K-drama likes a friends turn lovers story, especially if the boy and girl have known each other most of their lives as in Fight For My Way and Pinocchio. Nevertheless, in most K-romances, the drama starts with a woman meeting a man she doesn’t know. In the love triangle situation, if you want to read the tropes to reassure yourself that the pivot is going to make the right choice, a good guide is to note which leg got their punch in first: a sign even used consciously by characters themselves on occasion. However, you have to be careful as that trope is frequently trumped by subsequently revealed and inexplicably forgotten flirting when children (Queen of Tears, Once Upon A Small Town, Cinderella and the Four Knights). This is when ‘love is fated’ plays its ace against ‘timing is key’.
Canadian-Korean Celine Song’s 2023 debut feature film, Past Lives, navigates this trope in realist mode or as the female protagonist played by Greata Lee says, ‘in yeon (fate) – that’s just something Koreans say to seduce someone’. Well, yes, obviously, and also, not really, as Past Lives deliciously explores. One More Happy Ending is a standout example featuring Jang Na-ra playing a thirty something divorcee who falls hard for a doctor who ‘saves’ her from a panic attack (timing) only to discover, deliciously slowly, that he’s a little too self-absorbed for life partner material. The doctor’s best friend, who triple meet-cuted our heroine early on (fate), is thus finally rescued from unrequited love, but we knew that was coming because we’d seen the flashback of them awkwardly relating as children. The story of the nine-year olds’ crush is a beautiful little nugget, featuring mutual humiliation, engineered by a jealous ‘mean girl’, in a school production of Romeo and Juliet, resulting in the much-anticipated pre-teen kiss being delayed by twenty-five years.
The K-drama fondness for showing the early lives of its protagonists supports a substantial industry around child performers, many of whom graduate to adult roles in due course.