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kaigouAnd now, let's move onto the historical and quasi-historical (mythic?) manhwa. The best-known and biggest (and my very first introduction to manhwa, too) is Mi-Kyung Yun's Bride of the Water God, which I already recommended/critiqued at length. The rest of these are relatively recent discoveries.
This last manhwa also contains something I find repeated in Korean comics and television shows, that I can't even name one time of seeing similar in any Japanese anime, manga, or doramas: questioning the values of the system. Questioning, even, the validity of the system. Korean stories don't just rail against the inequality of the nobility enjoying their spoils while standing on the backs of the peasant class; Korean stories go the extra step (that Japanese stories don't appear to go, or at least very rarely go) and ask: why must it be this way? Couldn't it be different, be better? Shouldn't it be different?
In the specific example of Mok's story, the ghost has a back-story revolving around the biases and inequalities of Korea's highly stratified class system, but this is an awareness I've seen in other manhwa and six or seven saeguk (historical drama). The peasants are forbidden from certain activities or careers, but harsh taxation and limited job options result in an impoverished class. The only choice is to borrow the money (then used to buy food), or to steal that money (or the food itself). In effect, the system is set up such that those at the lowest rungs actually have no choice but to become criminals -- and I'm getting the impression that a big part of a good saeguk is that it highlights this classist limitation, and outlines (if it doesn't state it outright in neon letters) that this is not a sign the people are bad, but a sign that the system is simply that broken.
If this were a Japanese manga, I probably would've been a little surprised to find a personal-and-political anti-establishment slant in the middle of this fantastical pseudo-historical storyline. But I'm getting used to the fact that in manhwa, this is part of what you might call the saeguk manhwa/show/movie history cred: that it's not enough to fix this one situational or personal inequality. The existence of that individual situation is instead treated as a signal that the overall system is rotten, and needs some major fixing.
This kind of question-the-system is also reflected in the different approaches I see to genderbenders, between manga and manhwa. For the most part, both cultures (ignoring outliers like Boy of the Female Wolf, or maybe we should call that the exception that proves the rule) classify "girl [willingly] dressing as boy" or vice versa as indication of some significant internal trauma or misery. In other words: the girl refuses to "be a girl" because she hates herself so much, ergo, if she learned to "like herself" -- as a girl -- then this lack of misery would translate into being happy in her girl-place and dropping these boy-like affectations.
What stories like Click, and Saver, and to a quieter degree Sarasah versus to a louder degree like Boy of the Female Wolf, posit is that perhaps the issue is not that a girl who hates herself would act out her self-misery by pretending to be a boy... but that instead, perhaps it's the system itself that's at fault. As long as the system forces a miserable existence onto girls, then girls will seek happiness in other ways -- and if the only freedom comes from being a boy, then a girl seeking this freedom (by 'being' a boy) is not rebelling against her place... she's saying her place sucks that much that she doesn't want it.
Who defines the misery of that place? In Japanese animanga, the definition of misery appears to amount to "the result of stepping out of line from the natural course of things". If one is a peasant, a slave, a wife, a mother, and is miserable, this is the person's own fault for not accepting their part in the harmony of the overall system. In Korean pop culture, one's misery is a sign that something is wrong with the big picture -- and that even peasants, even women, have the right (the responsibility, even) to step up and do something about it.
Granted, this is not to say that Korean history is filled with successful peasant rebellions that reduced corruption and bribes and egregious loan sharking to a null degree. If we're being honest, we'd have to admit that there are very few true 'peasant' rebellions (in any country) that really achieved major, lasting -- multi-generational -- reform. That's not really my anthro-historical area of expertise, so there may be nuances I'm missing, but in a basic history-student way, I'd fairly comfortable saying it seems to be that each successive rebellion or reform was built on the backs of the previous (including those that failed). So you can either say "this specific rebellion or reformation failed" or you can say "without all these previous failures -- and the lessons and cultural changes that grew from each -- you could not have had this later rebellion or reformation actually succeed."
