[Staff Spotlight] Get to know mary

by mary

Explain your username (and/or avatar).

It’s my real name! Fellow mary beanies will know the struggle of registering this username without having to add 3 letters, 25 special characters, and the square root of your high school crush’s phone number divided by the birthdate of your pet hamster. So I love this username and I’m not giving it up! (Sorry to the other mary beanies!) My avatar is nothing special. Just a picture of some Random Guy sending a cheesy heart out to the world.

What is the first drama that you watched (or the first drama that made an impression)?

Lovers in Paris was my first marathon but it was Delightful Girl Chun-hyang that really hooked me. Before Chun-hyang, most of the dramas I’ve seen were set in haciendas where the poor girl gets chased by a lecherous landlord while she falls in love with a rich guy from the city whose parents hate her for being poor (basically, every Thalia show ever). So a K-drama where scholarships were important and some adults are prejudiced against underachieving kids seemed groundbreaking to me. Who knew you can use the teenage phase of a drama for anything other than setting up Tragic Separations and Fauxcest?

Tell us about a job or two that you’ve had in the past.

Outside of web development, I’ve never had another job. But the first one (a student assistant role) was memorable because I coded as a hobby and never met anyone in real life who knew HTML/CSS before that. I expected to be interviewed by a strict, senior professor who will throw me out with “We only take Computer Science students, how dare you step foot in our office?” So I was gobsmacked when the door was answered by a cute “student” who turned out to be the teacher in-charge of the web team. Five minutes into the interview, he cracked a joke about CSS and laughed this nerdy laugh… and I was a goner. I credit that first job for teaching me “dedication.”

Have you ever lived a moment that you thought belonged in a drama?

Very often! Our family life resembles loud, sprawling weekenders. I want to swap it for a rom-com but I’m scared I’ll get a daily makjang instead.

What drama genres do you especially like?

Something with comedy in it and/or an opportunity for shipping of any kind, regardless of whether it floats or sinks.

What drama genres do you especially dislike?

Occasionally, I’ll make fun of some shows for being craptastic, but I don’t really have a specific genre I hate, I just avoid shows where the main character is an absolute doormat. I also used to avoid shows that advertise themselves as “smart” from the get-go because it puts me in the poke-holes-at-everything mindset, and most shows won’t stand up to that level of scrutiny. Later on, I learned to accept that dramaland is on a different plane of logic, and I learned to love the good parts if they weigh more than the bad. *cough*Mystery Queen*cough*W…

Is there a drama character you’ve ever strongly identified with, and why?

Not to sound like a broken record but… Chun-hyang! She could handle her fights. She had okay grades but wasn’t a stickler for rules. She even got in occasional trouble at school. Heh. She also worked on her dream job even if she couldn’t go to college for it, and at the end of the show, she didn’t forget about that dream!

What drama character would you want to be?

Girl friends. They’re funny and awesome. They have a less stressful life compared to the heroine AND they get their own cute happy ending without 15 episodes of angst.

What was your major in school?

“Just” Chemical Engineering (I didn’t try for my license and I never practiced it).

What’s a random skill you have?

Average pen-spinning. Both hands. At the same time.

I say average because when I looked up what it’s called, there’s a whole ‘nuther level of pen-spinning out there, complete with special pens for balance. O___O After an ego-crushing hunt on Youtube, I learned that my favorite party school trick is called a Harmonic thumbaround.

Favorite non-Korean movie and/or TV show?

Ever After and The Walking Dead. But I hurt my back last week and was stuck watching HGTV so my sister thinks I’m getting a tiiiiiny bit too invested in Love It or List It (Team Hillary!) and Brother vs. Brother (Team Jonathan!)

Which Hallyu celebrity would you actually want to meet and spend an hour with?

Random Guy from #1.

Which of the 7 deadly sins would be your undoing? (Pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, or sloth.)

I’m an infinite ball of wrath. I get ragey about lots of things like the way people cross the street, the energy people waste on fandom wars, and the shortsightedness of blanket bans on plastic bags, to name a few. If not for the internet training me to think twice and keep my rants to myself, I’d be murdered in an intersection by an enraged fan wielding a “Paper Bag Oppa ♥” sign because I told them off for not waiting for the green walk signal.

Your favorite drama has an unholy alliance with your most hated drama and produces a mutant baby drama. Describe the plot.

Mermaid Girl enters the human world and steals apple wine from the set of a Famous Chef’s cooking show. She gets drunk on the stolen wine and grabs his butt thinking it’s another apple before passing out. The next day, Thispatch News releases exclusive footage of the scene and calls it a dating scandal, so Famous Chef signs a marriage contract with Mermaid Girl to save his career. They move in together and bicker endlessly before bonding over their love of cheesetastic puns. In episode seven, we find out that Famous Chef is the second lead. In episode eight, the show gets cut because of the low ratings, but the producers make vague excuses about having a second season so as not to disappoint the show’s dozen fans.

 
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