Moreover, having a heroine also be one of the boys gives us a chance to marry romance with bromance-the very best way to have your cake and eat it too. That may sound like a cop-out, but it is a step in the right direction and the dramas that use this trope often do promote tolerance and acceptance, even if the heroine does turn out to be a she. In a society that is still overwhelmingly driven by heteronormative ideals, crossdressing flirts with transgressing those norms, challenging characters to value love above social acceptance, while also allowing them to have a sunny happy ending when they don’t actually have to give up that acceptance. When the hero of Coffee Prince decides that he’ll love the heroine “whether you’re a man or an alien,” it becomes the ultimate declaration that she is what matters most, not her appearance or gender or place in the world. I don’t mean that crossdressing results in a truer love than others, but as a narrative device, it’s a wonderful way to cut to the heart of what draws two people together. What crossdressing in K-dramas accomplishes so well is in addressing one of the heart’s most earnest desires: to be loved wholly and unconditionally for who you are, as you are.
But it’s not for nuthin’ that it’s also frequently featured in the dramas on many a favorites list (see: Coffee Prince, Sungkyunkwan Scandal, You’re Beautiful, Moonlight Drawn By Clouds). Javabeans: Crossdressing-particularly in the woman-as-man iteration-is so frequently featured in dramaland that a newcomer might find the fixation strange, or at least disproportionate to the rest of the world. If you’ve seen a drama (or ten thousand), these will be familiar to you.
This is why we still watch dramas and still love them, no matter how many we’ve seen, because there is an inherent appeal in the way these tropes are used-sometimes with great creativity-to set up a love story, or to complicate it, or to make it sweeping and epic. Why does that dumb-sounding premise get its hook into your heart? And why does the twentieth drama to explore the same concept still manage to get your heart racing and tears flowing? Javabeans: Also, I think that it may be entertaining to poke fun at commonly used cliches-I’ll never find a Truck of Doom to not be funny, not by now-it skips over the more interesting flipside of the question, of why we all watch dramas anyway. The dramas where the trope was sincere and used to great dramatic effect, and made us all cry. Because for every cliched example out there, there’s a good version, or a hundred, that they left out. Girlfriday: Oh I hate mean-spirited snark too. Or maybe I’m just earnest and protective of my babies, even the ugly ones. Javabeans: For the record, I hate those snarky Top 10 Cliche lists, because I always feel like those list-makers don’t even get dramas, or set out to mock them and only pick bad examples.
That’s why if you only thought of the bad examples, this could easily be the Top 10 Cliches of Dramaland. Javabeans: Tropes are a funny thing, in that they can be wildly exciting when executed well, in a story that moves you, and when they’re done badly they’re the stuff that creates all those Youtube parodies and mocking diatribes about why K-dramas are weird, or cheesy, or dumb. Girlfriday: Yeah this list was particularly fun, because it allowed us to look at dramaland as a whole and talk about our favorite recurring tropes-the things we see time and again across all dramas, that are such a huge part of why we love them in the first place. (The list, I mean! Not the entries, which were as arduous as ever!) Javabeans: It was painful to pick only 10 dramas for the previous list of gateway dramas, but when we decided to write about tropes for this list, I found that it practically wrote itself. 225 JanuOctoOur Top 10 favorite K-drama tropes by DB Staff