Dramas and me
I may be a little obsessed right now, as I am sure you have all picked up on.
Currently on my to-watch list: Fantasy Couple (watched first few eps), Hwang Jin Yi, Jumong, The Snow Queen, Dae Jang Geum, Legend, Sandglass, Que Sera Sera, Dal Ja's Spring, Flowers for My Life.
I feel a little like I did when I dipped my toe back into the world of anime and manga a few years ago, nostalgic and overwhelmed with newness all at once. On the other hand, it's less with the nostalgic and more with the overwhelmed with newness when compared to anime and manga, just because I used to be a huge anime and manga fan (and am again!), whereas I never thought of myself as a drama fan.
Nostalgia
When I think about dramas, I always think about how popular jdramas were back in high school -- several people in my class watched all of Long Vacation on the bus during our graduation trip. I generally avoided jdramas, and eventually, during college and afterward, the increasingly-popular kdramas. I'm not sure why. I think some of it was because I was already getting obsessed with anime and manga, and I suspect my brain could only take so many Chinese-subtitled obsessions. I think I was also turned off by the romances, which I now find funny, given how much shoujo and romances I read.
But of course, I forgot I did watch dramas before. Around late elementary and junior high, my entire family would gather around the TV for our ritual drama watching. I suspect my mom and dad always watched them, and my sister began a little before me. Her old favorite was this fantasy one with a weird glowy Henson-esque creature, and I do not remember anything beyond the heroine and the glowy creature in a dark cave. As with all other aspects of life in Taiwan, I resisted getting into Taiwan pop culture. I don't even remember why I started watching; I suspect I was doing my homework in the living room day in and day out and eventually just started getting hooked.
I watched this drama about three people with a plum blossom brand set in three different time periods, one on a consort (?) or a girl who rose to be a noblewoman in the Qing Dynasty, one was this giant sob story about a little orphan girl with braids. She may have gotten cancer or something. And of course there was Yi Tien Tu Long Ji, the wuxia drama I watched religiously and babbled about at school with friends.
I suspect I may have watched other historical ones, but I can't remember them. I do remember that after a while, it seemed like no good historical ones were coming out any more, and I eventually just stopped watching. My parents have gotten into it again in the past few years; their friends have sicced several historical produced-in-China dramas on them, namely, the giant saga of Kangxi, the first of the three great Qing emperors. Both my mom and dad say all the good stuff's being produced in China right now; having seen a few episodes of another version of Yi Tien Tu Long Ji, I am somewhat inclined to agree.
I remember loving the court drama, the intrigue, the heavily embroidered outfits and elaborate headdresses of the Qing Dynasty one. And there was one kickass maybe-good maybe-bad woman in the wuxia one whom I adored to no end. I am sure I also loved the wuxia bits of the wuxia one. I'm so not surprised that most of the kdramas I'm drawn to are historical ones.
Newness
When Korean culture was the big new thing in Taiwan, I was already in college. I had caught the beginning of the craze for all things Japanese, including but not limited to the sudden appearance of ramen places everywhere, jdramas on TV all the time, and jpop and jrock in CD stores. A few years later, I went back and was shopping for cute hair clips in one of the street markets. I asked the lady how much something was, and she named a price, citing that it came from Korea and was hard to get! And special!
"Korea?" I thought. It had just been Japan a few months -- ok, maybe years -- ago.
I was relatively familiar with Japan, Japanese, and Japanese culture by then -- I had chosen to major in East Asian Studies and taken several years of Japanese, and I'd been to Japan a couple of times and done homestay there.
Sadly, I wasn't in Taiwan long enough for any of the kdramas or kpop or krock to stick, and I managed to get a degree in East Asian Studies while neglecting a third of East Asia.
And so, getting into kdramas has been incredibly interesting just from a cultural standpoint. I'm hesitating a little as I write this; I do not want to exoticize Korea, imply it's a monoculture, or go about culturally appropriating willy-nilly. But I also don't want to overly familiarize it, because I know I in particular run the risk of effectively bulldozing it with Chinese culture or to have any similarities between Korean and Japanese cultures overshadow the history of Japanese oppression. Um, yeah.
