clothes ( Heartless City, City Hunter, Personal Taste, Master’s Sun)Īnd I’m sure there are a thousand and one other examples from the series listed above and other series available.giving each other canned drinks (All of the above mentioned series except Heartless City – no cheap canned drinks for them… only Bourbon in fancy glass bottles).necklaces ( I Can Hear Your Voice Heartless City Pinocchio Master’s Sun).Handphones ( Heartless City Pinocchio).Narratives and especially romance plots, seem to narrow down to a prop that changes hands even when there’s no real need for it. The Gift-giving Language of Love is privileged. I suppose this means if we want to talk about a flip on the Laura Mulvey concept of the Male Gaze and the cinema, instead of looking at Magic Mike XXL (2015) and saying that it still presents the male body as a triumph of athleticism without lowering its status to a slab of meat to be ogled by women the way female bodies are ogled by men on screen, we should totally be looking at K-dramas to establish this point.Ģ. Isn’t it also strange that these dramas are coming out of countries with very traditional and very conservative patriarchal societies like Japan and S. This becomes especially significant when you think about how the spectacle of male suffering is put on display by women writers for women audiences. (Getting shot in the shoulder trying to flee from your sort of love interest who doesn’t know it’s you in City Hunter) (Getting stabbed and then having to sew yourself back up… in Heartless City) And surprisingly (ok, maybe not that surprisingly), physical trauma dealt to male characters usually come in the form of penetration by various implements such as knives and bullets. In a lot of these dramas, male characters are brought low by overpowering external or societal circumstance and made to suffer both psychologically and physically. I swear I look like that when it happens too… There’s even the green glow.) More than that, I think what’s key in a lot of these dramas is male suffering. We want to see that our mere presence could unsettle and disrupt a character that’s normally portrayed as stoic and cool, calm and collected, and generally on top of things and in control because, hell, it’s empowering. obligatory shower scenes for the male characters where we get to ogle their hot bods living together scenes at his place where we get to see the normally calm and unflappable male character get flustered male characters getting injured/sick and abusedĪs a female viewer, we want the guy to be hot and the girl to be completely average so we can seamlessly insert ourselves into her place and make-believe that a guy like that is totally within our reach without having to feel like we have to go out of our way to look like supermodels before we can snag a hot guy.I’ll concede sometimes they have cool qualities too like Park Kae-in in Personal Taste who’s the only character who actually gets offered a job and completes it with aplomb… And I can’t think of any other female character from the 5 dramas listed above that I like All the guys are abs-tastic and the women are average-looking, silly, bumbling, over-dramatic, irrational, indecisive, and generally more trouble than they’re worth, but they get the guy anyway.And I didn’t need to do any research to figure this out. I am also aware that these personal observations are based on a very, very small sample of all the marvelous offerings from the weird and wonderful world of K-drama so if I extrapolate something about the genre as a whole, please know that I know that it is a biased opinion as well.ġ. I feel like at this point there should be a disclaimer that these are just my personal thoughts on K-drama and that I mean no offense to anyone if I rag too hard on a series. And by tactical retreat, I mean I couldn’t finish the series for a myriad of reasons. Given the group of friends I hang out with these days, and the one class on Asian Media and Pop Culture I’ve been auditing in school, I’ve been strongly encouraged to revisit my teenage fascination with dramas.Īnd so far, I’ve conquered, and by conquered I mean completed in full, Master’s Sun (2013, 17 episodes), Pinocchio (2014 – 2015, 20 episodes), Personal Taste (2010, 16 episodes), and Heartless City (2013, 20 episodes).Īnd conducted a tactical retreat from My Love from Another Star (2013-2014, 21 episodes), I Can Hear Your Voice (2013, 18 episodes), City Hunter (2011, 20 episodes). So… I’ve been watching an embarrassing amount of K-drama lately.
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