K-Dramas and Filling the Rom-Com Void
A look at the rise of K-Dramas in the fallout of the Rom-Com's brutal death.
Spoiler Alert! Mild Spoilers for Crash Landing on You
Hello everyone and welcome to the first issue of Keeping Up with the K-Dramas! I’ve truly been shocked and incredibly happy that so many of you decided to subscribe! I was so shocked in fact that I felt extra motivated to sit down, write, and rush this thing to the digital presses a little earlier than I had planned! It truly means so much to me that anyone would want to hear anything I have to say, so all I can say is thank you so much for feeding my ego and I really hope you all enjoy!
So, as I mentioned in my Issue 0, this week I will be talking about my theory on the boom in popularity of K-Dramas that has sort of been going on for the past 10 years or so. I want each and every one of you know to know that this theory is maybe only partially based on things that are known to be true about the world of media (gotta put that Film degree to use somewhere) and the last little bit is going to be a little more focused on the unending hell-scape of a world we find ourselves in and the sociological factors that — in my mind — have influenced what sort of media we all consume. I’ll also be drawing a little bit on my own life and experience because I think the appeal that these dramas have to me, are similar to the larger trend at play — and like I said, I’ve gotta feed my ego :)
The first thing I want to do is set the mood. Imagine you’re bopping in the car to Ke$ha’s “Tik Tok,” on your way to see James Cameron’s Avatar for the third time [one of the most underrated films of all time, especially given it’s box office records]. That’s right folks, it’s the year 2010 and things seem great in the world. The reason we’re starting here is because this was a pretty strange time for Hollywood. Marvel movies have yet to really make the cannon-ball style splash that they would make a couple years later with Avengers and the Disney-Lucasfilm deal is still a couple years away as well meaning that the trajectory of Hollywood’s productions is still somewhat up in the air because Disney hasn’t swallowed up everything yet.
Studios are only just beginning to catch on to the idea of franchises as a whole, and are throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. There’s a big, short-lived Young Adult boom with your Harry Potter’s, Hunger Games’, and Twilight’s; your animation movies are doing pretty well; and there are a slew of other big budget type films that are routinely being green-lit in the hopes of finding the next big thing. As we know, superheroes and Star Wars are going to be those things, because, capitalism is going to capitalism, but the other, more interesting phenomenon is what begins to disappear from theaters.
Those films being the mid-budget (about $40-80 million) ones in the genres of romantic comedy and classic studio comedy. The pretty apparent reason for this is basically that the movie market went global. Hollywood started seeing dollar signs in their eyes as they looked at countries like China and this led to films to being big hits domestically and overseas. Fairly understandably, those aforementioned, mid-budget films that could be categorized as comedies do not translate too well to the international markets. As the cherry on top, some pretty big flops in the rom-com department brought to you by people like Katherine Heigl, the stake was slowly being driven through the heart of the rom-com right before our very eyes.
As a brief aside, American television maybe could have been seen as a natural replacement to what was lost in the film world, standard comedies had always done well, but rom-coms never really have been a huge feature of Western television’s oeuvre and the “Golden Age of Television” never really picked this up either, opting for more dark, gritty, anti-hero style stories. Your Breaking Bad’s, Mad Men’s, and so on. With this seemingly all media abandoning the rom-com and heading in a more cynical, somewhat nihilist direction, I think it left a lot of people wanting something else from their media and that is where our little friend, the k-drama, comes in.
Before I continue on, I do want to also acknowledge the other big factor in all of this: streaming! As streaming became more and more. . . mainstream (I’m so fucking funny) . . . it obviously made access to our shows and movies much more accessible allowing those damn capitalists to . . . capitalize (another homerun). . . on untapped markets. So what we have at this early 2010s moment is a media landscape that is changing extremely fast and as Netflix starts shifting to original programming in the later 2010s, we start to see more and more of these non-western options in our recommends.
To marry the two points I just made about the proliferation of streaming and the rom-com being Old Yeller’d, I’m going to get a little bit personal, because frankly, the reason I got into k-dramas at all was for a fairly personal reason. I also don’t want to pretend I have any sort of academic reading on why or even when exactly it was that k-dramas started getting popular so I can only go with my gut.
