Moving: A K-Drama with a Classical Touch

In classical Chinese novels, writers often use one technique to build characters and drive the story. In fact, most classic works of Chinese literature are built this way. It's called the chain structure.

What is a chain structure? Here's a simple example. One of the Four Great Classical Novels is Water Margin. The first character to appear in it is Wang Jin. Afraid that Gao Qiu will frame him, Wang Jin flees to Yan'an Prefecture. On the way he passes through a place called Shi Family Village, and there he teaches martial arts to Shi Jin, who will later be known as Nine Dragons. That introduces the first of the Liangshan heroes.

Shi Jin then befriends some bandits, ends up burning down his own village and going on the run, and sets out to find his master, Wang Jin. Passing through Weizhou, he stops for tea and meets Lu Zhishen. To save Jin Cuilian, Lu Zhishen kills the "Lord of the West" with three punches, flees to Mount Wutai to escape trouble, and later goes to Daxiangguo Temple to tend its vegetable garden, where uprooting a willow tree brings in Lin Chong.

That's the chain structure. From the start, one person's story leads into another's, one after another, introducing countless characters. Each character gets their own chapters. Water Margin, for example, has the famous "Ten Chapters of Wu Song," ten chapters devoted entirely to Wu Song's story.

So what's good about writing in a chain structure? First, giving characters their own stories lets you develop each one in depth, so readers get to know them better. Second, characters lead into one another and are finally tied together by the main plot, which lets the writer handle a much bigger setting and world.

You see this technique all the time today too. Web novels and film and TV scripts alike are full of examples that use a chain structure.

The simplest example: web novels have a concept called "changing maps." Once the protagonist clears one level, they move into a whole new setting and meet a whole new cast, and the old characters barely come back. At heart, that's the chain structure developed and applied to online fiction.

Film and TV work the same way. The easiest example is the Avengers series, which was a hit all over the world. Whether you look at a single movie or at how the Marvel universe builds its standalone films, it's a perfect showcase of the chain structure. The Incredible Hulk's post-credits scene brings in Iron Man, and Iron Man's post-credits scene brings in Thor. That's Marvel's favorite trick.

In K-dramas, though, I've rarely seen this technique used to build characters and move the story forward.

K-dramas are usually short, mostly 12 or 16 episodes. In that space, writers usually don't need complicated characters and storylines. They just need to use that time to tell the stories of three or four leads well, with a clear sense of who's main and who's supporting.

But a K-drama I watched recently, Moving, unusually uses the chain structure, and I loved every minute of it.

At heart, chain-structure storytelling needs two basic things: first, a large cast, and second, several deep subplots built on the main story. Most K-dramas have neither. Most are built around male lead 1 and female lead 1, male lead 2 and female lead 2, and the story is all about how those four people's lives intertwine.

Moving has a male lead and a female lead in the traditional sense too, Kim Bong-seok and Jang Hui-soo. But the story doesn't just move forward around the two of them. Along the way it reaches back into the past and brings in four key characters: the two leads' parents.

Out of 20 episodes, the final battle takes five. Of the remaining 15, eight go to telling the parents' stories and building them as characters.

The arc of all 20 episodes goes like this. It opens with an American assassin to set up the mystery: the past of the old Agency for National Security Planning, and something suspicious about the leads' school. Then the parents' stories bring in the history and explain the present. Along the way, it spends a lot of time on the humanitarianism of Kim Bong-seok's father, Kim Doo-sik, and the romanticism of Jang Hui-soo's father, Jang Ju-won. This is the fastest way to build characters in a short story: give them strong loves and hates.

After finishing Moving, when I think back on its characters, I remember that the whole story was set off by Kim Doo-sik's humanitarianism. Because he was kind, he left too many people alive the first time he went into North Korea, and the struggle between the two countries' superpowered people dragged on to the present day of the story. I also remember that Jang Ju-won loved his wife deeply, and that their meeting and their story were just like the Jin Yong wuxia novels he loved to read: full of fighting, and full of love.

There's also the male lead's mother, Lee Mi-hyun, who keeps running from place to place with her child, carrying her love for her husband. Every one of these characters is full of intense love and hate.

That's how Moving uses the chain structure to create several vivid characters in twenty episodes. And on the other hand, a huge, sprawling storyline is what the chain structure inevitably produces.

As I said, at its core Moving is the story of a crisis set off by a humanitarian.

Kim Doo-sik is a superhuman who can fly. Back when North Korea didn't yet have any superpowered people of its own, South Korea sent him to assassinate North Korea's leader. Kim Doo-sik went alone. He had a habit: when he attacked anyone other than his main target, he aimed for a spot that would stop them without killing them, to cut down on the deaths of people who weren't his target.

When Kim Doo-sik had dealt with all the guards and opened the leader's door, he found the leader was gravely ill, with little time left. Holding to his humanitarian principles, he didn't shoot. He walked away.

In the end, all the guards Kim Doo-sik hadn't killed were executed by North Korea, and the officials who survived began searching for North Korean superhumans. And so a war between the two countries' superpowered people began.

The story builds on this main thread and anchors itself in the stories of Kim Doo-sik and Jang Ju-won. Together they lay out a world with superpowered people in it, and the rules of how their powers work. The show also shows, on one side, the cruelty and coldness of leaders under the control of secret state agencies, and on the other, the helplessness and compromises of superhumans inside the system.

Kim Doo-sik's failed assassination of North Korea's leader brings out the fact that superhumans can pass their powers on to their children, which finally leads to a state-run program to raise the children of superhumans. The two leads from the start of the story are part of that program.

Jang Ju-won and Lee Mi-hyun spent all those years hiding their kids from the state, never realizing they'd been under watch the whole time.

That's roughly the shape of the whole story. Where a traditional K-drama has a single love story as its main thread, Moving has several love stories, and on top of that there's the rush of battle, the bittersweet pains of growing up, the sorrow of partings in life and death, and the tension of a struggle between nations.

Fitting this much into 20 episodes is proof that Moving's writer and directing team are hugely capable. They use a classical storytelling technique to tell a great story in an orderly way.

Moving has an 8.9 on Douban. With 270,000 people rating it, I think that's a fair score. Objectively, it isn't perfect. There are things you could knock points off for.

But personally, I'd say this show is easily a 9-plus.

And 8.9 isn't bad. It's kind of like the gatekeeper for a 9.0.

Want a 9.0? You'd at least have to beat Moving, right?

Douban's K-drama ratings sometimes leave me scratching my head. For example, a while ago I watched a K-drama called Twinkling Watermelon. It has an 8.7 on Douban, but I gritted my teeth through six episodes, couldn't take it anymore, and dropped it.

It's one of the few shows that has ever made me quit. I won't get into exactly why here. My point is just that a 0.2 difference can be a really, really big gap.