Blogging bloopers

It’s pretty absurd that I blog about Kdrama.

Before I started Outside Seoul, my exposure to things Korean was limited at best: A friend and I had once stood in front of the local Korean restaurant for about 15 seconds before turning around and leaving. (“Too authentic,” we whispered on the way to the car, dazed by a menu full of words we’d never seen before.) Also, I had read a book about Korean culture. (For a job I hated and left shortly thereafter.)

But knowing about Korea isn’t a requirement for loving Korean dramas. Their concerns are universal—love and family and a hunger for connection aren’t things that exist in only one language or one culture. Things might be a little confusing in the beginning (“Oppa? What’s an Oppa?”), but the more you watch, the more you understand. Which is pretty darn awesome—while we Western viewers are  swooning over Song Yi and Min Joon, we’re also learning about another culture’s values, traditions, and way of life. 

By 2012, I’d been obsessively watching Korean dramas for more than two years. I had probably seen more than a hundred of them: I knew the actors, I knew the tropes, I knew the trends. I thought I had everything figured out, and was sure I’d never again be mystified by what I saw on screen. But then I watched Queen In Hyun’s Man, and I realized I was a fool. When a character appeared with a yellow piece of paper with red writing on it, I had no idea what it meant. It wasn’t until I read the Dramabeans recap of the episode that I realized it was a magical talisman. It struck me then that even with my insanely prolific viewing of Kdrama, I had barely scratched the surface when it came to Korean television and culture. 

As a blogger, this means I’m always writing about things I don’t fully understand. I don’t think this is any reason for me to stop, though. There’s value in seeing things with new eyes; like the subtitle says, this is Korean drama from the outside in. I’m learning more every day, and the dramaweb and well-informed people who comment here is one of the big reasons why.

But over the years, I’ve posted some pretty silly things on this blog. In honor of the recently passed Festivus season, I thought I’d take this opportunity to highlight a few of them.

Drama Review: Answer Me 1994 (2013)

Grade: A-

Category

Romantic comedy

What it’s about

A group of college students from the countryside move to Seoul, where they live in a homestay and share friendships, romances, and the pains and pleasures of growing up.

First impression

I’m a little torn going into this series. I loved its predecessor—the similar but largely unrelated drama Answer Me 1997—so much that I had to take a week off in the middle of watching it, and not just because sad things were happening on screen. I identified so completely with obsessed fangirl Shi Won that it was actually hard to watch. The scene at Tony oppa’s house nearly killed me because it so closely matched my own 1997-era fandom, which was probably the last thing I expected from a show about Kpop, a musical genre I wouldn’t know existed for more than a decade. But Kdrama sequels have a terrible reputation and I’ve heard lots of unhappy commentary about this show’s resolution. Plus, I hate all organized sports with a fiery passion. Can I possibly love a drama about a basketball fan, even if it’s the follow-up to one my favorite shows of all time?

Final verdict

This sweet, funny drama is full of nostalgic charm. Just don’t watch it expecting another Answer Me 1997—in spite of their many similarities, the two shows are fundamentally different in a lot of ways.

Drama Trends of 2013

In 2012, I somehow managed to watch every Korean series that I was remotely interested in, and then write this gigantic year-end post about their many similarities. This year it’s a different story: Thanks to a more demanding job and my discovery of Tumblr, I saw far fewer dramas.

I still couldn’t help noticing some common themes, though. So here’s a doubtlessly incomplete list of things that made the pop-culture rounds in Korea this year.

Drama Review: White Christmas (2011)

Grade: A

Category

High school thriller

What it’s about

Prompted by a mysterious letter, seven students spend winter break at their posh boarding school instead of returning home. As a huge snowstorm cuts the school off from the rest of the world, they attempt to decode the letter and uncover its sender. But a series of terrifying events makes them afraid they may not live long enough to do either.

First impression

Creepy and compelling.

Final verdict

This is a tricky drama to write about without totally spoiling your reader. In the course of its eight-episode running time, it morphs from a story about a schoolyard secret to an adult mystery, and then to a fight for the survival of body and soul. So here’s the key piece of information you need to know: You should watch it.

Most everything about White Christmas is beautifully, thoughtfully done. From its twisty, turny script and gorgeous cinematography to its surprisingly capable acting, this show is a striking break from the workaday norm. It uses its tiny cast and remote setting to grapple with serious issues we all confront every day, touching on isolation versus community, fear versus trust, nature versus nurture, and crime versus punishment.

The Breakfast Club with bullets, White Christmas takes as its starting point the typical high school stereotypes: there’s the brain, the freak, the bully, and the rebel. But instead of stopping with these skin-deep categories, it turns its characters into flesh and blood beings with their own idiosyncrasies and motivations. (Standouts include the drug-addled “Angel,” the dispassionate genius, and the rule-breaking bad boy.) The show then proceeds to push each of its creations to their spectacular breaking points, using their terrible circumstances to both draw them together and tear them apart.

