Beanie level: Errand boy

#2024 Round Up – Favorite Oldie

I watched some great shows from 2023 but that doesn’t exactly feel old, so I’m going to jump all the way back to 2004 and recommend the j-drama Orange Days. A slice-of-life look at the transition from college to the “real world”, it presents a less glossy view of relationships, disability and growing up than many similar k-dramas, but also knows exactly how to land its emotional beats. It’s on Netflix right now and I highly recommend checking it out before it disappears again into the increasingly inaccessibly dark side.

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#2024 Round Up – That Wonderful OTP

Not this year and not Korean, but my hands-down favorite couple in any drama I watched (and maybe my favorite drama couple of all time) was Ren Ru Yi and Ning Yuan Zhoa in A Journey to Love. Who do I have to pay to get more couples where both partners are equally matched in intelligence and ability, are fiercely protective of both their people and principles, and are experienced adults with zero f**ks to give about propriety and arbitrary social norms?

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    Pay and PRAY the Cdrama novelists who come up with these characters and the scriptwriters who adapt them onto the screen 😊

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      *pray to

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      This was an original screenplay, which I know makes it a bit unusual. There are plenty of drama adaptations from Chinese novels that I’ve really enjoyed though.

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        Yea, I ageee that it’s a rare occasion that Cdramas get original screenplay scripts. The last one I can think of is Luoyang, and imho, it wasn’t great— more bark than bite and relied too much on the theatrics and making things (and the people) look pretty than delivering a good story

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#2024 Round Up – Best Womance

It was lovely to see eclectic, supportive female friend groups in both No Gain, No Love and A Virtuous Business. However, if you prefer actual romance in your womance, Jeongnyeon was the way to go, even if (regrettably) the love never dared to speak its name.

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#2024 Round Up – The scene that touched my heart

Pretty much all the performance scenes in Jeongnyeon, honestly, although I’d single out Ok-Gyeong and Hye-Rang’s brutal on-stage break-up and the final performance as especially powerful. This is a show that understood that sometimes the heightened, presentational language of the stage can get at emotional truths better than naturalistic realism.

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#2024 Round Up – Worst Parents

Surprisingly, the k-dramas I watched this year had few truly terrible parents. Therefore, I’m going to shift to C-dramas and tweak the prompt a bit to give a shout out to Joy of Life 2 for suggesting that even if life gives you a sociopathic biological dad, you can still end up with the best adoptive parents ever, and that real family is about love, not DNA.

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#2024 Round Up – Non-K-drama recommendation

I mean A Journey to Love, but y’all probably already know that. If I had to limit it to just this year, I’d go with Joy of Life 2, which is every bit as much fun as part 1, although I’m always wary of fully endorsing a show until I see how it ends (looking at you, Lost You Forever 2). To the Wonder and Will Love in Spring were both excellent as well.

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#2024 Round Up – Oh, that tall guy

It’s Roowon, isn’t it? (It’s always Roowon)

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#2024 Roung Up – Favorite Meta

My favorite meta technique this year was shows using their narrative structure to critique social or governmental censorship.

Jeongnyeon’s play-within-a-play structure highlighted how both 50’s and contemporary audiences are fine with queer relationships on-stage as long as they’re labeled as “straight”, and how they will ignore all but the most direct visual evidence to argue that such things just don’t exist in real life (see all the comments about the show that say that all the lesbian relationships were removed or that all the women are portrayed as just really, really good friends).

While I didn’t love the show as a whole as much, I also enjoyed how the older Chinese show, The Bad Kids, used a dual narrative structure to point out how government censorship imposes fake “happy endings” on dark stories and the dangers of believing in fairy tales when trying to address social ills.

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    Though Jeungnyeon’s time as a popstar (one performance) was not the highlight of the show, the contrast of how she was forced into a gender-one-sided performance, catering for the male gaze, was made comically clear with the initially pleased, and then disappointed and confused, investors gazing at her till their eyes almost fell out.

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      That was an awesome scene, and I love how the show deliberately contrasted it with the rapturous applause that the mostly female audiences bestowed on the “masculine” portrayals by women in the gukguek shows.

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#2024 Round Up – Favorite Mess

I didn’t really have one of these this year. I was hoping My Demon would fill this niche, but then it became agonizingly dull, and I prefer my messes trash-tastically entertaining.

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#2024 Round Up – Funniest Scene

Well, there was this “light saber” fight in No Gain, No Love . . .

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#2024 Round Up – The Real Villain

Could it be . . . American streaming services? Looking at you, Netflix and Disney+.

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#2024 Round Up – Most Stylish Drama

I loved the intricate staging and atmospheric direction of all the gukgeuk scenes in Jeongnyeon, but for overall production design I’d go with the 2023 Chinese version of Three-Body. The art direction, soundscape and cinematography all combined to make even the most mundane places & scenes feel eerie and otherworldly, and the design for both the Red Coast observatory and the museum-turned-operations-headquarters were especially stunning.

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#2024 Round Up – Childhood Connection

This is usually one of my least favorite troupes, but for k-dramas, I thought the version of it used in No Gain, No Love was more effective than most because it resonated in such opposing ways with each half of the couple rather than simply suggesting “fated love”.

However, my favorite 2024 take on this was in the Chinese show Will Love in Spring. Watching two teenagers pulled towards each other by their shared rage at the universe was much more intriguing than a typical meet cute.

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#2024 Round Up – Favorite OST

Standing Sword from A Journey to Love has been my battle anthem all year, and that entire score is glorious. This year has confirmed that if Chen Xue Ran is the musical director for a show, my ears will be happy (see also the haunting OST for Three-Body).

