I saw this being discussed in a forum of K-dramas’ fans in my country and I found it really interesting, so I thought of sharing it with you all. Do you have someone to share your love for Asian culture and dramas with? How do your family and friends react to this “love” of yours?
I’ll share my experience first. Before I accidentally discovered Asian entertainment and culture, I had never heard of K-dramas or even K-pop. That was about three years ago. So, when I got addicted to K-dramas, I was a “weirdo” to everyone around me. My family was making fun of me, my friends were surprised. Note that in Europe, western culture is dominant and we never had too many contacts with Asian entertainement, except for some famous Asian movies that made it to the big screens of Europe. Of course, now, everyone has been used to it and my husband even watches some shows with me (I know which ones he would like😉 ) and my friends ask for recommendations to get an idea about it. And all this fuss about “Squid Game” made K-dramas more known and trending. But, through viki and other forums, I met some people who share this love and they’ve become friends and I also started learning Korean, making more friends.
So, everyone, I’l love to hear your stories!
P.S. If this is something being discussed in another thread, I apologize in advance.
My mother doesn’t have Viki but when she comes over she watches series that I have worked on at the moment she really loves Live your own life, she doesn’t see them in order as she lives 4-5 hours away by car (but 16/11 she will catch up and on new years eve). I have friends that watch Japanese as I belong to a dojo and takes lessons in Japanes at the mo. I think there hasn’t been a time in my life that I (and when I was younger my family) has been interested in other people and their culture, not only Asian but African and so on.
Oooh, I love this discussion. My story with Asian entertainment officially started about 2 years ago, but I count it as much earlier. I actually really wanted to learn Chinese as a little girl, but I never had a chance to. I don’t know it now either, but I’ve been trying to learn a bit through an app and I’ve picked up some phrases from C-Drama. It’s not much, but I’m proud of it. Hahaha!
Anyway, when I was in high school, one of my best friends got super into BTS and she got me a bit into it too, but I wasn’t a super fan or anything. She used to watch some K-Drama too and I had some friends who watched anime, but again, I guess it wasn’t my time.
Fast forward to about two years ago during the wintertime, I was super into watching cinema from different countries. It was something my mom and I did together. Since it was cold and polluted outside (Living in a capital city is really fun, huh?) and we both work from home, we spent a good portion of our free time doing this. I remembered “those Korean TV Shows everyone talks about” and asked her if she wanted to try one. Anyway, we actually ended up watching a C-Drama first, because I didn’t know C-Drama was a thing. After that, naturally, the next choice was a K-Drama and the rest is history. My dad, being the cinema fan he is, naturally saw what we were doing and wanted to join us too, so we got him into it too. Since I accidentally got my family into it, there’s absolutely no negative comments from them and they get it. Now that I translate here too, they also regularly watch the dramas I translate.
As for friends, I thankfully have a couple who really love dramas too. I also successfully got another one of my best friends really into it too when she was visiting me last year and we watched “Meteor Garden” together, so I’ve added her to her list. We now regularly text each other with messages like, “Have you seen this drama? It’s really good!” and we have discussion video calls on the dramas we’ve seen every once in a while. 
And of course, I’ve now got all of you guys too and I love chatting with you on these forums. 
Unfortunately, in real life, nobody! And I did try. I begged people saying “Just watch the first episode, and if you don’t like it, I will never ask you again”. But nope.
When I went to Korean lessons, at the Didaskaleion Xenon Glosson (a language subdivision of the Greek Capodistrian University of Athens, but it’s not only for the students, anybody can join if they pay more), I met many k-drama fans. BUT they were most and foremost k-pop fans, mad about idols and drooling about them, wishing/going for concerts etc. Note that they were 40 years younger than me, so, no matter how I tried to be “one of them” in class, and they were very nice to me, there was always a sort of gap between us. Our Messenger chat was not fun at all, the things they liked and did in their day-to-day life were so boring to me. They hardly talked about dramas, and I couldn’t convince any of them to come to Viki as a volunteer.
And then I had to quit the course, so now watching dramas is a very solitary pursuit again.
So glad to see you sharing it with your family❤️
Yes, I get what you mean! Where I study Korean, most of the students are like that too. But there are some ajumas like me, who don’t care about K-pop, only watch dramas and love the culture, so I’m lucky. In fact, we are discussing about organising a trip to Korea sometime, for us older girls who want to see the culture someday, when we’ll have enough money, since it’s quite an expensive trip. And I got the chance to meet people from viki too, mostly e-meet, but also in person. Distance is always an issue, even if you live in the same country, but we do get some chances.
I don’t really have irl friends to discuss things with, only acquaintances and I’ve never brought it up to them before. But I do have relatives on my mother’s side who love watching kdramas, so I occasionally talk about it with them when we’re facetiming… but it’s not as often as I’d like 
I was into ITV (indian shows), I get to know a group of girls on ■■■■■ that we all share the love of “Imlie” that premiered in Nov 2020, but as usual to ITV, they never end and tend to ruin the shows for the sake of viewer ratings, so I get upset and mad and stopped watching ITV and these lovely girls introduce me to K-drama, they gave me a list to watch, I started it mid Jun 2022 and I just got hooked! All their list was too great. And always catching up with them.
My family and friends at first started to have fun of me, but little by little, they accepted it, and sometimes ask me for recommendation too!
My husband I convince him to watch “Imlie” but till now I can’t convince him to watch K-drama, and he is not into screens that much already.
My girl and brother into anime, so they try to pull me with them, l like them, but they are often not my cup of tea.
In my case, I actually love the exclusivity, it’s like a world of my own. I’ve noticed one of my siblings is very much into Spanish dramas. 
