My name is Marissa and I’m a K-drama-holic!

By Marissa  Bañez 

I ugly cried, I laughed out loud, I fell madly in love, I desperately craved Korean fried chicken. 

All this was my daily experience while watching my first Korean drama, the incomparable Crash Landing on You.  All the characters felt like friends that I missed after the show ended.  So, I watched all 16 episodes again.  Then again for about 50 million times after that. 

CLOY is the number one rated most watched K-drama.  I’m convinced I put them over the top. 

And who can’t help but love the real-life drama where Hyun Bin and Son Ye-Jin, the two lead stars, end up married with an adorable kid and another on the way?  Romcom at its best!

Hoping to recapture that same magic, I enthusiastically dove into the black hole that is Korean drama.  First, I watched everything with Hyun Bin because, well…Hyun Bin.  Then, everything with Son Ye-Jin.  Then I watched shows with interesting storylines like Tomorrow, Move to Heaven, Extraordinary Attorney Woo, Castaway Diva, and many others.  I also delved into the historical fictions from the Joseon period (1392-1897), like The King’s Affection, Rookie Historian, Under the Queen’s Umbrella, and, again, many others. 

Don’t get me wrong.  Not all K-dramas are created equal.  There are some that are nothing more than multi-episode commercials with their shameless pervasive product placements, others that started out strong but petered out with weak or nonsensical endings, and still others that weren’t to my taste.  As someone who has put out “works of art” into the world as a children’s author, I won’t publicly denigrate those shows by identifying them.  These are just my opinions and I respect that others may differ.

Now, I mentioned product placement.  All the shows – except for the historical ones for obvious reasons – have them.  Even CLOY (hence, my craving for oh-so-yummy Korean fried chicken).  But the product placement in CLOY didn’t take away from the story.  In fact, many of my friends didn’t even notice it and simply took it as “background” that provided some semblance of authenticity.  The height of subliminal advertising, to be sure.

Speaking of advertising, because K-dramas are very popular in the Philippines and with Filipinos everywhere, Hyun Bin and Son Ye-Jin did commercials for Simple Smart Ako after CLOY became a worldwide phenomenon.

I once saw an interview with a K-drama actor who was asked for his opinion on why Filipinos love K-dramas.  He said it was because K-dramas are, for the most part, innocent and chaste.  Despite that I find it equally humorous and embarrassing for the actors that some of the kissing on K-dramas are not only innocent and chaste but also unbelievably passionless, his response resonated with me.  Frankly, I’m so tired of all the gratuitous and graphic sex and violence scenes that seem to pervade most shows.  To be sure, there’s a lot of violence in many K-dramas, like in Vincenzo.  But the lead in Vincenzo was a mafia consigliere and violence was his thing.  If it’s germane to the storyline, then I’m fine with it.  It’s the gratuitousness of sex and violence ubiquitous in many non-K-dramas that annoys me.  I just don’t need or want that much verité in my cinéma. 

Anyway, many, many K-dramas later, I’m now watching the recently-released Queen of Tears, written by the same person who wrote CLOY.  High expectations abound and lots of comparisons made with CLOY on social media. 

While still worth watching, I don’t feel the same pull with QOT that I felt with CLOY.  To me, the characters are simply characters in a show, not “my friends.”  Although I like QOT overall, I already know that I will probably not watch it again.  Maybe it’s just because I’m no longer a K-drama virgin, but I have neither cried, laughed, nor fallen in love while watching QOT.  On the upside, all that social media chatter about QOT and CLOY made me buy some Korean fried chicken.  So yummy!

Marissa Bañez is a contributing writer for The FilAm, a lawyer, author of ‘Hope and Fortune’ and ‘Hues and Harmony (How the Rainbow Butterfly Got Her Colors),’ and a self-proclaimed K-drama junkie.