What Korean history and culture does appear to have that Japanese history and culture has significantly less of is a belief of speaking truth (or fist) to power. Even something as simple as the iconic Robin Hood -- whatever name he gets, from Robin Hude to Iljimae to Gildong -- is a trope you can find repeated in Korean literature and pop culture... and I'm still trying to think of a Japanese equivalent. There are plenty on individual levels -- ie Rurouni Kenshin's compassion to help whomever, at that moment and directly before him, requires his assistance -- but there aren't any on a major system-wide level, not that I can think of (and not that also, mid-process, contain a fundamental critique of the system itself).
Helping one person at a time may be noble, but it's not at all the same as social or political reformation. Robin Hood and his ilk are, however, leading edges of social reformation movements, I think, because the steal-and-give action is meant as a noisy critique of the system that keeps the rich very rich, and the poor downtrodden and desperate. In other words: to address one's actions to just-any-rich-person (independent of personal knowledge or resentment/anger) is to say that any, even all, rich people qualify for this corrective steal-give balancing. When "this person" becomes "any person of ___ status/class," what's getting indicted isn't the person's own virtues, but the system that created and/or contains that ___ status/class. You'll see this over and over in Korean manhwa and dramas, I'm finding... but I'm still drawing a blank on any Robin-Hood-like, mass-scale, system-condemning mangas or dramas of Japanese make.
...and I'll cover the dramas in the next post... so very tired, can't keep my eyes open!
- Kim, Tae Yeon: Ban Hon Sa [manhwa: complete; scanlation: stalled]
Bakaupdates summary: "A series of fairytale-like stories, loosely connected by the ongoing adventures of the enigmatic Hwa Ryungang, a man with strange powers and a connection to the spirit world, and Moohwe, an irrepressible wanderer with a mysterious identity." Complete at seven volumes and unlicensed, but only four volumes are scanlated, and the last update was two years ago. I weep for the last three chapters...
The story is somewhat episodic, but there are growing hints in the third and fourth volumes of an underlying arc. The problem is that twigging on that arc seems to require some knowledge of Korean mythology, and maybe a bit of shamanistic/indigenous religous-folklore. There are casual references (and some implied backstory) that set off my alerts for myths and folklore, but for which I have little to no reference so only have the sense that this bit has a bigger meaning or implication if only I knew the right stories to read between the lines.
- It feels a little like, oh, how to explain. Like, let's say you're USian (or pretty familiar with its iconic history) and a story set in the late 18th century has two sibling-characters, and someone makes a reference about their step-father being known for never lying. It's possible you wouldn't immediately think, "ahah, those are Martha Washington's children from her first marriage," but you might hear the "never lying" and immediately think of the legend about George Washington refusing to lie to his father. And maybe if someone else asked you why you immediately responded with, "these are presidential children," you might not be able to say exactly why, because you last heard the story/history so long ago -- it's just that all the teeny clues are there, and it falls into place and you don't actually give it much thought, because it's a throwaway line.
- Yun, Ji Unn: Pahanjip [manhwa: complete; scanlation: dropped]
Note: the art style looks influenced by mid-aughts manga-style developments; the lines are more sketch-like, the faces more triangular, the features less detailed/defined. There's also a stronger emphasis on the flow of garments, but without the stiff flatness you find in Bride of the Water God or Ban Hon Sa, which aren't, hrm, stiff so much as a feeling of a tableau, in the sense of being frozen in place. I think it's mostly due to the lightness of the artist's lines in Pahanjip, that hint at movement due to the lightness/delicacy of the lines.
The author includes notes on every story in the semi-episodic series, including this note (in the first volume) on the story's main title:A book that breaks the silence -- a collection of the major works of Lee In Ro, a poet of Goryeo [Korea]. A book containing not only poems, but anecdotes related to and critical of his poems, general opinions on culture, theories and controversies between authors, and simple interesting stories, Pahanjip was written to closely examine the value of cultural views and culture itself.
Each story is a retelling or adaptation of an older story, and the author's notes do help with placing the story in context. The general framework is that of a rather lazy (and tending to wine, women, and gambling) exorcist, whose father was a great exorcist (and therefore seems to have little ambition to top a parental reputation he has no chance to really surpass); his sole companion is a lower-class but highly-skilled warrior, who acts as his bodyguard (and personal secretary, and conscience, and person who drags him away from the wine when it's been enough already). Their interaction is low-key, and hints at many tensions, but again, it's a finished work but only partly scanlated. So there may be developments later; I've got nothing more than three volumes, and it's a six- or seven-volume work, total, IIRC.
