't really feeling crap because I was tired, but I just felt like crap in general and I can't really pin point why.

First thing I had to do at work today was prepare an Accessory List for that condo delivery project I was thrown into, which is a fucking joke because I was placed into that project to help with the delivery, not as a stylist to shortlist accessories for the space, but I did it anyway, and when I send it over, the response from the condo management side is...

"Could you propose other options for the vases, flowers and scents again?"

... Vases, Flowers and Scents is pretty much 95% of the list, that means they wanted me to redo the entire proposal, but because my company doesn't work with any accessory brands, aside from the ones that I had already prepared for the Condo Management, I had nothing else to present to them as an alternative. I then replied to the email to tell them that I have already given them the full selection from our store's catalogue, that if they don't think it's what they are looking for, they should go and source on their own. This isn't the first proposal our side has send to them, my ex-colleague who was originally in-charge of the project had already proposed to them 4 times, and all 4 times they were rejected. Naturally, when they rejected my proposal, I figured that there is no point, if what we were proposing isn't what they are looking for, then it would just be a waste of everyone's time to continue with this pointless endeavor.  

The condo's upper management called me up afterwards, really frustrated with the situation and we essentially had this back and forth whereby I was telling him I had nothing else to offer in terms of accessory selection and him responding back...

"We got your furniture from you because we were planning to get the accessories from your side as well, now you are telling me you don't have any other options for us? That's not the way this should work., you know we have spend a huge sum on your furniture, we could have easily gotten furniture from other places, but we invested in your brand and this is very disappointing."

... and I was just as frustrated as him because once again, I was attached to this project to assist with the delivery, I did not come in as a stylist. I then tried to explain to him that we had very limited options but it just wouldn't get through.

It was so frustrating, but I wasn't necessarily frustrated at him because I understand he is just doing his job, that him being placed in his position is really unfair for him as a consumer because the project kept changing hands. This project was originally handled by my ex-colleague, after he left, another colleague from an entirely different department took over, but then that colleague also quit soon after, and it's only after that did my manager and I get dragged into this mess by our upper management to deal with this shit.

It's a fucking mess.

  

Like this is the way my company works, very very messily, upper management will just leave their employees to drown after throwing them into the deep end of the pool. I'm so thankful that my Manager is reliable enough to deal with all that shit, but of course, her reliability is also at the expense of her mental health because she is very much at her breaking point with this project.

A few companies have been reaching out to me to go for job interviews, maybe it's time I start actually setting aside some time to go attend a few of them.