One of the things I love about kdramas is that it really subverts what masculinity is supposed to be. You see the loser who's down bad for the female lead (Lovely runner, queen of tears, Love Next Door, Strong Girl Do Bong Soon, the Judge from Hell), you see the soft masculinity in hometown cha cha cha, summer strike and Doctor Slump and extraordinary attorney woo, the protective kind of masculinity in any of Ji Chang Wook's and Ahn Bo Hyun's works, the reassured and confident masculinity of Seo Kang Joon in Undercover High school and Lee Jun Hyuk in Love scout, the playful masculinity in Twinkling Watermelon and Crash Course in Romance, the stoic but gentle masculinity in Doctor Romantic and Hierarchy, and the "I care about you and only you" kind of masculinity in Vincenzo to name a few.
This is progress from the old kdramas and I get that it's fictional and in real life, some of these actors are assholes. But in the era where Toxic masculinity is rampant, I think we can turn towards kdrama to have some inkling of what kind of man we should strive to be and what kind of man we should want. This should not something we see only in fiction. We should raise our sons (I'm 21) to be like this so that one day it's not just a concept for fictional love stories.