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#2024 Round Up – A Case of Miscasting

A Virtuous Business gets this dubious honor. I don’t know if this was so much a case of miscasting as it was of mis-writing, but when the male lead goes to hug the female lead, it should make me want to cheer, not wince. I mean, who thought it was a good idea to create a story ostensibly about the joys of sexual experimentation and then toss in a male lead so emotionally repressed that there was zero chance of the leads ever using those hot pink fur-lined handcuffs?

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    You have a point. I also had some issues with this show.

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    I don’t agree because in her case it was to find it her own pleasure by discovering her body and herself What she did.

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      I would have been fine with that if there had been no male lead at all, or if the show hadn’t shifted so sharply to focusing on the male lead’s trauma in the second half at the expense of telling the story of the female lead’s empowerment (and relegating much of that to a magical three year time skip never shown on screen). Or if the lead couple had actually had chemistry with each other.

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#2024 Round Up – Drama/Scene Stealer

Jung Eun Chae’s Moon Ok Gyeong fully lived up to her prince reputation in Jeongnyeon, effortlessly stealing my attention whenever she appeared, and her on-stage break-up with Hye Rang was one of the most electrifying scenes I watched this year.

I also want to give a shout out to He Lan Dou as the princess in A Journey to Love. She had an exceptionally dramatic character arc, and she made every moment of it utterly convincing.

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#2024 Round Up – 2024 Crush

Well, I might have watched three different Zhang Ruo Yun dramas this year, and that wasn’t an accident . . .

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    That’s never an accident 😂

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    He’s definitely swoony!

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      He was lovely in JOL 1, but his styling in part 2 was a whole different level of hot.

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        Part 2 probably had a bigger budget. The Joy of Life trilogy is definitely one of those dramas wherein the producers and production crew definitely took a chance with it:

        They all probably produced Season 1 with anticipation but didn’t expect much of it in terms of how much love and buzz they would garner, especially when half of the cast are either rookies/unknowns or veterans who are brilliant at what they do but do not garner traffic/buzz. Season 1 was probably produced simply out of love for the script and wanting to produce a good drama. After all the unexpected love and attention that Season 1 got, Season 2 probably received a lot more sponsors and a larger budget 😍😍😍

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    Not an accident at all. 😊
    What was the third ZRY drama you watched? I only saw JOL 1 and 2.

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      I watched JOL 2, The Hope and Under the Microscope. He played three very different characters in each one, and Fan Xian was definitely the swooniest, but his acting was top notch across the board.

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        I will look for those dramas in my subscriptions. 😊

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          The Hope is on YouTube, although I will say I spent much of the drama wanting to kick his character in the shins. The drama as a whole is quite good though. I believe Under the Microscope is iQiyi only, although I’m not 100% certain.

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#2024 Round Up – Favorite Male Lead

In a surprising turn of events, K-dramas really didn’t do anything for me in this department this year (unless I can count Jung Eun Chae’s memorizing Moon Ok Gyeong). However, C-dramas did supply the incomparable Zhang Ruo Yun as the incorrigible Fan Xian in Joy of Live 2, which softened the blow.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record though, the one male lead to, well, lead them all for me this year was Liu Yu Ning as Ning Yuan Zhou in A Journey to Love. Because I do like my men tall, dark and empathetic, thanks for very much.

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#2024 Round Up – Favorite Female Lead

For k-dramas it’s really a team award to all the amazing women of Jeongnyeon – they excelled at both screen and stage acting, and then they started singing, and dancing, and sword fighting, and doing drum ballet and slapstick comedy and switching genders like nobody’s business and it was all glorious.

However, my favorite female lead in any show that I watched this year (and one of my favorite female leads of all time) was Liu Shi Shi’s Ren Ruyi in A Journey to Love. Most “strong female leads” fall apart mid-show so the male lead can rescue them or suddenly start conforming to traditional social norms (or are never allowed to break them to begin with), but Ruyi was always fierce, flawed, fiendishly intelligent and a driver of the action.

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    A Journey to Love is such a good drama! I liked the FL but my favorite female character was the Princess, played by He Lan Dou.
    Some of her scenes are impressive.

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      I loved her as well and she gets my best supporting actor award this year.

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    Thank you for taking the time and making the effort to be accurate and to correctly spell (type) out the names of the cast and the characters. It breaks my heart and irks me to see people not putting in even the littlest of efforts or giving the minimum amount of respect in getting the spelling of a person’s name right when chatting about dramas on here sometimes, especially for Cdramas, just because Cdramas aren’t the main focus for DB. And admittedly, I’m probably also a little more sensitive and attentive to the names related to Cdramas, its cast, and characters because I am ethnically Chinese, so I catch it more often than not and probably more often than most people on here

    @wonhwa @isagc 🥰

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    Beautiful description of Ren Ruyi. 😊❤

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#2034 Round Up – My Favorite Drama

For K-dramas, that would be Jeongnyeon with its extraordinary female cast and emotionally charged recreations of gukgeuk. This is a show created by people who adore theatre and it showed in every frame.

However, if you asked me what my favorite show I watched from any year, any country, that would be A Journey to Love. A kick-ass feminist wuxia packed with great characters that uses the tenets of Marx to rip wolf warrior machismo to shreds? Why yes, please, I would like more shows like this.

I also want to give out shout out to the utterly unique, hilarious, heart-breaking super-hero/horror/family/almost-romance drama that is Oh No, Here Comes Trouble! This little Taiwanese gem uses its comic book styling to deliver one of the most powerful meditations on grief I’ve ever seen.

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    Perfect choices!! All very powerful stories so much so even the little uneven-ness seems charming. 🫰🏻

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