Yes! Well put. Drama-watching is educational, lol. But seriously, watching variety shows has made me read much faster now in Korean because I'm trying to read the captions before they disappear.

@missvictrix, I do struggle a lot with how much time I spend watching and what else I could be doing with that time. Especially when a drama that seemed promising goes off track, but I'm still invested in finding out what happened to the characters. I agree with you about a middle ground. I do feel that learning more about Korean language and Korean culture (even through the filter of dramaland) makes the time spent more valuable.

And as far as this : "When we think about how well a character is being developed, analyze the clarity and compellingness of a plot arc, or even discuss how well themes and metaphors are pulled together — these are all things that make drama watching active rather than passive." --- this is why we love Dramabeans, isn't it? Why we can't wait to get a discussion going about the things we love and hate, the things that are so perfect and the things that could have been done better, the meta references, and so on. Thanks to @javabeans and @girlfriday for creating this place to make our drama watching more "effortful."

I never realized how much I pick up Korean language, and how much I actually comprehend the dramas I watched from both the subtitle and the native language until I started my Cdrama adventure recently. Considering how I never formally learned Korean, that would mean my drama watching time is quite an effortful one, isn't it? Besides, I'm pretty sure that shitposting about bad dramas like some of the beanies like to do isn't as effortless as it seems to be. 😜

Ever since I started watching K-dramas a few years ago, I have been wondering why I only managed to finish a handful of them every year while every other Beanie just gobbled drama after drama without any interruption. Thank you @missvictrix for teaching me about effortless and effortful fun. K-dramas and practically everything in my downtime is effortful fun to me, due to concentration problems and not being able to multitask. Watching a one-hour episode, no matter how captivating, takes way longer and I cannot be doing anything else at the moment. Maybe I can give you some self-discipline in exchange for some effortless fun, that way we both can juggle multiple dramas on multiple days without any problems! ;)

I realised how much Korean I now understand. I’ve learnt new cultural references. I am able to tell a SK accent from a NK one! 🤣 educational fun?
Effortful fun for me is cooking!! So when I watch Take Care of my Refrigerator - I go try out a recipe. Same with Delicious Rendezvous. Or any other variety show for that matter.
I also make bucket lists of places to visit - most recently - Trans Siberian Railway! 🤣

I get free holidays to Korea because my Mom wants someone who can speak enough Korean to navigate the not-seoul areas, which means me, and it's all thanks to 12 years of Kdramas. Ahahhahahaha.

Maybe Crash Landing on You made you want to whip up fresh noodles like Hyun Bin did (that ramyun!)

Wait how did you know I made ramyun after seeing Hyun bin make it?

(Ok i made instant pho, i ran out of my ramyun stock TT)

Depending on how serious you take your dramas (or your level in inner nerd — and mine is high...

After watching too many crime dramas and intense googling, i think i know fairly well the laws in South Korea, much well than i know them about my adopted country...
This is where i spend most of my time,rather than actually watching the drama, i am reading pages and pages of articles and reserach papers about South Korea, last one I read was on reforms in Civil service hiring in Korea for grade 9 civil officers and grade 5.

Time management and drama
@missvictrix, oh high five, i have tried and failed at all those methods of controlling my time spend on dramas and googling about them... Even after the fact that i am very efficient at dropping dramas...
So my current rule is to watch only two episodes a day of any currently airing drama...and since i know i will binge completed dramas, i actually do that over weekend and it spills over because of my googling skills or rants or raves on fanwall...

Learning Korean

I actually watch Korean dramas on viki in learn mode and sometimes switch languages of subs from English to German or French (i am learning them) it's fun!

@missvictrix Honestly, I don’t think that watching a good drama is effortless fun. I would characterize it more as meaningful fun/a meaningful activity. Story, be it in written form, be it in theatre, be it in movie, be it drama’s touches you. It makes you think about life and how to deal or not to deal with life. Yes, when you watch a drama you stare at a screen, but you engage with a story and that story can touch you … deeply. There are books, movies, and even dramas that changed the way I looked at the world and I could swear I was not the same person after immersing myself in that story. I can remember watching a movie in the cinema and after coming out I could have sworn that two months had passed because it felt as if I had lived two months of my life on screen with the characters. I became a part of a story I wouldn’t have encountered in my real life and went through all of the emotions together with the characters sometimes wanting to hug them or shake some sense into them. Going through the experience with the characters spoke to a non-logical part of me and made me see the world differently afterward. It wasn’t something that consciously changed.

