Welcome to my weekly blog post where I give thoughts on dramas I’m watching but not recapping.
This week I posted the last episode 17 of the Thai soap opera with an LGBTQ+ character and loveline To Sir, With Love, and posted my final thoughts on the Japanese BL My Love Mix-Up!.
This week I finished:
When I Fly Towards You – 当我飞奔向你 – (2023)
A recently aired Chinese youth drama with 24 episodes.
It’s a Chinese youth drama. A sweet young woman meets an introverted young man and immediately falls for him.
The show maintained its gentle quality with no high dramatics, just little conflicts through the end. It was fluffy, but with enough substance that I could still feel for the characters and their struggles as they became adults. Some typical tropes I’m used to didn’t show up and others were handled in unexpected ways.
The show does cover High School, College, and beyond all in 24 episodes so there are times when it felt a little too rushed, and I wanted to see more of their lives. This is a compliment since most shows of these types drag on until I don’t like the characters anymore. They do a good job of covering all the important moments so you feel happy for the main couple and confident about the strength of their relationship.
Extra points to the second couple, who followed the usual route of the second couple in a youth drama (adversarial friends with one falling first) without making me see divorce in their future. The 2ML supported the 2FL and treated her like he cared about her even when his love was one-sided. The 2FL enjoyed teasing the 2ML but was thoughtful about him and his feelings even when she wasn’t in love with him yet. They may be the first time I’ve liked a second couple in a youth drama.
This is probably the best a youth drama can be for me with the constraints of Chinese censorship. I recommend it if you’re needing something sweet without any sharp edges.
I binged quickly through:
My Perfect Stranger – 어쩌다 마주친, 그대 – (2023) Pictured
A recently aired timey-wimey Korean drama with 16 episodes.
Two strangers end up traveling back to the 80s and caught up trying to solve a serial murder case.
This was a fun ride that falls apart if you slow down and look at it too carefully. The basic premise is a twist on Back to the Future, the ML finds a time-traveling car and our FL wants to break her parents up rather than keep them together. The 80s Korea that they end up in has the same kind of set-look-and-feel of the 80s Back to the Future movie. Our FL ends up learning a lot about her parents that they kept a secret.
Where it departs from Back to the Future, which I particularly liked, was where it touched on the reality that was Korea in the 80s and some of the terrible things happening (like the Gwangju Uprising). This provided an interesting contrast between the blithe innocence of the original movie and the harder reality of life. It also mirrors the FL’s ignorance of the reality of her parent’s lives versus what she learns.
This makes it sound as though the show gets really dark, which for the most part it doesn’t. It maintains a more light, upbeat tone regardless of some of the harsher subject matter. There’s a feeling of adventure and hope throughout the show that keeps it exciting.
For me though, the writing was weak in many places. I don’t need my timey-wimey shows to make sense, but this show lacked the details needed for our characters to face clear risks and have satisfactory triumphs. The character’s attempts to find a serial killer mostly involve running around trying to see their face. Another character spends weeks in a garage trying to fix a time-traveling car with no updates on what he’s doing with all that time. The murder mystery made it fun to speculate about who could be the culprit and give interesting twists to the various potential suspects’ actions but ultimately suffered the worst from this vague writing.
Back to the Future also went pretty light on the details, but it was a two-hour movie with no serial murders, so it could get away with it.
I do find it amusing that in drama land the Korean police are simply the worst. These police are frustratingly awful, but that’s part of the plot. I’ve seen dramas where they are supposed to be good but are wildly incompetent.
At the end of the day, I recommend this if you want to go on a fun ride with some nice (and horrible) characters, see 80s Korea, and turn off your brain. It’s entertaining enough to be worth it.