Now, we’re time traveling back once again. This time to the year 2018 — a year that seems like a literal lifetime ago. I daresay that this was the toughest year of my life. I had just graduated college in the winter of 2017 and had moved back home to my suburbanish/ruralish hometown after attending university (yeah, I’m fancy and say university) in DC. As I mentioned earlier, I had a degree in Film so you can probably guess what my career/job options were and I had basically moved back on what I thought was going to be just a short 3 months until I scampered off to Los Angeles or wherever and find a job. Well let’s just say those 3 months turned into 18 and an Alison that was 180 pounds turned into one the was 230 pounds. Yeah folks, we’re talking depression :)
After graduating college I just felt so completely lost as a person. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do — still don’t — and I just didn’t really know who the fuck I was as a person — working on this one, though! Almost 3 years later I pretty fully understand why I felt that way at the time, but at the time, I just didn’t know how to deal with it so I think I ate my way through it a little bit (oops). I don’t remember exactly the thing that pulled me out of this dark period, but this was definitely the period that I watched my first ever k-drama: Hello, My Twenties (aka Age of Youth). I don’t want to go into it to much here cause I definitely want to devote some future issues to looking at that show, but I remember connecting so much with this show because well, I was in my early twenties just like all the main characters and you sort of get to just see them live their lives and be friends.
Before that dark period of my life, I had been an extremely emotionally closed off person who never cried and never really felt anything, so you can imagine being struck with this overwhelming sense of suffering was like. Shows like Age of Youth forced me to confront what I was experiencing in my own life because during that time I was mostly using TV and video games to help me disassociate. That was also me only dipping my toe in to the k-drama pool because before I knew it, I found myself pulling myself out of a 9 month long depression. I found a part-time job, I started exercising and eating healthier and before I knew it, I was on a plane to Japan weighing 160 pounds — take that depression and maybe an undiagnosed eating disorder.
I mentioned last time that I was trans and this is the portion of the story where that comes in to play. As I said, after I graduated college, I was still extremely lost in terms of who I was. I didn’t have a ton of friends, no relationships to speak of, and just a very insecure person. Insecure about my gender specifically. I truly never engaged with the thought that I might be trans until January of last year while I was living in Japan but as soon as I even started questioning a little bit, I knew it was true. But before all that, when I had initially moved out there, I thought it was like a fresh start: new country, new me. But after being there for a few months, I felt my old habits start to creep in and this is where I really started to dip more into k-dramas because whether or I knew it or not, in my subconscious there was something stewing.
Seeing more and more dramas over my time in Japan really helped figure out how I was feeling because, as I said, I really hadn’t been engaging in a lot of that feeling thing. Luckily I was able to pull myself out the first time, but as I look back on it now, I may have actually gotten out of it by repressing things even further. So when I found myself in Japan with my fresh start and all, slipping back into that, I got really worried. If I didn’t want to go back to that place, I would need to start confronting some things about myself and the dramas helped a little bit. I would watch something with an insecure, lonely character and then seeing them as they learn to love themselves and be happy with another person. I wanted that more than anything in the world but I just didn’t know how. I’d ask myself why I can’t learn to love myself. I got there eventually. I was reading stories of other trans people — which may as well have been written by me because our experiences were so eerily similar — and it just finally clicked. Smash cut to me landing back in the US in March of 2020 and then starting hormone replacement therapy in April and that’s when ——————————
THIS IS THE CENTER FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND WE INTERRUPT THIS PROGRAMMING TO WARN YOU ABOUT THE NOVEL CORONAVIRUS
Ah yes, and then the pandemic hit. We love it folks. You’re just starting to get your shit together when the shit starts hitting the fan. I’m over-exaggerating a little here because the last 9 or 10 months have actually been a pretty positive overall experience but the shittiness of the the overall situation stands. But even in this small amount of time through the pandemic and everything, I’m really grateful that I have really been able to reevaluate myself as a person.
I mentioned that I didn’t experience a ton of emotions and want to elaborate on that a little further. Before my body had the healing power of estrogen pumping through it, my ability to experience emotions, good or bad, was akin to looking through a pinhole but once that shit hit my bloodstream, I was an absolute mess. When my hormones finally leveled out, the highs were high and the lows were low (but a different type of low than the misery I was feeling before). With my newfound emotional range and a whole new lease on life, I decided to head to the deep end of the k-drama pool and fully explore them!
