Welcome to my weekly blog post where I give thoughts on dramas I’m watching but not recapping.

This week I got through episode 5 of the Thai soap opera with an LGBTQ+ character and loveline To Sir, With Love, which means things are getting a lot of fun with blood-sucking mushrooms and hot assassins. This show is so good.

I also announced my new recap, My Love Mix-Up!, which is one of the first Japanese BLs I fell in love with and is fun to revisit. The first episode recap will be out on Tuesday.

So this week I finished:

Joseon Attorney: A Morality – 조선변호사 – 2023

A recently aired historical-ish legal-ish Korean revenge drama of 16 episodes.

A flamboyant lawyer sets up business in a new town and takes on some interesting cases, attracting the attention of a princess-in-disguise.

More than once I’ve mentioned that a show wasn’t for me but I might recommend it to others. Unfortunately, this show falls into the latter category, I enjoyed it and am glad I watched it but I’ll be slow to recommend it to others.

Woo Do Hwan is great. His character, Kang Han Su, who covers deep pain and vulnerability with bravado and humor is a delight. I loved watching him escape sinking ships and legally joust with bad guys and romance a hidden princess and have shirtless fights. It was fun to watch him work the system and maintain his cynicism but also want to do good.

But it was less fun to watch him suffer in the second half of the drama. I’m good for suffering mixed with comedy, like the drama reviewed below, but this didn’t feel like it had any purpose but to repeatedly beat down the main character. Besides Woo Do Hwan’s excellent acting, I didn’t feel like I gained much insight into the human condition, the character, life in the past, the legal system, or anything. 

In general, outside of Kang Han Su, the characters are weak, and it is mostly in the writing. More than once a character declared they were going to do something, but then didn’t seem to do much and fail. Then they would feel bad about it for a minute and the story would move on. Particularly in the second half I didn’t understand why side characters were doing what they were doing except that the plot needed it. 

This drama is based on a webtoon and that could easily be the cause of this weakness. They may have tried to include too much of the webtoon story or tried to cater to those who have read it, leaving too much out for someone only watching the drama. The characters could have had good reasons for what they did, but they weren’t on the screen.

I think this show would have been pretty good at around 12 episodes. They could have cut one big arc out of the second half that didn’t add much to the story.

So the TL;DR version of this review: It had some really great parts, but the whole was less than the sum of them. Woo Do Hwan is awesome.

I also fell completely in love with:

Oh No! Here Comes Trouble – 不良執念清除師 – (2023)

A recently aired Taiwanese modern supernatural comedy-drama of 12 episodes.

A young man wakes up after a devastating accident and is visited by entities wanting help with — something. 

I would recommend this show to anyone including strangers on the street not interested in Asian dramas. It’s so funny and so deep and so profound. This is easily one of my favorite dramas this year and there’s too much I want to say about it, so it’ll be one of the next dramas I recap. I’ll try to be succinct below.

The worldbuilding is fascinating and entertaining and complex. One thing that bothers me, even with fantasy shows I love, is how concrete the worldbuilding can be. The rules are clear, the magical items have specific qualities, the tasks are laid out, go down the yellow brick road, etc. It makes the stories simple and appealing and relaxing, but it loses some of life’s magical complexity.

This show is closer to the confusion that is reality. Our lead is the youngest in a line of calligraphy masters whose calligraphy has some kind of supernatural powers. The entities that come to him are lost and confused, wanting help. Exactly what the calligraphy does and what the entities want, none of it is clear at the beginning. The characters do their best to make sense of it as the story goes on and we get to go on that exasperating and rewarding journey with them.

The entities themselves are visually interesting and their stories moving. They aren’t just vague CGI-vomit or something that looks cool, but how they look is tied into their story. These stories were often sad, but it was a sadness that had a deeper meaning and had something to say about the characters and life.

Our characters are the kind of people I want to spend time with, as complex and interesting as the world they inhabited. Our main character is a terrible student, with a delinquent hairstyle and a habit of asking really, really stupid questions and not understanding what was going on around him. The frustration he causes others is very funny. He also feels things very deeply and has concern and compassion for those around him. His two sidekicks, an underdog cop and a brilliant former classmate, have a similar combination of petty flaws and deep feelings. One moment I’d laugh at them and the next I’d want to give them a hug. Like my real friends.

I can’t recommend this show enough and there’s so much more I can say about it, so stay tuned!