I’ll respond here instead of in the comment section, @WEnchanteur. It’s easier for me to add my thoughts.
🙂 One of the first comments I made about this drama is:
I feel like I’m loosing brain cells.You mentionned the scene about capitalism, but what hit more my attention here is when they say young people work a lot. Conditions of life are difficult in South Korea. Legal minimum working time is 52h/week. What was an improvement from the previous years. But prime minister was about to vote 69h/week recently. This wasn’t done, people mobilisation was quick. Add to that the high pricing of the houses and certainly some others problems. That’s make the birdthrate is now 0.7 children per woman. Yeah, 3x less than needed to just perpetuate population.
True, @WEnchanteur.
It’s hard sometimes to understand why “0.7 children per woman” is disastrous.
For the longest time, zero-population growth was deemed desirable. Zero-population growth means that birth rate equals the death rate, i.e., number of births and immigration = deaths and emigration. However, it’s now clear that zero-population growth has lots of negatives. The workforce is aging but fewer young, working age people are entering the labor market as replacement. Off the top of my head, some of the consequences of shortage of young workers are: decline in productivity (obviously), dependence on outsourcing and/or importation of labor from different countries (don’t talk to me about immigration woes), and financial strain on the government as it seeks to fund the pension and healthcare of the senior citizens.
A “0.7 children per woman” basically means that the child-bearing woman doesn’t even get replaced in the workforce when she dies. Take out the economic arguments, and it’s still a sad picture and statistics, human-wise.
Two more things about Seoulites:
a) they’re very image- and status-conscious. They buy non-essential things – even luxury goods that they can barely afford — to keep up appearances or to keep up with the Joneses.
b) they’re a consumer society. They place a high value on possessing material things.
If I were a top star in k-entertainment, I would make it a point to a) have 2 or more children, and b) abstain from wearing brand items and sponsoring luxury goods to instill in my fandom that beauty is unostentatious and low-keyed.
As I think about it: often you write dialogs from the drama. And in korean screenplay writing style (even with parenthesis). What I like a lot.
I’ve no idea how you do that, and it could be time consuming if you rewrite it. But you can find that on this website: https://subscene.com/
Thanks, @WEnchanteur. I’ll check it out.
Yes. I write the dialogues. They’re like court transcripts. It’s easier to follow the proceedings and oral arguments when you’re reading the actual record. Similarly, it’s easier to see the underlying motives and the changes in perspectives when the conversation is written verbatim. No confusion there…unless it’s the fault of the translation. (And that’s when I go to another site to double-check.)
Yes. It’s so time-consuming to have to write the dialogues down. I often dictate on my phone to get the job done quicker. What I do is I stop to dictate right away while watching the drama when I sense that it’s a big exposition/revelation. But it still takes time to edit…sigh.
However, the subbers’ job is more time-consuming so I really shouldn’t complain.
Oh yeah! TOO MANY side plots! And some are boring. Loooong scene with grandma and her new boyfriend. Taking a lot of screentime watching them dancing on a bridge.
Tons of time about Mr Bread and mother. Even the ex-bum have a scene here.
The grandma scenes are annoying. I do get the reference though when they danced on the side of the road. It’s a reference (or an homage?) to the Hollywood movie, “La-La Land.” To me, the grandma’s outfit was the tell-tale sign, and this scene was a foreshadowing of their ending: they’ll have to break up as the absentee husband is back in town.
“It’s a waste of lovely night…”
To be honest though, I’m waiting to see if this new boyfriend is a scammer, too.
As for Mr. Bread (or Mr. “Brad” – as in Brad Pitt)… I’m crossing my fingers that he’s the fall guy in this story, not Shi-Oh.
As for the ex-bum and his ex-girlfriend, until now I can’t figure out where the screenwriter is going with this side plot. However, I can’t imagine that these two characters were just added to the story (and the actors put on the payroll) if they had no
Clownish moments with Namsoon make what I like in this episode. There is even the imaginary scene about her in super-spy, when she’s desguised as a ghost. I think there was a way to do something more funny with that, as she lift a screen. Like making an illusion of her going out of the screen like the ghost in “The Ring”, to scare more the bodyguard.
Yes, I was amused by the “Expectation vs Reality” scene of Namsoon breaking and entering into Shi-Oh’s office. This series and its predecessor, “Strong Girl Do Boonso” aren’t manhwa adaptations, but in this scene, it definitely gave off cartoon-vibes. She was supposed to look like “Lara Croft” but she turned out to be a virgin ghost. Too funny.
There is one romantic scene with piggyback, however my feeling is the romance is dead now, and I ship no-one with Namsoon. It’s drowned in the mass of other things.
Namsoon is mostly a tool for Heesik and his mission. Even if he cares about her, when she drink the narcotic. I was expecting it have no effect, but the screenwriter was clever and makes her fall on the ground. It was just a diversion to surprise better with the funny scene later. People often comment the number of superpowers she have is too much (super strengh, super vision, etc). Let’s add this one, not affected by poison. However, it makes sens when she tell she eat a burning stone by accident. I suppose the muscle of her stomach have super strength too. So she eat the stone, chew it easely (without taking attention), then swallow it. 🙂
One thing I like about Namsoon is that she’s having FUN while taking on the bad guys. It’s like in the introductory scenes when she was in a tournament with that mountain of a Mongol wrestler. Instead of looking panicky, she was smiling from start to finish. Same thing with this club Madam. I was worried for Namsoon and was internally yelling, “Don’t! Don’t drink that, girl!” But all along, she pretended to be poisoned and was having fun watching the Madam’s reaction. She is “cheeky” as Heeshik said.
