It doesn’t make sense, does it? Since the viewer knew that s/he would watch a historical drama! It shows ignorance as well as lack of cultural sensibility. Yes, the period with shaved head in China wasn’t very becoming, that’s true (and I bet the Chinese hated it with all their heart, since it was an imposition from the conquerors), but if you want to present a story in that period there’s no choice, you have to go with it.
When something gets too boring or too bad I just abandon it. At the beginning I was reluctant to drop a drama, but nowadays I think that my time is too precious to spend in something I don’t even like.
I usually give them 4 episodes. If by then I haven’t started enjoying it, bye-bye!
Yes, sometimes there are some that do get better later on. They start as preposterous, overdone, with slapstick situations and unlikeable, over-the-top clownish characters who later have a “character arc” and become normal. But for how long must we the viewers exercise patience and torture ourselves? I have a whole collection of dramas that I completed and I regretted doing it.
Exactly. That’s why I don’t understand why people keep commenting that the drama is boring. They keep watching and keep posting the same comment throughout the drama. Just stop watching .
This reminds me of one of the comments in “The Legendary Queen Lau”. I always meant to go back and take a screenshot to post here, but I didn’t get around to it. At the very start of the drama, someone commented “I don’t like the filming style.” and someone replied with “Next time maybe you can film it!”
Additionally, I also watched “Unchained Love” and… the emperor was really something else. I understand the sentiment of the comments. I kind of wish I’d watched it with timed comments now, because there was a lot of potential for comedic comments there. Hahaha!
I don’t find it funny and I get very annoyed when people reply like this.
You say “this isn’t a good actor” and they reply “let’s see how you would act in his/her place”.
So if a dish has a bad taste or is burned, I am not allowed to say so because I’m not a professional cook and my cooking sucks? I still have taste buds!
That’s not logical. If I’m not posing as an actor, I’m not getting hired and paid as an actor, I am in no obligation to act well. But this person is a professional actor who comes to our screens. It’s his job. If I am not good at my job, my employer will sure let me know, even if s/he doesn’t know how to do my job. Just as the writer and director are professionals who claim our money and/or our time (many people watching means more ads on TV, more money for the company), so their job is to please us and we are entitled to an opinion. And, contrary to what that foolish commenter probably thinks, the creators of the content watch very carefully the opinions of their audience, even if the majority of us are not in the entertaining business and cannot act to save our lives.
The audience has its own opinions on whether something is good or bad, and that’s why some films make a lot of money and some films flop. Not saying that the majority of the populace is always right, of course. Not even the Academy members who decide the Oscars: sometimes they go for the most commercial film and not for the really best. But still everyone has the right to comment if something feels off.
We can disagree, if we like, but not tell him/her “You have no right to dislike this because you couldn’t do better”.
Oh, absolutely. You’re completely right, everyone is entitled to an opinion. I’ve definitely found myself disliking certain hyped stuff as well and just not understanding the appeal of it, while others swear by it. Perhaps I wasn’t the target audience or even if I was, it just wasn’t my cup of tea. However, in this particular instance, what was funny to me was that this exchange happened at the very, very beginning of the drama, not even a couple of minutes in, so it was way too early to form an opinion. Plus there was nothing all that strange in the filming style, like it wasn’t particularly artistic or unique or anything like that, which could have prompted an immediate reaction, so it was a bit of a strange comment from the get-go. Perhaps that’s just my opinion too, since I usually tend to wait a while before forming an opinion, since oftentimes I’ve found myself not liking something from the get-go, but then it proving me wrong as it goes on. For example, I really didn’t like the first episode of “Romance Is a Bonus Book” as it made me think it was a melodrama, but loved the drama later on. I also considered not continuing watching “Poong, the Joseon Psychiatrist” after the first couple of minutes, because it made me think it was too heavy on the crime aspect, but then it proved me completely wrong and it’s my favorite drama now. But then again, I’ve also had instances where I absolutely knew from the get-go that I just wasn’t going to like a thing, even if that thing was super popular and liked by many others, and even after giving it a while, I still didn’t like it, so I guess there could have been something I wouldn’t have noticed personally in those first scenes and the filming angles they may have used that prompted that sort of reaction from that commenter.
Oh well, absolutely. I fully understand what you’re saying, it’s happened to me too.
