Click here to follow Screen Digital on YouTube and stay updated with the latest from the world of cinema.
© IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd
Tags:
For years, women in most K-dramas seemed to slotted into particular categories. There’s usually the main protagonist who is perky, cute and a manic pixie dream girl. There’s the maternal type. Then there are a couple of supporting characters, ranging from gossipy to curious, who evaluate the main lead. Of course, there’s the downright evil and calculating woman as well, who doesn’t have an iota of nuance in her. She is usually redeemed at the end of the show. Women feature prominently in Korean shows as love interests, second leads, colleagues, mothers, aunts, and yet, for the most part, either they are distractions, create confusion in love triangles or serve the man’s purpose. Despite attempts at variations, the women would slowly drift to the background as the men took the reins.
There used to be a straight formula for a typical K-drama. Two men are interested in a woman. There are cutesy and longing stares, hand holding and typical bad boy behaviour just to show that the fellow is actually good at heart. The latter side would come to light when the woman is in danger. In all probability, she would get kidnapped and she’s completely incapable of rescuing herself. Violence administered to the woman makes the men livid, so they will throw all the punches and flying kicks. And a rain sequence later, there’s a love confession.
The men have taken great pride in reappearing magically to save their women. We have seen Gong Yoo literally dying to save Kim Go-eun in Guardian, Song Joong-ki going rogue to take down terrorists to save Song Hye-kyo, and Lee Dong-wook fighting off Yoon In-Na’s stalker in Touch Your Heart, with a suave flick of his jacket saying, “Stay away from my girl,” while his girlfriend looks at him in speechless awe. In 2020, Lee Min-ho took the knight-in-shining armor trope a little too seriously, and rode in on a white horse to save Kim Go-eun, while she helplessly sobbed into her bloodied hands. It takes one look at posts on social media as well as YouTube comments to realise how these male-saviour scenes are swallowed whole and savoured. Slathered in cheesiness, we’ve consumed it for years. After all, who can resist Lee Min-ho on a horse?
Yet, the fact remains that the woman’s personality, voice and character have been subdued in K-dramas. She loses her own essence and almost recedes into the background, which is a crushing disappointment to the feisty character we were promised at the beginning of some series. In The Heirs and Boys Over Flowers, shows that spurred the Hallyu wave, the women are relentlessly and literally shoved aside, and almost become a trophy for the warring men.
However, there has been a slow and painful dismantling of the old tropes. With actors like Seo Ye-ji, Moon Chae-won, and IU, the women have just as much as complexity and nuance, if not more than their male counterparts, and the old manic pixie trope appears to be fading away. In the standout drama of 2020, It’s Okay To Not Be Okay, Seo Ye-ji plays a bitter and seemingly emotionless author Ko Moon-Young, who has had a tragic childhood, owing to a murderous narcissistic mother, and a father whom she holds responsible for not looking out for her. She falls in love with Kim Soo-hyun’s Gang Tae, who is shouldering more burdens than he can carry, and much to their horror, they realise that the tragedies of their childhood are inter-connected. Moong Young was one of K-drama’s darkest women characters, and yet she was the protagonist. She was brittle, brutal with her words—sometimes cruel even. Her humanity came through in the way she loved. There was a pleasant gender reversal in the season finale, where she rushes back to save Gang Tae from being murdered by her mother—a somewhat rarity, as it’s usually the men dropping everything to save their women from ugly situations. What was even more heart-wrenching about the scene was the momentary conflict, with Moon-young almost considering killing her mother for hurting Gang Tae.
The beauty of the show was that apart from sensitively handling mental illness, it showed how two people could save each other—not by just throwing punches at others, or bashing up goons—but by just being together, and slowly working through the trauma of their past. This time, the woman got a chance to save the man too. Seo Ye-ji has a knack of taking up roles with depth. Her Lawless Lawyer, with Lee Joon-gi, saw her as an upright and virtuous lawyer looking to unravel the truth about her mother’s disappearance. The woman- saving was minimal in the show, and she managed to throw a couple of punches at a murderous gang of thugs.