Ok, the last few paragraphs were a lot about me, but this is where I am going to start tying things together. Essentially, now that I was starting to finally build a sense of self that I wanted and felt good about, I began thinking about what comes after my transition? What is life then? Well I didn’t really know, but I did know what I enjoyed watching on my tv for hours at a time and it wasn’t anything that was being produced in the west. I put on my critical thinking cap and started to try and figure out what was it about a lot of the stuff being produced that just didn’t speak to me and why the stuff out of Korea was so refreshing. Part of it, was definitely the burnout of watching just one cynical thing after another. I mentioned Breaking Bad and Mad Men earlier as examples and I do think they fit the very mold of the prestige TV era that I have come to be less interested in.
Like, Breaking Bad, is a show about a guy getting cancer and realizing he didn’t really do anything with his life so he decides to cook meth to make some money for his family. Good! We love to see it! Everyone loves a family man. But the show then becomes about seeking power and money and all that. Not to say it isn’t good or anything, just at this point in my life, I don’t feel particularly connected to that sort of story. Directly juxtapose that against a k-drama that is first of all, usually only one season — love a small commitment — and second of all, dealing with emotions that are much more accessible, not just to me in my unique experience, but to a whole slew of, I don’t know — normal human beings that feel lonely, isolated, lost, or whatever other feelings they might have. To see Se-Ri in Crash Landing on You not only fall in love, but also find friendship while being stranded in North Korea, is yeah, on one level an extremely absurd scenario, but on another, just the most relatable thing ever. I literally cried typing that by the way :)
To relate that back to the whole rom-com thing, it is just sort of a type of story that I think has been pushed out of the popular culture. I don’t want to say it doesn’t exist here at all because there are a lot of really great independent films that I think hit closer to the spirit of a rom-com or a k-drama, but obviously those films are harder to find and watch. Compare that to the 80s and 90s when movie stars are literally being forged in rom-coms. It’s hard to tell where we would be at right now if the rom-com hadn’t been put to death, but I do think that the void left behind by their absence has been partially filled by k-dramas. There’s obviously a growing community here in the West and I think it will continue to grow as people’s media diets are becoming increasingly hegemonic and we scoop up all the cool kids looking to be hipsters and rebel against the monoculture.
But beyond just being cool, why do we find ourselves here watching k-dramas? To go a little more broad, I think a lot of us find ourselves in a declining society looking for some sort of escape into a world that is a little bit more in line with what we want. Lives in American (and some other western countries) are becoming more precarious, people aren’t fucking, people aren’t having kids. I feel like a lot of people are choosing career over family and I don’t mean this in a negative way, it’s just fact that as people’s lives are becoming even more attached to their ability to make money in this world, what place do things like family and love really have beyond companies trying to monetize that like Tinder?
Well, obviously the reality is that we all actually do value those things and we all probably deep down value the relationships in our lives a lot more than our jobs. What it boils down to is that we are all searching for happiness in our own ways and for some of us that beautifully crafted world where two flawed people learn to love themselves and each other is a glimpse at what true happiness might be in our own lives because our own lives are even more complicated, so if the western media apparatus isn’t going to do a great job at satisfying that need, well the k-dramas can do that!
Whew. I wrote a lot more than I think I was planning to but it all kind of just spilled out of me. I hope that everything came across as coherent but I think I did an okay job. Oh! I also wanted to point out that today I mostly had in mind the sort of romantic k-drama. There’s obviously a whole slew of various types of shows, but I figured that the rom-com and romantic k-drama comparison seemed obvious and let’s be honest, those are the best ones anyways!
Before I say goodbye, I wanted to throw a few ideas out about what you all would like to read in the future because I don’t want this to just be me as some sort of authoritarian peddling out newsletters about things that you all don’t want to hear about!
So there are a ton of shows that I want to talk about for sure. Some that are currently airing like Run On and Lovestruck in the City. And then a slew of back catalogue things I’ve watched that I think are pretty common things people have seen like Reply 1988, Crash Landing on You, and a whole bunch of others. I’d also love to hear what other recommendations you all have for me because I do not pretend to be any sort of omniscient watcher or anything, so please let me know in the comments!
In terms of next week, I recently finished watching My Secret Romance so I may do some sort of post mortem on that because I saw in some thread on reddit recently that there was a lot of hate for this one and I found myself a little charmed by it so I think that could be interesting?
Anyways, until then, I hope you all enjoyed the first issue of Keeping Up with the K-Dramas and I hope everyone has a good week!