Selflessness: You're Doing It Wrong

Ah, noble idiocy: that moment in a kdrama when the music says, "What a sweet sign of true love!" but your brain says, "This is all a terrible idea."  For a while, I felt guilty watching these kinds of scenes. Maybe I'm too cynical! Maybe I'm just not noble enough to get it! After all, this is what the writers INSISTED true love should look like!

Then I realized that kdrama writers ALSO think that bowl cuts are all you need to pass as a man, sooooooo yeah.  After thinking about it some more, I noticed that many of these "selfless" moves were actually kind of selfish.

Don't believe me?  Let's look at some examples, shall we?


WARNING: Some spoilers below!

"Selfless" Move #1: "Something terrible is going to happen to a lot of people if I do this thing for you, but I don't even care--because love."

When a DEMON thinks your sacrifice is a good idea, it's probably time to rethink things.

Illustrative example: Arang and the Magistrate

This is the drama that pushed me over the edge to write this post.  Arang decides to give her body to a demon lady in exchange for letting her love meet up with his momma again.  Sounds sweet, right?  She would die not just for him, but for his mother! So noble!

Why it's actually selfish: Okay, so let's just overlook that fact that making deals with demon ladies is pretty much always going to be a terrible idea.  ALWAYS.  What is her incentive not to lie?  Even if this lady actually held up her end of the bargain, however, Arang has just given her immortal body to a demon who has been killing people for hundreds of years. 

Prioritizing your love over a bunch of other people just because it's your love is a roundabout way of prioritizing yourself.  Okay, so I've read those philosophical dilemmas about the train conductor with his kid on the tracks (Just get off the tracks, ya dumb kid!), so I get the idea that love might take over any other priority.  Still, trading your love's mom for an undefined number of people for the rest of time is selfish.  End of story. 

After watching Arang, I asked my husband if he would prefer that I let a demon lady kill a bunch of people to save his mom (who is very nice, by the way).  Fortunately, he looked at me like I was crazy, so I guess that resolves the dilemma.  Crisis averted!

"Selfless" Move #2: "My powerful mom/dad or your powerful mom/dad has threatened to fire a bunch of people if we're together, so I'm going to pretend to hate you."

Illustrative example: Boys over Flowers and a bunch of other chaebol heir dramas

I guess this is the opposite end of the spectrum from the previous example.  In order to prevent something terrible from happening to a bunch of people, you give up on love.  Surely, surely that's noble, right?

Why it's actually selfish: First of all, don't negotiate with terrorists.  Isn't that a life lesson right up there with the golden rule or something?  But that's not the main problem here.  You've taken the easiest possible way out without even thinking about how the other person will feel.  Guess what?  "It's easier if they just hate me" isn't actually a real thing.  Abandonment hurts, especially if you were supposedly in love five minutes earlier.  While you're patting yourself on the back and soothing your wounded heart with thoughts of how awesome you are, that other person is left with nothing.  Wouldn't it be better to wound your pride a bit and just talk it out?

"Selfless" Move #3: "Something bad happened in my life, so I will pretend to hate you in order to save you from my burden."

Illustrative example: Scent of a Woman, Dream High

You find out that you have cancer.  Or that you're an illegitimate child.  Or that you have an illegitimate child.  In order to protect your love from the shame or pain of this new development, you decide--of course--to break up with them with no explanation.  Better to suffer alone than to drag your love into the fray.

Why it's actually selfish: This move is kind of understandable if you're just starting your crush.  I think it's okay to say, "You know what?  I have my own stuff going on right now, so I'm gonna focus on that instead of this non-relationship that may or may not happen."  What drives me crazy is when drama characters pull this move once they are in a committed, established relationship.  Take the mother in Dream High for example.  In the long run, her pretend affair and subsequent abandonment probably hurt her family more than her death did.  She also robbed them of the chance to properly say goodbye.  Again, you have the comfort of knowing the truth while your loved one suffers the emotional scars of abandonment.

Dream High is an easy example to pick on because we never actually meet the mom in the series, but this type of thing happens pretty frequently in central kdrama couples as well.  This "romantic" gesture might just bother me more than the previous examples because it misses the entire core of what commitment means.  Love isn't just about sharing warm, fuzzy moments.  It's about opening your life and trusting someone else when the crap of life hits the fan--as life crap invariably does.  No matter what, something difficult is going to happen to one of you at some point in any relationship.  Giving up and running the other way every time something craptastic happens because you want to "protect" your love shows that you trust your own strength more than theirs--a self-centered move.

"Selfless" Move #4: "I don't deserve you right now, so I'm going to ignore you until I can be worthy of you."

Illustrative example: The Master's Sun 

I kind of hope that drama writers don't actually believe that this move is selfless.  Most of the time, it's an episode 18 extension kind of move.  Suddenly, the character feels a need to run away from love for a few years to save the company business or discover their "true self" or learn self-discipline in the army or something.  In other words, it's an excuse for a time jump.  The reasoning goes that only a truly selfless person would be willing to pause love to become worthy of that love.

Why it's actually selfish: How come the "selfless" person is always the one who gets to go gallivanting around the world while the other person has to sit at home like a chump?  Also, have you ever heard of a phone?  Email?  If you're really doing this for the other person, don't lead him or her to assume that you broke up somewhere along the way.  Protect the Boss, I'm looking at you!  I real life, people get busy with work all the time, but they don't say "I'm gonna ignore you for a few years--I promise I will come back, okay?" That's nonsense.

While I think the last-minute disappearance is an overused plot device, I don't mind this move when the show is honest about it.  In Coffee Prince, for example, we all knew that Eun Chan was running abroad purely for HERSELF, and that was totally okay.  It was also clear that she had kept an appropriate level of contact with her long-distance boyfriend.  

