Theme: Consequence and Residue
Episode 6 shifts from ideological construction to lived aftermath.
While previous episodes examined how fear, trauma, and power were structured and ritualized, this chapter turns to the atmosphere in which those systems were normalized. The recurring motif of dust originates from my childhood memory of rapid national development — construction sites, bulldozers, highways, and urban rebuilding. Dust becomes both literal and symbolic.
“I created a world based on my emotional memory of childhood. A memory that has always stuck with me from my past is the presence of dust. It was dusty, it was always dusty. In towns, bulldozers created dust while skinning out vegetation to build roads and bridges. There was dust while excavators carved through mountains to build highways. Trucks created layers of dust while carrying construction materials. It was the time for dust, the middle of rebuilding a nation’s infrastructure.
In schools, it was a different time; we didn’t have turf or green fields, there was always yellow dirt and sand. All the activities on the field created dust. Even the propaganda film crew built a big, black canopy in the middle of the naked, dusty field to host hundreds of children for the propaganda film viewing. The dust field became a ground zero of horror. Even so, as I moved to higher grades, the dust was everywhere. On the dust field, teachers used corporal punishment, there were school fights and gang fights, and it became a mixture of dust and blood. The image of blood drops giving rise to dust on the dry dirt ground is still ingrained in my mind. The slow progress of dirt soaking in the blood is an image that still fills me with regret toward meaningless anger and violence. It was a time of dust, horror, and blood.”
It represents:
Economic progress
Erasure of landscape
Suspension of clarity
Moral ambiguity
The propaganda screenings, school rituals, corporal punishment, and peer violence all unfolded in this same dusty environment. The ground — once framed as a site of national reconstruction — becomes a site of quiet brutality. In this episode, dust functions as residue: the physical aftermath of development and the psychological residue of indoctrination. Blood and dirt intermingle. Violence is no longer symbolic; it is embodied.
The choreography of aggression in this episode is slowed and exaggerated, not to sensationalize violence, but to reveal its banality — how anger becomes normalized within a system that rewards loyalty and punishes difference. If earlier episodes examined ideology as spectacle, this chapter examines its sediment.