White Christmas is not without some logic fails and loose ends, but most of them are fairly easily overlooked. As far as I’m concerned, it does have an Achilles’ heel: Its stakes. All these strapping young men would have been a real force to reckon with if they ever got their act together and used physical aggression against someone other than themselves. But that never happened, a fact that was made extra frustrating by the show’s relatively toothless big bad. This character felt sanitized for television, and he never seemed to deserve the panicked reactions he received. In spite of what happened off screen, he didn’t presented the visceral, mortal peril that would have ratcheted his scenes from unsettling to terrifying. This quibble receded as the show progressed, though, and it became clear that the big bad was just the beginning of the evils White Christmas had set out to explore.

By its shocking finale, some of the show’s questions may be answered, but you’ll still be thinking about them for a long time to come.

A note on sources

Although I swear it would be a boon to Korea as a nation for this show to be available on every streaming site out there, it’s actually incredibly hard to find. The illegal sites carry it, but you will loose out enormously if you watch it at anything less than HD quality. It’s theoretically carried by the pay website Mvibo, which has a ten-day free preview option. (Good luck with it, though—on the rare occasion I can get their website to work, I find their service lacking in pretty much every way.) The only other (scarily illegal) option for watching is downloading a torrent, either from d-addicts.com or Asia Torrents.

Random thoughts

Because this was a nontraditional watch, none. Check out my detailed thoughts on the first four episodes here and one tiny Tumblr post about the rest of the show.

 

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The 2nd Annual Go Dok Mi Memorial Wish List

Dear Drama Overlords,

Another year has passed, and once again I spent an absurd amount of time watching and writing about your mighty works. In this light, I feel entitled to make a few small requests this holiday season. So here’s my 2014 wish list, which should be considered a supplement to the 2013 wish list you essentially ignored. (Although I suppose that it’s possible the character of Young Do was created specifically to punish me for requesting that the second lead get the girl for a change?)

Boxing Day Marathon: White Christmas

Although most Korean dramas are bite-sized compared to American television shows, they still tend to be too long for a true marathon—at more than 16 episodes, it’s actually a punishing experience to watch one from beginning to end in a few days. (Not that I haven’t done it.)

But 2011’s White Christmas is a different story: as part of KBS’s series of drama shorts, it’s only eight hours long. This well-reviewed miniseries is an atmospheric thriller detailing the horrible events that happen when a group of students stay at their demanding boarding school over winter break. Nowadays, White Christmas is especially notable for its casting. Among other familiar faces, it includes early career appearances from both Kim Woo Bin (my beloved Choi Young Do from Heirs) and Sung Joon (star of Shut Up: Flower Boy Band and the upcoming I Need Romance 3.)

As today is the first day of my own winter break that I actually have to myself without family or work responsibilities, I thought I’d use it for a true marathon. I’ll post updates and thoughts here as I go.

Note that the discussion of episodes 1 and 2 are fairly spoiler free, but from here on out I’m going to chart my theories about what’s going on. So if you don’t want to be spoiled, tread carefully!

My (carbon copy) Love from Another Star

I sometimes think originality is overrated.

It’s a pretty standard assumption that the first is always the best, and that everything following afterward is a pale imitation. We think originators are motivated by the pure and noble spirit of creativity, while imitators are motivated by a failure of imagination or—even worse—money. As someone who has watched Jaws, Orca, and Piranha, I can say without reservation that this is sometimes true.

The more I watch Korean drama, though, the more I see an alternate interpretation: things can also start off as rough and unpolished, and repetition can be the thing that smoothes out the sharp edges and actually makes them good.

Take the recent spate of supernatural dramas. One of the leaders of the pack was 2012’s Operation Proposal, which was barely watchable. Its time travel device was ridiculous, its plot wafer thin, and its storyline frustratingly repetitive. Again and again, the main characters did the same stupid things and got the same stupid results. Since that show aired, many others have played with time, and each has had its own failures and successes. But it wasn’t until early 2013 that Kdrama finally created a truly great show on the theme of time travel—Nine. And Nine was so good not because it was some magical, pathbreaking innovation; it was so good because it learned the lessons of the shows that had failed before it. The mind-numbing back-and-forth of Operation Proposal was suddenly exciting in Nine. The underused murder mystery of Rooftop Prince became the star of the show.The bizarre baby-in-a-jar time travel device of Dr. Jin turned into suitably mystical (and portable) sticks of Tibetan incense. The impact-free relocation of Faith’s heroine became a dangerous game that changed both past and future. And the logic fail ending of Queen In Hyun’s Man became a set of internal rules for time travel that were almost flawlessly obeyed, guiding Nine’s story instead of falling victim to it.

And now there’s My Love from Another Star. (Or You Who Came from the Stars. Whatever you call it, I’m sure you agree its title is ridiculous.) Its central premise may not be as easily categorized as some Korean dramas, but it draws so heavily on other shows that its script almost qualifies as an act of remixing.

This might sound like less than a good thing. But Korean dramas are the magpies of the entertainment world—they borrow and reiterate and reconfigure and end up with something even better than their intact raw materials were. Scenes used again and again develop their own emotional resonance, building a giant, interlocking web of references that encompass a thousand dramas that came before them. From the fade-to-white death scene to the Dramatic U-Turn (tm), Korean dramas are full of what Tumblr user This Won’t Be Big on Dignity recently called “visual tropes and metaphors; universally understood coded content.” That code was developed over years of repetition, and it serves Kdrama—and us—well.

For the sake of appreciation, here are some of the borrowings I’ve noticed in My Love from Another Star.