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dismallyoriented) wrote2026-03-07 08:08 pm
dismallyoriented) wrote2026-03-07 08:08 pm
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Tragic Unrealized Love Yay
Sup folks. This was originally meant to be my last post of 2025, after getting seized by the angst-lover in the core of my heart. A bunch of other life stuff got in the way, but now I finally have a little breathing room, so now you're getting a short spiel on one of my favorite kind of fictional relationship - the tragic almost-love.
For this, you can thank our good fellow Todd in the Shadows, who one week prior to my drafting this post released his Worst Pop Songs of 2025 video. Some country star with shitass politics did a cover of a very anti-war song by the Chicks (big name country band in the 90s and 2000s that got blacklisted after criticizing Bush's invasion of Iraq). Todd was understandably deeply peeved by both the cover being a poor adaptation and the guy's shitass politics directing his choice to turn it into a "God Bless Our Troops" anthem instead of the mournful critique it actually is. But we're not gonna waste anymore time on the shitass version, we're gonna talk about how this song rocked my ass.
"Travelin' Soldier" by the Chicks is a song about the Iraq invasion reframed through the lens of Vietnam War. A lot of people understandably hold no patience for imperial core art about their colonial war grief, but I am still receptive to sad guitars about drafted boys. The song is about a young man about to deploy for the first time, who meets a local girl working at a diner. He asks if he can write letters back to her, because he doesn't have anybody back home to write to. Then when he dies abroad, she's the only one left who knows him well enough to grieve his passing.
It's tragic unrealized love because ultimately she never really got to know him. They met once in a diner and exchanged some letters and his memory of her kindness helped him make it through the war until he didn't. She was a stranger who decided to share a kindness and that became the basis for a brief connection. But there's enough of a something there that she remembers and misses him when he dies. The tragedy is necessary, because it's an anti-war song, because it's pointing at senseless death and violence and the state consuming its youth. The point is that they will never get more time to find out what they could be to each other, because political machinations stole it from them.
---
One other piece of media stands out in my mind as the pinnacle of tragic unrealized love. Wild Goose Dreams was a Korean-American play I saw in college, at The Public Theater in 2018. The title is in reference to "wild goose fathers" - fathers who stay in Korea to work while their wives and children emigrate to the US or other anglosphere countries to give the kids better access to education and English fluency.
The play is about one such father, Guk Minsung, living alone in Seoul as he slowly grows distant from his family abroad. Meanwhile, Yoo Nanhee is a North Korean defector living alone and struggling to make a life for herself while trying to get back in contact with her father across the border.[1] The two of them meet on a dating site and form a bit of a connection - Nanhee making Minsung feel less discarded and useless, and Minsung assuaging Nanhee over her guilt for leaving her father behind. But meanwhile their lives continue falling apart around them, as Nanhee finds out her father may be in danger and Minsung finds out his wife has fallen in love with another man and wants to divorce him.
The first time Minsung says, "I love you," to Nanhee, she rejects him immediately. To be fair, he has been distracted all night ignoring phone calls from his wife and hasn't entirely been listening to her part of the conversation up until then. But she doesn't believe his confession - she's not in love with him, and neither of them are in a position to have a relationship or build a shared life together. As she puts it, they are simply together to assuage each other's loneliness, and that isn't love. He is married already, and this feeling he's trying to describe is a matchstick without any fuel to make it last. Minsung points out that they do mean something to each other, and asks if they can call it love for now and wait to see what it becomes. But Nanhee doesn't answer, so he retracts his confession and says he won't bring it up again until he can find some wood or coal to back it up with.
Eventually, Nanhee's guilt gets the best of her and she flees back to North Korea to see her father and make sure he's safe. Minsung writes a song for her and posts it online, where it eventually goes so viral that it makes its way across the border to Nanhee and her father. But Minsung losing contact with his family and Nanhee all at once eventually becomes too much for him, and he kills himself before Nanhee can return.
In the final scene of the play, Nanhee returns to the Banpo bridge, where Minsung first confessed his feelings. It's the wrong time of year for the evening light display, but she imagines the lights around her, and then imagines Minsung coming to say goodbye.[2]
They have a properly honest heart-to-heart, getting closure and thanking each other for their impact on their lives. Nanhee apologizes for not letting him call it love, but Minsung says it's not too late and asks if she still has it. So she pulls a long matchstick from her pocket.
