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kpopgerapitico · 6 years

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EOYR 2017: K-Dramas Part 1

I couldn’t do all the dramas I wanted to talk about (in depth) in one post. So here is the first one.

For this list, these dramas are decent. They are not the cream of the crop, and they all have issues. But for some reason (hint: it’s usually chemistry), at the end of the year looking back, I still love them.

So here, in no particular order. I decided to make a different format than my song stuff, because of course I should. So I borrowing a little bit from Dramabeans, and a little bit from Josei next Door (both of whom (or whoms? since Dramabeans is a bunch of people) do great work).

Strong Woman Do Bong Soon:

In A Sentence: Do Bong Soon is super strong, thus shenanigans ensue (and maybe some romance).

Steer Clear If: You cannot suspend disbelief (cause oh boy) or if you expect this to be your new feminist drama. It is not.

Comments:

There are some extraordinary parts of this drama. Namely Park Hyunsik throughout, though the lead Park Bo Young does some good work too. The romance is squee worthy in a lot of places. And it hits the notes you want from superhero dramas. It is really fun to have a beta male who is so in love with the lead, and doesn’t fear her strength quite as much as get turned on by it. Again, Park Hyunsik kills it, his face in this whole drama is both meme worthy as well as an epiphany for his acting skills. Some of the humor is also really good (the sandbags always get me, as well as the high school gang), and if you like low brow humor, there is quite a bit of that as well. Also, the soundtrack has the superpower girl sound, which is great, is one of the few songs that I remember from a drama well enough to sing it in my head without any prompting.

Then, there is the rest of this show. Boy is it a train wreck. There is a serial killer plot line that could be really good in a different super hero show (maybe Blade Man?), but is absolutely jarring. Jisoo plays a second lead that is never more than half-dimensional character. There is a caricature of a gay man played only for humor. There is some very possibly manipulative behavior from the lead guy to the girl. There is mentioned abuse between the mother and father, which is also played for comedy. There is a whole lot of stuff that makes me very unhappy with this show.

But then I remember how much I was crying while Ahn Min Hyuk refused to leave Do Bong Soon on the roof to die. Or how much it hurt every time Ahn Min Hyuk’s family was mean to him. Or how much I loved how confident Do Bong Soon was, and how much she fell from that, every once in a while.

And it reminds me that for all its faults, this show still managed to make me care. And that this year was quite a feat.

Age of Youth 2:

In A Sentence: The girls are back (for the most part), with more of the hi jinks of college, and life just after.

Steer Clear If: You like dramas that don’t disappoint you at the last possible second. Or you haven’t seen the first season (do it, it’s better).

Comments:

I love a lot about this series as a whole, and this season kept a lot of that up. Even if I had to fight with everyone else for subs. Han Yeri’s plot line still makes me very happy, even as she navigates another incredibly hard job this season. It makes me wonder why she isn’t in more dramas every year with how well she does. Han Seung Yeon’s character got her happy ending and it felt deserved. Kim Min Seok was the treasure we all know and love from Descendants of the Sun, this time cuter and more honest. Lee You Jin was also an epiphany this season, doing better in the role of awkward and uncomfortable in your own body than I think Onew would have. Choi A Ra’s character was one of the more background characters for me in remembering the show, but stands out for how she related to Kim Min Seok.

You may have noticed some names missing. The first, the first year couple from the first season, suffered from a recast and a re-characterization that also made no sense to me. No wonder he broke up with her as she went straight down the line to crazy town (she was literally being a stalker/overly attached ex through half the season).

Then comes my biggest gripe. There is AMAZING chemistry for the whole season (and a lot of last season) between Im Sung Min (Son Seung Won) and Song Ji Won (Park Eun Bin). We have all been waiting for them to get together for 2 WHOLE SEASONS!!!!! And what did the show do? Dangle the relationship in front of us, and leave us with NOTHING at the end. NOTHING!!!!!!!!

In the end, there is a lot to love about this show. I think this season especially gave us incredibly relatable women, and quite a few swoon worthy men as well. It enforced the community around the first season and helped it grow (my favorite part of the community is the subber who does the English subs on the JTBC Drama YouTube channel, they are amazing). And it showed us that everyone has similar problems to us, and deals with them just as poorly as we do.