It's also licensed, which means no one will scanlate it (obviously), but the publisher is also (in my opinion) excessively annoying -- they've released all chapters in their online monthly (subscription) journal, but don't keep back copies. Instead, despite having all chapters translated and released, they're sticking to a publishing schedule of something like a year-plus between volumes. That means waiting three years or so from now, something like that, before all volumes are released. Irksome. - Mi, Young Noh: Threads of Time [complete]
This manhwa has a similar framework to Sarasah (among others): the time-travel is karmic. Where the action of going-back-in-time is related to an object or a magical spell or a bend in space in nearly all the Japanese time-travel manga I've read, the Korean manhwa appear more likely (anecdotal, but still) to use 'resolution of a past life/karmic issue' as the groundwork for the time travel. The artwork also has a strong westernized-feeling -- in terms of strength of line combined with lighter sketch-lines, the stylization of garments to indicate flowing/movement, and the incredible fight scenes. It's really an incredible work, visually.
Short version: the protagonist, Moon Bin Kim, has an accident in the modern-day, and ends up sent back in time to resolve the history that remains tangled with his karma. Mainly, he has to kill Sali Tayi, a mongol general. (Don't read the Wiki page, or you'll be completely spoiled. Bastards.)
The manhwa is licensed by TokyoPop, but if you can find anyone else's version (or a cleaned-up version by a fellow fan), do so -- because TokyoPop apparently considers it good marketing to put all the freaking spoilers of the volume you're about to read right there on the back cover. That's just plain rude, if you ask me. Don't tell me someone's about to die, sheesh, let me get heartbroken reading it as it happens! Talk about removing all suspense. (Not to mention the TokyoPop version, from what I hear, is horrendous quality, too, with tilted pages that cut off parts of words... could the publisher just not bother to put the original down square on the scanning plate or something?)
Anyway, the one thing TokyoPop does get right is that it provides historical context for American readers about any unfamiliar Korean history. If you're interested -- because this is the manhwa that got me started on learning Korean history (as more than just a side-chapter to learning Chinese or Japanese history), here's a short intro to the time period of Threads of Time.
Roughly speaking, the Mongols -- as you may already know, on a general level -- swept through Asia and conquered just about everyone they steamrollered... and then they got to Korea. The country had been unified a few centuries prior, if I recall correctly, and in the ensuing years, what had been a reform -- to solidify civilian/bureaucratic families as one type of nobility, and military families as another type -- had ended up eventually causing this major split between the two, with very different and never-twain-meeting ideologies. The Mongols had expected to take full advantage of that, I guess to hope the bureaucratic families overrode the military families (who'd want to fight back).
So once the Mongols manage to make it into Korea -- after several vicious battles that didn't come cheaply, and apparently even shocked them a bit at how fiercely the Koreans fought -- the imperial and bureaucratic leaders did do a kind of half-hearted surrender. The problem was that the rest of the country refused to get the message, and pretty much the entirety of Korea's time as a Mongolian vassal, the Mongols were constantly at war inside Korea, fighting for every inch. Every time they turned around, there was another guerrilla battle, and what apparently astonished the Mongols the most was that they fought not just the trained military, but that two steps past one battle, they'd find themselves in another battle -- this time with peasants and slaves wielding hoes and scythes and rocks.
The Mongols had expected that when the country's leaders said, "okay, we give up," that everyone would, but the Koreans overwhelmingly refused. In fact, from the dialogue in the story (and various articles I found elsewhere on the 'net), it appears what had the Mongols so off-guard about it was that they didn't expect peasants, let alone slaves, to consider "Korea" to be "their" Korea, and thus worth fighting (and dying) for. With or without the order of some dude in a palace a hundred leagues off.
The manhwa does show more adult content than most (it doesn't shirk from partial frontal nudity of both sexes, and considering the artist is female, the drawing style is strongly big-breasted western), but where it really shines (or horrifies) is in its violence, and in its implications of the damages of warfare. More specifically (and trying to avoid spoilers), let's just say that invading armies don't hold back when it comes to using and abusing women-captives, be they alive or half-alive, old or young. Just be forewarned, the deeds of the bad guys are... pretty freaking bad. If nothing else, the manhwa makes perfectly clear why the citizens -- from slaves to nobility -- would pick up any weapon at hand to defend their homes.
