Tragedy Becomes Joy: My Favorite Romantic Tragicomedies

The tragedy here is in male lead Lin Yiyang's past. The present timeline shows him reaping the fruit of everything he's been and done as he pursues the love of his life and finds his way home. This drama touches on community, chosen family, karma, redemption, national identity, and morality. 

The experience of this drama is highly romantic, as the couple are front and center. Secondarily, Amidst a Snowstorm of Love is a sports drama.  Both leads are billiards stars. Her star is rising; he contemplates a comeback. 

This love story spans generations, with two characters from the anti-Occupation underground reborn in a sunnier present that still bears hidden karmic scars. A third character lingers as a ghost, his karma unresolved. Chicago Typewriter has profound messages about the bonds of friendship, the power of love, and the psychic wounds left by the Occupation.

Part 1, Moon Rising is lighter and more domestic than the karma avalanche to come. Here the drama explores family dysfunction, parenting dilemmas, sacrificing for the nation, and characters hoping for personal happiness. The drama depicts family and social conflicts, but also altruism, military glory, the dream of peace, and the aftermath of war.  

Part 2, Sea of Clouds takes characters who wished for happiness and fulfillment in everyday life and moves them into the royal palace. The dark side of family meshes with murky politics. Characters face conflicting loyalties. Peace is endangered by fault lines from past betrayals. Fated love meets inexorable history. 

Artfully written, Pinocchio has a fairy tale title for each and every episode. And like traditional tales, it explores morality, and specifically journalistic ethics. Throughout, it questions the nature of truth. The drama also illuminates family, adoptive family, loss, betrayal, revenge, redemption and forgiveness.

These lovers are beacons of liberation in the fight to resist societal prejudices. This drama probes the extremes that traditional parenting can produce when a parent has a troubled personality. Primary protagonist and female lead Yun Jin A  emerges from family and workplace betrayals able to discard stifling roles. This drama takes a loving yet merciless look at what she has to let fall away to keep her soul alive, and the undeniable losses and costs of breaking free.

A new generation joins hands to heal the previous generation's broken dreams.

Healer is one of the most romantic slow burns ever, and it's connected not only to the leads as people whose harsh life experiences made them into each other's perfect other half, but also to them both becoming orphans due to governmental abuse, corruption and censorship. 

To pack that much meaning into the love line, opening episodes touch on political gut issues. 

But it's the hard-hitting historical exposition that fuels the romance-action powerhouse.

A morality tale that grows in complexity as the story unfolds.  A vintage noona romance that breaks the mold. This drama is a wild, tropey ride, but grounded in excellent writing and characters.

An intricate courtship, a time slip, and an evolving, dynamic timeline. Two people marked by the same heavy karma - yet it takes many threads of causality to bring them together. This drama shows characters being pushed and pulled by karma, unable to see where it's taking them. But as the proverb says, "Fate brings together those that are a thousand miles apart."

This drama starts out with high conflict, ripping the hypocrisy bandaids off some cherished myths about social, familial, and societal harmony. In time, it reveals its compassionate, humorous, profound, humane, romantic heart. Enemies to lovers about people who treat, and who suffer from, mental illness. This drama powerfully critiques societal stigmas, and delivers profound messages about trauma and healing.