This is a BL adjacent question, so no pressure to answer if it's too off topic! But I was watching "Because This is My First Life" last night and it dawned on me that the main pairing seems very tsundere/sunshine. Is that even a thing in het pairings? I know we often complain about the seme/uke dynamic being problematic in the heterosexual assumptions...which made me wonder -- Do het pairings in Asian dramas have the same tropes?
Do Het Kdramas & BLs Use the Same Tropes & Archetypes
Sure do.
Due to benevolent sexism (another thing I complain about all the time) some pairings are much less common in het than BL (sunshine m + tsundere f) but they still happen (see: Happiness, Decedents of the Sun, When the Camellia Blooms.
Grumpy(tsundere) m + sunshine f is super common (Gogh, Secretary Kim, Business Proposal). Probubly the most common, because it plays into traditional stereotypes: the man is reserved, closed-off, and stern, the woman is warm, loving, and cheerful (also endearingly clumsy).
Honestly, clumsy-bunny trope might be working it's way around to being one of my least favorites. (I gotta stop watching Cdramas).
One of the reasons I like noona romances so much is because the woman is given a... how to put this?... more masculine form of agency and autonomy, for a Kdrama.
Kdrama's also really love the suffering plucky heroine (which we see less often in BL) although I feel like My Ride served us this. So like Heirs, Run-On, Camellia. I kinda like this archetype but it's more common in older Japanese stuff. And also can lean into bullying and the whipping boy/girl trope pretty quickly. That’s a bit old fashioned for most modern audiences. So again, only really Japan these days. With the exception of Boys Over Flowers, I suppose.
There ARE certain visual tropes that seem to mostly belong to BL but never completely, so far as I can tell. But we got: clear umbrellas (the hets got the colored ones), peeling shrimp, pink milk, engineering gears & smocks, and a few other things you’ll see tumblr joke about in terms of “cute boy summoning circles.”
Generally speaking any heterosexually dysmorphic tropes we see visually represented in BL (seme forehead kisses uke but uke cheek kisses seme) come from het Asian romance drama tropes. Or at the very least are intimately tied together.
MORE?
Kdramas That Should be Remade as KBLs
Why Are KBLs So Short Compared to Regular Kdramas?
