I’ve been holding this blog post since September since I got pretty busy
over the following days after my last post. I went to the capital to
join an anime event then things got hectic so I had to push this further
at the back of my mind. So let’s cut to the chase and on to my topics.
Who is Lee Hongki? I first encountered him on a Korean drama
(He’s/You’re Beautiful) that I was watching last July/August and I
didn’t really pay any attention to him at first since I didn’t find him
as bishie compared to his other male co-stars. But he was really
charming and he has a certain appeal when he’s on-screen. His role on
the drama was Jeremy, a wacky character that seemed to have an endless
energy when he’s acting out his role. I found him really funny and when I
was referring to him, I still call him Jeremy even if I’m not referring
to the drama, since I didn’t bother looking him up on the net. Here is a
compilation of funny Jeremy scenes from the drama. (credits to the
video owner)
As you can see, he’s bishie-ness isn’t actually on par with his
co-actors, but Jeremy’s really cute and adorable, and funny to boot,
that he made quite an impression to me. When my friend, who introduced
me all the Korean stuff I know, shared a Korean music video to me one
day I listened to the music first before watching the video to avoid
any bias. It was pretty cool and I got hooked. I clicked replay and
played the MV again and watched the video this time. I looked at their
vocalist and thought that his face was quite familiar. Korean
celebrities’ faces tend to confuse me a lot and I often mix them up with
another person. I knew that there was a chance I was going to be wrong
with my question , since, like I said, I’m no Korean expert and I asked
my friend casually if this particular band’s vocalist was Jeremy from
the You’re Beautiful Kdrama. Wouldn’t you know it, I was right lol.
I got really hooked to that particular song and for two weeks straight, I
had the music video play over and over again since the song was stuck
on my head and I didn’t even bother getting an MP3 version of it. His
band’s name is FT Island and here’s the said music video:
I won’t bother posting a video which has English subs on it since
there’s a chance it might get taken down. The song is pretty catchy, and
contrary to what most people might think, I didn’t like the song since I
found them cute and bishie. Like I said, I listened to the song first
before watching the actual music video. And besides, I’m not really
liking their hairstyles in this video.
So I told my friend that I got addicted to the song and, like any good
friend, she proceeded to bombard me with a lot of their other songs. To
my surprise, their songs are pretty good, too. I got curious enough and
looked them up on the net. Their band has quite a history, and I won’t
be mentioning the details here anymore since it might make my post
longer. Anyway, from that moment, I reverted calling him Jeremy to his
name, Lee Hongki.
I’m a solid L’Arc~en~Ciel fan and I’m quite happy that I found another
band that creates a lot of great-quality music and I really have to note
that Hongki’s voice is powerful. What’s impressive is that his voice
doesn’t change when they perform live unlike some artists do. I know for
a fact that L’Arc’s hyde-sama’s voice change when they perform on
concerts, but Hongki’s doesn’t. I also found out much to my
disappointment that they briefly appeared on a noon time show to promote
You’re Beautiful here in my country and that they also performed a
concert at Manila sometime last summer, but it wasn’t publicized that
well so they’re not that well-known in my country compared to other
Korean music groups.
Here’s another song of theirs that’s one of my favorites. I really love Hongki’s hair in this music video:
They’re also quite popular in Japan and they happen to have Japanese
songs and albums released as well. One of their singles, Satisfaction,
was an ending song in the anime Toriko for the first 25 episodes.
And, last FT Island song for this post, their most recent music video which became an instant fave:
Moving on, I’ve also been reading a lot of Junji Itou works since last
August. Of course, I probably have read every manga scanlated at this
point, unless some scanlator would decide to work on his other
(licensed) works. I actually found him by accident since there was a
time that I frequented r/Creepy and saw one of his works (Enigma of
Amigara Fault) posted there. I previously had read Fuan no Tane long
before encountering this particular manga and liked it, and
coincidentally liked this particular manga as well.
I tried to look for his other works and found out that there are quite a
lot of his published works. His famous manga (I think) is Uzumaki and
it’s not for the feint-hearted. The events of the manga (and
illustrations, too) are pretty disturbing. As much as I appreciate his
work, I don’t think I would be reading that again. I would post some
sample pages of his manga right now, but I find it tedious at this
moment.
Probably I’d make a review next or make a line up list of the things
I’ve watched after Jin. XU Days is coming up so who know when I’ll get
to post again.
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