Solutions

So what options do kdrama characters have?  If they can't protect their love or protect other people without being selfish, isn't that a little unfair?

Actually, there are dramas that find ways around these problems.  I really liked the way that Queen of Reversals flew in the face of noble idiocy, for example.  When the controlling father threatened to fire an entire team of people, Yong Shik was just like "Go ahead and fire them.  I do what I want!"  That sounds kind of terrible at first, but Yong Shik wasn't just gonna let those people suffer for his love!  After he took a stand against his dad, he went ahead and formed his own company to employ all of those people.  To make matters even better, he made sure that the object of his affection was present for his stand-off with his dad.  That way, she would know exactly what was happening.  Sure, towards the end of Queen of Reversals, they stopped communicating, but at least it was a step in the right direction!   That's what I would love to see in more dramas: just a little more communication so that we don't get brain damage from banging our heads against our computers in frustration.  Or maybe I'm not noble enough and should just trust the gooey ballads that say "No, really--this is true loooooove!"

Guest Post at Viki: Kdrama Love Squares

Hey guys, the excellent streaming/news/everything kdrama(and every other kind of drama) website Viki asked us to do a guest post for them on their blog!  We were really honored that they even found our little blog over here, let alone that they let us work with them!  Thanks, Viki!

We are including the post here as well for anyone interested, but let's be honest:  You were going to  spend your Saturday streaming kdramas anyway, so you might as well check out our post on their website while you're at it!

Kdrama Love Squares: Keep 'Em or Cut 'Em?

Anyone who has watched more than one K-drama on Viki has probably figured out that the heart of every series is the “love square.” You would think that we would get tired of them after the amount we’ve seen, but they still get us every time – clichés and all. Let’s take a look at what we would keep or cut from the typical K-drama love square.

Female Lead

First up: K-drama female leads – love them or leave them? She’s the girl whose antics get her into all sorts of awkward situations. With two attractive rich men fighting over her, she’s also the luckiest girl in the world! Female leads are typically hardworking poor girls in desperate need of a makeover. They break down into either sassy girls who don’t let anyone mess with them, or girls who are downtrodden and overly accepting of nonsense.

One of the things that attracted us the most to K-dramas were the spunky, confident female characters, such as Sam Soon from My Name Is Kim Sam Soon. This type of female lead is an obvious keeper. But the dramas in which the female lead follows the male lead around like a puppy (Playful Kiss) are ones we might cut.

In their defense, downtrodden female leads are not all bad. It’s really satisfying to see someone go from frumpy and passive to beautiful and empowered, but only if the progress is extreme. For example, in Scent of a Woman, the female lead starts out painfully wimpy and homely, but by the third episode, BAM, she’s a total powerhouse. In spite of problems, we would keep her because deep down, most of us still feel like that awkward girl who hopes to become powerful and miraculously snatch the man of her dreams.

Male Lead

Male leads – at least they’re consistent. Ninety percent of the time, they are abnormally attractive, abnormally wealthy, and abnormally selfish and rude. However, by the end of the drama, they’ll end up with girls who are less attractive than they are, care less about their money, and become decent human beings with deep feelings. Although these male characters are in almost every single K-drama, we love them anyway. (Not to mention the brooding shower scenes!)

These male leads do come with their share of problems, though. Sometimes their version of a “decent human being” isn’t decent enough. Even though we don’t want to cross Boys Over Flowers fans, you can’t tell us that we’re the only ones who found Jun Pyo’s intensity just a little bit unsettling. Especially when he said things like, “I will encircle you forever so that you can never leave me.” There has to be some minimum standard for change.  For example, don’t beat someone’s faces to a pulp. Totally reasonable, right? 

Although they are ridiculous, overall we can’t help but say KEEP the traditional male lead trope.

Second Male Lead

Second male leads are easy to spot. They’re the handsome ones lurking (or stalking) in the background, doing thoughtful things for the female lead while she makes ugly crying faces over the rude man she loves. They’re the type of guys your dad wants you to marry.  

Second male leads occasionally end up with a terrible girl, but most of the time, they just end up brooding and sad. And for all of this brooding, they don’t even get shower scenes. Don’t they have to shower, too? Or maybe they don’t shower, and that’s why they lose the girl.

It’s this sadness that makes us dislike second male leads. And here’s why: we love them too much. We suffer from “second lead syndrome” on a regular basis (Flower Boy Next Door being the most recent example). So when the second male lead implies he will “never love again,” we get a little cranky. If you need to create jealousy in a drama, introduce an old love for a couple of episodes and then send the person on a business trip or have the person get hit by a car. It’s something that happens all of the time in dramas! Just cut these nice guys and give them a break.

Second Female Lead

The girl we all love to hate: the second female lead. Or, as it often happens, the first love who is often a raging monster in disguise.

What we would keep is the flexibility of the second female lead. Although most are monsters, some are kind, sisterly types who respond maturely to their jealousy. For example, Coco loves the second female lead in Coffee Prince. If she could, she would be best friends with her in real life. They would hang out at art galleries and eat brunch (because she’s too classy for lunch).

In reality, we have to recognize that sometimes second female leads literally kill people. In fact, we would rather have her be a horrible person and a murderer, rather than be tricked into liking some previously terrible person. But let’s face it: we fast forward through 90 percent of second female lead scenes anyway, so keeping them isn’t a big deal.

To sum up, we have pretty conflicted feelings about all of these characters. But conflict is at the core of K-dramas, which is why we adore them so much!