Long distance relationships in kdramas~
Annyeong~~ How have you been? We’re almost done with a quarter of 2021! What in the worlddddd. This week, I’ll be chitchatting (pls feel free to hit ‘Reply’ and chitchat back) about long distance relationships (LDRs) in kdramas. Here we gogogo~!
Kdrama LDRs are often tiring to watch.
I became aware of my annoyance with kdrama LDRs in the middle of an episode of Sunbae, Don’t Put On That Lipstick (SDPOTL). The male lead, Hyun Seung, (Rowoon) had just found that that the female lead, Song Ah, (Won Jin Ah) had been offered an opportunity to work overseas for 3-4 years and flat out told her that he worried they would break up if she took the job.
(Sidebar: In general, SDPOTL wasn’t thaaaaat fantastic, overall. It’s an ok show to have in the background while you do work but not the kind that’s gonna sweep you off your feet.)
Now, if their relationship at this point in the drama had been unstable, I would have understood his response – but after several montages of them going on happy little dates, achieving emotional growth through their experiences at home and at work and the mutual support they had shown each other, it didn’t make sense that Hyun Seung was THAT resistant to the thought of one. I mean, we have Zoom and WhatsApp video/voice calls. We don’t even make trunk calls these days. (Trunk calls was the term we used to refer to international calls back when the only way to call an overseas number was with your landline because the only phone at home was the landline :D)
To Hyun Seung’s credit, he got on board eventually, but the LDR didn’t really work out. It was a bit reminiscent of the LDR in Reply 1994. Both relationships crumbled because the OTPs weren’t being open about how they really felt.
In Reply, Trash Oppa went to the extent of hiding his mother’s death from Na Jung (I have griped about this before because what is this nonsense). In SDPOTL, Song Ah was actually the one who was unable to spend time with Hyun Seung whenever he flew to Europe to visit her. She felt that he was wasting his time with her and that he deserved better. So, she single-handedly decided to break up and ‘let him go’. This really annoyed me because it reeked of Noble Idiocy. It reminded me of when Dal Mi did the same thing in Start-Up. What Dal Mi did was probably worse because she didn’t even allow Do San to believe that she loved him, fearing that his knowledge of her feelings would dissuade him from taking an overseas job opportunity. And I -
Waaaaaaait a minute.
AISUDFAWUIFD I think I just figured out why kdrama LDRs frustrate me!
They’re often a precursor to some form of Noble Idiocy! This is why the Coffee Prince LDR, even when thrust into the 2nd last episode of the series, didn’t annoy me all those years ago!
The Coffee Prince LDR~
Coffee Prince aired in 2007 and starred Gong Yoo as Choi Han Kyeol and Yoon Eun Hye (where has she gone; I miss her) as Go Eun Chan. Han Kyeol was slightly resistant to the idea at first but he turned round in no time and the LDR made the relationship stronger.
Of course it did, though. I mean, this is Coffee Prince we’re talking about. That OTP defied (and defined, I hope) social norms in more ways that some might like to admit. (Coffee Prince was seen progressive at the time because Han Kyeol confessed his love for Eun Chan, like every other kdrama OTP. Except he thought Eun Chan was a man, providing a perspective on homosexuality in South Korea. I’ll elaborate on this aspect of Coffee Prince more in my next piece about the portrayal of LGBT relationships in kdramas, so look out for that :) )
Both Han Kyeol and Eun Chan both came to rely on each other as emotional sources of support, which meant that he was thoroughly supportive of her choice to further her studies overseas. So yes, while the LDR plotline didn’t reallllly impact the narrative, it didn’t muddy the waters either.
When LDRs actually contribute to the plot/character development
In terms of the narrative contribution of LDRs in a drama, then, the one in Dear My Friends hit all the right notes. This drama focuses on a group of elderly friends as they navigate senior citizenship so the LDR stuff with, one of their daughters, Park Wan (Ko Hyun Jung), was very much a side plot. In order to write her next book, Wan interviews her mother and her friends, while being in an LDR with Seo Yun Ha (Jo In Sung). It wasn’t a relationship in the conventional/official sense of the term (honestly, any single label would be an oversimplification of the bond that Wan shared with Yun Ha). Either way, the time spent with the elderly allowed Wan to acknowledge, address and resolve her own emotional trauma which, in turn, pushed her to repair her relationship with Yun Ha. What I really enjoyed was how the writers put Wan in a position where her reluctance to reduce the physical distance was eventually revealed to have stemmed from her inability to confront the reason behind the emotional distance between them. Using the LDR to juxtapose physical x emotional distance to make a point about trauma? THAT’S HOW YOU INCORPORATE LDRS INTO DRAMAS LAH SIA.
What about real life?
Of course, real life is not entirely like kdrama life. A couple of days ago, I ran a poll on Twitter to ask for opinions on LDRs (I should have said this ages ago, but if you’re on Twitter, come hang with me @myotpwatch ahaha).
Huge thanks to the 7 who voted! I found it particularly interesting how the majority of votes were for ‘Never tried, don’t mind’ and ‘Tried it, didn’t work’ respectively – this means that the latter group used to be the former. I’m now wondering as to how open they would be to LDRs in the future. Do you believe a failed LDR with one partner equates to it failing with someone else? Is it worth trying again?
If you’re in the ‘never tried, never will’ category, I’m curious as to how you decided you definitely wouldn’t give it a go. Please hit ‘Reply’ and let me know. I feel like I’m hover between ‘never tried, don’t mind’ and ‘never tried, never will.’ I suppose, it ultimately depends on the dynamic between the couple. So, with my partner in mind, yes, I’d be open to it but if I’d wanna avoid it if possible. Here’s why:
Last year, I ended up rewatching Crash Landing on You (CLOY) and, this time, my mum joined me. I’d found the ending absolutely lovely when I first watched it. Two characters from North and South Korea who weren’t even allowed to call each other through a landline figured out a way to meet for two weeks every year, in Switzerland? The ultimate LDR gone right, right?
So, when the last episode came to a close and I asked my mum what she thought of the ending, it’s safe to say, I wasn’t prepared for her response:
“How they gonna meet during the pandemic?”
See you in two weeks, folks! <3
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