grrrlsoverdramas

[grrrlsoverdramas]

#KDRAMAWOMENSWEEKS 2025 [year 2017 day six; strong foundations // ON WOO JOO]

Perhaps all of this was caused by your desperate sincerity.

FRANKLY SPEAKING 비밀은 없어 (2024) dir. Jang Ji Yeon

frankly speaking is possibly my favorite kdrama of 2024. it's written and directed as two women's sophomore project that often suffers from indecision on what sort of story it wants to tell at the beginning, but if you ask me it gradually finds its footing along the way. and it does so in a manner that makes you glad to have stuck around to see the process at work.

i don't want to wax lyrical on what the drama itself is about & i'm of the opinion that it's best to go into it blind, so that makes talking about what i love in on woo joo, its enterprising & people savvy senior variety writer heroine, all the more difficult.

all 3 main characters of frankly speaking are connected to one another via either a lie or an unfortunate truth that they've spoken aloud while trying to help each other. all 3 of them are people who are so accustomed to donning a mask that it's gradually replaced their own faces, and their bodies have kept the score. song ki baek embraces the artifice in order to set himself apart from his origins of poverty, kim jung heon his celebrity persona in the hopes that eventually his success will prove redemptive & bring back the people he's lost along the way. on woo joo's case is a bit different from the other two's in that she doesn't have anything she's running away from or toward, in the beginning: against all odds, she's just trying to do the work she's good at.

she's the responsible center of the story & a place of stability for many characters of the cast. she keeps her emotional distance, makes concessions wherever necessary and keeps the torch burning, so to speak. even to the people she can't forgive she's never unkind. kang han na plays her with such dynamism that even watching her in her element makes you want to find yours.

but the entrance of ki baek into her life and the responsibility she feels about having indirectly caused his plight upends her world. she's no longer a writer but character, and no character is ever allowed permission to not participate in their own life. what do your attempts at caring for others & the mistakes you make surrounding those attempts look like, once you cease to have control over their narrative weight?

it's not until the last quarter of the story that we delve into the things that have made on woo joo who she is today & it occurs during her period of hibernation where she's virtually unemployed & not working on a project. the ties that bind her have always been those of gratitude, and regardless of how much she's stifled herself while adhering to them, the story itself has a place for her very late teenage rebellion and the airing of her grievances; the support she's provided to the people around her returns to her tenfold in her moment of crisis that she doesn't even manage to acknowledge as one before she has to articulate someone else's for them, later on.

it's nothing particularly subversive & the bar itself is very low, but i've really admired the quiet but steadfast way in which frankly speaking loved her. in our eternal pursuit to be good to the people we care about in order to stave off the inevitable dread of existence we often forget that they want to be good to us, too. it hurts them when we don't hold them to the same standards that we do ourselves. the work of showing up for others itself is not thankless, not when it is all that we have to keep ourselves tethered to the world at large. and i liked how this drama let on woo joo have the time to reach her own conclusions about it :)

[grrrlsoverdramas]

YOU MEAN TO TELL ME THAT CIR GOT HIT BY A CAR, LIED ABOUT COMING FROM A PARALLEL WORLD, GOT HIT BY ANOTHER CAR, AND THEN HIS IMPOSSIBLE LIE JUST HAPPENS TO BECOME REALITY?

[grrrlsoverdramas]

Sang Yan☀️ & Wen Yifan 🌙 in THE FIRST FROST 难哄 (2025)

[grrrlsoverdramas]

Qiongnu meimei, when you ate cold noodles, did anyone still share the lotus root with you?

PERFECT MATCH (2O25) - EP 36

[grrrlsoverdramas]

What are you doing? - Of course, I'm here to complete the bride fetching, wedding ceremony, and the ancestral temple visit. I would marry you into the Shen family in glory and make you my wife.

