Rec List: BFF Couples

Last week’s contrasting posts—one about the problem of consent in Asian dramas, the other about the coziest lead pairing of 2013 thus far—got me thinking about my favorite kind of Kdrama couple: the best friends.

Some dramas revolve around lovers who have exactly one thing in common: mutual attraction. Take Boys over Flowers. What do Jan Di and Jun Pyo talk about when they’re by themselves? Not much, beyond whatever obstacle is currently keeping them apart. Their union is based solely on a whim that’s heightened by the forbidden-fruit thrill of his mother’s objections to their relationship. The hardest work of their romance—building something lasting and real that can weather the difficulties of life—is still ahead of them.

But best friend couples, in life and in drama, already share a meaningful connection; they start out spending time together because they like and respect each other. When they fall in love, it’s with another human being, not just a fantasy of what someone would be like as a mate. And being best friends allows them to step outside the traditional roles that define the interactions between so many Kdrama lovers. BFF guys are hardly ever physically aggressive with BFF girls, and they don’t force kisses on them. In turn, BFF girls aren’t modest or retiring; they are simply themselves.

Here’s a brief catalog of the BFF couples I’ve enjoyed most.

Drama Review: I Hear Your Voice (2013)

Grade: A-

Category
Courtroom romance

What it’s about
As a young boy, Park Soo Ha watches the murder of his father and is only saved from the same fate by Jang Hye Sung, a reluctant hero in the form of an uncertain teenaged girl. When she stands up for him in court against her better judgment, Soo Ha vows to spend the rest of his life protecting her. The two meet again ten years later, after she has become a public defender and he has started his senior year in high school. They work together to solve cases and bring his father’s killer to justice. (And did I mention Park Soo Ha can hear people’s thoughts?)

First impression
This breezy and bright drama finds a perfect middle ground between melodramatic romance and light comedy. Although not without failings, the first few episodes are enjoyable and set the stage for an epic lead couple (or OTP, in Internet parlance).

Final verdict
Despite being about two episodes too long and a little shaky in the logic department, I Can Hear Your Voice is a charming distraction with a cast of likeable characters and an impossibly compelling central romance. It gives viewers a mouthwatering taste of many of Kdrama’s biggest tropes—noona romance, cohabitation farce, revenge quest, supernatural drama, and birth secret mystery.

Hands Off: Consent and the Asian Drama Male

When I first started watching Korean drama, I spent a lot of time being preoccupied by things I don’t even notice nowadays. I would zone out for entire scenes because I was so transfixed by someone’s expert use of chopsticks, or so stunned by just how much makeup the male lead was wearing. But after two years of being the world’s most obsessed fan of Kdrama, this sort of stuff is second nature to me.

A comment on my recent review of Queen of Reversals made me realize that I’ve also become blind to something else: sexual violence. The commenter, Vivi, asked about the first kiss shared by that show’s leads. “That moment was really problematic for me,” she said. And I didn’t even remember what she was talking about, because you can only see something like this so many times before developing defense mechanisms to tune it out.

The kiss in question occurred at the very end of episode 20, with its aftermath playing out at the beginning of episode 21. In this scene, the male lead is shown as sad, upset, and a little desperate. He has just met his birth mother for the first time and discovered that she had borne and raised other children after abandoning him. It’s a snowy midwinter night and he sits on a bench surrounded by bright Christmas decorations. It’s the kind of sublimely romantic setting Kdramas are so fond of—colored lights sparkle, a scattering of snowflakes falls, and a moody rendition of “The First Noel” plays in the background.

(Spoilers and triggers ahead.)

UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who stopped by for the chat! It was fun to “meet” you and for once talk about Kdramas without being the most knowledgable person in the conversation. I will definitely try to organize another one in the future, perhaps for a live watch. 

You are cordially invited to a Kdrama chat!

Where: Amanda’s place

When: 2 pm EST on Saturday, August 10

Attire: Casual (This is a text-only chat)

Why: Because we just don’t think about Korean drama enough

Drama review: Meteor Garden (2001)

Grade: B+

Category: Youthful love story/Taiwanese

What it’s about
If you’re visiting this website, you almost certainly know already. Along with its international cousins Boys over Flowers and Hana Yori Dango, Meteor Garden is the most essential of drama romances. The first of four live-action series to be based on an original Japanese manga, Meteor Garden tells the story of an everyday college girl who catches the eye of her richest, meanest classmate. When she stands up to him, he decides to bully her out of school, only to fall madly (and rather inexplicably) in love with her unrelenting stubbornness and brave personality. They overcome countless obstacles on their quest to be together, including a number of other love interests and his nasty, controlling mother.

