K-Drama Nostalgia
Back in my day ...
It’s 1 AM on a Wednesday night (morning?) and you’ve already hit refresh on the same webpage six times. Tomorrow you’ll spend most of your physics class with the side of your face planted on the desk, but right now sleep can’t compete with the possibility of finally seeing the leads in your favorite Korean drama kiss. Seventh refresh – yes! The new episode is up. Who cares if translated English captions are only 46% complete? You’ve waited long enough. Hit play, and let the swooning commence.
It used to be nearly impossible to be a casual K-drama viewer if you didn’t live in Korea or speak fluent Korean. There was too much effort required to clear the hurdles of language and access for anyone to stumble into it on accident or with half-hearted interest. For those of us on the inside, the barriers to entry were both a pain and a relief. The guessing game of when the latest episode would become available was inconvenient, as was the questionable accuracy of the crowdsourced captions provided by translators with handles like KPop_Noona87. But it was also comforting to know that the people refreshing, watching, and commenting alongside you were equally devoted to your TV obsession – if not more. Just because our interests were niche didn’t mean we were alone.
There were Korean diaspora kids like me, who weren’t totally lost without English captions but still needed them to round out a drama’s details and nuance. There were adolescent fans of K-Pop idols who were only there to spam the comments with positivity about their faves’ first forays into acting. There were moms and students and 9 to 5-ers from every time zone in the world, all in search of an escape and a story that would make them forget about their own lives and stay up until dawn to see what would happen next.
In 2016, Netflix launched in Korea. Since then, the streaming giant has reportedly invested $700 million in local content and created over 80 original Korean series and films. Netflix also has multi-year licensing deals with South Korean cable TV network JTBC and Studio Dragon, a subsidiary of Korea’s largest studio, that not only gives Netflix access to their existing content but also provides funding for more Korean originals. Long story short: most people aren’t going to wait for bootleg captions on sites riddled with pop-ups when they can just watch the same shows on Netflix instead.
Netflix’s commitment to producing Korean content and putting it in front of more eyes is a net positive – for creators like Squid Game director Hwang Dong-hyuk, whose ideas have historically been a bit too edgy for Korea’s mainstream TV networks; for the actors and writers whose careers will benefit from the global exposure; and for the viewing public that will get to enjoy a wealth of content starring and produced by Korean talent. And it’s not like those K-drama streaming sites have gone entirely extinct – some, like Viki, have survived by implementing their own subscription models.
Still, it’s not the same. K-dramas being so much easier to watch now is a good thing, regardless of any lingering resentment I may feel toward newer viewers who haven’t been subjected to the same timezone struggles and shoddy translation hazing that I experienced. But there’s a part of me that can’t resist romanticizing a time when one of my favorite corners of the internet was a little smaller, weirder, and cozier. Fly high, KPop_Noona87.
Formative K-Dramas and What They Taught Me
Boys Over Flowers (2009)
The set-up: Geum Jan-Di (Gu Hye-Sun), whose defining characters are her bangs, her family’s lack of wealth, and her clumsiness, begins attending a high school where filthy rich teens bully each other to death (literally – the pilot opens with our heroine preventing another student from jumping off a roof).
At the top of the social food chain is F4, a clique made up of the tallest boys with the most powerful daddies and the curliest perms. Jan-Di catches the eye of F4’s leader, Gu Jun-Pyo (Lee Min-Ho), when she becomes the first person in recorded history to tell him no. She proves her Not Like The Other Girls™ mettle by developing feelings instead for a quieter, less flashy F4 member, Yoon Ji-Hu (Kim Hyun-Joong). Does Gu Jun-Pyo sound like someone who gives up, even when the object of his affections tells him to repeatedly? Of course not. You know how this ends.
The takeaway: Being a damsel in distress is harder than you might think. How many perfectly good outfits were ruined by Jan-Di’s endless cycle of victimization and rescue? Also, I’ve never read the manga that this K-drama was based on, but from what I can tell, it’s basically illustrated self-insert Y/N fanfiction – so it’s only natural that I loved an adaptation of it as a 13-year-old.
You’re Beautiful (2009)
The set-up: Go Mi-Nam (Park Shin-Hye) and her twin brother are both on the brink of achieving their dreams: she’s following in Julie Andrews’s manic pixie dream nun footsteps while he’s poised to join popular boy band A.N.Jell. But through a convoluted series of events, Mi-Nam ends up temporarily taking her brother’s place and attempting her best drag king transformation. The group’s leading man, Hwang Tae-Kyung (Jang Keun-Suk), doesn’t think the band needs any more members and resolves to make the new guy’s life hell until he quits. Fire, meet gasoline.
The takeaway: No theater geek will ever contribute anything of greater cultural significance than Shakespeare’s fixation on heroines who dress as men. You’re Beautiful, She’s the Man, and Motocrossed – that’s what we call a legacy, not Miku Binder Thomas Jefferson.
Coffee Prince (2007)
The set-up: Ever since Go Eun-Chan’s father died, she’s stepped up as the caretaker and breadwinner for her mom and younger sister. The fact that people often mistake her for a guy because of her tomboyish looks doesn’t bother her – especially if it means she can get jobs she otherwise wouldn’t as a woman. Would coffee heir Choi Han-Kyul hire her to pretend to be his gay lover as a shield against his grandmother’s arranged blind dates if he knew Eun-Chan was actually a woman? No. He also wouldn’t employ her as part of the handsome all-male staff at his new cafe, Coffee Prince, designed to attract female customers with deep pockets. But when Eun-Chan and Han-Kyul start falling for each other, her little lie starts to have much bigger consequences than originally intended.
![The Cast of "Coffee Prince" Reunite After Years Apart!](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F926cb0ea-d1da-4f14-97aa-4d8a6429d6db_1200x628.jpeg "The Cast of "Coffee Prince" Reunite After Years Apart!")
The takeaway: I still can’t believe Coffee Prince aired on a mainstream Korean network in 2007. The show’s willingness to delve into issues of gender performance and homosexuality without stigmatizing its characters’ desires or actions is still an anomaly in the K-drama landscape today. Han-Kyul has an Eun-Chan-induced sexuality crisis and comes out on the other side of it knowing that he wants Eun-Chan, gender be damned. He kisses Eun-Chan when he believes her to be a man – and there’s no anger or resentment in it, just a bone-deep certainty that he wants a future with this person.
Iris (2009)
I don’t really remember what happens in this one and honestly, I don’t feel like looking it up. I know there are sexy spies and government conspiracies and I vaguely recall that at least one episode was set somewhere with a lot of snow and scarves. The takeaway is that beautiful people saying my name a million times per episode was both thrilling and surreal. Also, Kim Tae-Hee.
