Welcome to my weekly blog post where I give thoughts on dramas I’m watching but not recapping.
This week I posted through episode 7 of the Thai soap opera with an LGBTQ+ character and loveline To Sir, With Love and episode 2 of the Japanese BL My Love Mix-Up!.
This was a slower week for me with dramas, so I’m going to depart from my usual and only give a final review on a drama I dropped:
From Me To You – 君に届け – 2023 (Pictured)
A recently aired Japanese high school drama, I watched 9.5 of 12 episodes.
A socially awkward young woman gets help from a friendly classmate and starts to interact more and make friends.
I did not drop this show because I thought it was ‘bad’ (which is not a thing I believe in anyway), I dropped it because the last 1/3rd focused heavily on my least favorite tropes.
I’ll start with the positive. If the over-the-topness of most Japanese dramas isn’t your thing, this may be a show you want to try. The characters and their world feel fleshed out so that I can almost imagine myself walking around the town, finding their homes, and chatting with them — or maybe joining them in a bowl of ramen. For the most part, while flawed, they are also the kind of people you would want to spend time with too. The story sticks pretty close to the usual High School tropes, so it’s an easy watch with nothing too stressful.
If all those things appeal to you, I totally recommend it. But now, let’s get to why I dropped it.
I complained about the ‘cool’ teacher trope in my initial review of this show, and it only got worse for me. Along with the ‘pervert with a heart of gold,’ this may be my least favorite-but-most-common trope in Japanese dramas. The way Pin interacted with his students, particularly the female ones, made me uncomfortable. He commented on their love lives and pushed them about their futures in a way that felt insensitive. I wouldn’t have just dropped the show for this though, because it wasn’t that much of a focus of the story.
Then there was the ‘parental-abuse-equals-love’ trope. This parent is introduced in the second half of the show and he slaps his child in a parent-teacher meeting. The show doesn’t treat this as wrong but instead has our female lead urge this character to understand that the parent sincerely loves them and is just bad at showing it.
As you may be able to tell, I am sensitive about how authority figures are depicted. If you have been watching Asian dramas for a while and this type of thing has never bothered you, I doubt it will bother you here.
Finally, it hit on a very common trope in High School dramas that I skipped ahead to discover would be most of the last three episodes. I won’t say exactly what it is because it feels like that would be a spoiler, but it’s pretty common in a lot of High Scool stories. Probably, it won’t bother most people the way it does me.
I think if the show had just two out of three of these things, I probably would have kept watching to the end. As it is, I can maybe recommend it to people who aren’t me?