K-Drama recommendations

[boatyardblues]

A K-drama thread was suggested on the Netflix subtitled gems thread so we can discuss in more depth without swamping the other thread. There are a lot of Korean films & boxsets on Netflix and I’m discovering the quality is variable, so I thought this would be a goid place to swap recommendations (and ‘avoids’). So far, I have hugely enjoyed:

• Something in the Rain
• Mr Sunshine (new episodes still dropping weekly)
• Live

Would also love to hear how closely these dramas represent real life in Korea from anyone who has lived there. Its fascinating learning about another culture.

Am now thinking for the drunken team-building trip to the lakeside cabin we need some second male leads who are absolutely lovely but obv. will get overlooked by their very nature.

Bettys you really need to watch Fight For My Way/ Fight My Way - I loved his character in that. A more everyday guy, slightly dopey and funny.

The second male lead from DDTD should get a place in the cabin. I’m not 100% sure about how sparkling the conversation would be once he goes off-script, but he’s lovely to look at & I reckon he’d be good at chopping firewood. Also, there was a very tall, elegant supervising officer in his 30s in Live that would be a good addition. Can we also add Ghost girl from Oh My Ghost for entertainment value? She looks like she’d be a hoot after a few beers.

I’d also like to nominate the male lead from Black to smoulder gently in the corner. We can put him in charge of the BBQ.

Agree with all your suggestions boatyardblues, Ghost girl probably has some good drinking games and we could get smouldering Black guy to teleport us through the cupboard if we run out of beer on top of smouldering/BBQ duties.

How about the cop friend from SGBS for additional second male lead duty in case we get lost in the wood while playing a team-building game?

HeechulOppa two episodes of Kim left and then it's Fight My Way.

How about the cop friend from SGBS for additional second male lead duty in case we get lost in the wood while playing a team-building game?

That’s a definite yes from me. I’m not even sure how I forgot him, as I think Bong-Soon definitely made a mistake on that count. Still, it leaves him available for our team trip. 👌

One programme I found v weird was Mischievous Kiss. It stars the lead actress from Because This is my first life but she’s a teenager. She’s also Ae Bong in Sound of your Heart.

Basically it’s your typical high school romance- goofy unpopular girl in love with the handsome top student and how she wins him over. But I found it hugely problematic! The first few episodes were really good and the whole thing is lighthearted fluff but after a while you realise the characters are actually really awful in their own ways.

ML is an absolute bastard to FL most of the series. There are a few times where he’s nice to her and she clings to that but he always goes back to being a bastard yet is presented in a romantic anti-hero light. But actually some of the things he says and does are really cruel, he gives her no real indication that he likes her - in fact the opposite, he’s always telling her how much she annoys him and humiliating her and there’s nothing really to indicate he’s masking his real feelings for whatever reason. However you can still feel a bit sorry for him because...

FL is basic obsessive stalker! The basic premise is she and her dad have to move in with ML and his family and she never ever leaves him alone. She is utterly convinced they are destined and she never lets that go. No matter how many times he tells her to back off she’s convinced he doesn’t mean it and she constantly goes against his wishes, or goes full on Bella from Twilight and locks herself away in a depressed state. It’s horrible because she started as a great character and this is all presented light and fluffy. But by God she is a giant red flag! She literally never leaves him alone - he moves out, she follows him. He gets a job, she goes there every day and gets in the way/ tries to win his coworkers over in an effort to make him see he loves her. I swear if the genders were reversed it would have people up in arms (and I don’t say that lightly!) She even gets his mum on side to help win him over which is awful because...

His mum is even worse!!! She’s the comic relief too! Basically she always wanted a daughter so when FL moves in she’s overjoyed and doesn’t hide the fact she prefers FL over her sons. She is constantly plotting to marry the two leads up (which FL loves) and completely ignores her son’s wishes all the time!! It’s genuinely like she’s really trying to go against his wishes. And she constantly turns up in disguise at his school to meddle in his life, even though everyone knows it’s her. This extends to spreading rumours she knows will humiliate him.

ML’s little brother is a little shit too. He’s about 8 and treats FL like crap, openly looks down on her and calls her useless and stupid despite the fact she saves his life - twice!

Ugh, gave me the rage!!!

HeechulOppa - It helps to know which kdramas to avoid, especially given the many hours’ investment (for those of us who don’t skip the saggy middle bit ) so thanks for the heads-up.

Def one to avoid - such a shame as she was so good in Because This Is My First Life and I've just seen her & Lee Min-Ki's cameo in Secretary Kim

Noting for the record that Dr Romantic needs a slap for the dramatic meltdown when there are multiple extremely poorly patients in the ER needing surgery. I’d be kicking his arse from here to next Friday, silly boy!

If I was drinking a shot of soju every time these surgeons are hit with arterial spray, I’d be properly mashed this evening. None of theatre staff ever wipe it away so they can see to suture either. 🙄

As long as it doesn’t get on the knitwear ...

