My Korean Drama Diary

Now airing…vampire medical drama Blood
How do you like your Kdramas?

Maybe you’re one of those who’d rather follow a drama as it airs. If it’s good, you keep yourself on a weekly watch – ensuring you never miss an ongoing episode. You’re commenting with everyone else on every fan-following thread on the topic of the drama.

You rave, rant and cheer with the characters and keep the adrenaline pumping right to the very end with that heavy sigh of relief. Or disappointment, depending on how the story evolved.

Or maybe you’re like me. You’d rather wait till the drama’s all wrapped up and then you let yourself get into it. You already know it’s good – you just didn’t want to get caught up in the tide of week-to-week nail-biting. Your nerves just can’t take it.

So you binge-watch the completed 16 or 24 or 56 episodes the first chance you get. Then you start to wish you were along for the joy ride while it was on the air – but alas it’s too late and everyone else is so OVER the drama now – except you.

So it’s true what they say when they tell you ‘some like it hot, some like it cold – and some like it in the archives a few months old…’ Or something like that.

One of my latest dramas that I followed while airing was Birth of a Beauty.

Good golly. The sheer agony. I loved the male lead’s take on his character. Joo Sang-Wook could play cute, dominant, bossy and adorable in scene-stealing ways. He definitely made the drama for me.

I wasn’t sure I’d go the on-going route after BoAB. It was just so much emotional hassle. But then when I heard about Hyun Bin’s new drama Hyde Jekyll, Me then I decided that once again I’m up for the adventure that comes with watching a drama unfold as it airs. So far I’ll be withholding my views on the drama since I’ve shelved watching after the first few episodes.

I’m definitely following Blood though. It’s starring Ku Hye Sun whom I totally LOVE from Angel Eyes. So far so good with this new vampire drama. A lot of mixed reviews are coming up but I’m a bonafide fan of both leads and I’m definitely rooting for and following their story. I love anything ‘different’ that doesn’t need to appeal to the populace. It’s a take-it-or-leave-it kind of drama and I’m cool with that.

I’ll just have to close by saying that Healer was one recent drama I truly wished I followed while it aired.

I missed enduring all the emotional highs and lows of Ji Chang Wook and Park Min Young as they developed their characters in the drama. I started to watch Healer two weeks after it finished running. healer-pic-collage Because I was reluctant to see

the two of the leads in a different role from the ones I loved them in prior to Healer.

I loved Ji Chang-wook as the Emperor Toghon in Empress Ki and Park Min Young blew me away as the cross-dressing scholar in Sunkyunkwan Scandal.

Still, I did get an immense kick from being patient and getting to watch it all in one swoop. Yep, totally worth it.

Not saying I’ll ever have a formula how I’m going to be watching my dramas in future. I always like picking up something random from way back ( for example, now watching Hwang Jin Yi which is from 2007) or I could consider finally indulging in Misaeng which I’ve heard only awesome things about.

Basically, with kdramas, you can’t play things by the rules because there are no rules. It can just grab a hold of you and you’ll think to yourself oh no not again, I promised myself I was bigger than this…ah hell. There you are, jumping in again doing things you swore you wouldn’t.

Like watching raw episodes just after they’ve aired because you can’t even bear to wait for the few hours or one day it would take to get English subbed versions.

Oh well, I guess that’s the life of a Kdrama fan. And hey…we love it that way!