Romance is a Bonus Book: The start of the modern representation revolution in K-Dramas.

(This article may contain minor spoilers from K-Drama “Romance is a Bonus Book”.)

There’s always a lot of discussion around K-Dramas (around any Asian drama actually, but mostly Korean ones) and how they don’t portrait accurate elements of love, work, relationships and life in general. Even when K-Dramas are known for these cheesy, over-reacted and dreamy scenarios with cliché characters, these past few years Korean productions have reached a transformation of content. This with a new revolution of characters and getting rid of planted stereotypes little by little; also presenting a change in relationships and toxic traits that started to bother some viewers, specially women, with the implanted normalization of dumb/weak women characters that just cared about sentimental things.

The perfect representation of this new revolution of content is tvN’s Korean drama “Romance is a Bonus Book” which just ended on March 17, after being released every weekend since January 26, and which was also available in the global platform Netflix every week (and where I got to discovered it).

Starting with a completely unconventional main female character, Kang Dan-I, a divorcee, single-mom and almost homeless woman, was not what we were used to see in Korean dramas. Kang Dan-I is the perfect model of strength but also a controversial representation in Korea, which is usually portraited as a bad example and categorized as disparaged; tvN broke down a lot of walls since the beginning with this character, as it is impossible to end the first chapter without sympathizing with her, even when it is a more mature version of a main female character than we tend to see in these productions.

We see a determined woman, trying as hard as she can to support her daughter on her own, working atany job she can get and trying out any possibility, no matter how many times she gets rejected. Dreaming about her successful life and career before dedicating herself entirely to her daughter and ex-husband, we see Kang Dan-I struggle to keep faith sometimes, but she never gives up and gets over every obstacle life throws at her with intelligence and strong convictions.

One of the best scenes of the drama, and probably one that will just pass unoticed, is when she remembers how she begged her cheating ex-husband not to leave her, then she talks to the memory, calmly saying to her past self not to cry and to be strong, as she’ll have to face life alone from then and on. This is such a powerful portrayal of overcoming toxic habits that are so common these days. The main female character realizing these kinds of situations and trying their best to emend them is, also, a rare vision on older Korean dramas.

Romance is a Bonus Book accomplishes breaking the perfect/toxic relationship mold, in which getting angry after a misunderstanding transforms into communication resolving problems, where fights are avoided by being sincere, and where dumbness is changed with energizing determination that keeps all the characters going.

We can relate with other modern and more real-life topics such as divorce, suicide, the impact of trends and modern content in society, failure and disappointment, grief, life expectations, living alone, misconceptions of oneself and not being enough professionally and in a personal matter, all dealt with great sense of maturity and logical thinking, a welcomed shift from the irrational and impulsive attitudes Korean dramas’ characters were known for and which contributed tremendously to numerous idealisms the world has about Koreans.

It helped a lot that love relationships were not crucial plot points during the whole drama, which brought out even more how the characters dealt with the mentioned topics and created more human interactions.

This revolution of content and shifts we are witnessing might take time to overcome the established paradigms that are so well rooted in the Korean content box, but the success of this drama is definitely a right guess on the correct path to a modern and mature side of Korean productions. We hope more entertaining companies take some risks like this one to try and keep this flow of open-minded themes on Korean television to contribute with this important change of ways.