First impression
Oh, how I love you in all your guises, Hana Yori Dango. You are the queen of Cinderella stories and the ultimate comfort-food viewing. Your Japanese and Korean incarnations introduced me to new cultures—they were the first dramas I watched from each of their respective nations. This makes it strange to come to Meteor Garden with some knowledge of Taiwanese television—I’ve already seen all three of the leads in other shows, and have a good idea what to expect from both this drama’s story and its execution. Tdramas always seem to be more romantic than Jdramas and sexier than Kdramas, so I’m pretty certain that love is in the cards for the two of us.

Final verdict
Meteor Garden has all the shortcomings you’d expect from a drama of this vintage—it looks, feels, and sounds dated and its production values are bargain basement. But I’m still a sucker for its swoony, starry-eyed love story, and this might just be my favorite of its incarnations.

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.

Checking in

Possible reasons why I don’t have a real post this week:

1. Korean law enforcement raided my home after realizing that I’ve made snide comments about assorted Korean actors and also used questionable methods to acquire subtitled dramas for viewing. I am now awaiting trial in a Seoul-area detention facility. Prison kimchi is surprisingly tasty, but internet access is hard to come by.

2. A bevy of attempts at recording an audio post on my iPad proved fruitless. In more than twenty tries, I never once made it past the one-minute mark without saying something so incredibly stupid that I was compelled to start over from scratch. Javabeans and Girl Friday may make it sound easy to talk about Kdrama, but I can assure you it’s not.

3. The fifteen-minute memory upgrade the computer shop promised me has taken six days and counting, leaving me without easy access to a computer.

I’ll leave it to you to decide which of the above scenarios are true.

Next week I swear I’ll be back on a regular posting schedule, but for now here are a few things I’ve been thinking about lately.

Monstar. I’m still enjoying this drama a lot, but it’s rather less wonderful than I once hoped it would be. The characters and music are great. I love the fantasy sequences. (Last week’s personal troubadours were particularly amusing.) What I don’t like is the listless plotting—the cast has spent the past few episodes pinballing around each other with little real connection or forward momentum. All the fantastic toys in the world are useless if you don’t know what to do with them. Monstar could have used more one-off music challenges, like Dream High, and less makjangy, multi-generational love triangle action.

American Horror Story. I just finished watching season 2 of this FX series. Its violent, sex-crazed subject matter couldn’t be more different from your typical Korean drama, but the show itself actually uses a surprising number of Kdrama tricks: There are nose bleeds of doom, flashbacks to scenes that took place all of two minutes ago, and limitless reappropriation of long-standing clichés. Its short, stand-alone seasons are also reminiscent of Asian dramas—each tells a story that is completed in a twelve- or thirteen-episode running time. If only more US television was like this, maybe I wouldn't have defected to Korea. (More Evan Peters cosplaying broken, beautiful Kurt Cobain wouldn't hurt, either.)

Meteor Garden. As expected, watching the Taiwanese version of Hana Yori Dango/Boys over Flowers is a real treat. It’s goofy and over the top and full of good-looking boys, some of whom even appear to be hot kissers. Its narrative trajectory is almost exactly the same as Korea’s Boys over Flowers, although there are some interesting differences. BoF did away with the female lead’s guy friend in favor of fleshing out her work buddy, which seems like a good decision to me. It may be different from the source material, but I like the tidier Korean take on things (and the swoony romance it developed into). I also miss the brother that both HYD and BoF gave the female lead. It made for some sweet, humanizing scenes showing the male lead getting to try out normal family life. The other members of F4 and the friendship they share isn’t as developed in MG as the other adaptations, which is a pity. But for the first time I can say that I ship the lead couple—Ji Hoo and Rui were just too tempting in the other versions, and the other male leads didn’t capture the petulant little-boy charm of Dao Ming Si. Now if only he wasn’t such a jerk to Shan Cai, I could really be into this pairing.

Welcome to drama city, population 1.  I’ve been having trouble finishing shows lately, which means the Random Thoughts sidebar is getting out of control. I watched the first few episodes of Dating Acency: Cyrano when they first aired, but was seduced away by all the good buzz Monstar was getting. Then came Alone in Love, which is well made but has some lead-likability problems for me. The siren call of Meteor Garden lured me away from that one, and I’m about ready to explode with desire for I Can Hear Your Voice, which is definitely next on my list.  Why are you full of such wonders, Kdrama? I just want to quit life and watch you forever.

Next week, things will be back to normal around here. (Really.)