ByGD
If you’re new to K-drama and having a hard time predicting who the heroine will end up with, there’s a trick to identifying the winner. Her true love will be announced well in advance through a series of flashbacks revealing that the hero and the heroine knew each other as children, but have been separated for decades. Western viewers thrill to the idea of finding the needle of true love in the global haystack. But K-drama viewers know true love is based on a secret childhood connection.
ByGD
I only realized how that title sounded after I typed it. So sorry for the suggestive click-bait, but this is a post about K-drama Tropes, and K-drama is squeaky clean. Like the best K-drama tropes, the drunken piggyback ride is an event that is common in K-dramas but rare or unheard of in American media and (presumably) in real life in both countries. The trope I’m talking about today appears in nearly every Korean series I’ve watched. In this trope, a woman gets drunk and a man carries her home on his back.
This is not the same trope as the Cute Piggyback Ride, which often involves a twisted ankle.
ByGD
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.
ByGD
Even in the West, there is a story trope where the parents (usually of a wealthy and respectable young man) meet the lover (usually an impoverished and sincere, if not quite respectable, young woman) in secret to destroy the relationship. In the European canon, the most famous examples are Alexandre Dumas’ (fils) Camille and its subsequent opera, La Traviata. But rumor has it that this element of classical literature has become a K-drama staple.
ByGD
As the mother of a teenager, it is perhaps inevitable that Korean pop culture would become a critical component of my media consumption. The year 2019 began with my introduction to Webtoon and my headfirst dive into manwha. The year ended with a nearly OCD buy-in of K-Drama.