Drama spreads a story out over a longer period in time. But what occurs in the drama doesn’t leave you at the end of the episode. Sometimes you carry the sadness of the story with you in your day-to-day life because the character has become your friend and you feel so concerned for her/him. Sometimes there are aspects to a drama you can’t understand and you sit and ponder about it while driving to work or during coffee breaks trying to figure out why the character is acting a certain way, trying to fill in the gaps in the story, trying to figure out what the writer is trying to tell you. You reflect on your life experience because sometimes it requires life experience to understand what is being said. And months after the drama I will have my eureka moment because I finally understood what the writer was telling me through an experience I had in my own life. Sometimes there are aspects of a drama that hit you so hard that you need to reflect on your own feelings and why it bothers you so much… that all is a meaningful activity to me.

I do, however, think that less is more with drama. I currently don’t feel the need to watch more than one drama and savor it and take everything it has to offer me. But I never feel that time spent watching a “good” drama is wasted time.

A “good” drama, to me, is a story that is not laid out for you but requires some effort to understand and requires a willingness to go through the necessary emotions. There are brainless movies/dramas [feel good movies/dramas] out there which I love too. Because after a draining day at work, sometimes you just want to immerse yourself in beautiful, fuzzy emotions that are like a balm on the soul and allow you to relax, feel good and get on with the rest of your life. They are wonderful as long as they don’t become a...

I've watched A LOT of dramas over the last 10 or so years and there was a time I felt bad for investing so much time into this obssession of mine without getting anything worthwhile in return.

I've since gotten over it because I once asked myself if I really could live in a world without k dramas and answer was "Don't be ridiculous. Why would you even ask that?"

In recent years I've realised that dramas have given me much more than I gave them credit for. I've taken an interest in learning the Korean language and I'm making progress. Dramas have helped with my pronunciation of words and where I would normally be afraid of butchering a word, I'm much more confident saying it because I know for sure it's pronounced that way since I heard it in a drama. It just so happens that my effortful fun is related to k dramas. I didn't plan it but it worked out well.

Dramaland has also led me to some incredible friends who love what I love and who just get my crazy even though we've never met and live oceans apart. As an introvert I find it incredibly hard to make friends "out there" and let's face it, if I tried to explain the culture of drama watching and spazzing over an oppa or how moving it was to see a pair of boots cross over a wire they'd have me committed.

But here, in the dramaverse, my behavior is perfectly normal... i think. I may have invested an incredible amount of time into dramas but it wasn't all effortless fun. It was learning a new language, navigating friendships, seeing a culture and a people in a different light. It was, as someone recently told me, a form of self-care.

I think I can live with that.

*looks at this post* *looks sideways at herself*
Effortful fun you say… *chokes on a 4k word essay*

Hey Sic why do you write so much? Why do you analyse so much? Why do you watch things you hate? Why do you shitpost? What is a shitpost? Why do you rant so much? Isn’t it exhausting?
Well, yes… and no.

I like analysing things. I analyse things all the time. Especially written stories, be that in film, TV or literature.
In part because that’s just how my brain works; it does it with everything. In part because I am also a writer and analysing other stories makes me a better writer and helps me learn ways of doing or not doing things. And in part because I like knowing how things work, and thus enjoy breaking down creative processes and storytelling.

On top of that I am a budding linguist and love history and all things language and inputting knowledge and learning new things. There have been many a sageuk to lead me down strange and wondrous research journeys from Joseon rice laws to ancient Tibetan seal scripts to sword making to Chinese mythology. And I enjoy watching things in other languages precisely for the foreign language factor, which means that yes, I too am like you and am constantly comparing the subtitles to my limited Korean and repeating new phrases out loud whilst watching.

Combining my inherent analytical nature, with my love of storytelling and learning means there is very little time spent watching, or indeed at all in everyday life, with my brain turned off. It doesn’t do that very easily.
Very occasionally I will encounter a drama which I can watch mindlessly, without analysing much of, however generally this never lasts for a show’s entire run, and then the analytical academic mind kicks in again and I feel the need, no I even thrive sometimes, off pulling apart a show to see what makes it tick, and why it ended up the way it did, for better or for worse (although statistically more worse than not).

