asanokatana

Me saying the quiet part out loud as to why K-Drama fandom annoys me to no end…

1. You almost certainly can’t tell the difference between good acting and bad acting; it’s just something people say in an attempt to sound credible.  You won't learn the difference by watching a lot of dramas, either. People go to school to learn the performing arts for a reason. You are using "bad acting" to mean "I don't like that actor or character".

2. Don’t say a script is badly written while doing so with the writing skills of a second grader. (This goes for a much larger proportion of this site than you might think. People are notoriously bad at judging the quality of their own writing; they're bad writers because they don't know what good writing looks like.)

3. The word “chemistry“ has been so semantically bleached from overuse by drama fans that you could just as easily say “those two had great microwave oven together“ and it would have as much meaning. It's a filler word and when you use it you tell me that you have nothing to say, but you seem to think "why not speak anyway".

4. The narrative structure of stories told in East Asian cultures is often significantly different than Western narrative traditions (read about Kishōtenketsu). If you review a drama with the position that it was bad because it was missing conflict or a clean resolution or you have a fixation on a clean and structured "plot", you are applying the tired, worn cliches of Western storytelling to a non-western culture. This is a quick way to kill your credibility and disclose you as a pseudo-intellectual dilettante at best, and cultural negation at worst. Take your Freytag's Pyramid and go play in the Marvel sandbox. (A corollary to this is that you probably don't know what the word "plot" means if you use it in the singular tense. Even most short films have multiple plots; you don't understand "the plot" because you think there is just one.)

5. Netflix isn't ruining dramas. First of all, Netflix has virtually nothing to do with the production of dramas, they are a distribution channel. They do commit funding to "Netflix originals" at the starting phase in order to gain exclusive distribution rights, but that is common in all film an TV production around the world. Netflix is the reason most people outside of the ROK get to watch Korean Dramas. The fact is, there are far more dramas coming out now, but as a proportion, there are as many good dramas coming out now as ever, and as many bad dramas coming out as ever. I don't think you understand how tired and vapid the "dramas used to be better back when..." drivel sounds; try an original thought on for size. And, if you complain about the "westernization" of dramas on this site...I don't know what to say about the cognitive dissonance needed to make that statement on this site.