kirtil

"As you can expect from Japanese drama, you will find a lot of nudity and sex scenes here."

This sentence is so very wrong when you are talking about mainstream dramas.
There are in fact some japanese titles that have nudity in them, but they are generally of a specific genre. As far as I know, Japanese TVs and audience are very (you can even say extremely) conservative.

I think strong woman is one of the top contenders of a bad kdrama, and nearly, everything in it was bad.
I really liked Park hyun shik until he presented the special "work place" he prepared for PBY, and then he was done too. Giving a toy desk to someone may be appropriate or cute when they are 7, but I found it extremely demeaning when you do it to an adult. imo it was not cute, it did not show how the boss was still a kid inside, innocent and sweet; It showed how skewed the power balance between them were.

I don't know what's going on with Netflix Turkey, but the top ten lists, most watched lists constantly change for me.

I watch a hollywood romantic/comedy movie; suddenly there are romantic movies from USA in my most watched (popular in Turkey) list, I watch a series from europe, same thing; suddenly my most watched list peppered with european tv series. I watch a drama from korea, china or japan, Netflix remembers; "ummm, actually all turkish people love asian stuff" and my most watched/popular list is suddenly populated with kdramas or such.

Either Netflix algorithm is a manipulator with no shame, or a swing voter is stalking me.
Or I don't realize but I am watching Netflix so little that the next time I am on Netflix is one or more months later and the list is indeed changed.

My heart is in the first one. I would love an algorithm who loves me so much that it blatantly manipulates statistics to make me happy. With pandemic going for over a year, I am now in a place where I feel happy with even the messages sent by my bank.

probably a lot more people watched it during that time and not rated as high

closed it at 8 mins I think.

Felt too forced, like seeing someone that you haven't seen for 13 years and pushed to act casual like it's yesterday.

I believe the reasons that they cast older people for younger roles are simple; profit, taking the easy way and/or taking less risks.

out of 10; 6 are among my fave female characters, 4 i haven't watched yet. I am not sure about tomorrow with you, heard not so good things about it but the rest I will try to watch.

Good post.

I hate her passionately ever since I watched one of her dramas where she made the wife forgive and return to her husband, a repeat offender of DV. And not only this, she made other characters in the drama explain that the wife was partly responsible for these several DV offenses.

I open mdl, as part of my daily routine and first article has a picture of one of my old time favorites, and also her name, with the word tribute included.

WTF!

As you implied; when I come here nowadays, I kinda prepare myself in case I see another suicide article about an actor I may or may not know. But man, this one shook me.

Lunch Queen is one of the dramas that made me want to watch more jdoramas, and it was my go to drama when I felt down and needed something to feel good for many years.
I am incredibly saddened to hear her passing.

@Popcxqueen, @3GGG, The problem with tags and moderating them is that they are kind of subjective. as seen in comments sections of most dramas, people who watch same thing can get completely different things from it. Unless they open a discussion session everytime you submit or ask to take off a tag where you can explain and defend your "thesis", there is no guarantee there is no misunderstanding between you and the person who rejects your tag.

How I would do is to not have a moderation and instead just have a set of rules, like add the tag and not show it until XX number or people also add same tag. And open a tag to moderation when a set number of people down voted or reported it.

Thank you for another article filled with numbers. Looking forward to part 6.

My gut reaction when I read there were a lot less successful lead tags compared to other tasg was that underdogs makes better story leads, but maybe you are right; maybe we tend to not add certain tags because of expectations. You expect MLs to be successful in the end so why tag it when it is the standard situation.

My take on MLs not tagged on nice is closer to 2; they are probably jerks (a bit). While I can remember MLs not being nice or mean, most MLs I remember are in or closer to the mean category.

Lately my main criteria for deciding if a lead is strong or not is simply; are they a good role model? Would you be proud of them if you had a friend like them?

Lately I use tags a lot when deciding to watch or skip, but I don't remember deciding not to watch because of any tags describing mains. it is usually tags related to story that I check, but I remember dropping dramas after I did not like how ML treats FL in the beginning. Don't remember all, but some for sure had mean or cold ML tags. if only we had abusive ML or gaslighting tags... Mmm we do have those. 4 and 11 kdramas tagged respectively. \
If only we used abusive ML or gaslighting tags more. There, now done.

I live in Turkey and I was not seeing images (let's say most, if not all) in any of your articles.
Getting a VPN connection to UK did not solve the problem, but VPN Germany did.

I think itaewon class would have been popular in 2008.
story of underdogs, fighting against oppression, solid male lead character. Yes the characters of FL and the trans person would not be as popular as today, but it was only 12 years ago, we had trans people back then too.

Some dramas thrive with longer episodes. Not all mind you, but some family dramas that have between 40-100 are specifically made that way to deep dive the relations between characters and cater a certain audience.

second lead thing really annoys me sometimes, mostly like the times you mentioned (when the ML is acting like an ass and treating FL like sht and still they end up together and what do you know; everything ML did was out of love. /bleh) . It is really sad that this is such a cliche now, that we can guess who will end up with who just by looking at cast list.
I also hate when the bad people not get punished to maintain a standard happy ending.

