The Best K-Dramas to Watch If You Love the Friends-to-Lovers Trope
One of my favourite tropes and there’s so many gems to watch!
If you’ve been following me for a while, you know I love K-dramas. They provide so much satisfaction: incredible romance tropes, stunning actors, and 16-episode seasons that (most of the time) provide perfect closure and a happy ending.
One of my favourite romance tropes is friends-to-lovers and K-dramas deliver on this trope very well! Here’s a few of my favourites:
More Than Friends (2020)
More Than Friends is one of my most re-watched K-dramas. I absolutely love it and it’s the one responsible for me becoming a huge fan of Ong Seong-wu.
In this K-drama, Kyung Woo-yeon (Shin Ye-eun) and Lee Soo (Ong Seong-wu) are friends from highschool. Flash forward 10 years, and Woo-yeon has been harbouring a secret crush on Lee Soo for their entire friendship. She’s working now as a calligrapher and doing short-term, part-time jobs to make ends meet, and Lee Soo is a famous photographer. They keep in touch and Woo-yeon is able to keep a lid on her feelings because they see each other fairly infrequently — until, that is, Lee Soo decides to move back to home, throwing him back into her orbit.
What I love about this particular friends-to-lovers drama is watching Lee Soo finally realise his true feelings for Woo-yeon. His character is somewhat serious and a bit on the cold side, not really open to love at all. Ong Seong-wu plays the role so well. There’s also a gorgeous cast of friends — who have quietly known all along how both Woo-yeon and Lee Soo felt about each other — who have their own storylines to get invested in.
Fight For My Way (2017)
Confession: I love Park Seo-joon. He’s my favourite actor and he plays the most LOVEABLE himbo in Fight For My Way. Four friends move from a small town to Seoul to follow their dreams. Park Seo-joon is Ko Dong-man, a former taekwondo player and now martial arts fighter; Kim Ji-won is Choi Ae-ra, who works at a department store but dreams of becoming an announcer; and their friends Kim Joon-man (Ahn Jae-hong) and Baek Sol-hee (Song Ha-yoon) are in a long-term relationship and perhaps the most successful of their group with permanent positions working for a home shopping network.
Personally, I wouldn’t say this is the most romantic friends-to-lovers stories — but I’d definitely say it’s one of the more realistic and actually takes a backseat to the overarching narrative that is the four friends working to realise their dreams. And it, I think, brilliantly shows the awkwardness that comes from being friends with someone for decades and navigating sudden romantic feelings. Park Seo-joon and Kim Ji-Won give an excellent performance!
Romance Is a Bonus Book (2019)
One of these days I will write a whole separate article about why I love Romance Is a Bonus Book so much — another of my most rewatched and actually the friends-to-lovers trope is only a tiny reason why I do. Anyway. My love letter to this K-drama is coming soon!
This gorgeous drama is set in a publishing house, and stars Lee Jong-suk as writer and editor-in-chief, Cha Eun-ho, and Lee Na-young as his best friend Kang Dan-i — recently divorced and navigating discrimination as she tries to re-enter the workforce as a single mum. Eun-ho has had a crush on her since they were kids — but Dan-i has always seen him as her ‘younger pal’ rather than a love interest. There’s a kind of fabulous love triangle (square?) that develops as the drama progresses and it’s just so fun and beautiful watching Eun-ho look out for Dan-i and watching Dan-i slowly start to fall for Eun-ho.
Absolutely worth a watch — especially if you love books! This K-drama is as much a love letter to reading and books as it is about Eun-ho and Dani’s romance.
The Reply series (2012–2016)
The Reply series is one of the most well-known, highly rated Korean dramas — made up of three standalone dramas: Reply 1997, Reply 1994 and Reply 1988. All three serve up friends-to-lovers goodness with a distinctly retro backdrop, and revolve around groups of friends and/or neighbours. The series flash back and forth between the characters’ time growing up in the 80s and 90s, and where they are in the present day as 30-somethings — and for extra fun, you’ll be guessing the whole way along which of the characters actually do make the leap from friends to lovers (there’s always somewhat of a love triangle in there, kept deliberately mysterious).
Each series is special in it’s own way, but my favourite is Reply 1988. It stars Lee Hye-ri and Deok-sun and she’s got a posse of four male best friends — they’ve all grown up together in the same neighbourhood. As the friends get older, feelings start to blossom and I remember being so torn as to whether I shipped Deok-sun marrying Jung-hwan (Ryu Jun-yeol), her moody and sarcastic neighbour (who is actually a teddybear on the inside) or Choi Taek (Park Bo-gum), her very shy, very introverted friend who just happens to be a very successful Go player.
There are of course many others I could recommend, and I’m sure there will be many more K-dramas to premiere that deliver on the friends-to-lovers trope.
What’s your favourite friends-to-lovers K-drama? As always, I am open to recommendations — leave me a comment below.
And if you’re after more K-drama content, check out the Most-Anticipated K-dramas of 2024:
Or have a peruse through this handy list of all my K-drama content on Medium:
