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:
