Can This Love Be Translated? I Can't Handle It

I've been busy with other things lately, and I haven't watched a K-drama in two or three months.

Today a reader messaged me on WeChat to recommend a new show called Can This Love Be Translated?

I'd just finished lunch and had a two-and-a-half-hour lunch break, so I started watching right away.

I can't handle it.

Why are K-dramas so good?

A few months ago I wrote I Actually Really Like Watching K-Dramas. It got decent traffic, and in it I gave two rational reasons for why I like K-dramas.

Now I think maybe K-dramas aren't so much good as I happen to be exactly the person they're made for. Their whole formula just works on me.

Plot aside, there's so much about them I love.

Take the visuals. The K-drama look has become a cultural symbol of its own. No other kind of show has that feel. It isn't dreamy and it isn't twee. It's a sense of real, lived-in life, and it gets there without shaky handheld camerawork.

Take the music. In K-dramas the music and the picture blend together perfectly, and the score always lands its punch at exactly the right moment.

Take the themes. Most of the K-dramas I watch are love stories, but under the love story there are lots of specific questions about relationships: Yang Gwan-sik's devotion in When Life Gives You Tangerines, the reconciliation between Kim Ji-woong and Kook Yeon-su in Our Beloved Summer, the healing in When the Weather Is Fine. Each one is handled with real care, and each one leaves plenty of room to talk about.

It's like the show asks a question and spends a whole season answering it.

The male lead of Can This Love Be Translated? is Kim Seon-ho. Apart from Park Bo-gum, he's my favorite K-drama actor. He has a great voice.

The story takes off fast. In a single episode it shows the leads' pasts, how they meet, their first clash, and how it resolves. And that's another thing about K-dramas I can't resist: the drama.

K-drama drama is different from any other kind. You can often guess what's about to happen, but instead of feeling bored, you feel excited. And when that moment actually arrives, you think, called it, and it feels amazing!

Every time I watch a good K-drama, I get the urge to spend the rest of my life studying K-dramas.

But because I have other things to do, I watch them in cycles.

Whenever I find a good one, I have to watch several in a row before I'm satisfied.

Then I go quiet for a while, until the next time I open one up.

This endless cycle of opening and closing them proves one thing: I really, really love K-dramas!