Amnesia, The Ultimate K-Drama Trope

My first experience of K-drama was the wonderful series, Her Private Life. What struck me most about the show was the intelligent writing and the emotionally mature characters. So the overall impression the show left on me was that of a very realistic, down-to-earth story about balancing work, romantic love, and personal passions. But, actually, there was so much amnesia.

An Expectation of Amnesia

Before I started watching K-drama, I expected it to be a Korean version of American daytime soaps, with bad production values and outlandish operatic plots filled with amnesia and evil twins. I think that may have been the case in the past, but Her Private Life, as I’ve said, was no more unrealistic than the sort of heightened circumstances and improbable-but-plausible coincidences that all tv relies on. Or at least it felt that way.

Amnesia in Private Life

Actually, there was a lot of amnesia in Her Private Life. Multiple cases, in fact. There was the fairly credible version of, “I had a traumatic childhood, and don’t remember much from before things stabilized.” And there was the garden variety soap opera amnesia of “After a car accident I recovered fully except I completely forgot certain members of my family.” Naturally this set high expectations for amnesia in future viewing.

Other Cases of Amnesia

Once again, Crash Landing On You goes meta. I think it’s in episode that protagonist Yoon Se-ri assures the North Korean soldiers she won’t tell anyone back home where she has been. “As soon as I get home, I will develop a case of amnesia,” she promises. K-drama fan staff sergeant Kim Ju-muk confirms this for his comrades. “That’s right,” he says, “People in South Korea get amnesia all the time.” The soldiers hypothesize that it might be a capitalist disease.

In Cinderella and Four Knights there was a circumstance where characters discovered they forgotten their previous meeting. But I consider that particular case to be an example of fated by childhood connection [trope post pending].

In the super soapy K-drama Hyde, Jekyll, Me Hyun Bin has a split personality, which in this story is a type of amnesia because the two personalities cannot share memories. The amnesia is doubled because whenever the balance between the personalities is off, the dominant one absorbs the other’s memories, creating memory loss in the weaker self.

Hyun Bin has another case of amnesia in Secret Garden. This time, the heroine’s father died saving his character’s life. But he doesn’t know that because the accident was so traumatizing he blocked the memory.

In the classic Boys Over Flowers, love interest Joon Pyo is hit by a car and nearly dies. When he wakes up he is completely fine – except that he can’t remember who the heroine is.

In Love with Flaws (featuring one of the Four Knights referenced above) the heroine doesn’t know she has amnesia until the second half of the series when she suddenly realizes her recurring nightmare about her parents’ death is actually a partial memory.

The show Guardian: The Lonely and Great God (often called more simply Goblin) takes amnesia to a whole new level when God directly intervenes to erase the memories of any human who had knowledge of a character’s existences. Of course, in the next episode, memories begin to seep in, and one character begins to wonder if he’s the only one who doesn’t know what really happened. But he writes it off with the line, “Of course, as a chaebol [heir to an elite business family] you’ve got to go through an episode of amnesia.”

The movie Daddy Long-Legs centers on a series of found emails sent by a person who is suffering from a virus (perhaps a bad translation of disease?) that causes memory loss. On the eve of a risky surgery to fix it, afraid that they will forget their one true love, they write these emails to their future self, telling the story of their years’ long love that they never had the courage to express. Because the emails are found by someone else, the surgery must have failed. Who wrote them, and who was their secret love?

This is a major K-drama trope. Just check out this 2017 pan-Asian list of 51 Drama with Memory Loss.

Or to be more specific, here are ten funny K-dramas with amnesia.

Childhood Amnesia

I want to circle back to Her Private Life, because as I’ve watched more K-drama, I’ve realized it is representative of a sub-trope. I generally expect amnesia to result from a head injury (often as a result of a car accident). And there are plenty of examples of that. But there are so many adopted characters in K-drama (another pending trope post) and those characters rarely have any memories from before their adoption. This even though the adoption usually occurs under traumatic circumstances and at an age when you might expect some memories – like the child’s own name or birthday – to survive, even if a lot of things would be fuzzy.

Healer – Right up there on my favorites list with Her Private Life, Healer gives us another double case of amnesia. The children of two close-friend couples are practically inseparable until the age of five, when both families are destroyed by criminal-induced tragedies. They meet again 22 years later, but not only do they not recognize each other, neither one of them remembers who they were or anything else about their pre-trauma lives.

What’s your favorite use of amnesia in a K-drama?