Welcome to my weekly blog post where I give thoughts on dramas I’m watching but not recapping.
This week I recapped the special episode and added my final thoughts on Our Dining Table. It’s a lovely comfort food of a watch, great for these colder, darker days in the northern hemisphere right now.
What am I recapping next? Until the end of the year at least it’s going to be shorter series with shorter episodes, and the next one is most likely My Personal Weatherman.
But what did I finish this week?
Love Class 2 – 수업중입니다 시즌2 – 2023
A recently aired Korean BL with 10 episodes.
A young man finds a not-so-long lost crush while his two best friends struggle with their feelings and a TA dodges a persistent art student.
Ready for another drama-as-food analogy? This show is an appetizer sampler, you get a little bit each of three couples, not enough to get sick of any of them but not enough to feel full either. They even came in 3 different spice levels, starting with ‘stiff kisses’ couple and ending with ‘hot kisses and shirtless in bed’ couple.
Our ‘main’ couple involves a college freshman with a crush on his former-tutor-now-upperclassman. The younger guy is brave and mature and his love interest skittish and high-maintenance. I’m a sucker for a younger character taking care of their (slightly) older partner so this was a tasty treat.
The second-couple-friend-pair doesn’t break ground with their introvert/extrovert dynamic, but this is a reliably enjoyable flavor combination. The introvert’s longing and the extrovert’s oblivious eagerness won me over. I wanted to see the cute kids happy together.
Finally, there’s the overly nice TA and the teasing art student, who are the most unique mix of ingredients here. After seeing the TA in his underwear the art student romances the TA so aggressively that he flaps the unflappable older man. They have great flirty banter and hot looks.
Nope, not a lot of plot. The title of the show refers to a ‘love class’ at the university that I find conceptually horrifying. There’s a sad backstory for one character that ends with a ‘meh’. The final episode pushes the bounds of plot-less-ness by either being an ad for glamping or a reality-dating-show simulation. Luckily I found it amusing to watch our 3 couples go shopping with the goal of making food.
It was cute, it was fun, it wasn’t a whole lot more. If you like anthology romances, the HIStory series, Love Actually, appetizer samplers, or are just in the mood for a little bit of a few different things, it works!
(No, you don’t need to watch Love Class 1 to watch this, I didn’t.)
Candy Color Paradox – 飴色パラドックス – 2022
A 2022 Japanese BL with 8 episodes.
A reporter and a photographer with clashing moral compasses are put on a case together, in a medium shot. They exist in a world of only medium shots.
I want to know what happened during the production of this one. Did they have only five minutes to set up for each scene? And they could only shoot it once? Was there a rule anyone in the scene had to be in the frame always? There has to be some kind of explanation of the constant and unvarying medium shots with which this entire show is composed. The boring editing and uninspired music don’t help.
And look, I love low budget stuff. The boom mic appears in the above reviewed drama a few times and I didn’t mention it because I found it kind of charming. But this is something different. This is boring.
The problem is, with such monotonous visuals edited without any rhythm and accompanied by bland music, I got very little insight into what was happening on screen. Nothing felt important, felt deep, felt funny, felt meaningful, felt intimate, felt upsetting, felt anything. The poor actors are acting but with absolutely no assistance from the production it was hard to get into their characters.
Underneath this boring presentation was a story about a nice guy and a jaded guy, working together and getting to know one another. They work on emotionally charged cases. They aren’t students and neither of them is the boss. It’s a set-up and dynamic I could enjoy if it was put together like a real story.
If you’re really into the characters maybe you won’t mind everything else, but it’s not one I’m recommending.