Is The Sound of Magic a Musical?
Of course, though not as musical as the first episode suggests to viewers. There are increasingly fewer musical numbers as the series progresses, with the most musical numbers coming in the first few episodes. Annarasumanara, the webtoon on which The Sound of Music is based, is not a musical (as it is a web comic); this element was added in the adaptation by Itaewon Class director Kim Seong-yoon. The series uses the musical numbers as a way to access the interiority of these reserved characters, as well as to depict what a sense of childlike wonder can look and feel like to an audience perhaps unused to seeing characters burst into song, the setting coming alive around them. In conclusion: normalize TV series having random musical numbers if and when it allows viewers to access story, character, and theme in a productive and interesting way.
Who Killed Seo Ha-yoon in The Sound of Magic?
One of The Sound of Magic’s least successful story elements is a shoehorned-in teen murder plot. Meant to raise the stakes in relation to Ri-eul’s treatment by the community, allowing Ah-yi and Il-deung to come to his aid in different ways, it is an unnecessarily gruesome addition to the world. Arguably, Ri-eul’s ostracism is unfortunately already articulated and exacerbated in other ways, including in the stigma around mental illness.
That being said, we find out in the final episode that it was Ah-yi’s former boss, Kim Doo-sik, who killed Ha-yoon. Like Ah-yi, Ha-yoon took a part-time job at Doo-sik’s store. And, as he would later do to Ah-yi, he sexually assaulted Ha-yoon. Ha-yoon recorded the entire thing, and blackmailed Doo-sik for money. When Ha-yoon met with Doo-sik in the seemingly abandoned theme park, he killed her.
What is The Magician’s (Ji Chang-wook) Backstory?
In “The Last Performance,” Ah-yi and Il-deung meet up with Min Ji-soo, a woman who knew and liked Ri-eul (whose legal name is Ryu Min-hyuk) while they were in school together. From her, we learn that Ri-eul is 30 years old (though probably 28, in “international age,” as Korean’s use a different age-counting system) and that he comes from a similar background to Il-deung. Like Il-deung, Ri-eul was born into a well-respected family; his parents were (and presumably still are) well-respected professors who were on TV a lot, according to Ri-eul’s friend. His siblings did traditionally well too, and Ri-eul was also always top of his class in middle school and into high school.
In a Ji-soo-narrated flashback, high school-aged Ri-eul is depicted as strange and kind, as well as very focused on maintaining good grades for the sake of his parents’ happiness. (It puts his mentorship of Il-deung into more specific context.) Later in their high school career, Ri-eul becomes despondent and depressed. He faints in the hallway while studying flashcards and, when he wakes up in the hospital, he doesn’t stop studying, even when Ji-soo begs him to. “Maybe for Min-hyuk, that impressive wrapping paper [of being a brilliant boy from a family of prestigious professors] felt like an invisible prison,” muses Ji-soo. In the final flashback in Ji-soo’s story, we see Ri-eul fall off the top of the school building while reaching for a butterfly only he can see in what is coded as a suicide attempt. (Suicide has been the leading cause of youth death in Korea since 2007.)
Ri-eul survives, and continues to live with mental illness. We know from the police detective that Ri-eul left a mental health facility. At some point, Ri-eul began learning and sharing magic. Following the theme park’s closure, Ri-eul found a home there. We don’t know what happens to Ri-eul after Ah-yi helps him escape from the police. “You’re a real magician,” she tells him before he goes. “Because you made me really believe in magic.”
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