Why I just kennut with the Memories of the Alhambra OTP.
Aka what happens when brilliantly conceived sci-fi is derailed by an inability to create complex female characters.
Annyeong, I’m back~~! Hope 2021’s been treating you well so far! My OTP watch will be coming to you every two weeks/twice a month - every 2nd and last Friday of the month. Yayyy.
I had some trouble working on the first 2021 issue - I’d been working on a piece on high school kdrama OTPs and crystallising my ideas was a c h a l l e n g e. Is this because I took a break? Who knows? Haha, either way, I ended up rewatching bits and piece of Memories of Alhambra (2018-2019) and this piece wrote itself so here we are, visiting my memories of Memories of the Alhambra.
This sci-fi fantasy drama, written by Song Jae Jung, starring Hyun Bin and Park Shin Hye, aired in 2018 and wrapped up in 2019. (Hyun Bin worked on this from 2018-2019 and Crash Landing on You from 2019-2020. Where, then, is our 2020-2021 Hyun Bin installment??) The premise was thrilling from the start. A hotshot CEO, Yoo Jin Woo (Hyun Bin) buys over the rights to an augmented reality (AR) game before realising that there’s something seriously wrong with his fancy new product.
Jin Woo’s transformation from entitled, privileged and morally ambivalent to disillusioned and desperate made perfect sense, as the AR game started to wreak havoc in his real life. (Of course, Hyun Bin in the lead role helped. Hyun Bin is one of those actors who makes me cry whenever he cries - 11 yrs on and episode 17 of Secret Garden still b r e a k s me) . This wasn’t surprising, considering how Song put her male protagonist through the wringer in the previous drama she’d worked on, W: Two Worlds (2016). At the end, however, there proved to be more similarities than I liked across the two dramas.
You see, W: Two Worlds was as daring as Alhambra in its conception. Just as Song fused the real world with the in-game universe in Alhambra, she did same with the comic book universe in W. The flawless integration of multiple worlds, in both dramas, spoke to the tons of research Song and her team must have done. Where there were comic-book-esque transitions from one scene to another in W, there were extended gamer-esque first-person POV shots in Alhambra. I lurrrrrved it. BUT.
Around the halfway mark in W, an epic plot development that was meant to push the narrative forward, only served to slow it down to the point where plotholes were e.v.e.r.y.w.h.e.r.e. What’s more, the OTP started to feel lopsided. W’s male lead was a webtoon character. W’s female lead was the daughter of the webtoon writer. The plot, which left her stuck between her boyfriend and her father, sapped all her agency. While the ending wasn’t…horrible, an initially wonderful fantasy had turned into a rather confusing one with a female lead that seemed…lost at the end of it all. So, as I watched Jin Woo running around the place in the first few episodes of Alhambra, I hoped, that this time, Song would have spotted and fixed the issues she failed to in W.
She hadn’t. Cri
While narrative mediocrity is usually somewhat salvaged by sweet OTP moments (for me, at least), the Alhambra OTP dragged the rest of the plot to the pits of drama-hell. As my friend Samseng Zhabor has shared, there are some OTPs you can switch your brain off while watching and some that demand your brain do some werk-twerkin. This OTP was the latter. Criiiiii.
Now, Park Shin Hye played two roles in Alhambra – Jung Hee Joo, the female lead, and Emma, a Non-Playing Character (NPC) within the game. While Park does seem to be distancing herself from her usual Candyesque roles (remember Heirs?) with her recent film/tv picks (#Awake, The Call, Sisyphus: The Myth), Hee Joo was the ultimate Candy, who didn’t even really bring much to the table.
The term ‘Candy’ has its origins in a Japanese manga/anima, Candy Candy, about a hardworking girl who remains optimistic despite her life circumstances. These circumstances improve later in the story with the appearance of a rich benefactor. Many kdrama heroines were based on this trope – classic examples include the female leads from Boys Over Flowers (2009) and Hyun Bin’s 2010 hit, Secret Garden. The trope has even been referred to within kdramas - in Master’s Sun (2013), the female lead explicitly informed the male character that she refused to be his Candy. As much as the trope is dated, being a Candy doesn’t usually to equate to having a blank canvas for a personality. In that regard, Alhambra’s Hee Joo was possibly the worst Candy I’ve ever encountered.
A hardworking breadwinner working multiple jobs to take care of her brother, sister and grandmother, Hee Joo did have some semblance of a personality in the first couple of episodes. All this unravelled once her OTP ship with Jin Woo started to sail. Long story short, she left her personality in the non-recycling bin at the harbour because it NEVER. CAME. BACK.
Sure, there was some attempt to integrate her role as a Spanish tour guide/translator into Jin Woo’s main quest (The AR game was mostly based in Spain.) It just wasn’t enough. Hee Joo was reduced to a teary, trembly, terrified female lead who practically did nothing but sob every time she thought of or saw Jin Woo. In most of these scenes, Alhambra’s OST track, ‘My Heart Is You’ played in the background. (It’s safe to say I can’t listen to that song now because all it reminds me of is what happens when writers decide to use their female leads as nothing more than plot devices. All the angers.)
What’s more, this lack of agency wasn’t just limited to Hee Joo. Park’s NPC character, Emma, held the secret to beating the game. She kinda did – yet, until the end, that NPC was very much also an NPC in the larger design of the drama. She didn’t do anything except sit there and glow/strum her guitar/look up at him with wistful eyes whenever Jin Woo came to her with question. As a cousin of mine would say, “there was just no value-add.” The real question was why? Why did Song reduce her female leads to tropes and devices??
Song responded to viewer criticism by sharing that she did struggle with pacing in general. She tended to feel that the pacing was faster than what viewers seemed to eventually feel. She also shared challenges about integrating the romance into the overall narrative. But what I took issue with was her response to the lack of female characters in her work (including her pre-W dramas).
She mentioned that she’d already apologised to Park, ahead of filming, for giving her a small role but also that this was a ‘genre characteristic’. I’ve literally translated that from Korean so it sounds a bit odd but it essentially points to her belief that dramas of this genre are not meant to have complex female characters.
Just…yknow what, I need a minute.
It’s not like Alhambra didn’t have round characters besides Jin Woo, by the way. They were all just men. He had a secretary (the bromance here was 10/10), his toxic ex-best friend, his non-toxic other best friend, his mentor. Instead of weaving two non-essential characters into the plot (and wasting so much time) for the sake of it, any of these roles, which were already quite juicy by themselves, could have been modified to become a more prominent leading role. ANY OF THESE ROLES COULD HAVE BEEN PLAYED BY A WOMAN.
I’ve gotta say, I was even more frustrated and disappointed by the fact that a female writer can actually justify the reduction of women to tropes in her writing. The thing is, I really do admire Song - it would be a dream come true to conceive drama like these and see them come to live on the small screen.
But how can she not see that in taking such a risk, she is proving that women *are* fully capable of kickassery and that creators define the limits of genres, not the other way around? How can the same person who creates epic fantasy worlds also believe that the notion of badass women is so out of this world??
*exhales*
For what it’s worth, if/when Song reveals her next drama, I *will* likely to give it a go with fingers and toes crossed that she’d write better dramas. I do encourage you to give Alhambra and W a try too. The non-OTP elements in both dramas were intriguing and those are bits I like to rewatch. And hey, if you watch it and decide to write fanfic to improve the quality of the OTP, please let me know cos I’d be 100% up to read that.
In the meantime, that’s all from me for now. Stay safe, y’all. See you in two weeks! :)