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

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

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.)

Schedule update

After more than a year of updating twice a week, I’ve decided to cut back and post on Tuesdays only. (But I will continue to add Random Thoughts whenever something strikes me. Shutting up isn’t my specialty, after all.)

There are lots of really wonderful bloggers who manage to make thoughtful, well-written posts every day, but I don’t know how they do it—between watching dramas and writing about them, I barely have time for personal hygiene. My obsession with Kdrama is by no means flagging, and I can’t imagine giving up this blog anytime soon. I just need a break.

When I started blogging here I never imagined that anyone would actually visit. But you do, which makes maintaining Outside Seoul incredibly rewarding. So thanks for sharing your time (and obsession) with me!

Three Notes

Note 1.  When I was bitten by the Kdrama bug, Soompi was one of the first websites I started visiting regularly. It’s huge and frequently updated, and the scope of its coverage is amazing: from dramas to Kpop to celebrity gossip, Soompi’s got it all. So I’m tickled pink to report that I’ve been invited to contribute commentary and reviews to the site—the first installment of which has already gone up, as shown in the fangirl screen grab above. I’ll be posting there once a week (although the material will probably all go here, too).

The thing I find most amazing about Soompi is how long its been around: It was founded in 1998 by an American fan of H.O.T. (How Answer Me 1997, eh?) Back then I had only the dimmest awareness of Korean entertainment, largely gleaned from a friend who was attending Berklee College of Music in Boston. Although she was always reporting things like “The Korean Britney Spears is in my composition class!,” the concept of Kpop was mostly a curiosity to us. We were too busy following our favorite American boy band around the country to really care, and I was in fact founding my own website devoted to them. That website—and the whole fandom, really—is long gone now, so I appreciate how special it is to create something lasting on the Internet. When its age is calibrated to Internet fandom, Soompi is probably the equivalent of a thousand years old. (For fun times, check out the old versions of the site archived on The Wayback Machine. Note, in particular, the first item in the list of updates on the left.)

As a newcomer to Kdramas, I’ve found Soompi’s amazingly active forums to be an endless source of fascination. They’re the place to go for behind-the-scenes photos and news updates for current shows, but even more interesting are the threads devoted to old shows. During the depths of my obsession, I swear I read every single post in the 650-page Coffee Prince thread, which made me feel as if I had traveled back in time to experience the show’s original fan reception. It’s bizarre yet wonderful to read post after post debating whether this mysterious Gong Yoo guy would be a good actor or not—looking back five years later, I think it’s safe to say he was a success in the show.

Someday I’m bound to run out of things to say about Kdrama, but that day has yet to come. So in the meanwhile... Onwards!


Note 2. The next time I say something like ”Oh, Korea’s not that different from America,” I would like someone to remind me of the below photo. It’s from a prayer ceremony held earlier this month for the upcoming drama Alice in Cheongdam-dong. Most notable in the image? The head of a decapitated pig, all blue-tinged and...decapitated. Also, the fact that it appears have something into its mouth. What is this, the silence of the hams?

Note 3. There’s a fox in my neighborhood, and I can see why the real animals may have inspired the gumiho myth. I kept being woken up in the middle of the night by an unholy wailing that sounds thisclose to human. I’m not sure who’s more freaked out—me or my cat.

Beyond Good and Evil: Kdrama, Blogging, and Purpose

Fanfic got Shi Won into college, after all...

I recently finished reading the book Everything Bad Is Good for You by Stephen Johnson. In it, Johnson argues that our engagement with modern pop culture actually makes us smarter, more alert, and more capable when it comes to problem solving—all of which sounds like a lot of wishful thinking, but still holds some merit as far as I’m concerned. For proof, look no further than my obsession with Kdrama. Hour by hour, episode by episode, I’m leaning the Korean language practically by osmosis. I’m discovering a culture I never once thought about before, and I’m coming to understand more of the limitless ways that life can be lived on planet earth.

These are some pretty impressive developments, especially considering that television soap operas are their catalyst. I also have Kdrama to thank for one more thing: I haven’t written this much or this regularly for years. And when I did write, my words were in service of an employer rather than myself. The daily grind of being a grown-up made me forget about the English degree I earned once upon a time, and that I used to dream about writing books when I was a kid. I’d even lost sight of what a thrill it can be to have something to write and know I can write it well. This is an experience I suspect many civilians live their entire lives without having; there are only a few people who actually make their living writing, after all, and people who aren’t obsessed with the Internet don’t have much call for lengthy critical analyses of their favorite show or think-pieces about gender-bending in Asian dramas. (Poor things.)