There's an unexpected twist near the end -- this story does pivot on the issue of karmic entanglements, after all -- but I don't know if others will see that twist coming. I try to avoid analyzing mid-read on fiction, so as to allow twists to catch me off-guard, but YMMV, as always.
The story is also one of the few with absentee parents. That is, the parents of this-day are alive, but have chosen to distance themselves from the protagonist/son; the parents of past-days are also alive, and both demonstrative and affectionate towards the protagonist-son. Continuing the patterns I've seen in many other manhwa, the parents show every sign of being willing to sacrifice on their child's behalf (rather than expect their child to do the sacrificing for the family's behalf).
If you can get past the violence and the horrors, it's a coming-of-age story that mixes in a lot of history that just might whet your appetite for more. It did for me. - Ryu, Ryang: Sarasah [manhwa: complete; scanlation: dropped]
We're back to an art style closer to a manga-style -- big eyes on the girls, triangular faces on the (really rather bishonen) boys. It's also licensed by the same company doing Pahanjip, which means it's in the same boat: dropped by any scanlation groups, fully translated by the publishers, but with an enforced slow-to-publish schedule that means waiting several more years before all the volumes are released. Grrrrr.
Like Threads, it's a karmic tanglement that sends Ji-hae into the past, but that entanglement is caused by her unrequited love... for a prince of the school who in return hates her with a viciousness that seems completely unfounded. I mean, there's disgust at a girl's absolute crushing, and then there's true loathing, and he does the latter. He even ends up shoving her down the stairs to punctuate his statement of utter loathing, and it's that fall that sends her into a coma (and thus to the threshold where the PTB decide sending her back to untangle the original knot is the only way to prevent repeating this in yet another lifetime).
It's not a complex story... well, on the surface. Visually, it looks like your average shoujo, and the fact that Jihae ends up cross-dressing in the past is really just a matter of going with a very technical definition. That is: she continues her modern-day behavior (which to her qualifies as "feminine") but within the past, her demeanor and appearance are undoubtedly coded "masculine". In other words, she's cross-dressing and genderbending without having changed a thing; it's only the context that's changed, but that context sets the standard for everything.
The story does (like many manhwa) eventually get into the political, and there's complications with the previous version of her unrequited love/hate object (who, incidentally, does not detest her -- yet -- in the past-version). She's given some degree of agency, though this is both political expediency and because she carries herself in such a way as to be a believeable (to that time period) boy, which I find amusing. She's not really behaving any differently than she did in the modern-part.
Okay, so her obsessive, near-stalkerish behavior in re unrequited love is annoying, and her continued focus on that love-object even upon landing herself something like eight hundred years in the past is... well, it's also annoying. It casts a shadow of "cross-dressing to be near a boy" but this time it's more like "travelling time and sort of cross-dressing and mostly be anachronistic... to be near a boy". Which fails the Bechdel test so thoroughly as to be utterly laughable, but then again, so would most shoujo-romance girl-likes-asshole kind of stories.
Still, it hooked me despite its flaws, and I really wish the rest of the volumes were available, though given the choice, it's not one I'd pay full-price for, unlike most of the others on the list. - Lee, Eun Young: Saver [manhwa: complete; scanlation: ongoing]
I'm listing this with quasi-historical, though it's more fantasy (girl falls into alternate world) than history, but it has all the earmarks of the usual historical political-military thriller... but the shonen hero is a girl. And I don't mean the "shoujo heroine in a boy's story" (a la Hitomi in Escaflowne, frex) but a genuine honest-to-goodness shonen hero who happens to be a girl.
The plot is really simple (if you ignore the borderline-incestuous themes in the first volume, since I'm not sure it's necessarily incest per se if the siblings are half, not full, and weren't even raised together, let alone aware of each other's existence prior to adolescence): girl falls into alternate dimension/history, has to rise to challenge of saving the world.
