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

(frozen)

[kaigou]

That's how it came across, that you wanted me to take what had been just a flippant set of remarks (about every example, I might add) and badger me into retracting the humor in favor of a full-on treatise. I don't mind doing full-on treatises -- and I daresay I know quite a bit more than you're giving me credit for -- but this is hyperbole, and as such, it would always fall short of whatever it is you're wanting me to post, instead. It's exaggeration for the purposes of humor. That's kinda a big part of how humor works. Your analogy works better if it's rephrased as this: telling a joke in which one adds two plus two and gets five works because we're all aware this is at most only four-fifths truth and the remaining fifth is sheer exaggeration.

Clearly, you don't welcome humorous comments about a specific topic -- and I say "specific" because clearly you didn't rankle at the hyperbolic treatments of the rest of the examples. That's a signal to me that you've got a bone to pick. I don't mind bone-picking and would normally welcome it, but when a post is just meant to be amusement and nothing more, the testy note in your response indicates you've got a hot button -- and your second response confirms it. But it doesn't make it my problem, and I was simply trying to suggest that if you do prefer to debate, that perhaps some other post with more substance would be more appropriate.