Amanda's Choice

Mi Rae’s choice is child’s play compared to yours

Dear Amanda in 2011,

In a few months, you will face a great temptation. I’m sending you this letter from the future to encourage you to give in.

You might think that I would suggest otherwise—that if only you applied yourself in work and life you could become a real-world success. But who wants that, when instead you could spend years on a couch potato bender? So when Boys over Flowers starts insistently appearing on Netflix’s list of recommendations, just hit play. You can thank me later.

As someone older and wiser, I would like to make a few suggestions for the journey ahead.

Drama Review: Return of Iljimae (2009)

Grade: B+

Category

Action/adventure fusion sageuk

What it’s about

The epic (but occasionally tongue-in-cheek) journey a hero and his desperate efforts to protect Korea and her people.

What it’s not about

Although it was released after the similarly themed Iljimae, the two dramas are totally unrelated. I suggest staying away from the original Iljimae, which blew its wad on lots of pretty actors but forgot that it needed a script, too. Return of Iljimae’s title makes it sound like the lesser of the two, but it’s actually based on an original comic while Iljimae is based on...Lee Jun Ki’s cheekbones?

First impression

In spite of our uncertain beginning, I’m really starting like this show. It’s trying to be a Korean version of The Princess Bride, which is a very noble calling indeed. The modern narrator is acting like the grandfather in that movie, guiding us through a series of stories about Iljimae’s youth. The Joseon setting has all the storybook charm of Florin, and its inhabitants—including a baby-eating giant and a flamboyant Chinese spy who only walks sideways—have the quirky, one-dimensional glow of fairytale characters. Korean dramas may love over-the-top people, places, and ideas, but they rarely venture into the realm magical realism. I’m hoping this mythical hero’s quest could change that.

Final verdict

Return of Iljimae really hit the sageuk sweet spot for me: It’s sweeping and glorious and tragic, stuffed full of genuine emotion and powerful friendships. But best of all, it managed to sidestep all the things that usually annoy me about this kind of drama.

Let’s talk about sex

As a fandom that exhaustively catalogs, critiques, and names kisses, we sure don’t talk about sex much.

For some English-speaking fans, there’s a good reason for this: to them, Kdrama is a bastion of safety in an oversexualized world. The relationships it depicts almost always revolve around the soul, not the body, and the rare act of physical intimacy is treated with an almost sacred mindfulness.

I’m glad that Kdrama exists for people like that, but I can’t say that I’m one of them. I don’t mind a tasteful, consensual sex scene, and have actually been frustrated by the lack of naughty bits in Kdramas. To someone with a Western mindset, a romance that’s as bloodless as the one in Autumn in My Heart doesn’t feel like a romance at all. But even for me, the courtly, spiritual love at the core of so many Korean dramas is part of their appeal. When they’re done right, these shows are fairy tales separate from the world of the flesh, always pure and perfect and good. And because of this, a single Kdrama kiss has more emotional weight than all six seasons of Sex in the City combined.

When it comes to Korean television, there’s not much sex to talk about, anyway. Drama kisses are precious and rare, but drama sex is harder to find than Bigfoot riding the Loch Ness monster with a unicorn in a party hat looking on from the shore. 

The indexes

I have watched a shitload of Korean television.

You’ll have to excuse my language, but sometimes strong words are called for. Say, when you discover that you’ve watched 109 Korean dramas in the space of three years. According to Mydramalist, that’s 89 total days, or almost a full month out of each of those years that I spent watching Kdramas instead of doing useful, real-life things like sleeping, doing laundry, or working toward world domination.

My suspicion is that in 2013 I saw far fewer dramas than I did in the past. (I can’t be sure this is the case, though, because I didn’t keep track of what I watched through most of 2012.) My viewing habits definitely changed this year, and not because I did something crazy like get a social life. No, it was because I signed up for Tumblr, the world’s best distraction. (Candy Crush might be partly to blame as well.) Nonetheless, I still made it through a whopping 33 dramas in 2013.

Rather than writing a true post this week, I made two indexes for this blog: one that contains an excerpt from every single review I’ve posted at Outside Seoul, and another that arranges dramas in a few favorite categories. These are my versions of Dramabeans’ ratings page, which I think is one the Internet’s most valuable resources if you’re looking for an older show to watch. (But unlike Dramabeans, my reviews are fully biased: if a show works for me, it works. I’m unconcerned with little, unimportant details like actual quality.)