This particular girl, though, is one major bad-ass. Not only is Lena very very good at kumdo (the Korean equivalent to Japan's kendo), she's good enough to be the team captain. And it's not because she's cute or she's token (the illustrations make it clear there are other girls on the team) but because she really is just that damn good. Furthermore, when an opportunistic (and somewhat chauvinist) bastard attempts to have her DQ'd to open up a space so he can compete in the upcoming events, she not only takes his challenge, but she wipes the floor with him. And in no little importance to me -- as former jock on team-sport, hello -- the rest of the team backs her up.
Lena is mistaken by several characters -- in this world and the other -- for being a guy, and even has her own obsessed fangirl (although the girl redeems herself, IMO, when she does her best to assist Lena in getting away from a bunch of goons), but what causes that mistake is seeing her in kumdo gear, not just holding her own against male students but laying them flat. While her features are drawn as handsome (think, oh, Angelica Houston or Angelina Jolie rather than pretty-pretty like Reese Witherspoon), it's her behavior and fierceness on the mat that gives her shades of genderbending. Otherwise, she dresses in a girl's uniform, wears her hair like a girl (ponytail, though this is an ambiguous style when you consider the romanticized hairstyles for swordsman in manhwa/manga), and makes no attempt to 'pass' as a boy. She's just a girl who doesn't do girly.
She has shades of being a tsundere in that she's stern, has incredibly high standards for herself and others, is taciturn, even a little imperious, but she doesn't have the explosive abusiveness of the usual tsundere. She's too strong-willed and hot-headed to really be an ice queen, especially on the mat, where she's both perfectly focused and viciously competitive. (She doesn't play it cool yet doesn't make mistakes, is what I mean.) Off the mat, any ice queen impression is set up by the author -- and then summarily undermined -- by showing Lena's gentler side when she finally falls for someone. But since that happens pre-transport, it's not like she's kept in that gentled neutered state. She can smile at someone with fondness, and in the next scene pick up a sword and give serious what-for, and it's not a contradiction nor treated like an anomaly (anymore than her emotions are used to render her helpless).
I haven't finished the series completely (too busy, ugh) but I'm about halfway through. Lena -- Ley, in the alternate world -- continues to be a serious bad-ass when it comes to fights, continues to be (mostly) taciturn and somewhat unfriendly, but not without compassion. If you can overlook the pseudo-European tones of the alternate world (man, I am so sick of redux'd Italian-French-British cities that Never Really Were), it's a damn fine story, and the hero is an awesome blend of feminine nuanced with a number of coded-masculine (but realistically just as feminine) kick-assed bad-assitude. - Lee, Sung-Gyu: Era of Death [manhwa: complete; scanlation: stalled]
Note: the original story is complete at 9 volumes, but the scanlation appears to have stalled at the fifth chapter (first volume). The last distribution was a year ago, so I don't know what happened, or if the team dropped it. It's listed as "ongoing", not dropped, so I suppose there's some intention to continue, but... who knows.
Anyway, to summarize the story, Mok -- the only son of a yangban (elite) family -- awakens from a serious illness to discover he's now protected by four divine spirits. The drawback is that post-illness, he's also now sensitive to the world of spirits, and the summary implies his four guardians become his helpers in a series of ghost-returning stories. Roughly like that, but with only five chapters scanlated, I've no idea if it stays mainly episodic, or develops an overall arc. (I'd think at 9 volumes, there'd be at least one major arc, but that'd only be a guess.)
What's of particular interest about this manhwa is that it's set right after the abolition of the yangban class. You could think of it as equivalent to the abolition of the samurai class in Japan, in terms of completely removing an entire sub-culture from the overall culture, except that yangban weren't a warrior class. They're really the scholarly elite (in a generalized nutshell), and although the government bureaucracy ostensibly appointed positions to any scholar who passed the civil service exams -- and for which any male citizen of free birth could apply -- in practical application, it was really only families above a certain income level who had the money to educate sons to the degree required to pass the civil service exams.
Even as late as the start of the 20th century, those exams (I'm told) still required extensive knowledge of Chinese, and Confucianism, and a deep and wide foundation in classical studies. Like Mok's father in the manhwa, men would prepare for years to take the civil service exams; despite what pop culture representations would show you now, most men who took the exam were into their thirties and sometimes older. (Err, I'm pretty sure, or maybe it's China that didn't have an upper-age limit on the exams. Hrmm. Well, you get the idea, all the same.) However, the abolition of the yangban -- and the accompanying abolition of the civil service exams -- basically means Mok's father has been studying nearly his entire life... for a bureaucratic rite of passage that no longer exists. Talk about having your cultural feet knocked out from under you.
