Welcome to my weekly blog post where I give thoughts on dramas I’m watching but not recapping.
This week I posted through episode 15 of the Thai soap opera with an LGBTQ+ character and loveline To Sir, With Love and will finish recapping it this week. I also recapped the final episode 10 of the Japanese BL My Love Mix-Up! and will post my final thoughts next week.
This week I finished:
Love Tractor – 트랙터는 사랑을 싣고 – (2023) Pictured
A recently aired Korean BL web drama with 8 episodes.
A young man from the city moves into his grandfather’s country house and meets an excitable and kind local young man who is quickly smitten with him.
Like all Korean web dramas it’s short, with 8 episodes of 25 minutes each. It’s based on a webtoon, which tend to run longer than manga, so they had to cut the story down.
I think it did a pretty masterful job, serving up a satisfying, sweet, short story of love between two very different people. The pacing worked and the story stayed focused on the two characters arcs.
Ye Chan, a farm boy with a broad build and an enthusiastic and irrepressible nature, is the stand-out character. He’s drawn to burnt-out city boy Seon Yul from the beginning and his bright personality is what both the audience and Seon Yul need. Their relationship developed at an appropriate pace for them with natural conflicts that arose out of their different personalities. Even with the short run time, there were moments of character growth and warm fuzzies.
The short run time does mean that plot points rush by at a lightspeed pace, but I felt the character arcs were shown well despite their hit-and-run nature. There are some cute side characters but most of them don’t get much on-screen time. This was a feature not a flaw for me, as I can only handle so much romanticization of rural living.
I only skimmed the webtoon, and I can imagine that if you were someone who read it and loved it, this length adaptation might leave you unsatisfied. In general, I’d recommend this to anyone looking for a shorter, heartwarming love story.
I started:
When I Fly Towards You – 当我飞奔向你 – (2023)
A recently aired Chinese youth drama, I’ve watched 9 out of 24 episodes.
It’s a Chinese youth drama. A sweet young woman meets an introverted young man and immediately falls for him.
I have a love-hate relationship with Chinese Youth dramas. Due, I think, to the nature of Chinese censorship they can be some of the most formulaic dramas out there. They also often have one of my least favorite tropes, a final act break-up and time skip.
But I keep watching them because I am susceptible to the fantasy of young lovers with bright futures and guaranteed happy endings.
This one was recommended by sources I trust and since it’s been a long week, I needed something formulaic and stress-free. I rapidly binged through to nearly the midway point, so that’s a recommendation in itself.
All the tropes are there: a bubbly sweet female lead, a quiet smart male lead who every girl in school wants, a ridiculous beginning conflict, a school play, an evil classmate who wants our male lead for herself, and high schoolers who are nostalgic for high school even as they attend.
But there are nice places where this show has interesting and different details. Our male lead is terrible with English, and the female lead is so good that she tutors him. He has a younger brother who is some kind of genius and feels that he’s not good enough despite being at the top of his school. He’s introverted, but not a jerk. The female lead is very kind, but not to people who mistreat her, and she’ll stand up for herself and others.
It reminds me of high school and the excitement of having a crush on someone, but with none of the bad parts and the comfort of knowing things will turn out okay. So far I can turn off my worries, relax and watch, and that’s what I really want from Chinese youth dramas.