17th challenge completed! Thank you for such a great rec, Tanii!
Hi, Jojo! Quite a few I thought to recommend you have already seen, so here is my very long rambling set of recommendations this round (just woke up from a nap that was much needed after wiping myself out earlier, sorry for the word vomit, dear!). Don’t be too surprised if I get you again and recommend the others after so much researching this round! Of course, if you mention that you are completely not gonna watch one of these, I will X it out. :)
If you don‘t need the drama to have super slick cinematography, I really recommend 2004 jdrama Home Drama that starts with a group of people, all of whom lost their closest loved ones to an accident when a tour bus flipped (some right beside them in the bus, some not there because they were busy working, etc) who have survivor’s guilt and are mourning but have no one to just exist and breathe around… they come together in the new home, still in progress, of an architect who was one of the survivors and sent them an invitation to stay there… It is deeply healing for them and my heart both ached and felt relief, fell in love with all their stories, and just loved how it all fell together. My eyes had to do some two-decades-ago adjusting (especially since naturally it was put online when the resolution was not so amazing), but once I was there with the characters, I was charmed and couldn’t dock points for compression in the “early days of YouTube” era of the web or it being made then because it had my heart.
More modern options:
Dr. Romantic -I saw S2 in your watchlist, and this (along with the extra episode called the “appendix” cleverly that goes into a bit of backstory of the main “Kim Sabu”) really does need to be watched first if you want to get the real heart of all the characters because so much is established in the first season that you would be missing some seriously lovely buildup to scenes in S2 if you don’t watch its first. I wasn’t in love with the younger of the two MLs having known, back in med school, guys just like him lol, but he grows quite a lot (I also have a Yang Se Jong bias and have since that trio of back to back feeling releases he did, Duel especially, so of course I wanted more of him)… the hospital staff is an eclectic mix that I love to bits, and Han Seok Kyu admittedly makes my heart flutter as an older person who wants a bedtime story series of his voice to go to sleep to lol. It is 20 eps, 20 hours, plus the 21st episode (linked here) with lots of stories told in that time. (FWIW I like S2 even better bc of the young residents and romance in that season, but it would truly not do justice to the immense stories of everyone else to not know what transpired in S1-a whole lot of it would be just thrown at you without you having the benefit of understanding the plights that lead to those points/developments… not impossible, but you won’t have context for many parts even if you could probably just nod and say “well, this is what is happening now” without looking into the history of this place full of it. Definitely better with S1 references understood, hard belief on my part lol.
My Dearest is a historical kdrama that was, yes, hyped like mad (I was guilty of picture posts to occasional extremes, commentary on cinematography and how the writer and director were constantly using tiny color cues to reference things we’d already watched, things that showed the mindset of the character we were looking at as they often were thinking of the other lead)… but if you want impeccable cinematography, even managing action shots at night with a crazy hard level of detail to achieve without washing out the colors with artificial looking lighting, it has that and a seriously intense love story… also some truly hellish but realistic scenes of invasions and how women were treated so badly as they fought to live or died for some reasons that are completely maddening. It is not light fluff despite starting with a couple of gorgeous idyllic episodes in a village full of people sheltered from the hardships outside their precious little home space. It does have 2 parts (they didn’t wish to have weeks of episodes being skipped while the Asian Games were scheduled w/SK playing on their days, so they found a suitable cutoff point and took a break in airing; part 1 here is 13 hours or so total, 10 eps that are about 80mins a piece acc to the page)… you can, naturally, stop at part 1 if that is the ending you want lol. :)
3 Nen A Gumi: Ima kara Mina-san wa, Hitojichi Desu (9 hours total viewing time) is a bit of a thriller that has a teacher hold, 10 days before graduation, his homeroom hostage, bombing the school to keep them stuck with him, to find out what happened to a student who died the month before. Self explanatory, I think, and the ML Suda Masaki is a favorite chameleon of a jdrama actor for me. (He also starred in Mystery to Lunakare and dele which I highly recommend!) Very fast-paced with a lot of heart and a little mystery.
A light option (though the high school set jdrama isn’t hard viewing, it isn't fluff) in case you want fluff that I just didn’t gravitate toward today: Taiwanese BL drama About Youth is a short, sweet slice of life (short as in 3.5 hours).
I hope you enjoy whatever you choose!
Open for recs! Can be from anywhere though I am craving Jdramas at the moment for whatever reason, probably storytelling style. No big deal if you don’t have any from there that would suit my taste or that you need someone else to see desperately! :) Same as always, no dubbing or romanticized violence from the writer’s POV (“bc he loves you so much and is a wounded man” justifications of domestic violence will make me hate a writer to a point of no redemption), and ignore my PTW (I prefer recs for titles I don’t even know about-those are my best surprises!)-most of my PTW titles that aren’t second seasons of something were added whenever someone I liked was “in talks” for something with little or no description, so I need to clean it out since many just proved not my kind of story and didn’t even have the cast member I wanted to see lol. My completed list, sorted by rating, is your easiest way to know what I like or really don’t. (Of course, if I’m already watching it or have it on hold, skip those-they are already on my radar, some on hold bc they are not completely out yet in that one season didn’t finish the story-I have Vagabond trauma, y’all ;_; .)
Well, this is easy-I’ve already seen Oh No! Here Comes Trouble, so I accept Forgotten_Words’s for In Blossom. I just finished a modern era investigation CDrama (Under the Skin-which is fantastic!) and now I will tumble into a historical one! Should be interesting to see them back to back, especially since I rarely watch Cdramas at all!
