My Black Hole to Another Galaxy

  Before introducing myself, I would like to thank the founders of this Club for inviting me to join. It is a great honor and I hope I will be able to live up to it.  Thank you.

  I was exposed to Korean dramas long before I ever watched one.  My older sister, the Ambassador, started watching them in 2013 and she was obsessed!!!!  Like seriously obsessed!!  She talked about them all the time, played the soundtracks and was finally able to convince Mum to watch them, I thought “okay, whatever”.  I do remember at one point saying, “I’m never going to say that I won’t watch any” because I had said that about Les Miserables….and I watched that.  

The summer of 2015, I was going through a rather rough time and one afternoon Mum and the Ambassador got to talking about the kdramas they had seen.  They told me the basic outline of City Hunter, Healer, a few others and decided that I needed to watch kdrama.  That weekend, we began watching You’re Beautiful.  I loved it.  It took me a while to remember the characters' names (and to actually be able to pronounce them), but it was so much fun.  After we finished You’re Beautiful, we moved onto Boys Over Flowers.  November came, and the Ambassador became too busy with NaNoWriMo to watch kdrama with us, so we wound up stopping in the middle of episode 7 and just stalled there for months…in fact, we still haven’t finished that drama, though I think we’re now on episode 11.  The Ambassador and I spent New Year's Eve 2015 watching the Korean movie Pirates that was hilariously funny, but we didn't go back to watching dramas.  

February of 2016 came and I really wanted more kdrama, I just didn’t want to watch BoF.  However I did very much want to watch Healer.  We watched it and I fell head over heels in love with kdramas!  (Before, I had just liked them a lot.)  I laughed, cried and cheered my way through it, glowering at Mum and the Ambassador when they would talk about spoilers in code, using puppy dog eyes (and promises of treats)- which didn’t always work- to see more episodes then we had planned to watch in a night. It immediately became my favorite drama.  It is still my favorite (I’m listening to the soundtrack while I write this) and I think I’ve re-watched it at least twice...and particular parts way more times then that.  From Healer we moved to City Hunter and that drama absolutely killed me, wrenched out my heart, trampled it, stabbed it, sliced it.  It was so beautiful, but so heartbreaking.  

While we watched that, the Ambassador was also watching Descendants of the Sun and giving the family weekly updates (generally at the supper table) and we decided that it was definitely next on the list.  DotS became my one of my second favorite dramas (City Hunter is the other) and from there it kind of snowballed.  I watched more dramas with Mum and the Ambassador, watched some by myself, watched them with just one or the other, but I’ve yet to find a drama I didn’t enjoy.  Even though I think The K2 could have been a lot better and was very disappointing because I expected so much more, I still enjoyed it.
 

 Now I watch them whenever I can, tell my friends to watch them (I’m quite proud of my gradually growing list of ‘casualties’ in that department!) and listen to soundtracks a lot.  

I found that kdramas feed me in a way that American TV/movies don’t. They tend to have deeper plots and characters, even the rom-coms, then most American drama.  I still love lots of American TV shows and movies, but now there are times when only kdrama will do!

 It is a great pleasure to meet you all and I look forward to sharing my kdrama experiences with you.