a short guide to korean dramas

[kaigou]

hollywood happy ending: everything ends happily, the lovers are reunited, and any damage during the course of the show/movie is miraculously repaired, restored, or otherwise rendered null.

hollywood unhappy ending: main character dies, but everyone else gets a t-shirt and learns to love again.

bollywood-musical happy ending: same as for hollywood, but with spontaneous mass musical sequences. possibly also involving helicopters. and extra dance maneuvers performed while riding camels.

bollywood-musical unhappy ending: unhappiness and bollywood musicals are like matter and anti-matter. it's theoretically possible but would likely cause significant tears in the time-space continuum.

korean happy ending: at least two characters die*. the lovers survive. mostly. except for the dead ones.

korean unhappy ending: everyone dies*.

* alternate option: utter insanity and/or hot pokers stabbed through delicate body parts.

...by k-drama standards, Hamlet isn't a tragedy, it's just a rom-com with a higher body count than average.

Comments

[aldanise]

Nooo, nonono. Everyone dying is in the happy ending category. It's when one of the lovers dies and the last shot lingers on the one who must now go on that we get into really depressing territory.

[kaigou]

Hah. Yeah, true dat.

(My first introduction to this was in reading the manhwa Let Dai, which has bullying, child abuse, gang rape, drug use, sudden and extreme violence, deaths of named characters, political and academic corruption, and that's just in the first volume. It gets worse from there... but the ending? The characters end up separated, though it's implied -- very loosely -- that things might work out. The various USians on fan-forums were horrified, while the Korean fans were delighted at how happily things had turned out. I asked a Korean friend about the reactions, and her comment was: "There were actually characters alive in the last chapter? That's a happy ending, by Korean standards." Heh.)

[aldanise]

Yeah. I get someone to spoil me for everything that I watch/read from Korea, since I can't handle the rocks fall, everyone dies endings without preparation. But, really, I do that for most media I consume; Korea just adds a ... particular importance to the practice.

[kaigou]

Korea just adds a ... particular importance to the practice.

I think the theory is that the bitterness makes the sweet just that much sweeter. And sometimes, that fits the mood... but it's not something you can really count on, like you can usually with Hollywood -- where if it's billed as a romantic comedy, you can be fairly certain it'll be romance (or Hollywood's version of it, at least, which means a lot of heteronormativity and locked-in-stone gender roles, but hey, who's counting?) and try for comedy... but I'm finding that the label "romantic comedy" for k-dramas means a requisite amount of angst along the way, sprinkled with tragedy in between the comedic elements.

Curious, now that I think of it: western genres don't tend to mix up quite like asian fare (Korean, Japanese, even Chinese, and plenty of Indian, from what I've seen). The humor tends to get blacker and darker as you go east from Europe, then past a certain point it becomes light-hearted again, but it's light-hearted in the midst of some of the worst tragic scenarios. Even anime/manga shows the same traits, of having unexpected (to Western eyes) comedic deformation humor riding almost on the tails of intense emotion.