Welcome to my weekly blog post where I give thoughts on dramas I’m watching, whether I’m at the beginning, middle, or end. I give my thoughts on dramas.
This week I recapped episodes 5-6 of the Japanese anime A Sign of Affection, wherein I have some opinions about Yuki’s family not knowing sign language. I also recapped episodes 13-14 of Thai BL Until We Meet Again, wherein we get to see college kids have fun at a waterfall.
Next week I get to re-start re-capping Eye Love You again, so look out for that!
This week I enthusiastically watched:
Love for Love’s Sake – 연애 지상주의 구역 – 2024
Recently aired Korean fantasy BL with 8 episodes.
A 29-year-old enters a video game and gets the unenviable task of making a miserable High School student happy.
This is one of those dramas I was too much of a coward to watch while it aired. Fantasy set-ups like these are built for nail-biting existential angst and I was not in the mood. Worse, everyone said it was good so the anxiety of waiting for episodes could be intense. But I kept it on my “to watch” list.
Hot take: Everyone was right.
First off, the video game world is excellent.
For the most part, the show isn’t making fun of video games, it’s imitating them.
The camera angles and moves imitate first-person-perspective video games perfectly. Often other characters face the camera directly while the camera moves slightly, and there will be a strange pause. Just like a video game waiting for the player to pick dialogue or decide their next action.
Let me talk about something I never write about, sound design. It’s amazing. Little in-game messages pop up in front of our lead character along with a sound that is a perfect video game notification. But more than that, there’s a great use of strange ambient sounds to heighten the mood of any scene. The music is also excellent, light, and nostalgic feeling.
Eventually, as things go wrong, the sound design creates as much of an uneasy mood as the excellent visuals. At times I was reminded of various high-brow movies.
It’s the kind of production that I can recommend to people who don’t normally watch BL.
Enough of that, let’s talk story and characters
We’ve got our older guy who is dropped into a video game and takes the entire situation in stride. He’s got to make this sad High School student happy, and those annoying video game notifications pop up periodically to let him know how he’s doing.
At first, he’s not doing great. Our miserable high schooler’s life sucks and he’s reluctant to let the possibility of happiness in. Our game player has to force happiness on him, learning more about him in the process. It’s sweet and funny at the same time.
This could be a light-hearted high school drama with a video game gimmick. But there are enough hints at darker things to add an edge of existential angst even to the earlier episodes. Around the midpoint, the story shifts gears (as it should) and we go into more of a psychological story. We learn more about our original player, how he might have ended up in this game, and what he might need to be happy.
The smallest of complaints
More of a backward compliment, this show could have used 1-2 additional episodes. The last two episodes take off running and I couldn’t catch up. Given the dense, psychological, and fantastical nature of what’s happening, it’s easy to get confused.
(It may not help that the original webtoon, which you can read in English here, is still being published.)
But I don’t expect my fantastical, psychological stories to have clean, clear-cut endings, so this is not a fatal flaw. It just makes a rewatch potentially that much more rewarding.
Also, the love story and relationship are a central, motivating, and important part of the story but they aren’t THE story. If you want to watch something that focuses on a relationship and gives you a lot of relationship fuzzies, save this for later.
Otherwise, I heartily recommend. Don’t be surprised if you see me recapping this one soon.
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