Yeah, those are all pretty familiar. Of course, the piggyback ride is something I’ve seen with drunk college girls in the neighborhood (occasionally — more often the guys just squat beside them while they moan and try not to throw up) and I was always under the impression the piggyback ride was more dramatic when it was used to carry someone who is in grave danger to hospital. (I always wonder: why not hail a cab?)

Another trope (yes, that’s the right word) is the oppressive mother-in-law freaking out on the daughter-in-law; the older woman screaming and getting into emotional fights with everyone around her (and being basically annoying). More recently, my students said there was a trend off glamorizing adultery and divorce — not “dealing with it” as in some TV shows (say, the Degrassi shows) but straight out making it look cool and desirable and positive, with little or not attention to the attendant problems.

As for people getting sick in the rain, yes, it’s funny. Also, it’s one of the few ideas that never struck me as alien, but which was nevertheless so exaggerated it still felt alien to me. (I grew up thinking that people who go out in the rain get sick, but I also believed one didn’t necessarily have to get sick… especially if one took a hot shower when one got home, to warm up. We often see that in Anglophone movies — “Come in, come in, you’ll catch your death of cold, here’s a towel to dry off with by the fire,” bla bla bla.)

- Koreans get sick when wet (out in rain)

- Single women are always getting drunk in public and someone gives them a piggy back ride. lol.

- Korean women only like the most selfish and coldest guys.

There are a lot of these funny tropes, I think thats a word, in Korean dramas.

I see no problem with this policy…

Hey, you can edit your comment if you like, after you’ve posted it. (Or does that only work when you’re logged in? Can you see the bar of options at the bottom of your comment?) If you like I can fix the typo and delete the second comment.

Yeah, I remember my friend Ritu telling me about a similar thing that happened in Indian cinema: after one film used a lot of shots in, I think it was London, then suddenly Indian films were being set (in part) in other places all over the world.

She told me this after we watched the film Kal Ho Naa Ho, which is set in New York City, if I remember right. Like in the Korean film, all the major (memorable) characters in that film were Indian, but you actually saw a lot more normal Americans in passing. They were integrated into dance routines, they worked the till at coffeeshops, and so on. And most important, they were not (and did not reinforce) stock stereotypes like the Poor Beggar Child or the Witchy Brown Lady in the Korean clip:

While that film didn’t have shots that looked like they were shot by some local tourism bureau, they did show off the city in a number of ways. But they didn’t belabour it, for one thing; and the characters weren’t being dumb tourists, for another.

(I should note that there were shots that to me felt like they maybe did belabour the scenery or “foreignness” of Europe and England, in that earlier film I mentioned that sparked the trend, they didn’t do it any more than the shots in films set strictly in India belabour the beauty and picturesqueness of the Indian countryside. And of course, a massively choreographed dance scene on a moving train (featuring a pretty girl who came out of nowhere) simply can’t avoid showing off the scenery, and if the dance is pretty freaking cool, you can shrug and go with it:

But yeah, I don’t mean to be toooooo harsh. I think Western TV of equivalent “quality” is just beneath my notice, whereas when I see mediocre or bad Korean TV it simultaneously pushes so many “WTF?” and “yuck” buttons.

The way I imagine some Koreans might feel seeing Jerry Springer for the first time. Or, though I don’t think it’s bad TV at all, the way I imagine some Koreans would find nothing to grapple onto in a show like “In Living Color”:

… or, for that matter, the way a lot of my students reacted to a few clips from Monty Python’s Flying Circus that I showed them when we were discussing British culture, humor, media, and so on.