I hope that’s not a white truck, Seadays?
I promise! nothing muhwahahahaha

heechul the thing is, what Koreans find stunning we don't, and vice versa. So while your friend might look gorgeous to us, in Korea, she could be perfectly average, or even unattractive. Stuff we don't even care about, especially skin colour and head size is a MASSIVE deal there.

SO often, we'll see a mixed couple (white guy and Korean woman) and I'll say 'what on earth is that beautiful woman doing with that guy, she could do way better) and my husband will say he was thinking the same - but opposite.

My students used to literally sigh at how lucky I was to have pale skin and a small head.

Plus, the whole status thing. Rich family/good education etc counts for so much, which fucking sucks, but that's just how it is. And so often, I know women who complain that they can't find a husband, then reject perfectly good guys cos they went to university in the countryside or they only work for a small company or their dad is a farmer. Not to say your friend is like that, but it happens a lot.

Hisaishi - Given my bewilderment at couple dressing, was there anything about British culture that your husband found bizarre when you first met him? I was thinking that morris dancers and those crazy local events like the cheese rolling in Gloucershire would seem odd to someone who did not grow up here, but there are no doubt more mundane things that we woukdn’t even think of as unusual. British queuing gets mentioned a lot. A Spanish woman once lectured me and some other Brits about the wrongness of baked beans on a jacket potato (too much stodge apparently).

Ah that’s why in She Was Pretty such a massive deal was made over her red cheeks!

Too much stodge? Does such a thing exist?

My husband is a very easy-going person in general and will accept basically all and any oddities of culture, but there are a few things he finds weird.

He can't get his head round the concept of the UK. Are you 1 country or 4, he asks. Me: kinda...both???

I am very typically British in that I will never complain or ask for help. I will complain bitterly in a restaurant about how horrible something is and he immediately calls over the waiter while I'm going SHHH SHHH SHUT UP IT'S FINE STOP STOP. Koreans generally don't think twice to complain about cold/bad food or to ask for discounts when paying cash etc. I cringe every time. The other day we went for Someorigukbap (cow's head soup) and they even had a sign on the wall saying 'if you find cow hair in your soup, we'll replace it for you' (lol). As soon as I started eating I found a hair and my husband's hand was up before I could finish my sentence while I begged him to just leave it, it's fine, I'll just eat the hair, it's ok and he's like BUT WHY??? THERE'S EVEN A SIGN!! So yeah, he finds that British reticence, and moaning, but never to people's faces, weird.

On a similar note, we were at a convention one time and some woman was trying to sell us something that I wasn't even slightly interested in and I was saying 'oh yes, lovely, just gorgeous, well, how wonderful, hmm, I guess we'll come back for it at the end so we don't have to carry it' and after we'd looked around, he said 'don't you want to go back and buy that thing' and I was like 'no, why?' and he said 'because you said you would' and I was like 'but I was only being polite.' He was totally mystified as to why I'd lie like that and spend time listening to her pitch if I wasn't interested. And actually, I'm mystified too but it just feels so rude to say I'm not interested.

He doesn't get that some foods are not breakfast foods, the other day he ate tuna and sweetcorn for breakfast and it made me feel ill. I can just about stomach Korean food for breakfast these days but tuna is crossing a line. But he doesn't know why it's not breakfast food.

I guess he finds it weird that I don't really know some of my friends' exact ages, but obviously it just doesn't matter that much to us. He thinks it's weird when I just call my brother by his name or friends/colleagues who are 20 years older by their names, it still feels awkward for him, I think.

His friends almost died of shock the other day when we went out and I had a backpack and my husband didn't carry it for me. 'You didn't even offer to carry it,' they hissed at him. He was like 'mate, I've tried, she'll just tell me to fuck off.' I really don't get why he should carry a backpack that literally had dog poop bags, a ball and some dog treats in it, if it weighed a ton, maybe.

Oh God, and pooping. People are really open about bodily functions here. It's really normal to just go to the bathroom and say 'oh sorry, I have terrible diahorreah, I'll be right back.' My face: :O Or his entire family (PIL too) fart away in front of me without even cracking a smile or saying sorry. Or I'll get up to go to the toilet and his mum says 'are you going to go and poop?', not in a joky way, just genuine interest. Or they ask 'where is your husband? Did he go to poop?' He thinks it's weird that I am in any way embarrassed by it.

He loves stuff like the Queen's Guard in London, he thinks it's really posh and amazing that we have a royal family still. But generally, I would say it's more social niceties and cultural differences that confuse him more than events or whatever.

Fascinating stuff Hisaishi, that explains a lot! Like the prevalence for loo scenes & obsession with farting in hospital 😣

About addressing people & the names, everyone seems to be either called by their work title, or use the full surname, generation name, personal name eg Park Seo Joon instead of just ‘Joon’ is this because of a small pool of surnames? When I started watching kdrama I got so confused with characters that all seemed to have the same surname. I looked it up & there only seem to be about 200 surnames.