(Of course, there is a flip side to that thrill: the times when writing a paragraph seems more difficult than building a space ship from items in my kitchen’s junk drawer and using it to travel to Mars. On those days I can write and erase a single sentence twenty or thirty times, with my mood becoming less and less pleasant every time I hit the delete key. But writing fails are the price all of us pay for writing successes. Without the first, the second couldn’t exist.)

Clearly, I’m not the only one who’s having my horizons broadened by Korean dramas. As I surf around in search of new sites to include on my list of Kdrama links, I’m always impressed by the variety and quality of writing there is out there. From the short to the long, from the funny to the serious, blog posts are as unique as fingerprints and just as varied. I’ve come across two discussions that touch on this lately: The first was an article on My Drama List that poked gentle fun at a number of different review styles, and the second was a longer piece offering blogging advice at Thundie’s Prattle.

It actually took months of blogging to settle on a review format that worked for me, and hopefully works for the people who read this site. My raw materials were my own preferences: When I read a review I don’t want to be told every little thing. A quick introduction to the facts is helpful, but there’s no need for a full cast list or an exhaustive outline of every single plot detail. (That’s what dramawikis and streaming sites are for.) What I’m really looking for is the writer’s own opinion of the show, and whatever new perspectives he or she has to offer about it. I don’t even mind writers who include spoilers: I almost never read a blog post about or review of a show I haven’t already seen. I usually decide what to watch based on the general ratings and comments at Dramafever or Dramacrazy, but anything more in-depth than that waits until I’m caught up with watching. This might make me weird, but I read reviews to enrich my understanding of the show, not as a preview of what I’ll see if I decide to watch it.

The review format I eventually settled on is a bit of a cheat. I repeat specific categories so I don’t have to re-invent the wheel every time I sit down to write, and also to sidestep actually crafting a single cohesive discussion of the show. Building bridges to get from one point to another is my least favorite part of writing, and thanks to my headings I never really have to do it. That work gets saved for the few shows I really love (or, theoretically, the few shows I really hate).

Because I’m a Hermione-style geek who feels the need to research everything ever, I also did a lot of reading of other people’s reviews when I was trying to formulate my own style. This was an opportunity to borrow what I liked and also helped me see what other people might find useful. (In retrospect, I hope my borrowing can be counted as taking inspiration and not plagiarizing.)

In my searching, I came across a few key types of blog posts that I really, really love reading.

• The syllabus. When I was first exploring Kdrama, my ultimate source of guidance was the Dramabeans rating page. The show descriptions here are so short and to the point that you might actually think they’re easy to write—but I bet you’d be wrong. As millions of Twitter users know all to well, brevity is hard. But as Shakespeare knew first, it’s also the soul of wit. Take Javabeans’ rating of the 2007 drama Air City: “Hot boys. Cold plot.” That kind of dispassionate restraint is hard, but these four words tell us all we need to know about the show. Whether they’re accurate, I couldn’t actually say: I took them to heart and skipped that drama altogether.

• The lab report. Some bloggers have literally turned reviewing into a science. Their reviews are full of graphs and complicated rating systems based on mathematical formulas that would make my old algebra teacher swoon with delight. Built around empirical backbones, these posts are straightforward and easy to navigate, and allow both writer and reader to focus on their particular points of interest. They also invite readers to compare dramas category by category and provide a standard format that can be expected from each new review. For particularly deft examples of this species, see any of the reviews at Daily KTJ Drama and Kdrama Guk (which seems to be inactive these days, sadly).

• The doctoral dissertation. Lengthy, insightful, and prone to referencing Foucault, reviews falling into this category are rare for good reason: they take forever to write and conceive. They plumb every smile and plot twist for meaning and significance, and can open your eyes to unimagined nuances in the simplest of scenes. As far as I'm concerned, there’s no pleasure like reading a downright scholarly discussion of a great show, like the ones found on Idle Revelry, The Vault, Mihansa, and High Yellow.