It's very odd trying to get used to an entire set of new genre tropes when you're also trying to get used to a new set of cultural expectations. It's particularly weird for me because it feels both new and old at once -- in some ways, the cultural expectations of a society with a history in Confucianism feels more familiar than stuff I see on TV in the US, but in others, I know I have zero idea of symbolism, important holidays, what different food means (not in a highly symbolic way, just really basic things, like how jajangmyeon is delivery). And it is absolutely baffling to listen to a language I have no knowledge of.
Language
The language is a huge part of it for me -- I hadn't realized I was used to understanding quite a few snippets of dialogue whenever I watch anime until I watched Kim Sam-Soon and realized I had not a clue as to what the Korean pronouns were, or what all the suffixes were. Like, if the emperor of a Chinese movie talks, I know how he's going to refer to himself, I know how his court will refer to themselves. I know -san and -sama and whatnot in Japanese. And now I feel like I'm lost again.
The last time I did this was when I first got into anime. I remember memorizing the lyrics to Gundam Wing songs by printing out the romaji and just having to figure stuff out. I remember puzzling out a few katakana characters by getting all the characters' names in katakana and piecing together that certain sounds went with certain kana. I remember teaching myself katakana and hiragana and practicing writing the kana in Chinese textbooks while ignoring the teacher. And I am not even at that point with Korean! Well, except the piecing together certain bits of the alphabet from menus in Korean restaurants when I was bored, but I have already forgotten what I learned.
I suspect it's even more difficult right now because I'm watching with English subtitles instead of Chinese. I think Korean has a number of words with Chinese-influenced pronunciations, much as Japanese does; "jajangmyeon" in Chinese is "zha jiang mien." I remember watching anime and being able to figure out that "ryoukai" was "liao jie" because the characters would say it as the Chinese appeared on the screen. Right now, there's the extra step in which I have to translate the English subtitle into Chinese and then compare that to the spoken Korean, and usually by then, I've completely missed whatever it is.
I've mentioned to yhlee before that I used to get very confused when I heard Korean, because the words would sound close to Chinese, but the rhythms of the language would sound Japanese (um, am not saying Korean = Chinese + Japanese!). Yoon's said that Korean and Japanese grammar are very similar (both SOV structure, probably other stuff that I do not know the linguistic terms for). And I keep hearing the particles and the suffixes attached to names and the ending particles for sentences (like "~no yo" in Japanese), and it is so frustrating, because I feel like I should know it, except I don't.
After marathoning some more, I think I am getting more used to all the appellations and learning a few teeny phrases; it's not much, but the language rhythms are starting to sound more familiar. It didn't help that the first kdrama I watched was a gender-bending one, which makes things extremely confusing when appellations depend on the gender of the caller and the callee! (Ex. Eun Chan calls guys "hyung," so "hyung" must be "woman's older brother." Oh wait, she's a guy right now...) Also, I think I can pick out "I love you"! Very important vocabulary for dramas. Now all I need to do is take classes...
Tropes, Gender, Race, and Class
And now, my favorite part of getting into new genres! Genre tropes!
So far, I have watched one entire trendy drama series (Kim Sam Soon) and parts of two (2 eps. of Fantasy Couple and 12 of Coffee Prince), along with half of a historical, so my information and impressions are highly flawed and limited. I'm just posting these because I remember being fascinated reading people's first impressions of anime and manga.
I adore the trendy dramas so far (are they the equivalent to romantic comedies?); I didn't think I would, but the cute factor! I suspect much of this is influenced by my Coffee Prince love, as a lot of the tropes that I've been hearing about tend to be things that don't appeal to me. What I do like so far is an increased focus on family, not just romance. I'm not sure if this is a general thing or just Kim Sam Soon and Coffee Prince though. I am particularly fond of the all-female families in Kim Sam Soon and Coffee Prince, though I also love the bossy, crotchety grandmothers as well. In both those dramas, there's also a marked tendency to try to talk through problems, and often, the turning point is when one person understands or sees the other's point of view.