As for shitposting itself, it is a combination of the things I like; effortful fun in analyzing kdramas, but also in making fun out of something that maybe isn’t that good and therefore initially that fun, drawing and writing, and making people laugh, having fun WITH people.

I like doing it all, writing and ranting and shitposting. I get something out of it.
For the most part anyway, because yes, it can be exhausting. If I prioritize my time spent analyzing a drama over say, sleep, or if analyzing (or shitposting) a drama is more mentally (or emotionally (or very occasionally spiritually)) draining than the process is fulfilling, we end up with a negative amount of beans from the whole affair.
And so I’m much pickier now, about what I watch, due to time and the amount of effort some things take to watch, even if it’s effortful fun, and about what is worth me writing about.

But even so, writing about something often helps. It helps me process what I just watched, it helps me figure out my...

Oh god, THIS topic has finally come. *hides mirror because I can't face myself*... A few years ago I realized I was using all my relaxation time with effortless fun. And at first I thought it was enough, and it felt so therapeutic. It was a safe haven... But a few months passed and then I realized it wasn't fulfilling. Or it was but it wasn't helping me move forward or do anything with my life. I would talk to people and then I realized all I had in mind where the dramas I had watched the night before or all the studying/or work I was currently working on. I began using my passion for dramas in fuelling other likes and varying my down time. I just love your insightful essays miss v! Looking forward to the next one!

I am a believer of all fun should be effortless. I don't want to spend any effort outside of 40 hrs work a week. It's true that I picked up Korean after years of watching kdrama, but I don't feel like I spent any effort on those.

Now I can watch a kdrama raw and understand about 75% when it's not using legal or medical terms. A little less for saeguk. But my brain picked up Korean on its own. It just works in it's own weird way, so I did not feel like I spent any effort at all.

And that is also why I love watching dramas, because it is effortless. 🙂 Maybe because I started since young to watch dramas only as entertainment, so I am just continuing to live like that. Sure, there are some dramas that provided a lot of food for thoughts, and I love those too. But in general, I've never lose sleep over drama or burnt my brain trying to make sense of one. In fact, only after joining DB that I have to spend a little bit of effort taking screenshots for my posts. 😋

I love dramas and I love effortless fun! 😁

I like that kdramas can be both effortless and effortful fun and like books there’s ones to savour and ones to devour in great gulps. I tend to keep watching dramas to the weekend so it’s something I do with my husband.

I think watching kdramas certainly can build language skills, I feel I have a better grasp on Korean than I ever did with German after 3 years of high study.

Like the author of this article, I am spinning too many drama plates currently and am starting to feel like a sideshow. I really appreciate the honesty here as it goes to show that good time management isn't always easily achieved. There's something about how compelling kdramas are (and effortless fun in general) that makes it so difficult to reasonably restrain oneself in watching them. Thanks for highlighting this as a universal struggle, as now I feel less alone!

(I realise after writing this that I may have gone a little off topic, but putting it out there nevertheless).

I loved this piece! What I would be also curious to know is what gets people into kdramas in the first place? And what makes them stay? Is it the storytelling? The foreign-ness of it? Or just because...?

Speaking for myself, I started watching kdramas fairly recently, only because they suddenly became easily accessible in my region. And I stayed because I loved the sound of the language, and the compelling storytelling, and the high-quality productions. But this wasn't unusual for me. To be honest, for the past few years, although I still communicate primarily in English, which is the only language I can claim to have some degree of native command over, I consciously try to read only literature in translation, and have stopped watching programming in the English language. Subtitles are still a crutch, because I have not as yet achieved proficiency in any language other than English, but as I watch "foreign-language" programming, I find myself mapping patterns and differences across languages and cultural habits. I also find myself exploring foods of different kinds, reading a lot more literature in translation (which sadly are not as easily available as one would like), and best of all, travelling with ears wide open. On that last point, it's amazing how much more fun a travel experience becomes when you visit a site like, say, the Eiffel Tower, and you can understand what the people around you are saying. Whom do they want to send that selfie to (yes - The Package comes to mind!)? Where will they head to dinner tonight? What is next on the travel agenda? 

I loved the line that Bong Joon-ho said at an awards ceremony recently - that all people need to do is overcome the one inch high wall of subtitles to be able to open up whole new worlds of cinema (I paraphrase, of course). If I were to extrapolate my own experience, I would say that watching in languages you do not already speak makes you more culturally sensitive, and by extension, makes you much more relaxed and easy-going in life. Things don't rile you up so easily. And when meeting new people, you celebrate cultural novelty and differences instead of scuttling away in search of the old and familiar. 