IU changed the game completely in dark dramedy Hotel Del Luna, where she plays a vengeful ghost, running a hotel for people who are passing into the afterlife. She had been nursing a grudge for over 1300 years till she encounters an innocent, earnest well-meaning man who, in fact, is the damsel in distress, as ghosts constantly surround him. She hires him as her hotel manager, and watches moodily as he gets invested in the lives of the ghosts and struggles to bring them to justice. The ice slowly melts, and she falls in love with him, slowly. Ironically, she is the one who has to rescue him several times from imminent death—another example of a pleasant gender-reversal. In Hotel Del Luna, her backstory of pain and heartbreak takes centrestage, something that is somewhat unique for Korean shows, where the girl often tries to ferret the man’s tortured past out of him.
There are quite a few noticeable changes in the way women characters are now being written. There’s a refreshing depth to them and more layers, rather than the straightforward trope of just existing to further the man’s story and character development, or being constantly kidnapped and held as bait for the men to prove their muscle power. Our Beloved Summer saw Kim Da-mi as a woman torn from inside with all insecurities, and the desire to maintain the one comforting relationship she has had for years, leading to a final breakdown and acceptance.
Sometimes, the lure of the tortured male appears too great—because in many of the recent shows, the women have relatable and well-defined personalities in the beginning, such as Shin Min-ah in Hometown Cha Cha, who is a methodical, almost calculative woman, till she gets side-tracked for Kim Seon-ho’s tragic story.
Kim Go-eun seemed promising as an empowering woman in The King: Eternal Monarch, where she played a disgruntled officer, accosted by a man (played by Lee Min-ho) from another dimension altogether. While her character had layers, the sheen of her personality reduced halfway through the season, as Lee Min-ho took over.
Yet, the women seemed to persevere. Han So-hee did two polar opposite roles in a span of two months in 2021. In Nevertheless, which is a mature drama on intimacy and desire, she subtly showed the confusion of a heartbroken woman, who is caught between her lustful desires and conflicting ideas on love. A month later, she appeared in My Name as a vengeful woman seeking revenge for her father’s death and is on the wrong side of the law. Vincenzo, one of the standout shows of 2021, saw a dangerous member of the mafia, played by Song Joong-ki, taking the help of a lawyer, Jeon Yeo-been, who teeters nervously on the blurring boundaries between law and vigilantism. There was a love story, but that took a backseat. Jeon Yeo-been did an incredible job of being the Nicholas Cage equivalent in the show, and was so positively eccentric that there was no way one couldn’t love her. Steering away from the overtly chirpy, innocent trope that most K-drama women fall in, she was also incredibly strong as she wrestled with the desire for revenge, what’s lawfully right, and her attraction for a man knowing that there was no future for them. She wasted no tears on begging him to return to the good side. In a strange act for a woman in the K-drama world, she revelled in his bloodlust quest too, though at points expressing shock when it went too far.
One of the most brilliantly written women characters was Jiwon, played by Moon Chae-won, in Flower Of Evil. A police officer, she is heartbroken to learn that her marriage of 14 years with Lee Joon-gi has been a lie, as he has had to pretend to be someone else to steer away from a dark past. As the show slowly progresses, she learns that he has been framed for a crime that he didn’t commit. In an exemplary, nuanced performance, Moon Chae-won portrays the internal conflicts of a woman torn between her profession and her desperation to save her husband from an iron law. She isn’t swamped by her love for him and prevents him from going over to the dark side. It’s a fabulous dual role that she plays in the show as continues her work, pretends to be ignorant of her husband’s lies, and yet saves him continuously, knowing that her life would be an emotional hell.
One of the most heartbreaking scenes of the show is when they are both standing on the bridge and an anguished Lee Joon-gi, who realises that she has learnt the truth about him long ago, asks her, “Why are you saving me. Why are you doing this?” She just answers, “Do you not know?” In the climax of the show, she is assumed dead and he almost loses his sanity, till she arrives. At the end, she summons the strength to move on from a torturous life after he loses his memory (a favourite K-drama trick), till he requests her to stay, so that they can give their marriage another chance. Another example of giving women their agency in Flower Of Evil is when Lee Joon-gi hands the key to a girl trapped in a cage, and tells her to find her own way out.
It’s a long road ahead for those who desire more fleshed-out women characters in the K-drama world, but it’s not impossible—-the changes are there, as the Hallyu waves continue to hit international shores.
Click here to follow Screen Digital on YouTube and stay updated with the latest from the world of cinema.
