Episode 49: White Truck Of Doom (Media)

This week Jun and Daniel discuss a topic that is very near and dear to our American host’s heart: Korean dramas, or K-dramas for short. Daniel has been a casual viewer since his early 20s, long before Squid Game put them on the global stage, but his K-drama watching ramped up while in Covid lockdown and hasn’t slowed down since. Like many Westerners, much of his perception and understanding of Korean culture has come from watching K-dramas. How true to life are K-dramas? How do Koreans watch them differently than Americans? What is the classic K-drama template? What is one reason why K-drama plots seem to lack continuity? What are the origins of product placement in K-dramas? What are our hosts’ all-time favorite K-dramas? Why aren’t there multiple seasons to popular K-dramas, at least historically before the Netflixization of them? Is Korea a harder place to live than other countries? Why are the foreign actors in K-dramas always so bad at acting? What can we learn about Korean society from the many K-drama tropes that appear in drama after drama? Which tropes actually reflect reality, and which are equally unbelievable to Korean viewers? What is the perilla leaf controversy (깻잎논쟁) and what does it say about Korea’s level of jealousy and standard boundaries when in a dating relationship? Listen in as our hosts have a truly meandering conversation about everything K-drama related, big and small.

If you're interested in any of these questions, tune in to hear Daniel and Jun discuss all this and more! Also in this episode, Daniel reveals one of his bucket list dreams to accomplish while he is in Korea, while Jun does his best to prevent his cat from getting to the fried chicken.

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