And then Minsung steps into the darkness, leaving Nanhee holding the lit match. Once she's ready, she blows it out, and the whole theater goes dark.
It has been eight years since I saw this live, long enough for my memory to distort and for me to have to reference the script to write this post. And it has still stuck with me for all this time precisely because of this reconciliation scene, because of two people shoulder-to-shoulder in the dark, lit only by matchlight. What a beautiful tragic play. What an encapsulation of unrealized love. Because Nanhee is right, that it wasn't love and that they only barely knew each other and were still learning to understand each other. It is only after she returns to North Korea that she starts to miss him and her feelings start to gestate into genuine interest and desire to be with him. What they had wasn't enough to keep her from running away, or keep Minsung from giving up and dying, and frankly even if Nanhee had been able to return sooner, it's possible they still would not have been enough for each other. But even though they will not have the chance to try, what they had was enough to change Nanhee's life and make Minsung's final days a little less lonely. A match is a match, but it is still a light, enough to be cherished and remembered for eight years and counting.
Wild Goose Dreams is a really, really good play. I cut out a lot of other thematic points and important details to focus on the love story - Minsung's family, Nanhee's father, the ways this play is also about the overwhelming cacophony and isolation of modern digital life. I don't think there are any pro-shots out there, or further productions that may exist, so I don't know of any other way to experience the play without simply reading it. But if nothing else, I am glad this play existed and I am glad people got to see it.
---
[1] An important context note, Nanhee's guilt over her father manifests as an apparition that only she can see and talk to, and he becomes a minor supporting character throughout the play who influences Nanhee's feelings and decisions, including prompting the final scene. He often shows up as a mix between Nanhee's father and a penguin, in reference to the same idiom that wild goose father comes from. Wild goose fathers must migrate/fly great distances to see their children, while a penguin father is flightless and cannot see them at all. [return]
[2] This finale is the reason this play has stuck with me, and why I bought a print copy of the script. In the theater I saw this in, Nanhee stood on a central catwalk and the stage lights came up around the ceiling in faint red-purple-blue, exactly the same way as it had for their original date by the river. Broke my heart clean in two. [return]
For this, you can thank our good fellow Todd in the Shadows, who one week prior to my drafting this post released his Worst Pop Songs of 2025 video. Some country star with shitass politics did a cover of a very anti-war song by the Chicks (big name country band in the 90s and 2000s that got blacklisted after criticizing Bush's invasion of Iraq). Todd was understandably deeply peeved by both the cover being a poor adaptation and the guy's shitass politics directing his choice to turn it into a "God Bless Our Troops" anthem instead of the mournful critique it actually is. But we're not gonna waste anymore time on the shitass version, we're gonna talk about how this song rocked my ass.
"Travelin' Soldier" by the Chicks is a song about the Iraq invasion reframed through the lens of Vietnam War. A lot of people understandably hold no patience for imperial core art about their colonial war grief, but I am still receptive to sad guitars about drafted boys. The song is about a young man about to deploy for the first time, who meets a local girl working at a diner. He asks if he can write letters back to her, because he doesn't have anybody back home to write to. Then when he dies abroad, she's the only one left who knows him well enough to grieve his passing.
It's tragic unrealized love because ultimately she never really got to know him. They met once in a diner and exchanged some letters and his memory of her kindness helped him make it through the war until he didn't. She was a stranger who decided to share a kindness and that became the basis for a brief connection. But there's enough of a something there that she remembers and misses him when he dies. The tragedy is necessary, because it's an anti-war song, because it's pointing at senseless death and violence and the state consuming its youth. The point is that they will never get more time to find out what they could be to each other, because political machinations stole it from them.
---
One other piece of media stands out in my mind as the pinnacle of tragic unrealized love. Wild Goose Dreams was a Korean-American play I saw in college, at The Public Theater in 2018. The title is in reference to "wild goose fathers" - fathers who stay in Korea to work while their wives and children emigrate to the US or other anglosphere countries to give the kids better access to education and English fluency.
The play is about one such father, Guk Minsung, living alone in Seoul as he slowly grows distant from his family abroad. Meanwhile, Yoo Nanhee is a North Korean defector living alone and struggling to make a life for herself while trying to get back in contact with her father across the border.[1] The two of them meet on a dating site and form a bit of a connection - Nanhee making Minsung feel less discarded and useless, and Minsung assuaging Nanhee over her guilt for leaving her father behind. But meanwhile their lives continue falling apart around them, as Nanhee finds out her father may be in danger and Minsung finds out his wife has fallen in love with another man and wants to divorce him.