But then one could say “How the heck did you form that opinion when we are not even a couple of minutes in?”
And not ask the viewer to display drama creation skills in order to be able to comment.
On the other hand, I have noticed a very curious thing that happens sometime. Comments that are clearly written at the end of the episode appearing at the very beginning. You know, comments like “Oh, this episode was intense” or “That ending was daebak” or “I can’t wait for the next episode, a week is too long!”, appearing in the first couple of seconds. I’ve always thought that there is a glitch like that, but we never fully talk about it because it’s not that important.
Have you noticed that, occasionally?
Now that you mention it, I have noticed misplaced comments too. Like comments will appear about a scene that happens a bit later. Or comments that refer to a scene that happened sometime before, but they’ve obviously been phrased as if it’s happening at the moment. I always thought that maybe there was something that might have been part of the episode, but then cut later on, like an intro or a deleted scene that ended up misplacing the comments. Or more comments being put in at a certain segment and then either pushing the existing ones forward or backward? It’s possible that if someone added more comments at the end of an episode, it could have somehow pushed those that were already at the end at the beginning, since there’s no more of the episode where they can go, causing a misunderstanding between the commenters. I’ve noticed that usually in dramas where you find one misplaced one, there’ll be a ton more, like all of them misaligned for some reason. I was very confused with one I was watching when I first noticed, confused what the comments were talking about and then when the scene actually happens thinking, “Now, why were people talking about this 5 minutes ago already?”
I was about to comment this too. Sometimes it’s not even in the right episode…
If comments appear at the same timestamp, the most recent comment pops up. That’s why you sometimes see people react to @lc(last commenter)/username, but you can’t find that comment anywhere. I’ve moderated timed comments before and sometimes you see a lot of comments that were made at the same time, but only one survives. Some commenters use this to cover up spoilers left by previous commenters (if they get the timing right).
Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for explaining. I have noticed people saying stuff like “covering up a spoiler” in the comments. Or tagging an “lc” when that one was never there in the first place. I wonder why they get that misaligned sometimes then. In one drama, I noticed that it definitely was a deleted scene, because everyone was talking about some sort of singing competition that never happened and it misaligned all the comments after that scene. But in others, there really was no obvious explanation why all these comments were just randomly out of place. There must be some sort of glitch at work that misaligns them sometimes.
Ah, then that explains why sometimes there are some scenes with different music than what the comments are referring to as well. I was confused why that happened and why they’d remove the song. I guess I kind of assumed that if the scene was in the drama and if the drama was on the platform, then automatically they had the copyright to the music as well. But I know copyright laws can get a little complicated and can be different all over the world, so it makes sense why scenes might get removed and/or have the music replaced if the copyright is no longer valid. Thanks for the explanation. I was wondering why some scenes were missing sometimes in certain dramas.
I also had that question “Didn’t they think of securing the copyright before filming or editing?” And then it dawned on me that they may have the copyright for Korea or other Asian countries but not worldwide. So the Korean audience who watched on TV saw it with that song, but we at Viki had to get another song.
Another instance. In “I’ll Come To You When The Weather Is Nice”, characters often quoted passages from a poet’s book. At some point, these voiceovers were completely removed and Viki requested us to also remove the subtitles with the translation. It was weird, because it was done mid-show. The pages of the book if shown on-screen were blurred. Also there were many scenes with voiceover from that book that were completely silent now, and they seemed boring, just showing landscapes etc. whereas the poetry matched what we were seeing and gave meaning to it - since the scenes were chosen to reflect the sentiment expressed, in relation with the plot of course.
Your theory makes a lot of sense. I always wondered how those copyright problems ended up happening and I think this definitely explains it. The poetry one must have been especially difficult, though. Because with the background music, it can just be replaced with something different from the OST. But when full sentences are removed, probably some of the conversations won’t even make sense. Especially if the poems they quoted are deeply embedded in the storyline. I know I would have loved it, since I really love when literature is referenced in cinema and it’s somehow intertwined with the story, especially poetry. Such a shame that they had to remove it.
The flying thing reminded me of “The Legend of Queen Lau” and the joke they made to poke fun at the “flying”. When one of the characters literally flew off got me laughing so hard I had to rewind it multiple times.
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