Jun. 16th, 2020

skygiants: Cha Song Joo and Lee Su Hyun from Capital Scandal in a swing pose (got that swing)
Last night [personal profile] tenillypo and I finished watching Crash Landing On You, a Netflix kdrama featuring a hard-boiled South Korean businesswoman who accidentally paraglides into the demilitarized zone while testing out a new line of designer sportswear and drops down in front of a dreamy North Korean military officer.



Obviously, they fall in love! Excitingly, Yoon Se-ri is an actually competent and adult kdrama heroine with confidence and resources, who navigates the extremely plausible premise with aplomb and has a great time once back in South Korea throwing her money around to get results. Meanwhile, Captain Ri Jyeong-heok is an unexpectedly top tier kdrama boyfriend with a truly astonishing dearth of asshole behavior. In one episode, he restocks her completely empty kitchen because he's very concerned that she only has water bottles in her fridge, and then he realizes -- by himself! without being told! -- that he's put everything on shelves convenient for his height and carefully rearranges everything to make sure the kitchen organization is useful for someone who's six inches shorter. Never was he more attractive to me than in that moment.

It's also the sort of romance where the protagonists have resolved all their interpersonal feelings by like halfway through the show, but the obstacles that keep them apart are extremely logistically legitimate ('I'll be killed if I stay in your country and your family will be killed if you stay in mine' is pretty difficult to get round) and both of them are constantly doing their level best to be responsible and kind to each other about it. Lots of flinging themselves in front of bullets for the other, both emotional and literal.

All that said, a lot of the charm of the show is also in the supporting cast. Cut for picspam )

A North Korean defector was apparently involved in the writer's room, and there have been several articles interviewing North Koreans living in South Korea to get their opinions on the show; the attitude as reported appears to be "the details about daily life: surprisingly well-depicted and nuanced! the dreamy and chivalrous North Korean military officer: haha not in a million years."

So, you know, there's that. Warnings also for mental health stuff details ), at least one more major character death than we were strictly expecting from this work of gripping not-exactly-realism, and extremely long episodes.

Profile

skygiants: Princess Tutu, facing darkness with a green light in the distance (Default)
skygiants

May 2025

S M T W T F S
    123
456789 10
11121314 151617
18192021222324
2526 2728293031

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated May. 29th, 2025 03:00 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios