Cinderella's Sister was one where I stuck to the recaps after getting tired of the slog around ep7. (Great idea, and post ep-4, absolutely horrendous execution.)
CP and I were talking over dinner about the historical representations, and kdramas are a little... odd, to me (but I think I see what's going on, culturally). That is there are stories like Queen Seodeok and The Iron Empress or the other one I can't ever recall, stories based on historical personages. But there are a lot more where we see women in roles that had me completely flabbergasted, the first few saeguks I watched: women were armor-makers? And not just warriors, but in command of troops? And business people? And artists, and traders, and all sorts of things? Which, as I understand it, might've been true here and there (at least the business end, maybe not so much the warrior part, at least not as a consistent and regular thing) -- yet at the same time, the places that women were verifiably incredibly powerful (even sometimes outshining the king in terms of socio-political power) was as shamans and shaman-queens, and I've yet to see a single woman of thank rank or ilk get any spotlight in a major kdrama. I've been looking, too!
[it's also possible that there might be a drama with that kind of character, but that english-language sites don't see this as something worth mentioning, so I can't find it in reviews or recaps or recs. But I still would've expected to see mention of it in academic works, at least, in terms of discussing pop culture representations, even if the work weren't subtitled.]
I think the pop culture argument there might be, "we can show women doing all these man-like things, because those were barbaric times." Or as CP put it, "once upon a time, women had a lot of agency, but now we're modern and civilized, and we keep our women pregnant and barefoot like proper civilized peoples."
Whereas I think maybe jdramas -- a culture where women do seem to be slowly gaining (the progress may be incremental but it's definitely there) -- where if they showed women in past/historical in any kind of power, this might lend strength to the argument that women "have always been powerful" and to gain power in your own right is to continue a fine Japanese-woman tradition. Perhaps in Korea, the incredible disenfranchisement of women in the mid-90s led to a tendency to show women as powerful back then -- a kind of historical-drama echo of the "here's a pretty but poor girl who gets the rich boy," as a sop to the audience who knows the reality is much crueler? Here, have some fantasies and stop worrying -- which is why I called such stories the opiate of the masses. Or at least the female masses.
As for genres... I am all over the map. I haven't seen Galileo yet (though CP's rec'd it to me), and IRIS put me to sleep. I've also watched fusion saeguks and straight-up saeguks, then dabbled in SF, rom-coms, day-in-the-life, police procedurals and hospital dramas. Basically, I'll give anything at least an episode's watching. (If I can sit through the first 8 episodes of Cinderella's Sister, it's a fair chance I can give even more than one episode of a fair shake.) What I was twigging on in the comparisons in my head with this post was that these are patterns I see in shows that are considered "highly popular" or "very successful" in the target age-group, though Boss is an anomaly because I have yet to see a kdrama that comes anywhere near close to the awesome of Boss, let alone the concept. (IRIS would like to think so, but IRIS is not even within ten miles of the awesomesauce of Boss. IMO.)
And where it really drives home is when you compare a Japanese drama based on a japanese manga, and then compare how the kdrama changed a few details, here and there. Girls get more violent, sometimes, but they get less bright. They get less sexually self-aware. Or, in the case of Iwaya, they go from genuinely elite -- graduate-level degree, trilingual, top-ranked journalist on foreign/international affairs, someone who really would scare the pants off plenty of people just for being so damn freaking good -- to someone who is... a fashion reporter. I'm not seeing "elite" anywhere in there, frankly.
Where CP and I went with that was the question of whether this is because it takes more to intimidate a Japanese man (or do Japanese audiences have a higher standard of what it means to be "elite" or maybe that a woman to be "elite" means she must have succeeded by a man's standard?)...or whether it's because Korean male audiences are so easily intimidated by a successful woman that they automatically redo the character to "tone" her down? Or is it that a woman that successful is so out of the realm of the current Korean female workforce that the PTB assumed such a character would just piss audiences off?
Really, I have no idea. But the shift is saying something. I'm not sure exactly what or what other nuances might be part of it... but it's definitely saying something.
