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Last night ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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.
Ri Jeong-hyeok's squad, ft. the rude one, the hot one, the baby one, and the one with the forbidden encyclopedic knowledge of twenty-year-old South Korean kdrama tropes who thus must function as Interpreter of Yoon Se-Ri's Strange South Korean Behavior
The B love interests: Gu Seung Jun, a South Korean con artist hiding out in North Korea who really just wants someone to neg him, and Seo Dan, Ri Jeong-hyeok's arranged North Korean fiancee, who is more than happy to oblige
The Rat, a meek and morally compromised North Korean wiretapper, who spends the first half of the series seriously fighting for his own soul; he ends the series with friends and a much more satisfying job that still makes use of his audio experience! We were so proud of him! Bonus points for every time he managed to use his wiretapping skills to solve an unexpected problem once he got redeployed into comedy hijinks in the back half of the show.
A clique of judgy ahjummas in Ri Jyeong-heok's North Korean village that Yoon Se-ri uses her networking skills to befriend, who subsequently get a few heroic moments of their own while navigating the ripple effects of Plot Shenanigans
Se-ri's adopted mom, who has spent the past twenty years coming to terms with the fact that her husband's illegitimate daughter is way more important to her than either of her useless and terrible biological sons but has not yet had any success at conveying that fact to Se-ri
Seo Dan's mom, who has absolutely no difficulty conveying her extreme supportiveness to Dan whether Dan wants to hear about it or not
And a special shout-out to the South Korean propagada's-eye view of the warm and cuddly National Security Service, who pop up in the last two episodes of the series to have a lot of feelings about forbidden romance.
Agent A: we've hired a psychologist to analyze CCTV footage of the North Korean infiltrator, and the expert says he's a very nice man who's really in love
Agent B, shedding a single tear: you fool! haven't you seen the way he LOOKS at her! OBVIOUSLY he's really in love!
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 (Se-ri has suicidal depression in her past, and is saved from jumping off a bridge by a chance encounter with her future soulmate; both her therapist and the show posit a trip to Switzerland as the cure to suicidal ideation, which really makes me wonder how much money the Swiss tourism bureau shelled out for this drama), at least one more major character death than we were strictly expecting from this work of gripping not-exactly-realism, and extremely long episodes.
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.
Ri Jeong-hyeok's squad, ft. the rude one, the hot one, the baby one, and the one with the forbidden encyclopedic knowledge of twenty-year-old South Korean kdrama tropes who thus must function as Interpreter of Yoon Se-Ri's Strange South Korean Behavior
The B love interests: Gu Seung Jun, a South Korean con artist hiding out in North Korea who really just wants someone to neg him, and Seo Dan, Ri Jeong-hyeok's arranged North Korean fiancee, who is more than happy to oblige
The Rat, a meek and morally compromised North Korean wiretapper, who spends the first half of the series seriously fighting for his own soul; he ends the series with friends and a much more satisfying job that still makes use of his audio experience! We were so proud of him! Bonus points for every time he managed to use his wiretapping skills to solve an unexpected problem once he got redeployed into comedy hijinks in the back half of the show.
A clique of judgy ahjummas in Ri Jyeong-heok's North Korean village that Yoon Se-ri uses her networking skills to befriend, who subsequently get a few heroic moments of their own while navigating the ripple effects of Plot Shenanigans
Se-ri's adopted mom, who has spent the past twenty years coming to terms with the fact that her husband's illegitimate daughter is way more important to her than either of her useless and terrible biological sons but has not yet had any success at conveying that fact to Se-ri
Seo Dan's mom, who has absolutely no difficulty conveying her extreme supportiveness to Dan whether Dan wants to hear about it or not
And a special shout-out to the South Korean propagada's-eye view of the warm and cuddly National Security Service, who pop up in the last two episodes of the series to have a lot of feelings about forbidden romance.
Agent A: we've hired a psychologist to analyze CCTV footage of the North Korean infiltrator, and the expert says he's a very nice man who's really in love
Agent B, shedding a single tear: you fool! haven't you seen the way he LOOKS at her! OBVIOUSLY he's really in love!
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 (Se-ri has suicidal depression in her past, and is saved from jumping off a bridge by a chance encounter with her future soulmate; both her therapist and the show posit a trip to Switzerland as the cure to suicidal ideation, which really makes me wonder how much money the Swiss tourism bureau shelled out for this drama), at least one more major character death than we were strictly expecting from this work of gripping not-exactly-realism, and extremely long episodes.
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