This turning point is also something I've noticed in anime and manga. I don't know if it's cultural or not -- I wish I could say if I've noticed it in the old Chinese dramas I used to watch, but I don't remember. There's also a marked lack of demonizing the third (or fourth, or fifth) party that feels similar to anime and manga as well.
On a completely shallow note, I very much enjoy that the trendy dramas I've seen have a lot of fan service in terms of the female gaze on the male body. I haven't watched any jdramas outside of Nobuta, so I don't know if this is in jdramas or cdramas as well? I want to say something about the assumptions of who the audience is and the affect that has on gaze and compare it to talk of homoeroticism in Casino Royale and 300 and the assumption that it's always the male gaze, only that is as far as my thoughts go.
I'm waiting to see if trendy dramas focus as much on male pain and angst as shoujo manga does; Kim Sam Soon and Coffee Prince both feel very much like the heroines' stories. They do have tons of male angst, and both Jin Hun and Han Kyul's Sekrit Pain feel very shoujo manga-esque, but I never quite feel that it overtakes Sam Soon and Eun Chan's stories. This may be because there have been more woman-to-woman relationships in both those dramas, and I can't tell if this is an exception or not.
In terms of drama dramas, the first episode of Snow Queen was so weird because it was all about the guy. I will report more when I've seen more, though from summaries it sounds more like drama dramas are about manpain? In terms of historical dramas, while Damo has a kickass heroine, I do bemoan the lack of more woman-to-woman relationships. I'm interested to see if Hwang Jin Yi will do this as well.
Just from reading summaries, I get the impression that most historical dramas focus on the men (as they usually like to tell stories of people in power); Hwang Jin Yi and Damo and Dae Jang Geum sound like exceptions (?). I will die of squee to have a historical drama All About the Women, and not just women making it in a man's world (though I am not protesting those either).
In terms of race, I've found Sun Ki in Coffee Prince very interesting. There also seems to be a tendency for characters to go to America. It reminds me a lot of the blonde, half-Japanese half-European character so often found in shoujo manga. There's definitely the undercurrent that English and America and Europe are cool and sexy and foreign. I am not sure if there's an attitude like that toward Japan in kdramas; the only data point I've got is Sun Ki. I was a little disturbed by Shuuji's mom in Nigeria in Nobuta. I am sure some people will argue cultural appropriation or exoticization with the attitude toward America and white Europe, but quite frankly, my impression is that it's seen as cool and foreign and sexy because of the implicit power those cultures have. There are also a good deal of references to Western culture in the trendy dramas I've watched, from movie stars to movies to songs and etc.
Clearly this is not going to be in historical dramas, but I'm interested to see if drama dramas have it as well (I am suspecting they do).
In terms of class, I find it very interesting that almost everything I've watched except Nobuta has the class divide. It's usually lower-middle vs. upper, and doesn't really look at the lower classes. Also, you can tell who the "good guys" are by what class they are -- if they're lower-middle venturing into the upper-class world, they are definitely the good guys. But there's also a tendency to play the lower class characters as buffoons (I found this most notable in Damo). Fantasy Couple is interesting because it's the woman who's rich. The heroine in Snow Queen is as well, though I suspect that's just because it focuses on the guy. I can't tell if the houses and clothes in the shows are like Friends in NY and completely unrealistic; Sam Soon and Eun Chan and the guy in Fantasy Couple and Shuuji's houses and clothes all feel fairly true-to-life, but I also wonder if Sam Soon and Eun Chan's houses are larger than expected? I don't know that much about real estate in Korea.
It's not saying much, but I like that Eun Chan and Sam Soon and Shuuji and the guy in Fantasy Couple don't have designer wardrobes like Buffy and the people in Friends. I like that they wander around at home in flip flops and t-shirts and shorts. That said, I don't think I've seen anything that really questions class; there's an awareness of the difference between middle and upper, but most movement is upwards. People will also talk about the difficulties in moving in a different class circle, and there's the usual "poor working person good, rich lazy person bad" thing, but the heroine still tends to marry up, I think. It's very much like the class differences in romance novels.
I am sure I will come back and read this after watching more and laugh at myself and all the things I misread.