As a writer, I really appreciate the way Kdramas are set up: 16-20 episodes of roughly an hour. It is enough time to do a deep dive into plot and characterization, but at the same time it is finite so there is a definite beginning, middle, and end, and usually a well-developed story arc... each drama a little novel, and so many to choose from.
Long ago I gave up on American TV, where well-written shows were "rewarded" by becoming endless years-long slogs of similar stories and zero growth in either character or plot. Kdramas brought me back to enjoy the medium once again.

Time really isn't a restraint for me when it comes to watching Kdrama. I'm retired and live in a dreary, rainy part of the U.S. were being inside is a winter long condition. I also live alone, so when I wake up @2am--I can watch Kdramas until I feel sleepy again. My big problem with Kdarma if finding a place to watch the dramas I'm interested in. I'm so surprised that the inventive South Koreans haven't seized on the the idea that they should turn out their dramas with English subtitles already attached. They should know by now that English speakers gobble up their dramas, and pay to do so. Therefore, it would make it much easier for the watchers and the producers of such fare to make it immediately available for consumption by their English speaking audiences.

To me dramas have been helping me in understanding how to express my feelings in a healthy way to my family and friends. I am really not good in understanding and expressing my feelings and that often ended up in me become angry in frustration. But watching dramas you see characters allowed to showe their feelings and verbally expressing them, witch made me analyse how to understand my own feelings and expressing them. It really have helped me and made me better person to my dearest people. Therefor dramas have become more than just passing time but also a way to learn something about myself.

Kdrama has been a great substitue for reading for me. I find that I could not find the focus, energy or time to properly read a book while jugglung between full time work, home and motherhood. I can enjoy kdrama while cooking or doing house chores. I also can still digest it at the end of the day when I'm fully exhausted.

Frankly I'm grateful to find kdrama. I can think of other options other people choose to escape reality that are destructive. I choose Gong Yoo or Hyun Bin affliction any days over hangover or drug/pill haze.

thank you for this article...i have similar thoughts but don't think i could have articulated my thoughts so nicely as you and everyone else have put it...kdramas changed my life (and its only been a year since i started them), i've learnt from them, get inspired by them, found laughter and tears in them, and i love the online community i've found...ever since i can remember, other than watching tv shows, i didn't have much interest in hobbies etc, plus i'm an introvert with limited human interactions, so whatever little of life i know is from the world of watching tv, but with kdramas it's another level altogether, the precious hours of sleep i've lost so far, but at this point, i feel like its (i.e the binge watching session) all been worth it:-)

Nicely put. Drama watching isn't as effortless as one might think it to be, & depending on what type of watched you are, it can be a different experience for you.

Ha how I wish I was an effortless watcher.

The best thing I did for myself as a kdrama viewer was to allow the word “dropped” into my vocabulary. For some crazy reason when I first started watching kdramas I assumed a rule: “Start a drama, finish a drama”. Talk about going from effortless to effortful. So after starting and completing 55 kdramas I encountered CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD (March 2018). I did not immediately realize that it would be my emancipation. The English subtitles were so poor that I threw in the towel after 4 episodes. Now I am not afraid to let one go. Right now my ratio looks like for every three dramas I complete I drop one.

Over the last several years I have planned trips late in the year that generally last about 2 weeks. That messed up my kdrama viewing and I found myself in serious catchup mode when I returned. So at the end of 2018 and 2019 I decided to skip the final cycle of dramas that end a year and carry over to the new. Sort of take the end of the year off to rejuvenate and get ready for the new year. Now it is kind of scary at the number of upcoming dramas that I want to check out.

Interesting article. There are many different ways to watch a TV show.

Immersive: getting totally involved in all the nuisances, character actions, procedurals, clues, plot lines to develop one's own plot theories. It is a show that screams for analysis. LOST was that type of show.
Rollercoaster: understanding and buying into the show premise, but allowing oneself to just react to the unexpected plot twists and turns, however bonkers. You are a passenger on the director's and writers' wild ride. 9.9 Billion Won Woman was that type of show.
Pure Entertainment: where one suspends belief in the premise, facts, situations or story to just ask the show "to entertain me!" These shows have strong actor performances to carry the show. Crash Landing on You is that type of show.