This review may contain spoilers
I still don't understand the title
This kdrama showed me a lot of the things I missed about the industry: real people - real skin, pores, skin texture, beard stubble, beautiful and healthy, sun kissed golden skin; people throwing liquids at the FL; a hopelessly in love ML; a healthy dose of nonsense; the nonsense ring tones and a ridiculous keyboard tapping sounds; people looking sad and depressed, saying nothing for long periods of time, looking longingly at their surroundings.
It was fun and depressing, with a little sprinkle of nonsense and hope. Even if it was annoying at times, it was nice to see real people and a story that takes its time. The state of recent kdramas has me longing for simpler times and I guess that's why I watched this one.
Even if the beauty standards aren't as strict as today, they're still equating glasses and curly hair with ugliness, but I guess that's still universal, unfortunately. In this drama we see superficial "improvement" or more topical and stylistic ones, instead of the permanent ones we're seeing in today's kdramas. Most of today's kdramas seem like an advertising to the plastic surgery and cosmetics industry. It feels like they're telling us to apply new paint to an imperfect house because what matters is what we see on the outside. Anyway, this kdrama was refreshing because it was an escape of what the kdrama world is largely becoming.
It has been puzzling me for a while how there are so many dramas that deal with cancer. It's a very specific trope to KDramas, which is probably something that is very present in Korean society. Tropes and stereotypes exist for a reason. They might be reductive but are usually indicative of at least a trend. I found out not long ago that there is a correlation between the presence of military bases and the increase in cancer diagnosis. Correlation might not be causation but the probability of causation is very high.
I'll leave a few articles here that might bring light on this:
https://gijn.org/stories/investigating-toxic-military-bases-and-their-links-to-cancer/
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/unpublished-study-finds-elevated-cancer-rates-us-military-base-2023-11-10/
https://www.civilianexposure.org/military-bases-are-full-of-cancer-causing-compounds/
Besides being the highest polluter in the planet, the US military is poisoning the people around the world. They have 800+ military bases all over the globe and these are the ones they have in South Korea, they're a lot for such a small country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Army_installations_in_South_Korea
It doesn't matter that many of them are closed, the contamination remains in the soil. The uncountable amount of cancer patients we see in KDramas could be linked to that, since, in some way or another, kdramas reflect Korean reality. Maybe that would be something interesting to talk about in a kdrama but with such levels of pro-US propaganda I doubt anyone will ever do that.
It was fun and depressing, with a little sprinkle of nonsense and hope. Even if it was annoying at times, it was nice to see real people and a story that takes its time. The state of recent kdramas has me longing for simpler times and I guess that's why I watched this one.
Even if the beauty standards aren't as strict as today, they're still equating glasses and curly hair with ugliness, but I guess that's still universal, unfortunately. In this drama we see superficial "improvement" or more topical and stylistic ones, instead of the permanent ones we're seeing in today's kdramas. Most of today's kdramas seem like an advertising to the plastic surgery and cosmetics industry. It feels like they're telling us to apply new paint to an imperfect house because what matters is what we see on the outside. Anyway, this kdrama was refreshing because it was an escape of what the kdrama world is largely becoming.
It has been puzzling me for a while how there are so many dramas that deal with cancer. It's a very specific trope to KDramas, which is probably something that is very present in Korean society. Tropes and stereotypes exist for a reason. They might be reductive but are usually indicative of at least a trend. I found out not long ago that there is a correlation between the presence of military bases and the increase in cancer diagnosis. Correlation might not be causation but the probability of causation is very high.
I'll leave a few articles here that might bring light on this:
https://gijn.org/stories/investigating-toxic-military-bases-and-their-links-to-cancer/
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/unpublished-study-finds-elevated-cancer-rates-us-military-base-2023-11-10/
https://www.civilianexposure.org/military-bases-are-full-of-cancer-causing-compounds/
Besides being the highest polluter in the planet, the US military is poisoning the people around the world. They have 800+ military bases all over the globe and these are the ones they have in South Korea, they're a lot for such a small country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Army_installations_in_South_Korea
It doesn't matter that many of them are closed, the contamination remains in the soil. The uncountable amount of cancer patients we see in KDramas could be linked to that, since, in some way or another, kdramas reflect Korean reality. Maybe that would be something interesting to talk about in a kdrama but with such levels of pro-US propaganda I doubt anyone will ever do that.
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