My first Asian drama was Hotel del Luna. I started it around when it released, but forgot to continue after a couple of episodes because I was watching many other shows simultaneously. Two years later, some lady-friends I met in online class said that I'd definitely fall in love with IU as Man-Wol. That I did, but I didn't watch any more K-Dramas after that. A few months ago, I read a long article about why so many women in India, where I'm from, are into Korean dramas: it portrays female characters of all sorts much better than most Western movies and shows do ("just changing Bobby to Sue," as Kristen Stewart put it), and it's a morale booster for women to see strong females reaching into themselves to overcome problems, quite what I remembered seeing in Hotel del Luna. So I, a 17 year old boy, decided this was the perfect genre to watch, if only to act all shocked when women told me they'd never watched K-Dramas. So far, I have only had one chance to do that, but I've actually loved watching these shows. They show strong women, poor women, clumsy women, tough teenaged girls doing many more and different things than Western stereotype girl-power shows can show, and the men, too, are regularly shown to proactively cook, dress up, gossip, cry uncontrollably. It all makes for much better characters than the same old cookie-cutter line-up of women whose strength is only shown through how much work and discrimination they can bear, and of course the super tough, mostly emotion-less guys who shed a maximum of one tear, that too only when something extraordinarily sad happens. I'm still new to this stuff, and I've started far more shows than college schedules permit me to finish, but I'm not abandoning this genre too soon. I hope I get to finish at least all the titles on my current watch list, but it may take anywhere between 2 months and 48 years, at the rate I can manage right now. Wish me luck! :D
I started it around when it released, but forgot to continue after a couple of episodes because I was watching many other shows simultaneously. Two years later, some lady-friends I met in online class said that I'd definitely fall in love with IU as Man-Wol. That I did, but I didn't watch any more K-Dramas after that.
A few months ago, I read a long article about why so many women in India, where I'm from, are into Korean dramas: it portrays female characters of all sorts much better than most Western movies and shows do ("just changing Bobby to Sue," as Kristen Stewart put it), and it's a morale booster for women to see strong females reaching into themselves to overcome problems, quite what I remembered seeing in Hotel del Luna. So I, a 17 year old boy, decided this was the perfect genre to watch, if only to act all shocked when women told me they'd never watched K-Dramas. So far, I have only had one chance to do that, but I've actually loved watching these shows. They show strong women, poor women, clumsy women, tough teenaged girls doing many more and different things than Western stereotype girl-power shows can show, and the men, too, are regularly shown to proactively cook, dress up, gossip, cry uncontrollably. It all makes for much better characters than the same old cookie-cutter line-up of women whose strength is only shown through how much work and discrimination they can bear, and of course the super tough, mostly emotion-less guys who shed a maximum of one tear, that too only when something extraordinarily sad happens.
I'm still new to this stuff, and I've started far more shows than college schedules permit me to finish, but I'm not abandoning this genre too soon. I hope I get to finish at least all the titles on my current watch list, but it may take anywhere between 2 months and 48 years, at the rate I can manage right now. Wish me luck! :D