K-Dramas: A Guilty Pleasure
Yesterday was my mum’s birthday and we went out for a family dinner to celebrate. That’s an excuse for missing things explained here, the actual reason being me getting completely and lethally into a K-drama (Korean Drama, for the uninitiated). To be fair though, I’ve drunk enough water to pee at least 4 times in the day and did extremely well in the daily crossword here (56%! See if you can match my score!), so that’s a 50% of keeping-up-rate.
Also, hello stranger! (yes, you with the iPhone…) I checked the stats a while ago, and saw there was one lone reader when I expected none for the inaugural post. It was a real thump-thump moment since this is where everything gets bared and I get vulnerable. Anyway, K-dramas.
I got introduced to K-drama when I was living in Chennai temporarily for an internship. A roommate was way into them and the Curious-Cat came over me and I shared some of what she had. It was new and novel — I had already seen American, British and Japanese TV and Korean was a whole new chapter to cover. Of course I dived headfirst into them and it was my major source of entertainment during the entire 6-month internship — K-dramas, K-pop, Reality TV shows, Music videos, the whole deal.
The first ever K-drama I’d seen was Boys Over Flowers, which any veteran will tell you that though highly popular among fans, is not that great. It was the usual candy-floss-fluff with the most stereotypical of characters and tropes which I learnt I’d be recognizing in most rom-com K-dramas. It was fun and an experience with so much insight of what Koreans consume for entertainment, who the dramas are aimed at in the country, the major differences from Indian TV soaps and the American and British TV shows that I’d been used to so far.
A couple of highly popular, yet low rated (I didn’t know at the time, besides I didn’t have any choice) dramas followed and I assumed from my limited viewing that over-the-top emoting, extreme tropes (rich-arrogant-guy & poor-hard-working-girl, nosy-shipping-ajhummas, a broody the-one-you-actually-root-for second lead, annoying noisy younger sisters/friends) and cheesy music characterized K-dramas.
Until I came across Coffee Prince. I’d also discovered the site Dramabeans, which recaps, reviews, interviews and podcasts everything about the K-drama world around the same time. Coffee Prince is one of those dramas with an interesting plot that has been handled delicately and portrayed excellently. Through Dramabeans’ recommendation, I discovered Dream High (inspiring) and Goong (so pretty and candy-floss cute!).
I liked watching them because they provided a small window into how life is like in South Korea. How the people lived, the different strata of classes and how each interacted and inter-played with each other, their city and the weathers, what they found good, beautiful, respectable vs what was shunned or unpopular, the ‘chaebol’ and use of ‘banmal’, the customs and little habits that are taken for granted but can be symbolic in a plot-twist because of how important they are…
The different TV shows aired in a country can be a pointer towards the demographic — their likes and dislikes, the conventions and the unspoken ‘rules’ that everyone accepts there but can be strange to foreigners. I concede that a major portion of it is untrue. No movie or TV show is a realistic portrayal of life: every other family’s life is not thrown into turmoil because of murders or falling economies, not every rich-person-poor-person cross paths so many times that they fall in love with each other. Things like friendships or marriage arrangements happen pretty much the same anywhere barring local traditions or customs that differ. But the untrue elements point towards the fantasies of the people, the target demographic of the particular drama — in the form of eye-candy, the clothes they wear, or the kind of people that are the leads or villains.
In my watching of entertainment from different places in different languages, I’ve noticed a pattern — Western TV (North America and the UK) vastly differs from Asian TV (Indian, Japanese, Korean). (Sidenote: There is a noticeable shift in entertainment aimed at housewives, or older people in India vs that for the youth, as majority of the youngsters have gotten used to watching American TV.) There’s some similarity in the TV soaps of India and the dramas of S.E.Asia that are aimed at similar audiences (housewives and young girls) in that both of them are pretty dramatic, emphasized on emotions of the characters and are serialized. There’s also some common character tropes. But the similarities end there.
I don’t always watch K-dramas, not a hardcore fan, but it represents a phase of my life that I’d like to escape to every once a while when life gets hard. It’s similar to listing a particular kind of music or eating comfort food or watching Saturday morning cartoons. I escape to the time when I discovered them, when I was living on my own completely for the first ever time while my parents were away in a different country, while I had to make all brand new friends, learn a whole different language and find a brand new routine. And I love being a stranger in a strange-land.
The heroines and other characters may be unrealistic tropes, but they sure do feel like a friend while going through the trails and tribulations of their own drama-world. And for that reason, I keep coming back for just a bit more, once in a while.
Until tomorrow then!