ETA: rilina's post on why she's watching kdramas.
Currently on my to-watch list: Fantasy Couple (watched first few eps), Hwang Jin Yi, Jumong, The Snow Queen, Dae Jang Geum, Legend, Sandglass, Que Sera Sera, Dal Ja's Spring, Flowers for My Life.
I feel a little like I did when I dipped my toe back into the world of anime and manga a few years ago, nostalgic and overwhelmed with newness all at once. On the other hand, it's less with the nostalgic and more with the overwhelmed with newness when compared to anime and manga, just because I used to be a huge anime and manga fan (and am again!), whereas I never thought of myself as a drama fan.
Nostalgia
When I think about dramas, I always think about how popular jdramas were back in high school -- several people in my class watched all of Long Vacation on the bus during our graduation trip. I generally avoided jdramas, and eventually, during college and afterward, the increasingly-popular kdramas. I'm not sure why. I think some of it was because I was already getting obsessed with anime and manga, and I suspect my brain could only take so many Chinese-subtitled obsessions. I think I was also turned off by the romances, which I now find funny, given how much shoujo and romances I read.
But of course, I forgot I did watch dramas before. Around late elementary and junior high, my entire family would gather around the TV for our ritual drama watching. I suspect my mom and dad always watched them, and my sister began a little before me. Her old favorite was this fantasy one with a weird glowy Henson-esque creature, and I do not remember anything beyond the heroine and the glowy creature in a dark cave. As with all other aspects of life in Taiwan, I resisted getting into Taiwan pop culture. I don't even remember why I started watching; I suspect I was doing my homework in the living room day in and day out and eventually just started getting hooked.
I watched this drama about three people with a plum blossom brand set in three different time periods, one on a consort (?) or a girl who rose to be a noblewoman in the Qing Dynasty, one was this giant sob story about a little orphan girl with braids. She may have gotten cancer or something. And of course there was Yi Tien Tu Long Ji, the wuxia drama I watched religiously and babbled about at school with friends.
I suspect I may have watched other historical ones, but I can't remember them. I do remember that after a while, it seemed like no good historical ones were coming out any more, and I eventually just stopped watching. My parents have gotten into it again in the past few years; their friends have sicced several historical produced-in-China dramas on them, namely, the giant saga of Kangxi, the first of the three great Qing emperors. Both my mom and dad say all the good stuff's being produced in China right now; having seen a few episodes of another version of Yi Tien Tu Long Ji, I am somewhat inclined to agree.
I remember loving the court drama, the intrigue, the heavily embroidered outfits and elaborate headdresses of the Qing Dynasty one. And there was one kickass maybe-good maybe-bad woman in the wuxia one whom I adored to no end. I am sure I also loved the wuxia bits of the wuxia one. I'm so not surprised that most of the kdramas I'm drawn to are historical ones.
Newness
When Korean culture was the big new thing in Taiwan, I was already in college. I had caught the beginning of the craze for all things Japanese, including but not limited to the sudden appearance of ramen places everywhere, jdramas on TV all the time, and jpop and jrock in CD stores. A few years later, I went back and was shopping for cute hair clips in one of the street markets. I asked the lady how much something was, and she named a price, citing that it came from Korea and was hard to get! And special!
"Korea?" I thought. It had just been Japan a few months -- ok, maybe years -- ago.
I was relatively familiar with Japan, Japanese, and Japanese culture by then -- I had chosen to major in East Asian Studies and taken several years of Japanese, and I'd been to Japan a couple of times and done homestay there.
Sadly, I wasn't in Taiwan long enough for any of the kdramas or kpop or krock to stick, and I managed to get a degree in East Asian Studies while neglecting a third of East Asia.
And so, getting into kdramas has been incredibly interesting just from a cultural standpoint. I'm hesitating a little as I write this; I do not want to exoticize Korea, imply it's a monoculture, or go about culturally appropriating willy-nilly. But I also don't want to overly familiarize it, because I know I in particular run the risk of effectively bulldozing it with Chinese culture or to have any similarities between Korean and Japanese cultures overshadow the history of Japanese oppression. Um, yeah.
