#het dramas

[gillianthecat]

psst. hey. yoo joo and han sung. let me let you in on a little secret. they're called *open relationships*. check it out. i feel like you'd both enjoy being in one.

[gillianthecat]

The Glory is so good. I don’t want to wait til March* for the second season 😭

*or even longer, apparently the March release date is just a rumor

I love all of the characters. Well, maybe love is the wrong word, but I find them all fascinating and complex. The storytelling, cinematography and themes are all working together. And this is hetero romance done in a way I like.

The actors are all amazing, I can’t highlight just one or two. Ha Do Yeong’s actor (Jung Sung Il) has such presence, I can’t take my eyes off him when he’s on screen. Or maybe I just like his face.

[gillianthecat]

I think I just need to get over my visceral dislike of those triple take, multiple angle, slow motion kiss edits. Because they're not going away, so I might as well enjoy them.

I just have this instantaneous annoyance whenever I see one. I guess I feel condescended to? Or maybe its just that it interrupts the flow of the story and feels fake?

There are good things about it! Uh.... It's nice to see a good kiss from multiple angles. I often will rewind myself to see it again. *grits teeth* remember this remember this, they're doing me a favor.

Does anyone know the history of this stylization? It's in pretty much every Chinese, Korean and Thai romantic drama that I've seen, BL or het. (I'm not remembering any in Japanese shows at the moment.) And I don't think I've ever seen it in a North American, European or Latin American film or show. (I'm not familiar enough with other filmmaking traditions to generalize about them.)

[gillianthecat]

I followed the trail of Kang Yoo Soek's filmography and found this shortest series (currently on Viki) called Growing Season. It may interest some of you because it turns out to feature two (2) (!) whole BL boys: the aforementioned Kang Yoo Soek (Shin Woo of Light on Me) plus a bonus Kim Kang Min (Ji Woo of To My Star).

It a slice-of-life university drama, following three young women who are working on a group project for their class on intimacy and sexuality. We see them deal with their relationships with men, with each other, and with their own sexualities and bodies. As far as I can tell it's completely heterosexual; I do get sapphic vibes from some interactions, but that's most likely my own projections.

It's a short series (KBL style) with twelve episodes of only about 20 minutes each. I'm currently on episode 4, and enjoying it so far, and find the women and their journeys engaging, though I'm not blown away. I do like their relatively frank discussions about sex.

The women are definitely the main characters, but our BL boys are two of the four featured men in their lives, playing a long term boyfriend (Kang) and a childhood friend (possibly -to-lovers?) (Kim). It's fun to see them in these very different roles.

[gillianthecat]

It looks like they're fighting so hard against the obvious polyamory that they'll pair Soo Hyun with the most random mismatched women to slot him neatly into a heterosexual duo. I don't dislike her, but she and him make no sense as a couple. (Personally I'd put her with her roommate, Young Ran. I just feel like she needs to get her worldview shaken up by falling for a woman. But obviously that's not happening.)

Young Ran is also the other possible love interest for Soo Hyun, and while I love her and want to ship them, it turns out I ship their friendship more.

Polyamorous trio with Joon and So Bin is the only reasonable option for him that I see.

[gillianthecat]

I started At a Distance, Spring is Green because Park Ji Hoon was so good in Weak Hero and I was curious to see him in something else. He's playing a completely different character here, all smiley and flirty, but is also excellent.

I'm liking the show much more than I expected, it's... the characters so far are a lot more nuanced and uniquely human than I anticipated. It's still tropey, but more subtly done than usual, and it feels like the characters/actors undercut it somehow.

I am yet again voting for the polyamory option (Park Ji Hoon's character has two hands! And a bottomless need to be loved) but we're of course not going to get that. And they really are depicting a Romance arc between the two leading men, even if they'll never let the relationship actually be queer. But I'm actually coming around to (what I assume is going to inevitably become) the heterosexual romance, because the story is approaching it in a rather interesting way.

It has some interesting thematic overlaps with Weak Hero as well, handled very differently.

Also the actor who played my sunshine boy Dang Gu from Alchemy of Souls is in it. He plays a minor douchebag, but it's hard to hate him because he will always be my sunshine boy.

[gillianthecat]

also i am so so relieved that eun chan doesn't have a "feminine" makeover so that she's allowed to be with her coffee prince (well, i have five episodes left but i'm assuming if it hasn't happened yet it's not going to). she dresses and looks exactly the same as she always did, he was attracted to her then and he's attracted to her now, the only difference is he knows.

honestly i went into the show assuming it would be inevitable. but they are approaching gender roles so differently than i feared. yes, there was a big transformation/reveal with heels, dress and makeup. But crucially, it was for the wrong guy.

and she never tried to change herself. she just dressed and acted as she wanted to, and other people made assumptions. I have no objections to She's the Man and its ilk (though somehow I've never actually seen it), where someone has to disguise herself as a boy for Plot Reasons, and work at getting it right, but the way Coffee Prince does it is so much more intriguing to me and has much more interesting things to say about gender.

[gillianthecat]

I also "finished" Extra-Ordinary You yesterday (i think. what even is time?) by watching up through episode 20 and then skipping ahead to episodes 31 and 32, the final two. It had been getting tedious, but I could see myself grimly forcing myself to watch the whole thing for 6 more hours, so skipping to the final was my strategy for circumventing that.

I actually quite liked the ending! (Spoilers ahead) The premise ended up being that these same characters kept repeating in different manwha (I'm unclear on the details which may have been in the episodes i skipped) and the high school story ended with the "main" romance getting tied up at graduation and all the characters fading out of existence. But then! It started the set up for a college manwha story and we got to see many of our characters meet again, including our leads. I think what i liked most about it was the tone shift to something more "mature" and "collegiate"—all the characters were calmed down versions of themselves and even the colors were subdued (á la Love Story (197?)). It gave the sense that even though the story ended, this characters would keep getting new stories and yet still be allowed to grow up. It was all very Guardian theme song

I now think I was too harsh on Rowoon, who played the male lead. I believe he put as much personality into the character as he could, but unfortunately the character had almost no personality besides "in love." But he was sweet and charming. I actually dove into the MDL reviews for this one, and surprisingly i agreed with the consensus view: starts off interesting and strong, then gets very draggy with the female lead getting flattened from focused and driven by her own needs to just boringly in love. But they handled the metafiction part reasonably well throughout. Lee Jae Wook as second lead continued to be the most compelling character, though even his tantrums got dull. And as far as I could tell Dried Shrimp Fairy turned out to be an extra who was put into story after story and had gained consciousness first.