monstersnroses

Taiwanese and Chinese are so good at making an incredible show on the strength of the actors and the script, without leaning so hard on the production value and a high budget to cover over creative laziness. I wish some other countries would learn from their examples.

(coughcoughsouthkoreacoughcoughcoughcough....)

I get Rosanna Arquette vibes. I like it. She's super cute without doing the "baby" act that grates on my nerves so often.

imo, people are being really generous by calling this a melo. True melos have elements of heightened angst, sadness, and dramatic tension. But you'll notice that every time a scene starts to ramp up strong emotions, the whimsical soundtrack, or some comic relief, or a scene switch or topic change, comes in and dampens the actual drama part of this "melodrama".

When I think melodrama, I think My Heart Twinkle Twinkle or Que Sera Sera, or What Happened In Bali.

I don't even know what i'd call this except "confused". And this happens when the producers/directors don't have any strong creative vision for a story.

Better than Ambien!

I can. When youre in what you percieve as a life or death situation, sometimes the self-preservation is to completely shut down and go on autopilot. Combine that with the fact that she's not sure how real the world she is in really is... and you could get like a kind of shellshocked lack of reaction.

Props to Arthur for actually putting in the effort to try to act and feel the way a 500 year old might. Sometimes when an actor plays what is supposed to be an extremely old character, they drop the pretense and just act like a normal ML or FL. In this one, because ML's acting is conscientious, it's easier to stay immersed in the plot.

Think? She saw him nekkid, they are getting together. That's the c-drama rules.

does anyone know if this is a one-ep-per-day situation or...?

Whoaaa, this is good. I was just going to preview it for a few minutes and i got sucked in so fast, and now I'm waiting impatiently for more episodes, a situation I don't like being in!

So good!

Nice Guy is literally putting me to sleep, so this tracks.

The hottest man in this drama is Kang Bin. If I was Mi Yeong, I would have dropped both of them and run away with Bok Cheon.

In the first and second significant interactions with him, the second things stop going HIS way, his violent tendencies surface. That's narcissism, baby!

I watch some really toxic and messed up romances and enjoy them, but to think narcissism is sexy and romantic is a very strange kink even for me.

I'm beginning to suspect the script was at least partially written by AI. I could be wrong, idk.

To me, another failure of this is that it's been labelled a 'romance' and there is barely any romance element to it. It's labelled as an action and there's not much of that. It's labelled as a melodrama, and yet lacks dramatic tension. What even is this? Mobster slice of life?

Did anyone watch The Spies Who Loved Me? That show had the same problem. Eric Mun was so fiery and spicy in Que Sera Sera, and then was really good in Another Miss Oh.... and then Spies Who Loved Me looked like it was going to be really fun, but it was a long slow motion face plant. And it also had a genre identity-crisis thing goin on.

I loved the first season of Stranger Things, and when I heard a season 2 had come out, I knew it was going to be worse, because Season 1 was a complete package, it doesn't need a season 2. Even my kids, who can watch anything they want from any time they want, are right now watching Peaky Blinders, Boardwalk Empire, and Sopranos.

I gravitate towards vampires, red flag romances, angsty, antihero, etc. And I started A Discovery of Witches and found season 1 to be a really watchable (I won't say it was good, but watchable yes). But season 2 got worse, and i stopped at the first episode of season 3 like 'i quit'.

Its truly ironic that out of all the countries in this world, the ones making the most adventurous, creative content right now are Chinese. At least from my romance-only pov anyways.

K dramas got international attention for being creative, adventurous and boundary breaking, and for being raw and full of great acting and writing.... and now that they have international audiences, they are no longer any of those things lol.

I wonder if AI is involved in the script writing these days. I'm an amateur fiction writer, and once I used chatgpt to help me write a fiction story. I was at first totally blown away by how FAST and EASY it was to finish a fiction work that way. But after it was finished, I realized it didn't feel like 'me', and I had turned out something very boilerplate and "typical" and I didn't like it. But like Nice Guy, thinking on it, has this similar feel of the script not having a lot of personal touch or idiosyncrasies. Just makes me think is all.

I tried to recc Secret to someone last month, and it took me forever to find a link for it, idk why that drama is so hard to find these days because it's a CLASSIC.

Yes this. I don't mind some wokeness in shows or moral preaching, especially when it comes to women's rights and treating women and minorities with a more progressive mindset, because RL SKorea can still be a somewhat misogynist place from what i've seen/heard. But it's when it's added to the show in a way that makes it feel like it doesn't really belong there, that it becomes cringe and feels "corporate" to me like it's pandering to US dollars and production teams.

Maybe SK shows are becoming more violent, but I wouldn't know because if it isn't a romance, I don't watch it normally. The only time I venture outside of romances is for the occasional comedy.

Which again is totally American to preach all these values at people and then turn around and produce a bunch of empty violent content. Aigoo.

I remember when you could watch crazy k-dramas like fashion king, boys over flowers, what happened in bali, que sera sera, that winter the wind blows, my heart twinkle twinkle, secret, kill me heal me....

what happened.

yes. There's nothing all *that* wrong with it, it's just boring and uninspired, and seems unable to pick a genre which makes it alllllmost feel slice-of-life.

I'll watch anything good, which is why i've only seen about 5 k-dramas in the past year, but i've seen probably 50-100 c-dramas. It used to be flipped, i used to watch mostly k-dramas but the've tanked. I suspect the invasion of american money into the k-entertainment environment caused this (such as disney and netflix etc), and now such large sums are involved in some productions, that korean producers and creative artists are afraid to take any risks, and "play it safe"... or try to cater expressly to american money interests, so they sanitize everything risky or questionable, tone everything down, and inject wokeness in random places where it doesn't belong.

I have had 2 instances in RL of stalkers who I got legal restraining orders against, and despite this, I sometimes really love the stalker-romances. BUT NOT THIS ONE. He is from the absolute outset of everything, a classic narcissist, he screams 'future wife-beater', this is legit not attractive, even to someone as messed up as me. You would have to be a self-hating female on a level I can barely comprehend to think his behavior is attractive in any way.

I almost didn't watch this because of the FL. I have been supremely dissappointed in her acting several times. But she's very good in this role, like it was tailor made for her because the emotional range matches her actual acting range.... she can play quiet, afraid, timid, overwhelmed, nice but not all that quick witted, innocent and oblivious, and afraid of intimacy.

If there is any significant character growth in her arc, she won't be able to act it with any degree of realism at all. She can't do anything out of her own emotional range.

For me the good of all this is she isn't ruining this drama for me like she has in other dramas i've watched with her cast as the FL. The script does that all by itself.