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Date: 20 Feb 2011 03:53 am (UTC)CP and I were talking over dinner about the historical representations, and kdramas are a little... odd, to me (but I think I see what's going on, culturally). That is there are stories like Queen Seodeok and The Iron Empress or the other one I can't ever recall, stories based on historical personages. But there are a lot more where we see women in roles that had me completely flabbergasted, the first few saeguks I watched: women were armor-makers? And not just warriors, but in command of troops? And business people? And artists, and traders, and all sorts of things? Which, as I understand it, might've been true here and there (at least the business end, maybe not so much the warrior part, at least not as a consistent and regular thing) -- yet at the same time, the places that women were verifiably incredibly powerful (even sometimes outshining the king in terms of socio-political power) was as shamans and shaman-queens, and I've yet to see a single woman of thank rank or ilk get any spotlight in a major kdrama. I've been looking, too!
[it's also possible that there might be a drama with that kind of character, but that english-language sites don't see this as something worth mentioning, so I can't find it in reviews or recaps or recs. But I still would've expected to see mention of it in academic works, at least, in terms of discussing pop culture representations, even if the work weren't subtitled.]
I think the pop culture argument there might be, "we can show women doing all these man-like things, because those were barbaric times." Or as CP put it, "once upon a time, women had a lot of agency, but now we're modern and civilized, and we keep our women pregnant and barefoot like proper civilized peoples."
Whereas I think maybe jdramas -- a culture where women do seem to be slowly gaining (the progress may be incremental but it's definitely there) -- where if they showed women in past/historical in any kind of power, this might lend strength to the argument that women "have always been powerful" and to gain power in your own right is to continue a fine Japanese-woman tradition. Perhaps in Korea, the incredible disenfranchisement of women in the mid-90s led to a tendency to show women as powerful back then -- a kind of historical-drama echo of the "here's a pretty but poor girl who gets the rich boy," as a sop to the audience who knows the reality is much crueler? Here, have some fantasies and stop worrying -- which is why I called such stories the opiate of the masses. Or at least the female masses.
As for genres... I am all over the map. I haven't seen Galileo yet (though CP's rec'd it to me), and IRIS put me to sleep. I've also watched fusion saeguks and straight-up saeguks, then dabbled in SF, rom-coms, day-in-the-life, police procedurals and hospital dramas. Basically, I'll give anything at least an episode's watching. (If I can sit through the first 8 episodes of Cinderella's Sister, it's a fair chance I can give even more than one episode of a fair shake.) What I was twigging on in the comparisons in my head with this post was that these are patterns I see in shows that are considered "highly popular" or "very successful" in the target age-group, though Boss is an anomaly because I have yet to see a kdrama that comes anywhere near close to the awesome of Boss, let alone the concept. (IRIS would like to think so, but IRIS is not even within ten miles of the awesomesauce of Boss. IMO.)
And where it really drives home is when you compare a Japanese drama based on a japanese manga, and then compare how the kdrama changed a few details, here and there. Girls get more violent, sometimes, but they get less bright. They get less sexually self-aware. Or, in the case of Iwaya, they go from genuinely elite -- graduate-level degree, trilingual, top-ranked journalist on foreign/international affairs, someone who really would scare the pants off plenty of people just for being so damn freaking good -- to someone who is... a fashion reporter. I'm not seeing "elite" anywhere in there, frankly.
Where CP and I went with that was the question of whether this is because it takes more to intimidate a Japanese man (or do Japanese audiences have a higher standard of what it means to be "elite" or maybe that a woman to be "elite" means she must have succeeded by a man's standard?)...or whether it's because Korean male audiences are so easily intimidated by a successful woman that they automatically redo the character to "tone" her down? Or is it that a woman that successful is so out of the realm of the current Korean female workforce that the PTB assumed such a character would just piss audiences off?
Really, I have no idea. But the shift is saying something. I'm not sure exactly what or what other nuances might be part of it... but it's definitely saying something.