So Mok's story takes place in 1895. It's the tail-end of the Sino-Japanese war, and the start of Japan's pressures on Korea to quote-unquote modernize. Not that Korea was really quite as backwards as Japanese propaganda of the time (and some current high school history books) might insist; Queen Min had been strongly reform-minded for the previous twenty-two years she'd effectively ruled (even if her husband was King in name). Well, she was pushing for major reforms until she was assassinated, at least. Within two years after the events of the manhwa, the Joseon dynasty -- the longest-running continuous dynasty in history -- would come to an end, and Korea would proclaim itself the Korean Empire. Only seven years after that, Korea would cast its lot alongside Russia, and thus be on the losing side to Japan, in the Russo-Japanese war, and in the treaties after the loss would become a protectorate of Japan. By 1910, Japan would be annexing Korea, and things would move inexorably towards the horrific years of the Japanese occupation.
There aren't many manhwa based in this time period. A space of time, really, when everything that's stood for so long -- the academic elite as a separate class, the rite of passage of civil service exams, the imperial family of the oldest unbroken dynasty in the world -- would come to an end. When you step back and look at how much changes in contrast between the middle of 1895 and only ten years later (and even more if you expand your view to twenty years and compare 1895 to 1915), it's almost unbelievable. There's forward movement, and then there's just plain insanity, in terms of cultural change.
In the midst of this setting -- and no surprise, now that you know the backstory, for one reason the author might've had for naming the story The Era of Death. It's not "death" in terms of ghosts (though I think that is one layer); it's also "death" as in "the end of an entire way of life."
Mok's story is almost archaic. He's dealing with guardian spirits, from a wandering/hungry ghost to a dragon, and he's newly-aware of things like restless spirits. At a time when Korea was launching itself (or being shoved) head-first into the next century with things like trains and telegraphs and mass lighting for city streets, the actual content of the story is rather... quaint. Well-written, sometimes a little culturally obscure (though easy enough if you're willing to keep an abridged history handy, just as general reference), but still: ghosts and other restless spirits on the eve of modernity.
Okay, so that's a really pathetic example (hey, it's 516am as I write this, go easy on me), but maybe you see what I mean. Little hints like that in a story -- especially when it's a story already loaded with folkloric references -- may not mean anything to me (in the sense that in this analogy, I don't know George Washington's full legend, or that he even had step-children) -- but I can tell there's a signal being sent out. I just can't interpret it, and that's what drives me just a little crazy about Ban Hon Sa. Because I know there are parts that mean something, or are giving me a clue, and I lack the full cultural knowledge to decipher them.
The art is an intriguing blend of Japanese-style mid-aughts manga, and the detailed stronger lines of the common manhwa style. It takes a little getting used to, and sometimes I wonder if parts of that are on purpose -- there's too much else in the story that feels carefully presented -- but it's hard to tell with only half the story, frankly. (This is one manhwa that if I could find the raws, and someone to translate, I would happily do everything else to be able to distribute it, and if I could find someone to help me parse the folklore/mythic elements and connotations, it would go on my list of reasons to die happy. The story mystifies and intrigues me that much.)
This last manhwa also contains something I find repeated in Korean comics and television shows, that I can't even name one time of seeing similar in any Japanese anime, manga, or doramas: questioning the values of the system. Questioning, even, the validity of the system. Korean stories don't just rail against the inequality of the nobility enjoying their spoils while standing on the backs of the peasant class; Korean stories go the extra step (that Japanese stories don't appear to go, or at least very rarely go) and ask: why must it be this way? Couldn't it be different, be better? Shouldn't it be different?
In the specific example of Mok's story, the ghost has a back-story revolving around the biases and inequalities of Korea's highly stratified class system, but this is an awareness I've seen in other manhwa and six or seven saeguk (historical drama). The peasants are forbidden from certain activities or careers, but harsh taxation and limited job options result in an impoverished class. The only choice is to borrow the money (then used to buy food), or to steal that money (or the food itself). In effect, the system is set up such that those at the lowest rungs actually have no choice but to become criminals -- and I'm getting the impression that a big part of a good saeguk is that it highlights this classist limitation, and outlines (if it doesn't state it outright in neon letters) that this is not a sign the people are bad, but a sign that the system is simply that broken.