The same way I’m into the dramas coming out of Asia, especially the ones accessible here on Viki, and similar platforms.
At first, people in my real life didn’t understand when I developed my Asian drama obsession. Some actively teased me and some were curious enough to ask questions, but no one has followed suit. After realizing it wasn’t just a passing fad for me, most of them have stopped giving me a hard time.
Thankfully, I found this community and have formed some really great relationships. We have a small, regular watch party group that watches things together several times a week.
I am really grateful to have found like-minded drama watchers with whom I can share this interest.
At first people laughed at me, but now everything has changed thanks to N…
A lot of people have converted to Korean dramas, even some people I used to beg to try. Some colleagues come up to me and tell me about the first Korean drama they saw, as if they’d discovered something new. 
The Glory, Crash Landing On You, Extraordinary Attorney Woo and of course Squid Game are the dramas that made a difference.
I tried to recommend Chinese dramas like The Rise of Phoenixes but they were not interested.
Fortunately, my sister has loved Asian dramas for as long as I have. So I have someone to talk to when something in a drama makes me mad or laugh.
My other sister watched Empress Ki just because of Tiktok videos. And that’s it, she finds all the other dramas boring. 
I really think my mom would love a lot of the dramas, but she absolutely refuses to watch anything with subtitles. She insists she’d never get good at it, no matter how hard I try to convince her otherwise.
My mother prefers subs in Finnish instead of mine in Swedish (that´s where she´s from), but watches a few series that i have worked on. Your mother might prefer som other language. <3
You know what’s funny? My niece (who is way too young to have watched “Squid Game”, in my opinion!) considers Asian dramas “my thing” and I haven’t been able to get her into it. (I have ulterior motives here. I tutor her in English and she’s not much of a reader, despite my best efforts, so her biggest problem is always with spelling. I figured if I could get her into Asian drama, she’d have to read subtitles. ) She found it as a random show and watched it dubbed, so I don’t think she realizes it’s a K-Drama. I’ve tried to point that out to her whenever we get on the topic of Asian dramas, but I think for some reason “Squid Game” seems to be considered as separate by some people, in my experience. A lot of my non-K-Drama watching friends have seen it and loved it and yet they don’t watch K-Drama and I haven’t been able to get them into it (yet!). Funnily enough, I still wasn’t into K-Drama when “Squid Game” was all the rage and I think, only recently, my brain started linking it to K-Drama. I don’t know how to explain it, but it was kind of like a separate entity in my brain for the longest time. Like, “That horror show everyone raved about”. Maybe it’s just because I didn’t like the genre. Someone should really write a paper on this “Squid Game” phenomenon. Hahaha! I’ve noticed that the other ones you mentioned were definitely all “gateways” of sorts for the most part (At least for me, since CLOY was one of my first and definitely cemented my love for K-Drama) for a lot of people, but “Squid Game” seems to be its own thing for some. Maybe because it’s not a typical K-Drama? Anyway, I totally digress from the topic at hand, but the mention of “Squid Game” suddenly made me realize this and I had to mention it, because it’s really funny.
I didn’t watch squad game or the glory yet! Hence members of my family watched them while they are not into K-drama at all! So yes, they are at a diferent level I guess 
My mom is a huge fan of K-dramas, so when I was around 9 years old, I started watching some of the dramas with her. After that, I watched them sporadically, but I was not an avid watcher of them. In 2018, I was watching the Billboard Music Awards, and I saw the performance of “Fake Love” by BTS and just completely fell in love with them. From that time on, I started to get more into the K-pop culture and was watching K-dramas more often. Keep in mind that when I say K-dramas, I mean I only saw K-dramas. The pandemic hit, and I ran out of K-dramas to watch, so I shifted to C-dramas and then Lakorns, and a lot of Asian dramas followed. I completely fell in love with them, and now I watch them constantly. My mom also only saw K-dramas, but now, with my influence, she has spread her wings and watches dramas from all over Asia.
My friends never really got my love for BTS and K-pop. They didn’t make fun of me or anything, but they didn’t really try to hide their negative feelings toward K-pop. Mind you, this was in 2018, when BTS was just starting to further open the doors in the western market. So many weren’t familiar. During the pandemic, some of my friends texted me, telling me how great K-pop was and all that jazz. So after all that, they ended up listening to it.
Ah, yes, I forgot about “The Glory”. Ironically, that friend I got into K-Drama has been trying to make me watch “The Glory” now. (Even more ironically, the friends I haven’t been able to get into K-Drama tried to get me to watch “Squid Game” back then too. ) But I keep refusing, because I neither like horror nor revenge stories. But I’ve heard “The Glory” is quite popular and my friend claims it’s fantastic, even naming it as her favorite K-Drama, even though I’ve never known her to like revenge stories all that much either. Like me, she’s more of a romance fan too. But if you don’t mind revenge stories, I know it got a lot of good reviews.
Yes, I know.
But you know what! right now I’m not mentally prepare for this kind of stuff. I just want to watch something refreshing and happy ! I have so little time to waste in a draining shows.
But they are in my list 
Squid Game is indeed in another category, not the classic K-drama. I mean, if someone asked me to recommend a K-drama to get into the genre, it definitely wouldn’t be Squid Game. But “The Glory” is another story. It is kind of harsh and more “liberated”, if I can use this word, than K-dramas usually are, but still I would include it in K-dramas, revenge as you said K-dramas, and there are a lot of them. And indeed it’s a great revenge K-drama, which I refused to watch at the beginning because of Song Hye Kyo, but I think she redeemed herself with this one.
It seems to stem from the school yard. There’s more in this video.
