What do you do when you’re recovering from hand surgery, you can’t engage in your normal activities of writing and drawing, it’s winter and too cold to go anywhere fun, you want to escape your own banal existence, and you’re damn near bored out of your own mind? Netflix it is.
Netflix hounded me with its promotion of Extraordinary Attorney Woo. I’d just finished watching two Japanese anime series—one of which I liked (Forest of Piano), the other I loved (Blue Period)—and wasn’t quite ready to return to the English speaking culture, American, British, or others.
So I gave Extraordinary Attorney Woo one episode to see if I liked it. One episode became a binge, which led to another Kdrama, and another and another to a certified addiction. I’ve been obsessing ever since.
Why?
Because I fell in love. I fell in love with the premise, the story, the acting, and the actors themselves. I became deeply involved with the emotional story line: I cheered, laughed, cringed, hated the antagonist, fell in love with the male lead, and cried through boxes and boxes of tissues.
(Seriously, all Kang Tae-oh did in Extraordinary Attorney Woo was flash a smile and I was all in, looking for other dramas he’d been in. Park Eun-bin is no slouch, either. I soon followed Extraordinary Attorney Woo with The King's Affection and it took me several episodes before it dawned on me that the female lead was Park Eun-bin. She’s got some serious acting chops! (And then I fell for Rowoon—or, “Swoon Rowoon,” as I call him, and had to know more about his acting career. But that’s another blog post.)
Simultaneously, my intellectual curiosity exploded with questions about how Kdrama stories are told, how the craft of storytelling differs from Western cinematic norms; about South Korean culture itself, its history, its mythology and folktales, and the phenomenon of South Korean entertainment. My curiosity kicked into overdrive—I just had to know. And the best way to know was to watch Kdramas and follow my nose about the things that piqued my interest.
My brain split in two: the escape into a drama's emotional story, and the intellectual exploration into craft and culture.
I love the craft of cinematic storytelling. I’ve written scripts and it’s probably the hardest form of storytelling there is (for many reasons, which I won’t get into here). There’s the story arc, character arc, plot twists, and there’s an unwritten contract with the audience, which differs depending on the movie genre. But there’s also an unconscious connection with our own cultural norms and mores.
Also, I love experiencing different cultures and understanding how traditions, values, beliefs, history, and social norms shape the way we express ourselves and how we perceive and interact with the world. I love that, biologically, we are all the same and we all have the same emotions (and storytelling is an emotional journey). What really differentiates us from one another is not our physical features, but our cultures.
Kdramas became a journey. I got carried away with the story and emotions, but as I watched, I was also simultaneously captivated with questions about how South Korea perceives itself and what it’s projecting onto the global Hallyu community. (Hallyu is a Chinese term that, when translated literally, means “Korean Wave”. It refers to the global popularity of South Korea’s music, TV shows, and movies.) Various series have addressed suicide, bullying, marriage and the role of women, the effects of AI and the 4th Industrial Revolution, single parents, and touched upon same-sex relationships.
Even so, what does it mean when a character starts hiccuping? What are the physical signs that someone is interested in another? What does it mean when a male protagonist’s hair goes from over the forehead to combed back or vice versa? Why is there so much drinking? What about fate, destiny, emotional traumas, reincarnation, myths, and superstitions? And what is it about white feathers?
I want to share the series that I’ve seen and enjoyed, loved, and appreciated. I also want to explore with you some of South Korea’s culture as it is expressed in Kdramas.
©2024 Caitlyn Frost. All rights reserved.
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