Furrowed Brow

Highbrow

Lowbrow

A few weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal’s Korea Real Time blog ran a short piece about Chinese viewers of Korean dramas. It caused something of a furor on the dramaweb, and no wonder. Even from the headline, you knew trouble was ahead: “South Korean Soap Operas: Just Lowbrow Fun?”

When someone is talking about scripted Asian television, they generally use one of two names: drama or soap opera. To speakers of American English, drama is a neutral word that describes a show’s format without judging its content. Soap opera, in contrast, is a loaded term. It tells you not only that the program is a scripted series, but also that it focuses on the domestic realm and is characterized by sensational storytelling. The phrase arises from the early days of the radio, when companies—often manufacturers of soap—funded programming geared toward housewives who would be listening on weekday afternoons. In America, soap opera is still shorthand for a dying breed of schlocky daytime series (although it occasionally pops up in reference to “prime-time soaps” like Dallas and The OC).

The real distinction between these two names is their assumed audience: Anyone can watch a drama. But it’s women who watch soap operas. Their scripts focus on things that are automatically gendered female: relationships and family and home life. They don’t necessary have complicated, self-consciously clever plots or deal with lots of thrilling action. Instead, emotions and the doings of the human heart are their canvas. And that’s exactly what’s undervalued by the sort of people who scoff at Korean television as being simplistic.

A short public service announcement

As has been widely noted, Drama Crazy is no more. In honor of this tragic occasion, I’ve updated the section of streaming sites in my list of drama-related links.

It’s also worth mentioning that this shutdown doesn’t seem to be the result of legal problems, unlike the shuttering of other streaming sites. (I’ve posted about several of these here: Copyright and Other Dilemmas and When Drama Fever Strikes. Also worth reading is Beavergate, Mr. X’s insightful article on the topic.) Based on their goodbye message, it seems that the folks at Drama Crazy just got sick of running the site. It must have been a huge job, and updates there had been becoming increasingly rare over the past few months.

Thank you for all the good times, Drama Crazy. You’ll be missed.

When Drama Fever Strikes

There’s a lot more to the Korean drama story than plot twists, broody shower scenes, and chaebols who sweep poor, hardworking girls off their feet. And although this is a blog about Kdrama, the shows themselves aren’t the only things I’m interested in discussing here: There’s also the online fandom that has grown up around them.

Watching Korean drama is a mostly solitary pursuit for me (in spite of my best attempts, I have yet to hook anyone I know in real life). But the more involved I become in the dramaweb, the more I realize that my feelings about the shows I watch are influenced by other people. Take Flower Boy Next Door—I was utterly swept up in the cycle of checking Couch Kimchi for episode stills, browsing Koala’s Playground for early reviews, poring over insanely detailed analysis on Tumblr, and then reading Dramabeans’ long, insightful recaps. Even the Dok Mis among us are never really alone when it comes to Kdrama.

More than any other website I visit (or maintain, even), Dramabeans is the hub of my online drama life. For me at least, it’s more than just another blog—it’s the spine of the Kdrama community. If I hadn’t found it after stumbling across Boys over Flowers on Netflix, I would have shrugged my shoulders and carried on with life, having learned only that Kdrama existed in the world, and that it might be worth watching more.

But the mere existence of a big, constantly updated site like Dramabeans is what brought me into the fold: it legitimized and normalized my preoccupation with Kdrama. Even more than a year later, it’s still my browser’s home page. And if I have time to visit only one website a day, Dramabeans is the one I choose. It’s expansive enough to be complete and informative, but not so expansive that trying to keep up with it would literally be fatal. (Unlike, say, the fun but insanely active kdrama tag on Tumblr.) It tells me what I need to know in the most entertaining way possible, through the voices of people who are smart and funny and insightful about not only Korean culture, but also about so many other things I love—including (but not limited to) storytelling, television, and celebrity.

So like a lot of other Kdrama fans, my hackles went up when I visited Dramabeans on Thursday morning to find a post about legal threats made against the site. Written by Javabeans, the blog’s founder, it read: