Turtle Stomper

Oof, you're smart enough to realize that everyone has a subjective opinion, but you waste 75% of your review on dissing fellow viewers.

Here's another option, your "good watch" might not come from your "green light" negative reviews at all, it might just be that you rate an overwhelming majority of dramas as a 9 or 10. Like...idk...72/95 rated are 9+ in 2021. That's 76%. If you add in the 22 that are rated 7-8, that's 94/95 dramas. In 2020 52 out of 63 dramas you rated 9 or 10, with another 11 tossed in for 7-8. There's only one single drama you've rated lower that 7...ever.

I agree about the character back stories. I like side characters to have some backstory that indicates the rationale behind them behaving the way that they do. One recent drama, Vincenzo, had a crap ton of side characters and the majority of them do not have backstories in the traditional sense, but Vincenzo really paid close attention in the script to drip-feeding you back story of every single character as the show progressed so that in the end you were like, oh now it makes sense why this character behaved this way. Happiness did not do that. Happiness was just like, "yo, here's a bunch of people doing crazy shit for apparently no reason, have fun!"

I also disagree with Inner Circle down there that Andrew had a decent back story. That whole serial killer arc was so bizarre and out of place, it just felt like a weird duplication of the doctor killer arc. It basically added nothing to the story that couldn't have been just as easily accomplished by the well established morally depraved doctor character. There was also zero motivation in some of the actions Andrew took, like giving the writer chick bags of food. Like it was super bizarre to me that he gave the apple to the cleaning lady and then subsequently killed her for apparently no reason. Overall the character development in Happiness is pretty poorly done imo.

I know what you mean about the window scene, but they did a lot of stuff like that in this drama, people seeing things that weren’t there. Even in that scene though, to me it looked more like she was seeing him as an angel, the one bright spot that made having to crawl out of her depression for a few moments bearable.

As for a season 2, like….it was loosely based on Killing Eve and that show went on for awhile. I think there’s hope for a season 2. They left a lot of cliffhangers at the end. Like the bad lady crawling out of prison via a hole in the closing animations after a prisoner in the neighboring cell triggers her “kill when someone tells me to” MO.

Oh no, how can you ship Inspector Koo and Santa lol. It seemed way more like a mother-son relationship to me. I expected him to be her dead husband's son or something. He takes care of her exactly like you'd expect a son to take care of his drunken mother.

But I agree about one thing... WHO TF IS SANTA? How can they leave us hanging like that? They dropped SO MANY HINTS....like when he says he won't lose her "again"....wtf does that mean. And how did the bad lady recognize him if the yarn she spun at the end wasn't true? They couldn't find any record of him or anyone looking like him attending that school...so wtf is his deal? There better be a season 2.

I was sad when that character died as well and would have liked to see more of her...but I disagree that her death was anything but completely vital to the story. That one incident held its thread throughout the entire remaining episodes and drove so many decisions and actions that otherwise would have been pointless. Her dying was absolutely necessary to the story progressing as it did.

Mostly, if I'm honest, what I missed was her aesthetic. She looked so badass with that haircut and makeup. So dark and aggressive. I'd watch an entire drama with her being the main lead as a badass in a heartbeat. ...but, I also think her character was underserved in the drama and she wasn't given much opportunity to be anything other than whiny and a catalyst. I suppose that's why they've made her the focus of the special, to give her character the face time and back story it deserved.

I won’t lie though, when the transition episode started I had a hard time trying to figure out if that short haired chick was the lawyer or not. Like not just her hair color and length changed, her mannerisms had changed too. She seemed like a different person. So that part threw me for a loop for a bit lol.

Yeah dude, it’s so bad, like a weird flat beaver tail stuck to the underside of the dude’s chin. It’s a style that’s right up there with those monks that shave just the tops of their heads bald. Like it’s somehow offense to our very humanity idk lol. But their treatment of it was so good, definitely watch it lol.

Anything that gets a little too cerebral tends to score low in ratings because a good rating relies on Joe Public to understand the plot with half a finger up their nose and eyes fixated on whatever social media app they're browsing throughout. I will say, there were some parts where I had to suspend my logic (like where TF was the military while people were being melted). But....I mean...there are tons of shows/movies that get good ratings while being massively unrealistic. Like it's a fantasy drama, people need to just accept this is a fantasy world and watch how the characters adapt and interact within whatever framework the writer/director set up for them to interact in.

Dude SAME, that one song "good morning son, I am a bird, wearing a brown polyester shirt" OMG for some reason that song with it's randomly weird food ordering lyrics sticks in my head and is one of my all time favorite Kdrama tracks. Every time I hear it the drama plays through my brain tv screen and I remember all of the best parts. There are a few dramas that really do amazing things with linking the timing of their soundtrack to events in the drama and the songs stick in your head for ages.

I should also say...like death games seem to be a human fascination. I mean...gladiator style survive the challenges games have been popular for thousands of years. But I frankly do not get the fascination. Like I don't want to watch people fight to the death personally lol.

I mean, Squid Game is fun and pretty to look at...but yeah I agree with you it's basically just another entry in a flooded market of horror game to survive. A quick Google search lists the first type of movie that came out with this theme in 1974... Chosen Survivors (1974). One site that's compiled a list of just western titles in this genre has 103 entries for movies alone. Like it's not a new or innovative theme, but it's fun to see the beautiful visuals and apparently people never get tired of this theme cause in 2021 alone there were 7 western movies with this theme.

I think one thing that does set Squid Game a little apart from the majority of entries in this genre are the sheer number of cast members. Like...they had hundreds and hundreds of extras. That's crazy! It's also true that a lot of the death game entries focus on reasonably well off people, so you are kind of like "sucks to be you, rich boy" when one of them dies. It probably feels new and fresh to people to have the mix of poverty with death game as a theme. But for those of us used to watching Kdramas, we're all very familiar with the social injustice type theme that runs through a lot of different genres all across the Kdrama market. ..so the mashup wouldn't feel as innovative to us.

The doppelganger thing, idk if it's in the original work or not, but in The Devil Judge they basically used it as a plot device to explain why the sr judge and his sister just accepted the jr judge as part of the family. Otherwise they would have had to muddy up the story with plenty of nonsense around all parties getting to know each other, which would have heavily detracted from the overarching theme. On a meta level, it fits though. The entire thing, across every person and plotline, is a treatise on how quick people are to judge each other without knowing enough of the whole truth.

It's basically like every romance Kdrama where they come up with some random ass reason why the two leads must cohabitate for several episodes. So this is like...the bromance version.

I think Kdrama genre has to be treated differently from how we consume western dramas, because they use a different formula. So like I might drop a western drama and be confident calling it bad because I watched 4/8 episodes and the acting was trash or the story wasn't interesting. But for Kdramas, especially a longer 12-20 episode formats, they're built completely differently. Kdramas spend an awful lot of time laying the groundwork for the actual meat of the story. They're not all like that, but a good majority of them are. So if you stop watching after only a handful of episodes and then try to judge how interesting the story was, I think that's a mistake.

The Devil Judge is a good example of that. The first several episodes there is a lot of confusion where the viewer has to go along for the ride of figuring out what is even going on. We do this through the eyes of the naive Jr judge and a lot of our perceptions about their reality are based on his misconceptions. But that's part of the journey, the writer/director show that disarray and confusion on purpose, because that's what the jr judge is perceiving. As the story progresses we're let in on more and more of the whole concept of perceived reality vs fact. By the time you get to the end, all the pieces fall into place. But as you're watching you sort of have to hold early incidents and clues in your head and not try to make sense of them in the moment.

I think Kdramas are largely a different style of artwork than western dramas. Like a Picasso vs a Warhol. They're doing more than telling you the surface story or theme, everything from the script to the set to the costumes to the music is specifically designed to weave itself into a total picture. If you exit midweave, sure it's fair to say you just weren't interested, but to your point it doesn't really give you credibility to be able to say it failed or was bad as a drama for specific reasons. It's like saying, "I saw Warhol pull out the neon pink paint and instantly knew the finished artwork would be crap". Like...GIVE THE PAINTER TIME TO PAINT BEFORE YOU JUDGE.

SAME, even in my gamer community the non-consent talk has gone down considerably in the last couple years. I feel like people standing up to add to the growing dialog, like you've done here, encourage changes in views. Sure maybe it's a drop in the bucket that only a few thousand people will see...but a drop here and a drop there and eventually you have a massive deluge of water and that changes society. But without articles like this adding their voice, the tsunami never happens. ....the consent tea video on youtube also helped...I link that sucker to every horny man-child that tries to hump my pixel toon XD

I wondered if you were going to mention Kim Won Hae in Strong Woman Do Bong Soon. I had the same initial reaction to the character as you did...oh wow this is not ok...wait actually maybe it's ok...actually ok they did pretty well. Kim Won Hae, in particular, has been in many roles that cross the gender lines and I think he does a great job being respectful in his portrayals without losing the comedy. He's by far one of my favorite actors. That same role in another actor's hands would easily come across as offensive, but his treatment of his characters to me has always seemed respectful and well thought out.

One thing that wasn't...or was I still can't decide....handled well in SWDBS was the lead's casual cover of being gay to explain why he didn't date. He wasn't gay, as it turned out. There was a lot of really judgmental and rude dialog around whether or not he was gay in that Kdrama. At first I was pretty annoyed because it all seemed pretty divisive especially when combined with Kim Won Hae's feminine character. But toward the middle I decided I liked the message they were eventually sending, that it doesn't actually matter if someone is gay or straight, they're just people and every person is different.

I also liked that they showed these characters as accepted and valued, even while in other scenes they were showing the negative views these characters had to fight to overcome. I thought the whole thing was perfectly summed up in the scene toward the end where Kim Won Hae's masculine and feminine characters meet. For me it was a beautiful juxtaposition of each person having both masculine and feminine traits. That they handled such a mature insightful subject matter with comedy was perfection to me.

In Mad For Each Other, initially I was a little worried with the way the cross dressing man was treated. But toward the end it became obvious that there had to be that initial moment of awkwardness because they story they were trying to tell wasn't one of immediate acceptance, it was the story many of us go through of wanting to be accepting but not sure about how to get there...and eventually the ML and other characters get there, but I like that it showed the work they all put in to change their views and knee jerk reactions. I thought it was very analogous to how the real world often is.

One example I didn't see on here, but that I also liked, was from A Korean Odyssey, the summer fairy and general frost. I really liked the way they handled two gender opposite characters living happily sharing the same body. It really emphasized the idea that the soul is the source of gender identity, not the body, and I thought it was really well handled in a relatable way.

This is a good article, well thought out with points clearly supported by examples and real world context. I struggle with this theme a lot too. I mostly watch Kdramas, and while there is still quite a lot of this type of non-consent behavior, to me it seems a few degrees better than some Cdrama's I've seen. I tried to get into watching Cdramas, but the overt level of male entitlement and aggression put me off a lot. To be honest, I've seen even more western dramas where non-consent is skirted and even outright betrayed in ways that are far more graphic than most of the k/c/j dramas I've seen. I think it's a huge problem in the global entertainment industry and articles like yours add to the growing dialogue around acceptable treatment of romance in film.

The horse from Wok of Love pretty much spent 90% of its screen time pooping.

I had wanted to see the dog from Chicago Typewriter too...then I remembered the fluffball is technically dead and reanimated by a ghost so like...probably too cringe for a list of cute.

This is a cute article! I'm glad that the kitty from This is My First Life made it in, that was a fun addition to the plot of that kdrama. I'm sad the tiny human in Flower of Evil didn't make this list, she is such a good little actor and so cute I could literally die.

Mostly though, above everything else, I'm pretty shocked the kitty from Meow Secret Boy was not on here. I mean....it's a cute cat (when it's not CG and missing a butthole) but it has the added bonus of turning into a hot dude! Although, that begs some less than pleasant logistical questions around litter boxes and cleaning habits I suppose.

Like....I can see a lot of people agree with you here...but most of them seem to be in the same boat as you, the "dropped the drama partway through" boat. Personally, I like to rate dramas and while I understand that each person has their own view of how good or bad a drama is based on what they got out of it, I think it's pretty disingenuous to write an article without slogging through to the end.

That's my only criticism. I am not fangirling any drama specifically, I rated some of those low and some high, that's all subjective to personal experience....but to call out specific dramas on a hate list, with only having finished one of them completely...idk your points lose credibility for me. Especially when it comes to Kdramas where so much of the first half is laying the plotline bricks that will get called back into play in the second half. If all you do is watch a dude lay a few rows of bricks, it's pretty unreasonable to assume you know what the finished building will look like.