It's very odd trying to get used to an entire set of new genre tropes when you're also trying to get used to a new set of cultural expectations. It's particularly weird for me because it feels both new and old at once -- in some ways, the cultural expectations of a society with a history in Confucianism feels more familiar than stuff I see on TV in the US, but in others, I know I have zero idea of symbolism, important holidays, what different food means (not in a highly symbolic way, just really basic things, like how jajangmyeon is delivery). And it is absolutely baffling to listen to a language I have no knowledge of.
Language
The language is a huge part of it for me -- I hadn't realized I was used to understanding quite a few snippets of dialogue whenever I watch anime until I watched Kim Sam-Soon and realized I had not a clue as to what the Korean pronouns were, or what all the suffixes were. Like, if the emperor of a Chinese movie talks, I know how he's going to refer to himself, I know how his court will refer to themselves. I know -san and -sama and whatnot in Japanese. And now I feel like I'm lost again.
The last time I did this was when I first got into anime. I remember memorizing the lyrics to Gundam Wing songs by printing out the romaji and just having to figure stuff out. I remember puzzling out a few katakana characters by getting all the characters' names in katakana and piecing together that certain sounds went with certain kana. I remember teaching myself katakana and hiragana and practicing writing the kana in Chinese textbooks while ignoring the teacher. And I am not even at that point with Korean! Well, except the piecing together certain bits of the alphabet from menus in Korean restaurants when I was bored, but I have already forgotten what I learned.
I suspect it's even more difficult right now because I'm watching with English subtitles instead of Chinese. I think Korean has a number of words with Chinese-influenced pronunciations, much as Japanese does; "jajangmyeon" in Chinese is "zha jiang mien." I remember watching anime and being able to figure out that "ryoukai" was "liao jie" because the characters would say it as the Chinese appeared on the screen. Right now, there's the extra step in which I have to translate the English subtitle into Chinese and then compare that to the spoken Korean, and usually by then, I've completely missed whatever it is.
I've mentioned to yhlee before that I used to get very confused when I heard Korean, because the words would sound close to Chinese, but the rhythms of the language would sound Japanese (um, am not saying Korean = Chinese + Japanese!). Yoon's said that Korean and Japanese grammar are very similar (both SOV structure, probably other stuff that I do not know the linguistic terms for). And I keep hearing the particles and the suffixes attached to names and the ending particles for sentences (like "~no yo" in Japanese), and it is so frustrating, because I feel like I should know it, except I don't.
After marathoning some more, I think I am getting more used to all the appellations and learning a few teeny phrases; it's not much, but the language rhythms are starting to sound more familiar. It didn't help that the first kdrama I watched was a gender-bending one, which makes things extremely confusing when appellations depend on the gender of the caller and the callee! (Ex. Eun Chan calls guys "hyung," so "hyung" must be "woman's older brother." Oh wait, she's a guy right now...) Also, I think I can pick out "I love you"! Very important vocabulary for dramas. Now all I need to do is take classes...
Tropes, Gender, Race, and Class
And now, my favorite part of getting into new genres! Genre tropes!
So far, I have watched one entire trendy drama series (Kim Sam Soon) and parts of two (2 eps. of Fantasy Couple and 12 of Coffee Prince), along with half of a historical, so my information and impressions are highly flawed and limited. I'm just posting these because I remember being fascinated reading people's first impressions of anime and manga.
I adore the trendy dramas so far (are they the equivalent to romantic comedies?); I didn't think I would, but the cute factor! I suspect much of this is influenced by my Coffee Prince love, as a lot of the tropes that I've been hearing about tend to be things that don't appeal to me. What I do like so far is an increased focus on family, not just romance. I'm not sure if this is a general thing or just Kim Sam Soon and Coffee Prince though. I am particularly fond of the all-female families in Kim Sam Soon and Coffee Prince, though I also love the bossy, crotchety grandmothers as well. In both those dramas, there's also a marked tendency to try to talk through problems, and often, the turning point is when one person understands or sees the other's point of view.
