My Holo Love 나 홀로 그대
I’m not a usual foreign show watcher, but when I do it most often hails from Asia. This tale is an introspection of our generation’s lonely heart syndrome.
In this most recent chance I had to bunker down into a series, My Holo Love was suggested to me by Netflix. I’ll briefly gloss over my immediate thoughts about the show, and then break it down into what I think the deeper meanings are. ** There are bound to be slight spoilers, though I’ll try not to **
My Holo Love [ 나 홀로 그대 ] follows the story of a young woman, who finds a high-tech pair glasses in her bag, after a day out in the city. These glasses are the beginning of a whole new perspective on life for her. As we soon discover, the glasses produce a holographic image of an AI male who is programmed to serve the wearer of these round frames.
The young woman So-Yuen’s life begins to prosper as she now has an inconvenient truth about her health revealed and solved and even aided all by having the glasses land practically in her lap. The attractive AI is only a added bonus for her life’s increase.
As the story progresses, we find that the AI is closely related to it’s creator. They look exactly alike. This is something that evades So-Yuen for quite some time due to her condition. All of this is background noise to the true underlying story developing.
In My Holo Love, we see a girl who is shutting down from the world, due to a disability the world is unaware of. She accepts her state, from a very young age, and decides to let it become a part of her life.
As such, when her disability is brought up in the first episode, she is framed as a “problematic person” when she doesn’t help her co-worker who falls. The hidden disability actually preventing So- from being compliant in the way that her co-worker “felt” she should be.
This triggered a thought in me, that we all have things that we deal with, that people don’t see, whether a disability, or a commitment that needs us more than we can bare sometimes, even personal weaknesses that we wish to overcome.
It makes me upset that it feels like we have gotten to a thin point in our society, where many judge before trying to place compassionate thought first (Or think the best thought).
Even a better after thought, how rare it is to experience vulnerability from others nowadays. Be guarded, or be stupid, let the wrong one in, and have them tear your whole world apart ? Are those my only two options? I’m playing extremes, forgive me, I’ll go back to my point.
She finally begins to understand what her glasses can do. There’s some lighthearted scenes where she is getting along with her new holographic friend.
Right here is where I want to say, I still feel weird talking on my headphones when I’m around other people, I don’t know how I’d feel about talking to someone only I can see. Just sayin’ 🙂
So expresses some co-dependent traits that the story’s writers cleverly wash away with her disability, but is it really even all that bad? She can still read a book, and I’m assuming this because of her job where her sour patch manager gives her all that paperwork, to do at the end of the night.
I’ll disregard the disability, and so shall you. Come, take my hand, we will walk among the clear skies.
So becomes dependent on this image of this man. She becomes obsessed at one point and claims that she can only see his face because “She loves him, he is the one” . This is really cute for the story, but it’s unrealistic. She’s also wrong. My best guess to the reason she can see his face, is probably a heavy mix of facial recognition from using Holo 24/7, & having a familiarity with him before the trauma she experienced.
I’d like to say I’ve never been so infatuated myself, but that would be incorrect. However, I think I have had more of a desire to have an actual friend around.
The developer Nan-do is who I want to really focus on… If you see through, to about episode six, actually, is when I started to see the metaphorical relationship between Holo and his creator.
He did lose his mother at a very young age, but let me ask you this: Would it have mattered how he lost her? Don’t you think he would have still resented her a little bit for dying, either way? I feel like I’ve blamed others quite a bit for exactly what they couldn’t prevent, or are completely blameless for, isn’t that only human? Maybe because our anger is aimed on what expectations they didn’t meet.
Anyways, Nan-do, with his devilishly handsome face and stature actually may not present as, but does have a form of Autism. It is shown through his many traits in the flashbacks of him as a child, and even in the final episodes, with the antagonist in several flashbacks. We can see through his anti-social personality, that he does definitely have something unique going on.
Actually, his love of computers and lack of interest in girls is what stole my heart. He added on to complete his AI replica, Holo, who personifies Nan’s more” in-touch” self. Holo represents all of what emotions and responses, Nan-do wishes he could share with the girl that sparks his interest. It sat with me for a minutes, but then I decided that this is also a deep representation of the toxic masculinity that has been portrayed in society; this was a perfect representation of how men struggle with their true selves, in an effort to keep a “macho masculine” pseudo presence in everyday life.
There is a lot to consider there in what I said.
For a moment, if we just focused on the moments where he and Holo had conversations, in the airy, open space of the chess board room. You see a completely unguarded Nan-do. You also see this as he and Holo work together to Hack an entire country’s electronic systems to prevent, what could have been, a tragic accident.
While he genuinely struggles to accept what he knows about So, and that he is consistently putting himself in danger for her, while having to keep the emotional dexterity to not be drawn into the calm and peace she brings him; is this dude a superhero? It makes sense that there is a split.
Maybe I’ll do a part two here. I need to get quotes, and all that jazz.
I love analyzing television and movies, for the psychology of it. 😉
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