The first time Minsung says, "I love you," to Nanhee, she rejects him immediately. To be fair, he has been distracted all night ignoring phone calls from his wife and hasn't entirely been listening to her part of the conversation up until then. But she doesn't believe his confession - she's not in love with him, and neither of them are in a position to have a relationship or build a shared life together. As she puts it, they are simply together to assuage each other's loneliness, and that isn't love. He is married already, and this feeling he's trying to describe is a matchstick without any fuel to make it last. Minsung points out that they do mean something to each other, and asks if they can call it love for now and wait to see what it becomes. But Nanhee doesn't answer, so he retracts his confession and says he won't bring it up again until he can find some wood or coal to back it up with.
Eventually, Nanhee's guilt gets the best of her and she flees back to North Korea to see her father and make sure he's safe. Minsung writes a song for her and posts it online, where it eventually goes so viral that it makes its way across the border to Nanhee and her father. But Minsung losing contact with his family and Nanhee all at once eventually becomes too much for him, and he kills himself before Nanhee can return.
In the final scene of the play, Nanhee returns to the Banpo bridge, where Minsung first confessed his feelings. It's the wrong time of year for the evening light display, but she imagines the lights around her, and then imagines Minsung coming to say goodbye.[2]
They have a properly honest heart-to-heart, getting closure and thanking each other for their impact on their lives. Nanhee apologizes for not letting him call it love, but Minsung says it's not too late and asks if she still has it. So she pulls a long matchstick from her pocket.
Nanhee: Oh. It's so nice.
Minsung: Very. Are you thinking you could take our very nice very pretty match to light it with some new guy?
[This makes Nanhee laugh.]
Coz I'm okay with that. I can be okay with that. Eventually.
Nanhee: Thank you. But this one is for you.
[She lights the match]
[Minsung claps. All the lights go dark.]
I will miss you. For a really long time.
Minsung: Thank you.
[He kisses Nanhee on the head]
Nanhee: Go. Fly.
And then Minsung steps into the darkness, leaving Nanhee holding the lit match. Once she's ready, she blows it out, and the whole theater goes dark.
It has been eight years since I saw this live, long enough for my memory to distort and for me to have to reference the script to write this post. And it has still stuck with me for all this time precisely because of this reconciliation scene, because of two people shoulder-to-shoulder in the dark, lit only by matchlight. What a beautiful tragic play. What an encapsulation of unrealized love. Because Nanhee is right, that it wasn't love and that they only barely knew each other and were still learning to understand each other. It is only after she returns to North Korea that she starts to miss him and her feelings start to gestate into genuine interest and desire to be with him. What they had wasn't enough to keep her from running away, or keep Minsung from giving up and dying, and frankly even if Nanhee had been able to return sooner, it's possible they still would not have been enough for each other. But even though they will not have the chance to try, what they had was enough to change Nanhee's life and make Minsung's final days a little less lonely. A match is a match, but it is still a light, enough to be cherished and remembered for eight years and counting.
Wild Goose Dreams is a really, really good play. I cut out a lot of other thematic points and important details to focus on the love story - Minsung's family, Nanhee's father, the ways this play is also about the overwhelming cacophony and isolation of modern digital life. I don't think there are any pro-shots out there, or further productions that may exist, so I don't know of any other way to experience the play without simply reading it. But if nothing else, I am glad this play existed and I am glad people got to see it.
---
[1] An important context note, Nanhee's guilt over her father manifests as an apparition that only she can see and talk to, and he becomes a minor supporting character throughout the play who influences Nanhee's feelings and decisions, including prompting the final scene. He often shows up as a mix between Nanhee's father and a penguin, in reference to the same idiom that wild goose father comes from. Wild goose fathers must migrate/fly great distances to see their children, while a penguin father is flightless and cannot see them at all. [return]
[2] This finale is the reason this play has stuck with me, and why I bought a print copy of the script. In the theater I saw this in, Nanhee stood on a central catwalk and the stage lights came up around the ceiling in faint red-purple-blue, exactly the same way as it had for their original date by the river. Broke my heart clean in two. [return]
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