Like everything else in life, being obsessed with Korean drama is a mixed bag. I would get more exercise if I’d never discovered Drama Fever, but I probably wouldn’t be doing as much writing. While this blogging business doesn’t use my quads, it does give the critical thought center of my brain quite the workout—which is what I value more, anyway. Ultimately, blogging is hard work. It requires thought and effort and time, but its rewards can be pretty amazing: There’s the pleasure of being another voice in the communal discussion of something you love, and the ability to meet likeminded people from around the world. 

And who knows? Maybe it also refines our thinking and makes us smarter, just as Everything Bad Is Good for You would have us believe.

*** *** ***

SIDEBAR: BLOGGING PRINCE

When I first started reading Kdrama blogs, it amazed me that so many people had so many different things to say about the very same episodes. To appreciate the variety (and as an excuse to think more about my favorite show of all time), I went through the sites included on my list of Kdrama links and searched for posts devoted to Coffee Prince. 

Here’s what I found.

• Adverse Effects: Coffee Prince
• Candy Me: I Rate This Scene: Coffee Prince Episode 17

• Crazy for Kdrama: Coffee Prince Review

• Dahee’s Plastic Castle: 호점 Review

• Daily KTJ Drama: 2 Good 2 Miss: 2 Good 2 Miss: 1st Shop of CoffeePrince, Stand Up!!, 1 Litre of Tears

• Dangermousie: Coffee Prince Ramblings

• Ginkgohill: Coffee Prince Review

• Idle Revelry: Coffee Prince: Anatomy of a Scene

• Kdrama Food: Coffee Prince: Kalbitang (Beef-Rib Soup)
• Kdrama Guk: 1st Shop of a Coffee Prince

• Korean Drama Ratings: Coffee Prince

• K-What?: Coffee Prince

• Oishiithoughts: Coffee Prince Review

• Outside Seoul: Drama Review: Coffee Prince

• Puddingpost: Someday My Coffee Prince Will Come

• Rainscene: Coffee Prince: Living the dream of punching your boss in the face!

• Wishiwasasian: Day 1 of the 30-day Kdrama Challenge

A Post That Is Not Really a Post

I’ve gotten in the habit of posting every Tuesday and Thursday, but for some reason my drama-watching cycle is a bit off this week. This means I haven’t finished the show I would normally post a review for today, so out of guilt I instead give you an extremely short list of thoughts to ponder.

• I’m a huge lover of the music site 8tracks. And guess what came up this afternoon while I was innocently listening to a playlist tagged study? That would be the song “Crystal Flower” from the Goong soundtrack, buried among a huge clutch of sweeping instrumental soundtracks from random Western movies.

• Here are images outlining why I both love and hate Drama Fever.

Love: It’s sassy and sometimes snarky, as when its employees savaged Big during a recent blog podcast. See also:

Hate: Couldn’t they have waited for the body to be cold before they started running this advertisement on Google AdWords?

• Today is To the Beautiful You day. And there was much rejoicing!

• Also exciting? The premiere of Nice Guy sounds as if it was actually pretty good.

• Would the song titles on the Coffee Prince OST show up correctly on my car’s radio display if I had bought a Hyundai instead of a Honda?

New Feature: Drama Shorts

For quite some time now, I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with the old Currently Watching posts from this blog’s sidebar. They’re hard to read on the current archive page, so I toyed with the idea of relocating them to Twitter or Tumblr. (Both of which I hate for crotchety old woman reasons: What’s the world coming to when people think 140-character bursts of nothing and “reblogging” are creative output? Get off my lawn you pesky kids!).

Ultimately, though, I decided to inaugurate a new feature here: Drama Shorts. Tidied up into actual posts, the Currently Watching quips become speedy little overviews of all the dramas I watch, including ones that don’t get written about in more depth. They’re not particularly involved or insightful, but my rationalization is that sometimes you just want to know what you’re getting into when you start a new drama. When I finish watching a show I’ll create a new post for it and delete its entries from the Currently Watching sidebar.

Because I’ve got quite a backlog of this stuff—and because I’ve now officially stuck with this blog for six whole months, miracle of miracles—I’ve decided to celebrate by getting a little crazy and posting two Drama Shorts a day for this whole week. That’s the fruit of more than 160 hours of drama watching, horrifyingly enough (which translates into practically every minute of free time I've had since Christmas).

(P.S.  For me, Twitter’s entire existence is justified by this single account: Gosling Literary Agent.)