Just finished the kDrama Miracle from 2022 where Luice (Chani) and Min Si Woo (Hwi Young) are the male leads going after Kang Min Ah (Lee So Rin). The drama received mixed praise due to the subtle romance and the lack of exciting satisfication. It’s the last part I want to touch on, as a show that breaks convention with 14-episode season (as opposed to 16) also breaks with the pace of a classic romance story.
First, an introduction to kDrama story arcs from my perspective.
- episode 1: set up the main female and second male, with some hook at the end, classic American pilot
- episode 3: male leads are staring at each other for poster shot
- episode 5: second female starts hinting about her choice, can be either male lead
- episode 6: tensions lead to a blow-up between the two male leads, the female lead is clueless
- episode 10: one male lead confesses
- episode 12: other male lead confesses, by then the fan ratings are in and the director chooses who wins
- episode 13: second female throws the wrench, can be at either male lead
- episode 14: decision for main female, second female starts chaos
- episode 15: resolution, second female loses, losing male usually says “haha I’m fine” or is incarcerated or similar
- episode 16: tie up everything, usually includes an incarceration or hospital shot
It’s a Save the Cat for romance quadrangles in general, kDramas are just better at it than Americans.
This episode does follow the beginning sort of. Car crash is pilot hook, yes. But already things get wonky, as they immediately jump in time five years. Now the viewer has to go “where am I”. The viewer gets morsels of the past over the remaining episodes. So episode 1 is the only time this show is actually linear.
Another oddity: the second female. By all accounts this is Shin Ye Seung (Oh So Hyun), based on screentime and plot impact. She’s interjecting in all the action and gives hints over and over as to who she’s into without actually acting. But she never actually admits her preference; that episode 13 wrench is never hers. That’s actually the third female lead, the trainee Eun Joo Ah (Noh Hyo Jung). Joo Ah drives the action plot. Ye Seung has a different role actually: driving the emotional evolution.
The male leads do have a dust-up but it’s tame as hell. In most kDramas you end up liking both of them, and it’s a slight bias that ends up picking the winner. Sometimes they don’t give you the bias; famously, one of Netflix’s first funded kDramas, Start-Up, everyone was actually biased towards the loser but well he lost. In this kDrama you like both but their dust-ups are boring. I think some attribute this to the acting but I think the direction was to act like you two are compatible. It’s a turn of the trope: the rivals actually are arguably more compatible than each is to the main female.
The confession in episode 10 … never happens. Seriously. The second female reveals all the different interests but there is never a moment where either male lead confesses. Never. This common trope - the snow fall or the flowers or the streetlight - never ever show up. The second male lead didn’t confess either. Episode 12 ended on one such moment … which doesn’t happen. Episode 13 just starts with walking, no classic saranghae or anything. This is, against all that is standard, a love story without a confession.
That leads to the resolution. Remember how I said it was 14 episodes? At the end, she knows both guys like him. At the end, she knows she’s got to choose one. The scene is set with the triangle on stage. But that’s not the ending scene, which is handed to Ye Seung to smash the fourth wall. I picked up my phone and looked up if there were two episodes missing. A sappy romantic kDrama in which there is no confession and the woman never chooses a man … wait a minute.
This isn’t a love story. This is a coming of age story, isn’t it?
Let’s go back again, same arc. Now the first male isn’t wrestling his emotions, he’s wrestling maturity because he never went to high school or college with friends. The second male is wrestling his guilt and his lack of direction as the nerd who didn’t know where to go next after high school. The first female isn’t choosing between boys, she’s actually choosing whether she can trust risk again after risk failed her before. The second female has no romantic interest, she’s trying to keep her extended family together. The third female lead is not driven by jealousy but rather by ambition.
This kDrama is good, better than the reviews most gave. Not just because it’s got a funky pace and teeters on the edge of being incomplete. The kDrama is actually an attempt, within an absurd world of kPop, to show the emotional evolution of human beings. The conversations, at the end, those resolutions, those are adults talking, not teenagers anymore.
Good drama, I recommend.