Compiling this index was a pretty instructional experience. One thing I realized was just how skewed my grading system is: I’ve given 35 dramas an A grade, 26 a B grade, 14 a C grade, and 6 a D grade. This is pretty laughably far from an expected bell curve, in which most shows would earn a C and a few outliers would end up in the realm of A or F. And yet, it kind of makes sense: I’m watching a genre a love, and I pick only the shows that interest me from the beginning. So of course I end up liking a lot of them.

I also noticed that I’ve never written proper reviews of the classics I watched during my first year of drama madness, many of which are on my first list of favorites. Naturally, this made me decide that I should rewatch them. I guess we all know how I’ll be spending my spring.

In the meanwhile, here are the indexes:

The sum of all dramas

Good kissers and juicy melodramas: series by category

Amanda’s Dream Drama: Sounds like Home

 

  

The following was inspired by posts from two of my favorite bloggers—Ladida at Idle Revelry and Kfangurl at The Fangirl Verdict. Feel free to hold it against them.

It’s the Kdrama I would write, if I could write a Kdrama. It would be a light melo and run for 16 episodes on jTBC. I would, of course, insist on the production team behind A Wife’s Credentials. Throughout the post, I’ve cast actors for key roles. (If you’re dreaming, you might as well dream big, right?)

What I’ve written is essentially a short story that traces the trajectories of the lead characters in the drama. The real thing would be much meatier—one paragraph of this post might constitute two or three episodes worth of air time.

I wish I was one of those people who had a song for everything and could give you a soundtrack for reading, but I’m afraid that’s not the case. So pick your favorite moody, coming-of-age track and hit play.

Part Deux: Kdrama Franchises

Two worlds collide in Answer Me 1994

One of the things I love most about Korean television is the finite nature of its dramas. They’re each novelistic in their completeness—free-standing, independent stories with a beginning, middle, and end.

These days, though, the trend is toward something a bit different: The drama franchise. From the Answer Me shows to the Flower Boy series, more and more dramas seem to be part of an ongoing brand. And while these individual shows may share a common name, they’re almost always distinct stories built around a unique set of characters, rather than what we Westerners would consider a subsequent season or a true sequel.

It’s easy to see why the Drama Overlords would like franchise series. You don’t have to start from scratch when you’re promoting I Need Romance 3—there’s instant name recognition, and potential viewers know exactly what to expect from your show. People who are familiar with the product are likely to tune in out of habit, unlike shows that are presented as fully separate entities. It also ties old dramas (what people in book publishing would call “the backlist”) to currently airing series, giving them new life by encouraging viewers to catch up with reruns and DVD box sets. I bet it’s also easier to sell a known quantity like a franchise drama abroad, and international markets sure are like catnip to the folks behind Korean television.

Drama Review: December Fever (2004)

Grade: B

Category

Romantic comedy that morphs into straight-up melodrama

What it’s about

Ten years after her shotgun wedding to a powerful doctor, Young Shim still doesn’t fit into his home. She works like a slave on behalf of his family and always keeps a smile on her face, but her husband’s mother and sister never let her forget her roots as a poor country girl. The more she tries to earn their respect, the more insults and cruelties they lob her way. When Young Shim finally decides to venture into the wider world on her own, she meets a handsome younger man who leaves her longing for human connection. But their blooming relationship is not without complications—he’s the ex-boyfriend of her new sister-in-law, and might just be using Young Shim to exact revenge for being dumped. When a terminal cancer diagnosis is given, Young Shim is forced to choose: does she stay in an unhappy marriage, or does she strike out on her own?

First impression

To offset all the recent dramas I’ve been watching lately, I wanted to try something retro. That’s exactly what this 2004 series is: from the clunky cell phones to the tragic finale lurking at the end of its 17 episode running time, it’s a perfect exemplar of the early oughts on Korean television. These older shows might not be as slick as what’s on the air today, but they do have lots of charm and somehow feel more emotionally genuine than even the best modern shows. Bring on the ill-fated, old-school noona romance. I dare you to make me cry, drama. I dare you!

Final verdict

When I started watching December Fever, I expected it to be just another treacly love story with a self-consciously tragic ending, probably intended for fans of 2002’s massively successful Winter Sonata. But in truth, this drama springs from the same gritty, downtrodden family tree as What Happened in Bali and I’m Sorry, I Love You, both of which were also released in 2004.