The Westermarck Triangle in K-Drama

K-drama does love a love triangle. When I first started watching K-drama, I thought all their love triangles comprised an average girl, a hot new guy, and the childhood friend who’s like her brother. And I didn’t love it, because it can easily turn squicky. Fortunately, it turned out to not be quite as common as I feared. But I think it’s still worth examining.

Westermarck Triangle

My old friend TV Tropes has several entries that relate to this trope:

Patient Childhood Love Interest

Like Brother and Sister

Unlucky Childhood Friend

But none of them quite covered exactly what I was seeing in the dramas. In the Westermarck Triangle, the brotherlike character is (usually) not attracted to the lead at all, until a new guy shows up and sparks her interest. Suddenly the pair’s comfortable friendship is disrupted, and the original guy begins to think of the lead as a woman (as they say in K-dramas) and the new guy as a competitor.

When well-executed, Like a Brother can be a sweet version of Friends to Lovers. That’s a personal favorite because your true love should be the person who understands you best, with whom you can be yourself, and should be someone you feel close to, rather than someone who makes you feel nervous and awkward. But as part of an adoptive family, I am also very sensitive to the fact that “like a brother” is a brother, and two people don’t have to have a blood relation to be too closely related for romance. That’s basically what the Westermarck theory says, and I firmly believe in it. Most of the time, bros should stay in the brother zone.

Her Private Life

The first time I saw this trope was in the first K-drama I ever watched, Her Private Life. It was the biggest flaw in an otherwise unimpeachable show. Eun Gi (Ahn Bo Hyun) and Deok Mi (the ever-charming Park Min Young) have been raised since birth by Deok Mi’s mother. Eun Gi is not adopted and has a distant but friendly relationship with his birth mother, but even at the age of 30, he calls Deok Mi’s parents Mom and Dad and sleeps at their place when he doesn’t camp out at his dojo. He and Deok Mi know all of each other’s secrets, pester each other like siblings, and have a shared parent-management strategy when there are family fights.

When Ryan Gold shows up, Eun Gi could easily have presented the same plot obstacles as an overprotective, jealous brother. Making him declare himself a love rival felt completely wrong. Adopted siblings are siblings, regardless of paperwork. Ahn Bo Hyun often gets cast as the dumb jock, but he’s a really good actor and that was the only thing that kept this subplot from going completely off the rails.

Romance Is a Bonus Book

The second time I saw the trope was the only time I’ve seen it both work in the story and work out for the brother. In Romance Is a Bonus Book, the protagonist Dan-i (Lee Na Young) has always thought of Eun Ho (the eternally babyfaced Lee Jong Sook – no relation) as a little brother. They met as kids when she saved him from being hit by a car. As a result, she has always felt protective of him and looked out for him like a big sister. But he has always looked at her with the sparkly eyes of hero worship. Now adults, they aren’t close enough to be confidantes, but they’ve kept in touch through her disastrous marriage and his rise to success. Now that she needs a rescue, he has a chance to make her see him as more than just a kid [brother].

Touch

In Touch two of my least favorite tropes duke it out. Pitted against Age Gap Romance, I actually wanted Like a Brother to win. After a decade of idol training, Soo Yeon (Kim Bo Ra in a much more likeable role than the sasaeng Cindy from Private Life) gets booted from her agency after a scandal. Do Jin (Lee Tae Hwan – why must he always be the second lead?) and Soo Yeon have always looked out for each other at the agency, but since he is already famous, he’s her sunbae and she calls him “big brother.” His character has the most impressive – and plausible – growth arc in the story, and it’s easy to believe that when he sees an old guy sniffing around his good friend, he would reevaluate his feelings for her. Even if he’s always been a brother to her.

The Best Hit

The Best Hit (aka Hit the Top) used the trope to good effect, despite finding a whole new way to make it squick. I often suffer second lead syndrome and Kim Min Jae’s contrasting baritone and baby face do inspire fixation. His character Ji Hoon has been a torch-carrying sidekick to Woo Seung for years, but he’s more than friend-zoned, he’s like a brother to her. When pop idol Hyun Jae (Yoon Shi Yoon cute and charming as always) time travels from 1993 to the present, he hits it off with Woo Seung. Their budding romance pushes Ji Hoon into action, making him (spoiler alert and also eeewww) his own dad’s love rival. Here the trope works because even though Ji Hoon is cute and his devotion is real, once a brother is always a brother. Woo Seung just doesn’t see him that way.