I also hate that some acts of harassment and abuse are written off as love and affection cliches. Kabe don scenes, wrist grab, lying/hiding the truth, forcing one to act or not act in a certain way, sleeping/unconsious kiss and/or skinship scenes (as @greendood333 mentioned)

I have no problem with "shirtlessness" in movies dramas etc. They are consenting adults after all.
BUT...
With the way things are in korea (and in japan too) nowadays I am strongly opposed to them. As I understand it (reading internet articles & watching videos- I have not fact checked any of them except reading several articles that support same pov) the fan base is pretty toxic especially on social media. There is a disturbing amount of bullying and suicides happening in entertainment industry over there.

So; great article. but a little light imo. I would have loved it more if there was a more in depth examination to see if what I mentioned above is in fact true or not.

Turkish

I know, Right! Why do you even have a female lead if you are not going to write something "lead-worthy" for her? I really hate when FLs are there to play second fiddle for the MLs. I don't mind FL being in distress or needing help (asking for help is also an aspect of healthy/strong person and relationship in certain situations imo), but if you do not even try and just write it to showcase how awesome the ML is; leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Child abuse was exactly one of the things I was thinking about when I was writing my comment and when you put it like that I'm 100% in agreement with you. it shows I still have a lot to learn about tags here. When I was writing, I completely forgot there was a child abuse tag and loaded everything in trauma.

I very rarely use smart and nice tags. I kind of think you can almost always use something more appropriate than nice in any situation and using nice kind of diminishes the things it is used for. Being a non-native english user, it is probably one of my hang-ups. Smart thing is a pet peeve of of mine, I think most writers are being lazy and instead of trying to write real smart persons they are instead making the rest of the people dumber to give us the illusion of smart.

I do agree we need well written FL/ML or something like it.

Thank you for another interesting read.

On the tagging a drama with strong female lead or not tagging anything; I immediately remembered all the dramas that the female lead was written specifically to buff the male lead, when she had no other value than making male lead more.. (insert whatever the scene requires; more human, intelligent, what have you). When you begin to think the norm in kdramas is like this, you may skip tagging it as it was as expected.
At least thats what I thought on why I was going out of my way (pause the drama - go to mdl - check if the tag is already there and either vote or add new tag) to mark dramas with strong female leads and not the ones with weak female leads.

Also, somewhat related to the tag clutter you mentioned, I find it interesting (read: disturbing) that the properties of leads have different connotations depending on genders. Tags like cold, mean, impulsive, naive, childish, aggressive or even clingy can mean positive or negative depending on gender of leads. I am hoping for an in depth review on this to see what your findings on the subject are and what you think if it.

I stopped picking/watching dramas before checking tags and use them all the time. As it is, I also think there are too many tags that points out the same thing, but also my gut reaction is if we only use umbrella type tags, there will be some misunderstandings.
The trauma example you gave for example.. There are some things I avoid in dramas and if a blanket form trauma is used for all things that result in a trauma, I might pick a drama with my particular triggers without meaning to.
Or the fact that strong female lead is defined as 4 things and I am only interested in 3 of them. I'd really prefer if there was a specific tag for physically strong female lead so I won't watch another drama like strong woman do bong.

I think you should do another article for more "before and after" bits.

This is the first time I am seeing this series and after reading all the previous ones and this, all I have to say is; wow.

I was already low-key complaining about the misogyny and discrimination in kdramas but man I missed so many more. Thank you for these illuminating statistics.
I usually like cohabitation stories but never stopped and thought about what it really means in terms of power levels of cohabitants. need to re-visit and check some of my completed list to see how blind I was.

The age gap section of your first part was also very revealing to see the perceptions of watchers on what is so normal that no tags were necessary and what is so unrealistic to make it tag-worthy.

This part did not bring many surprises to me. I prefer sismances to bromances so I was already kind of aware of the discrepancy between them. And I never really liked the rich/poor tag, but it was kind of re-affirmation for me and a pat on my back to read the statistics.

I do not feel that kdramas are moving away from rich/poor stories or making MLs rich at all. The only rich ML that I liked recently was on team bulldog I think.

I am most interested to see your take on the male/female tags and the difference on perceptions of that tags. most tags I remember seeing about females are (in no particular order) sassy, cold, strong, eccentric, nice, smart, calm, hot tempered and hardworking. But I kind of feel that they are not 100% used in the same way when they are used for males or the character is modified in a way like when a strong female lead tag is used to identify a physically strong or trained female; the lead is strong only in related scenes until they are with the (untrained) male lead. I am of course talking about the infamous wrist grab, kabe don, or forceful kiss scenes.

Also, on an unrelated point; I hope you find a more mode-neutral format for your future articles. This and all the previous parts were practically impossible to read in dark mode.

Looking forward to the next part.