reading your post about how korean media is mostly men talking to men, and what few outlets women have, i’m wondering whether romantic kdrama is one of them. i know i’ve personally found them to be an escapist fantasy from the reality of patriarchy in my real life, an escape i very much need
You have the coolest username ever.
Yes, romantic K drama is completely dominated by women writers. The way I understand it, a singular writer writes an entire series from end to end, so once you are The Writer, you become very powerful. And K Dramas are really made for the average Korean woman, it's a sort of for us by us type of deal. They perform the Harlequin romance novel function I think, of showing the current fantasy/ideal that will sell to the Korean woman, which means the ideal male they portray has changed over time.
I'm glad you get succor out of them. I really mean that. I find them absolutely unbearable - they do not show me a fantasy that I want to escape into, at all. In recent years, they keep showing as some sort of ideal guys with the exact same resume as the ones I work with all the time, and the vast distance between what's presented and what I know to be fact repels me further.
I'm very very surprised you find K-drama to be an escape from patriarchy, because Kdramas are extremely patriarchal to me and drive me nuts for being completely uncritical of sexism and misogyny, except in the most performative, surface way. But then, to be fair to Korean TV, I also found the vast majority of American and British TV to be unbearable too. In short, it's really hard for me to entertain myself, which is why, when I find something I like (like Ateez, ahem), I go absolutely bonkers.
Oh and PS: I don't know what it's like now but until a few years ago, women with advanced degrees, who had studied abroad, who were plainspoken and ambitious, were the villains, who somehow had to be defeated while the entire sexist patriarchal structure in which both the heroine and the villainess lived remained completely untouched by the end. Since I'm a plainspoken ambitious woman who earned advanced degrees abroad, I took this very personally.
