The Problematic of the Unproblematic

Back in March, I spent a day at KPOPCON ‘14 in Berkeley. I was there mostly for the Idols in Drama panel, featuring Stephanie Parker from Viki interviewing Javabeans and Girlfriday from Dramabeans. They covered a lot of interesting topics at the intersection of KPop and KDrama, including the phenomenon of “Idol Dramas,” which Stephanie illustrated with a promo poster from To The Beautiful You . I had always assumed that the producers of TTBY had cast their two leads because they were pretty, already famous, and demographically correct for the roles (i.e. two young human beings, one male and one female). However, apparently it was more the other way around: the producers made TTBY in order to cast the two leads. It turns out that TTBY’s stars, Minho and Sulli, are both represented by SM Entertainment. And while SM Entertainment represents a few actors and models, they are primarily a music agency — one of the “Big Three" agencies in KPop. (Thank you to Divina Magracia, Elle...

A few months ago, I was struggling to condense my thoughts about Jung-Yi: Goddess of Fire into a coherent evaluation. After enduring all 32 episodes I felt like I owed it to myself to write something about it, but I was getting nowhere, and on impulse I started watching Padam Padam... The Sound of His and Her Heartbeats as avoidance. Padam Padam was in my queue because I had recently seen the film The Good, The Bad, and The Weird , and had been intrigued by Jung Woo-Sung (who played The Good), but I discovered immediately that his costar in Padam Padam was none other than Kim Bum, whom I had just seen in GoF . Not long after that I realized that another show in my queue, That Winter, the Wind Blows , was also a Kim Bum drama, and an idea was born to watch them all back-to-back and review them together, along with Boys Over Flowers , which I watched more than a year ago but never wrote about. In the interest of completeness, I even added The Woman ...