If this were a Japanese manga, I probably would've been a little surprised to find a personal-and-political anti-establishment slant in the middle of this fantastical pseudo-historical storyline. But I'm getting used to the fact that in manhwa, this is part of what you might call the saeguk manhwa/show/movie history cred: that it's not enough to fix this one situational or personal inequality. The existence of that individual situation is instead treated as a signal that the overall system is rotten, and needs some major fixing.
This kind of question-the-system is also reflected in the different approaches I see to genderbenders, between manga and manhwa. For the most part, both cultures (ignoring outliers like Boy of the Female Wolf, or maybe we should call that the exception that proves the rule) classify "girl [willingly] dressing as boy" or vice versa as indication of some significant internal trauma or misery. In other words: the girl refuses to "be a girl" because she hates herself so much, ergo, if she learned to "like herself" -- as a girl -- then this lack of misery would translate into being happy in her girl-place and dropping these boy-like affectations.
What stories like Click, and Saver, and to a quieter degree Sarasah versus to a louder degree like Boy of the Female Wolf, posit is that perhaps the issue is not that a girl who hates herself would act out her self-misery by pretending to be a boy... but that instead, perhaps it's the system itself that's at fault. As long as the system forces a miserable existence onto girls, then girls will seek happiness in other ways -- and if the only freedom comes from being a boy, then a girl seeking this freedom (by 'being' a boy) is not rebelling against her place... she's saying her place sucks that much that she doesn't want it.
Who defines the misery of that place? In Japanese animanga, the definition of misery appears to amount to "the result of stepping out of line from the natural course of things". If one is a peasant, a slave, a wife, a mother, and is miserable, this is the person's own fault for not accepting their part in the harmony of the overall system. In Korean pop culture, one's misery is a sign that something is wrong with the big picture -- and that even peasants, even women, have the right (the responsibility, even) to step up and do something about it.
Granted, this is not to say that Korean history is filled with successful peasant rebellions that reduced corruption and bribes and egregious loan sharking to a null degree. If we're being honest, we'd have to admit that there are very few true 'peasant' rebellions (in any country) that really achieved major, lasting -- multi-generational -- reform. That's not really my anthro-historical area of expertise, so there may be nuances I'm missing, but in a basic history-student way, I'd fairly comfortable saying it seems to be that each successive rebellion or reform was built on the backs of the previous (including those that failed). So you can either say "this specific rebellion or reformation failed" or you can say "without all these previous failures -- and the lessons and cultural changes that grew from each -- you could not have had this later rebellion or reformation actually succeed."
What Korean history and culture does appear to have that Japanese history and culture has significantly less of is a belief of speaking truth (or fist) to power. Even something as simple as the iconic Robin Hood -- whatever name he gets, from Robin Hude to Iljimae to Gildong -- is a trope you can find repeated in Korean literature and pop culture... and I'm still trying to think of a Japanese equivalent. There are plenty on individual levels -- ie Rurouni Kenshin's compassion to help whomever, at that moment and directly before him, requires his assistance -- but there aren't any on a major system-wide level, not that I can think of (and not that also, mid-process, contain a fundamental critique of the system itself).
Helping one person at a time may be noble, but it's not at all the same as social or political reformation. Robin Hood and his ilk are, however, leading edges of social reformation movements, I think, because the steal-and-give action is meant as a noisy critique of the system that keeps the rich very rich, and the poor downtrodden and desperate. In other words: to address one's actions to just-any-rich-person (independent of personal knowledge or resentment/anger) is to say that any, even all, rich people qualify for this corrective steal-give balancing. When "this person" becomes "any person of ___ status/class," what's getting indicted isn't the person's own virtues, but the system that created and/or contains that ___ status/class. You'll see this over and over in Korean manhwa and dramas, I'm finding... but I'm still drawing a blank on any Robin-Hood-like, mass-scale, system-condemning mangas or dramas of Japanese make.
...and I'll cover the dramas in the next post... so very tired, can't keep my eyes open!