This turning point is also something I've noticed in anime and manga. I don't know if it's cultural or not -- I wish I could say if I've noticed it in the old Chinese dramas I used to watch, but I don't remember. There's also a marked lack of demonizing the third (or fourth, or fifth) party that feels similar to anime and manga as well.
On a completely shallow note, I very much enjoy that the trendy dramas I've seen have a lot of fan service in terms of the female gaze on the male body. I haven't watched any jdramas outside of Nobuta, so I don't know if this is in jdramas or cdramas as well? I want to say something about the assumptions of who the audience is and the affect that has on gaze and compare it to talk of homoeroticism in Casino Royale and 300 and the assumption that it's always the male gaze, only that is as far as my thoughts go.
I'm waiting to see if trendy dramas focus as much on male pain and angst as shoujo manga does; Kim Sam Soon and Coffee Prince both feel very much like the heroines' stories. They do have tons of male angst, and both Jin Hun and Han Kyul's Sekrit Pain feel very shoujo manga-esque, but I never quite feel that it overtakes Sam Soon and Eun Chan's stories. This may be because there have been more woman-to-woman relationships in both those dramas, and I can't tell if this is an exception or not.
In terms of drama dramas, the first episode of Snow Queen was so weird because it was all about the guy. I will report more when I've seen more, though from summaries it sounds more like drama dramas are about manpain? In terms of historical dramas, while Damo has a kickass heroine, I do bemoan the lack of more woman-to-woman relationships. I'm interested to see if Hwang Jin Yi will do this as well.
Just from reading summaries, I get the impression that most historical dramas focus on the men (as they usually like to tell stories of people in power); Hwang Jin Yi and Damo and Dae Jang Geum sound like exceptions (?). I will die of squee to have a historical drama All About the Women, and not just women making it in a man's world (though I am not protesting those either).
In terms of race, I've found Sun Ki in Coffee Prince very interesting. There also seems to be a tendency for characters to go to America. It reminds me a lot of the blonde, half-Japanese half-European character so often found in shoujo manga. There's definitely the undercurrent that English and America and Europe are cool and sexy and foreign. I am not sure if there's an attitude like that toward Japan in kdramas; the only data point I've got is Sun Ki. I was a little disturbed by Shuuji's mom in Nigeria in Nobuta. I am sure some people will argue cultural appropriation or exoticization with the attitude toward America and white Europe, but quite frankly, my impression is that it's seen as cool and foreign and sexy because of the implicit power those cultures have. There are also a good deal of references to Western culture in the trendy dramas I've watched, from movie stars to movies to songs and etc.
Clearly this is not going to be in historical dramas, but I'm interested to see if drama dramas have it as well (I am suspecting they do).
In terms of class, I find it very interesting that almost everything I've watched except Nobuta has the class divide. It's usually lower-middle vs. upper, and doesn't really look at the lower classes. Also, you can tell who the "good guys" are by what class they are -- if they're lower-middle venturing into the upper-class world, they are definitely the good guys. But there's also a tendency to play the lower class characters as buffoons (I found this most notable in Damo). Fantasy Couple is interesting because it's the woman who's rich. The heroine in Snow Queen is as well, though I suspect that's just because it focuses on the guy. I can't tell if the houses and clothes in the shows are like Friends in NY and completely unrealistic; Sam Soon and Eun Chan and the guy in Fantasy Couple and Shuuji's houses and clothes all feel fairly true-to-life, but I also wonder if Sam Soon and Eun Chan's houses are larger than expected? I don't know that much about real estate in Korea.
It's not saying much, but I like that Eun Chan and Sam Soon and Shuuji and the guy in Fantasy Couple don't have designer wardrobes like Buffy and the people in Friends. I like that they wander around at home in flip flops and t-shirts and shorts. That said, I don't think I've seen anything that really questions class; there's an awareness of the difference between middle and upper, but most movement is upwards. People will also talk about the difficulties in moving in a different class circle, and there's the usual "poor working person good, rich lazy person bad" thing, but the heroine still tends to marry up, I think. It's very much like the class differences in romance novels.
I am sure I will come back and read this after watching more and laugh at myself and all the things I misread.
ETA: rilina's post on why she's watching kdramas.