Drunken Piggyback Ride
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.
A Strange Ride
In real life (at least in my experience) piggyback rides are almost exclusively the domain of little kids’ playtime, sometimes offered to each other, but more often demanded of dad. And although a piggyback ride is technically a ride on someone’s back, the request for one just as often relates to a ride on someone’s shoulders.
I noticed a long time ago that in American media, unconscious or injured people are usually carried over the shoulders like a sack of potatoes. Or if the injured person is female, bridal carry. But in anime and Asian movies, injured people are always carried piggyback. (In real life, the only time I’ve ever encountered a passed out person being carried, it took two people to lift the drunkard, with one at his shoulders and the other holding his feet.) The bride-carry of course requires a lot more arm strength, but I wonder if it’s actually possible to piggyback a person who’s passed out and can’t hold on.
A Relationship Rite of Passage
Whether it’s practical or not, in K-dramas, the piggyback ride is how drunks get home. But not just any drunks. The inebriated person is always the female lead (or second lead, in which case she is getting drunk because the male lead doesn’t like her). And the person carrying her is always her fated love interest. The piggyback ride is never an element in established relationships. It’s always something that happens before the pair becomes a couple. It seems to be a rite of passage in relationship development, a sort of dating-life trust fall.
I suspect the trust-fall concept is not entirely coincidental, here. Because this is K-drama, the drunken stumble home never results in a drunken tumble. It is always an opportunity for the male lead to show his dependability and patience with the heroine’s foibles. Interestingly, it’s not a chance to show off manly strength – the man nearly always complains about hard it was to carry someone such a great distance.
But What Does it Mean?
When I was in high school, my boyfriend’s mom judged every show, movie, and music video by the quality of the messages it sent. I hated that, and I still do. Stories are so much more than vehicles for moral propaganda. But they also do actually send messages.
Rom-coms in the 1980s romanticized all sorts of behaviors that are now well-known red flags for abusive behavior. One guy standing under a window with a boombox after you’ve already broken up serves the story. But an entire genre of such behaviors can take some unlearning through real life experience.
So I can’t help wondering what this trope looks like to Koreans. Is it as dangerous as it looks to me? Does it suggest to young women that extreme drunkeness is a way to progress a relationship? Does it tell young men that taking care of drunk girls is how the hero behaves? Or am I turning into a middle-aged mom who reads too many messages in media?
While looking for images to use in this post, I found a blog that does a really good job of explaining Getting Home Drunk In…
(aka My Lovely Sam Soon) In the enemies-to-lovers series that kickstarted Hyun Bin’s career, he plays such a huge jerk that I hate-watched most of the series just to see him get his comeuppance. But even as a jerk, when he comes upon Sam Soon sloppy drunk, he carries her on his back. She even pees on him in the process. In CLoY, this trope takes place in Pyongyang when Captain Ri’s neglected fiancé meets Se-ri’s rejected fiancé in a hotel bar and drowns her sorrows. He says her drunken behavior is just his type, then carries her back to her mother’s apartment with a great deal of grumbling. In this age gap romance between a former idol and a professional make-up artist, the couple meet outside of work (I think by accident, or to discuss something work-related). The former idol brags about her tolerance for alcohol, then gets plastered and her boss carries her home where he hands her off to her friend. Another cast-off couple example. The woman who loves the main man routinely drinks too much. Usually she takes a cab to his house to pester him, but this time she drinks with the neighbor of the female lead while incoherently airing her grievances against the male lead. The neighbor (who at this point prefers the female lead) doesn’t know where she lives. So he calls for help from the main lead, who carries her back to the neighbors house where both guys end up sleeping on the floor. This ensemble story plays with the trope. One long-term couple became a couple in college after drinking together. The guy carries the girl home, even stopping for her to vomit on the way, but they kiss anyway and go on to date for seven years. The primary couple plays with the trope. When the female lead gets drunk, the male lead gets her a cab and sees her home, no piggyback required. But a third couple shatters the trope. They meet as the woman is dealing with the aftermath of a roofie-enabled date rape. I’ve also seen this trope in: Meow, the Secret Boy (there are a couple examples in this series) Coffee Prince (gender-flipped!) Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok Joo (where he gives up partway home and puts her in a shopping cart) Hyde, Jekyll, Me (where it is implied that she barfed in his hoodie) My ID is Gangnam Beauty (she passes out after two glasses; knowing that this is a prerequisite to dating, both potential love interests fight over who gets to carry her home) Cheese in the Trap (her younger brother is waiting at her apartment and assumes the boyfriend carrying the drunk protagonist and the love rival, who is trailing them, are up to no good) This trope shows up in so many K-dramas. Are there any particularly good examples I should see? My Name is Kim Sam Soon
Crash Landing on You
Touch
Romance is a Bonus Book
Riders: Catch Tomorrow
What Did I Miss?
Money or a Splash of Water – The Separation Bribe
The Westermarck Triangle in K-Drama
The Power of Awareness in Healer
About The Author
GD
I'm a freelance writer in Seattle specializing in parenting, arts and the environment.
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I often give my older sister a piggyback ride or shoulder sit ride at the beach and real shallow water. We never knew how much fun it was until we tried it. Now she always comes up on me from behind and jumps on my back, or she’ll tell me to bend down , then come up on me from behind and sit on my shoulders. It’s so much fun!
In response to my first reply, it looks so funny when my sister rides on my back. Her arms are wrapped around my neck like she’s choking me, and when she straddles each leg around my sides, her knees are bent the whole way back with her feet the whole way behind her, similar to how it looks to when she sits on my shoulders. Each one of her legs are straddled around my shoulders with her knees bent back so that the tops of her feet are up against my lower back.