The only time she really got annoyed was when ShiOh tested her strength with that industrial press.
I’ve seen a few videos or articles about this birth problem. I couldn’t elaborate more, but it’s sad. I don’t see many dramas tackling the subject. That’s why I liked the start of Bora Deborah, which at least talks about one angle of the subject. About young people giving up on having romantic relationships, or even sexual relationships.
Transcripts: and sometimes you even add a few descriptions (out of parenthesis). It really is a transcript! Yes, everything is clearer on paper. The ideal would be to have the screenplay of course, to see where the screenwriter puts the emphasis.
I talked to you about this once: at this point, you could write a drama. Not just the technical side, but use your analytical skills and experience. That said, maybe that’s not your motivation, or you don’t have the time, or simply drama analysis is a hobby you much prefer.
If I took the time to delve into the analysis as you do, it would help me. But paradoxically, in the same way, I’m a prisoner of my time, and my motivation is to write the drama as a priority.
Maybe one day you’ll be interested in reading the one I’ve written? I think a lot of ideas could emerge to improve scenes, character reactions. As long as, of course, I can’t change the story in depth, because that would mean rewriting the whole thing.
About creating and reworking a drama.
I’ve often said that creating a drama requires amputating a lot of brain activity. Or to use only the “automatic or logical reflex” part. Because that’s disruptive to inspiration. But then comes the phase of analysis, self-criticism and thinking, to edit and improve. This uses more of the intellectual mind. Elaboration, then writing, uses both aspects of the mind. Writers with a writer’s block often have a deficit of one or the other, or fail to switch harmoniously and quickly from one part to the other.
– Too much inspiration: ideas in disarray and inability to choose the right one, or to make the most of it.
– Too much self-criticism: impossibility of having a free mind to imagine and self-destruction of the content produced because of “it’s never good enough”.
The way in which creation actually takes place over time.
Here’s an example from Castaway Diva.
– On the island, Mok Ha finds potatoes to eat, recognizing flowers.
– But long before that, Ki Ho points out that the flower she’s wearing is a potato flower.
Creatively, how is such a situation done? Here, probably:
– The screenwriter first asked herself the question: what can you eat on a desert island?
– Then she asked her assistant to do some research. The assistant presented her with various edible plants.
– The screenwriter chooses the one that best suits her story. So she can have a good visual or a meaning.
– The final moment (potato field) is imagined first.
– Then the writer thinks “never make things too easy, it needs an obstacle”. To add some tension Mok Ha doesn’t find food quickly, how she would know what is edible?
– Then the previous moment is imagined to add the flower-in-the-hair situation during the video-clip scene. To reuse as a flashback. Add emotion by memory of Ki Ho.
Imagining a story, or improving it, is not a linear process. Some writers write linearly. But with all the dramas you’ve analyzed, you can see that there’s a great deal of structure involved, because good dramas have elaborate planning. The scriptwriter has the big picture, holding the whole drama not just on paper but in her mind. Logical links, intersecting themes, foreshadowing, etc. The mass of information is far bigger than a movie.
– Some elements are imagined beforehand, then reused.
– Some elements are imagined simultaneously (the moment of initial use and the moment of later use).
– Some elements are imagined afterwards. Then comes the idea of improving the use of the element, by modifying the story’s anteriority to emphasize this element beforehand.
– How to twist more a situation, add obstacle, more depth or emotion, etc.
– Also, the magic of inspiration creates correlations and meanings intuitively, without the author even knowing it at first. And understands why certain choices were made only after self-analysis.
This shows how a story can be improved after it has been written.
For Strong woman Namsoon: I also think that the various side-plots will be useful. But it’s more the number of them and the time spent on them that worries me. At the end of the day, it begs the question: was it necessary to devote so much time just for this?
Having not seen the film La La Land, dancing in a yellow dress now makes sense. But if the next step is to break up with grandma, OUCH! The barista will be a thing of the past. So much for that!
Using all these characters and situations is a decision made during the preparation phase of the drama. It’s cruel, because that’s when things are fuzzy and you’re most likely to make the wrong choices. And once you do, once the drama is written, it’s too late. The screenwriter is then trapped in a story whose cohesion is as hard as concrete, not really possible to modify.
The more time passes, the more tolerant I am of k-scriptwriters, even when I don’t like what they’re doing. I know that feeling of helplessness when you detect a fundamental problem, and you can just say to yourself, “ah! now that’s how it is”. It’s a pity that people so easily accuse k-screenwriters of “lazy writing”. Screenwriting is already ultra-competitive, but it’s worst in South Korea, where there is only one or two writers per drama. We can assume only the best of the best ones have a career.
I’m trying to subscribe to this thread. 🙂