At work, people almost always use titles, or just the person's name and 'nim' if they don't really know the title or whatever.

The generational name thing is not really as big a thing any more, so not everyone necessarily has that. It's not really trendy these days. And the generational name could be the second syllable either. But most people have the two first names eg Seo Joon and same-age/older friends/relatives will address them using both. I don't think anyone would ever just say Joon, unless as a kind of nickname, if it was an especially weird name or something, but anyway, it's not that common. It would be like calling someone whose name is 'Samantha' as 'Antha'. Just weird. Something really common is adding 'ah' or 'ya' to friends' names, like 'Seo Joon-ah' or 'Min Woo-ya'.

Park Seo Joon, well, people would use it more to get someone's attention, not all the way through the conversation or if they're angry or something like that. Maybe it's because there are so many similar names, I mean, even among first names, every second boy I meet is called some combination of 'Min'.

Among family, it really depends, my husband's extended family go in for the whole shebang of different titles for everyone so it is kind of a headache to remember what I should call my husband's younger cousin, same age cousin, older cousin's wife, younger second cousin's wife, this random uncle, that random aunt etc. Some families keep it simpler though and just use brother and sister for a lot of people. In the immediate family, they usually call him 'adeul' (son) and me 'myeonuri' (DIL), my younger SIL just calls me 'oenni' (sister) and I call her 'agassi' (SIL but it also just means 'young woman') although I realised recently I started calling her her name for whatever reason. My husband thinks it's weird that I normally just use his name instead of 'yeobbo'.

There are really few surnames and even fewer are actually common: Kim, Park, Lee, Jeong, Choi, Gwon, Gang, Yoo, Baek, Moon, Oh, Sin, An, Yoon...I'd say 80-90% of people have those surnames. It does make it hard to remember people's names, like I never remember any celebrities' names, there are just too many and I always get confused. With students/friends, it was always ok though, for some reason.

One thing I really hate is always being addressed as (my daughter's name)Umma. I don't mind any of the other titles, DIL, wife, teacher, sister etc, but as soon as I had my kid and I was suddenly just someone's mum, it was kind of horrible. So I just insist that they call me by my name or by sister/whatever (if they're older, no insisting allowed though, booo. My husband did tell my MIL that it upset me and she stopped so that's nice.)

I want to know why siblings share the same first two names, eg Park Bong Soon and Park Bong Il? Is it because the first two are family names (like Smith Jones or Cruz Perez in the Spanish tradition)? Or is it a way of signalling kinship, as married women seem to keep their maiden names?

DH and I recently had a very chatty Norwegian tour guide on a longish excursion. He sees lots of Nationalities in hos resort, so we had a great discussion comparing and contrasting. He was fascinated by the idea that Brits will rarely complain, even when they are very cross. We also talked about differences in directness. My friend’s mother is from a very straight talking culture and even after 50 years in the UK still struggles to temper her directness. My froend says her Mum struggles especially with her female friendships.

Family, generational, given for the names in order.
Not all have generational though, just to throw some variety into the mix.

Thanks Seadays. If there are cousins in the same generation, do all branches use the same 2nd name or does each branch do their own thing?

2nd name like??? Surname or the generational name?

As an example: brothers called Kim Min Woo and Kim Min Soo. The family name is Kim and the generational name is Min and probably all their cousins are called, like, Kim Min Hyung, Kim Min Won, Kim Min Seok etc, but not necessarily, just if their parents wanted to follow it.

But it could also be in the third position (my husband's is.) So it could be eg Kim Min Woo, Kim Hyeon Woo, Kim Jun Woo, Kim Sang Woo etc etc.

I once taught two twins who were called HyeonSeok and HyeongSeok, it was really impossible to tell them apart and whenever you called one of them, the other would answer too, it must have been a nightmare for their family!

Each family has a different list of names eg Andong Kims have a different name list to Gimhae Kims etc.

TBH people were shocked that we were even considering using the generational name, so I guess it's really dying out. These days, the trend is for native Korean names ie not based on Chinese characters. Haneul is really popular for girls, it means sky, or Bom, it means spring.

Thanks Hisaishi - I did mean the generational name and you have explained it very clearly.

Each family has a different list of names eg Andong Kims have a different name list to Gimhae Kims etc.

This bit also blows my mind. There is a very systematic approach to names in Korea, unlike the free-for-all here.

I saw this earlier and it made me feel quite stressed just reading it: www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-46181240 Those poor kids!

Just finished "what's wrong with secretary kim"... It was lovely! ❤️❤️❤️... I was even surprised how touched I was with the life of the office...!... But the amount of drinking!! 😳... Though I did enjoy the drunken scenes! Hee Hee!.... Next....!.....?