Ep. 28│五福临门 Perfect Match (2025), dir. Yang Huan

[grrrlsoverdramas]

Liang Yongqi & Ke Ying Promotional photoshoot for PERFECT MATCH (2025)

[grrrlsoverdramas]

genuinely how the fuck is the arc for the 4th couple this good and LEVELS above the other arcs so far it's like an entire drama worth of material in a couple of episodes

[grrrlsoverdramas]

[grrrlsoverdramas]

PARK SEO-JOON & KIM JI-WON as KO DONG-MAN & CHOI AE-RA FIGHT FOR MY WAY 쌈 마이웨이 (2017) dir. Lee Na-Jeong

[grrrlsoverdramas]

Ok so partly because I simply cannot take any waking moment to think about reality, I am watching Perfect Match because its mostly just silly and coming out daily on Netflix, and also it has like a beautifully stacked cast of people I love.

But because the Netflix subs are literal trash I have been interacting more with reactions/discourse then I have in a while because I am trying to figure out wtf they're actually saying (like... what is with this machine-translated style of stuff where they aren't even getting pronouns right???)...

SO it's just interesting to me that the reaction to this show has been so presumptive that it's sexist because like...the male characters have been? But the latest ep actually has some of the most interesting examination(s) of historical ideas around gender? Like this show is so spliced together and incoherent and then suddenly we have a layered, complex episode that ties together multiple threads/themes of the show and just presents some things that I think historical dramas usually just never wanna admit to?

(1) there is only ONE woman who is legitimately part of the ruling class, and that's the dowager empress, so let's present her as a character that contributes politically, rather than just as a villain or prop or whatever; (2) Let's have contemporaneous characters discuss how wild it is that only men make decisions; (3) Confucian ideals around filial piety are actually pretty sexist and just straightforwardly unfair; (4) women were treated like property and all of the men in society felt pretty much fine about that

And sure Du is a bit of an asshole toward his wife and is like... very patriarchical in some ways. But he also gets on his knees and calls his older wife jiejie, so idk.

Like I don't think this show is revolutionary or anything, but I do find it interesting that I think part of the dislike of the male characters right off the bat comes from the fact this show is not afraid of saying explicitly some of the background stuff in most other of these goofy period shows.

[grrrlsoverdramas]

I love them!

You know, he's so dramatic, he totally would kneel like this ahahaha

Bwhahahaha

OK, guys, don't let out your kink in public!!!

Also, once again, netflix, he's not calling her by name, he's repeatedly calling her jiejie, that is why all the sisters and their men are cracking up.

Hahahah of course.

They certainly have a dynamic going!

PS I love the fam losing it.

[grrrlsoverdramas]

STUDY GROUP 스터디그룹 (2025) Dir. Lee Jang-hoon.

[grrrlsoverdramas]

STUDY GROUP 스터디그룹 (2025) Dir. Lee Jang-hoon.

[grrrlsoverdramas]

theyre unparalleled

[grrrlsoverdramas]

LOVE SCOUT (2025)

[grrrlsoverdramas]

I rolled my eyes at the groom saying he will never sleep with his wife because she's a merchant.

Not rolling my eyes because of disdain but because of that relatively new cdrama need to keep heroine pristine for her eventual man even tho it makes no sense. Think of Dream of Splendor where they insisted she was a virgin despite being a performer. And now here - I could see a man disdaining his low born wife but to leave her untouched? Really?

If it was a one-off, it would be one thing but this is very much part of a pattern.

Long gone are the days when Shu Qi's FL had to whore herself for her gross assassin master and still ended up happily with Wallace Huo's idealistic scholar in Red Dust or Dilraba’s FL slept with and had another man’s child despite being eventually part of an OTP with Zhang Bin Bin in The King’s Woman or Imperial Doctress where Liu Shi Shi was married to and raped by her husband and eventually ended up with true love emperor Wallace Huo or Zhang Xinyi's Princess having to sleep with her gross husband despite being in mutual forbidden love with his brother played by Yuan Hong, and ending up happily with him eventually (or, to use a more recent example, Tang Yan having to sleep with her husband but eventually ending up with her first and true love Shawn Dou's character in The Princess Weiyoung.)

[grrrlsoverdramas]

Han Ji-min is really cornering the market of career woman shacking up with hot single dads.

First Jung Hae-in and now Lee Joon-hyuk?