While You Were Sleeping:

In A Sentence: A girl can’t stop the future deaths she sees in her sleep, but maybe with some help she can.

Steer Clear If: You expect things to always makes sense (cause they don’t) or you expect a procedural to keep you interested in the week to week plot (it really isn’t all that great)

Comments:

While You Were Sleeping is two different shows smashed into one. One of the shows, the rom com starring Suzy and Lee Jong Suk, works always and forever because their chemistry is adorable. The other show, a crime procedural about a girl who can the the future deaths of others? I really really really want it to work, and it is a bummer that it doesn’t really work all that well at all.

The plot is convoluted as all get out. And more importantly, it’s sort of boring in a lot of parts. Or maybe it just isn’t for me. Maybe I just don’t care about the inner workings of law in Korea.

But, if you leave the plot out, and instead look at the directing and the characters, it is a good drama. There is a whole lot of great emotional punches, most if not all of which hit. There is a great plot about brotherly love. There is a great plot about a guy and a girl just being friends, and the guy for the most part doesn’t get bent out of shape about the fact that she doesn’t have feelings for him. And most of the show, he really doesn’t have feelings either.

And there is Suzy and Lee Jong Suk’s characters, whose personalities are both half confidence, half embarrassing misunderstandings. It makes for prime rom-com territory. I especially like all the times they put their respective feet in their mouths. It had me laughing every time.

And the emotional hits do well too, with tears when it was appropriately sad, and laughter when it was funny. What more can you ask for from your entertainment.

Suspicious Partner:

In A Sentence: A lawyer in training becomes a murder suspect, but it’s a rom com.

Steer Clear If: You get annoyed when plot becomes more important than characters.

Comments:

I rewatched most of this show in preparation to write this. And at first, I could not realize why I remember only liking this show. It was so good. It hits all my favorite rom com notes: witty banter, respect between the two leads (both of opinions and often emotions), characters that call each other out (or even themselves in the case of the lead women stalking the lead guy), and everyone else shipping them too.

But then the 3rd act happens. And there is a whole lot of crap. There is noble idiocy. There is characters holding things back from each other. There is Ji Chang Wook being a badass (the only highlight of this section). There are characters suddenly acting differently for no other reason than it makes the plot work. It goes off the rollers.

But the first 30 or so episodes? They are pretty amazing. There is a friendship between a guy and a girl! And there is never a crush or love line between them! And they use that closeness to make the main guy jealous! Hell, he gives her chocolate for that purpose, or maybe just because he is legitimately nice.

Also, the funniest thing I have seen in a drama this year happened in this drama. There is a scene (mild but obvious spoiler) where the main couple reveals themselves to the moms. And the best friend and office guy (he has more personality than that I promise) pretend to be shocked. And I watched it over and over again, giggling every single time.

School 2017:

In A Sentence: It is hard to succeed in a high school ruled by money and grades, but damn it Ra Eun Ho is going to try!!!

Steer Clear If: You aren’t a fan of the school series, or high school dramas in general, because this uses all of the tropes, good and bad.

Comments:

School 2017 is a return to form of the School franchise after the train wreck of 2015 (I didn’t watch 2015 because I waited long enough for it to have bad reviews and thus stop me from watching). And boy does it do the return well. It has the romance you want from a school drama, adorable and cute in every way, as well as the bromance we all loved from School 2013. It has the wonderful discovery of Kim Sejeong in a role that she absolutely destroyed at, and most of the rest of the young cast also doing super well (I liked Kim Jung Hyun a lot and Min Sung Wook was rudely underutilized).

My one and only problem with School 2017 is that it wanted to do just a few too many plots. It meant that they couldn’t go very deep into any of them. I loved most of the plot, but I can’t fully get behind a series that never gets the full depth of everything. I especially didn’t like that the best friend got super shafted in her plot line, especially since she had some cute buildup in the beginning where they could have made some astute commentary about fan culture, and then they threw that away because they didn’t have time for it with the main storyline getting so complex and large. It was a waste of what could have been a cute part of the show.

But, School 2017 is still a good show, with endearing characters. It reminded me of Sassy Go Go in the best way possible. It made me remember high school fondly, which is hard to do, and exactly what I want from this franchise.

#eoyr 2017 #kdramas

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