Welcome to my weekly blog post where I give thoughts on dramas I’m watching but not recapping.
This week I recapped episode 1 of If It’s With You, wherein we meet laughing Amane and serious Ryuji. The pair remind me of both Ida/Aoki of My Love Mix-Up as well as Yutaka/Minoru of Our Dining Table. So if you liked either of those, I recommend checking it out.
Kimi Ni Wa Todokanai, a tropey Japanese High School BL I enjoyed, is now streaming in the US on Netflix.
I was sick this week so I watched a LOT of drama (like, all of Castaway Diva). I’m going to save some of what I watched for different content in the near future. I may change some things up in 2024.
But what I will talk about is how I started:
A Journey To Love – 一念关山 – 2023
Currently airing Chinese historical-ish, I’m at 20 out of 40 episodes.
A spy who’s tired of political nonsense and an assassin on a revenge mission work together to rescue a king held for ransom in enemy lands.
For the first few episodes I was completely lost, which is typical with Chinese historical-ish dramas. Let me explain what’s going on.
Both our leads have semi-recently gone through it. Our male lead is done with it and wants to retire to a solitary life. Our female lead is in disguise and seeking revenge for one of the few people important to her. As these things happen, they end up meeting.
And as these things happen, they end up needing each other’s help and working together.
They’re joined by an entertaining cast of characters that reminded me of beloved TV show of my childhood, the A-Team. Like A-Team we get a series of stereotypical ‘elite forces’ types with specific special abilities. One is good with ladies. One is good with machines. One is good with medicines. You know how it goes.
But unlike my fun-but-shallow childhood show, a Journey to Love goes deeper with these characters. The journey allows time and situations for each character to show they are capable of complicated and contradictory feelings and actions. They are more than just good at some particular skill with unique personality quirks. They have their own, er, journeys to go on.
Of course, our leads are the ones we get to know the best. Our jaded spy is an awesome fighter and strong leader who assesses complicated situations and get things done while keeping those important to him alive. He’s also a big puppy dog for our assassin.
Our assassin is cold blooded, having had a truly awful childhood and a life very much out of her control. She’s super capable but also super used to being alone. Working together with this group gives her a taste of a different kind of life.
As they work together, and of course fall in love, the spy and the assassin have lovely, adult conversations about the difficulty of their situations. More than once they delve into the particular hardships of women without it becoming preachy. It’s very much a part of the assassin’s character to want to maintain her agency in this male dominated world that wants to take it away.
The show does a very good job of balancing these more serious, real issues with light humor that keeps the show from being a drag. There are entertaining fight scenes, acceptable cgi, and swoony moments.
As of episode 20 I’m in love with this show and really hoping it becomes that rare bird, a long Chinese show that I want to rewatch.
I also finished:
Perfect Marriage Revenge – 완벽한 결혼의 정석 – 2023
A recently aired Korean revenge drama of 12 episodes.
A young woman wastes her life trying to please her horrible family, when she is betrayed and dies she gets to do her last year of life over. She’s going to approach it very differently.
Here’s a link to my initial review.
Well, that was a lot of fun. The show wasted no air time as it went from revelation to scheme to betrayal to revelation, taking the audience on an entertaining ride. It didn’t drag anything out and ended in a satisfying climax of just desserts.
In order to keep this pace and level of entertainment going, at times the show could be very simple. For example, our female lead had been poisoned as a kid so she had issues around eating that our male lead addressed with cooking and coaxing. How nice that it manifested so directly and didn’t need any therapy!
Of course no one is watching this show to see intense therapy for an eating disorder, and that’s not what I wanted. But it does highlight my one complaint about the show, it’s very shallow. There’s a lot going on as far as orphans and affairs and secret children and blood relatives. Sometimes I’d catch myself wondering what it was trying to say about family and inheritance and whether all children deserve love. (They do, right?)
In the end, I don’t think it was saying anything. These were just components of the ride to create drama. Not every show has to say something of course, but I think even mindless entertainment can say something if it wants.
Back to the simplicity though, that’s a big part of this show’s charm. Sometimes complexity and moral ambiguity can get exhausting and it’s nice to live for a few hours in a black-and-white reality. It’s nice to watch horrible things happen to horrible people and not have to waste any energy questioning the morality of the situation. It’s nice to watch the good guys winning and not question anything they did because they were more than justified in everything they did.
The show got all of this right. Unlike so, so, so many dramas out there, we didn’t have to suffer through any last minute redemption for anyone who didn’t deserve it. People who are bad are just bad. Good riddance! Let’s get back to that hot kissing between our leads.
Sometimes that kind of world is a nice escape, and this is the show for those times.