Recent Gender Findings

So, after I finished writing the previous post, I realized that I left some things out, in terms of the other things I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about "Ma Boy," the gender bender with a twist. The guy dresses up as a girl, making for a slightly different tale and series of gender hijinks. For once, the female protagonist gets to be our Irene's (Hyun Woo's) protector. Aww! I was kind of disappointed that this was only a mini drama made for the much younger audience. But it gives me hope that there will be more dramas like this...

I just finished "To The Beautiful You" yesterday. Although it was your typical high school gender bender, something about it attracted me, maybe because of all the pretty, the addicting OST (have you listened to J-Min's "Stand Up"?), or the fact that Lee Hyun Woo is in it, and they finally changed his hairstyle eleven episodes into the drama, thank goodness. I wanted to write about this before, but I never thought of writing a post about it.  "To The Beautiful You" was basically my ice cream treat to rely on throughout the week, just for fun and some laughs. However, there's one thing about it that will remain in my memory. For some reason, the part of the drama where Eun Gyul (my beautiful Hyun Woo) contemplates on his sexuality, about his being potentially gay, since he likes Jae Hee, who's a guy (or so he thinks).

There was a scene where he finally got to looking up "gay" on the web. The funny thing is, he finds that "gay" actually means a state of joy, "명랑한 즐거움," instead of its homosexual definition. He then has a daydream about what it would be like if he married Jae Hee, and there's this scene where their kid (Jae Gyul-ie, aw) comes crying to him about getting bullied for having two dads. Eun Gyul says it's a good thing to have two dads. Jae Hee comes in with a six o'clock mustache, talking about how they can wear couple shirts to their army enlistment, which is  coming soon. Ha. Then, Jae Gyul-ie asks them the big question: "Which dad gave birth to me?" That really made me LOL. And for some reason, that scene really stuck in my mind. Episode 4, almost halfway into the episode (here, around 13:30).

I thought that this scene was very unique in that, the drama approached the question about Eun Gyul's sexuality in a slightly humorous way, maybe even being gay as a positive thing, at least something not to be rejected by society. It kind of reminded me of "Personal Taste" in that way. I was kind of surprised that the drama actually bothered to include a daydreaming scene where Jae Hee and Eun Gyul get married. As you can probably tell, I totally soaked up all the parts with Eun Gyul trying to deal with his sexuality, all those innocent and funny bits melted in my heart. It was the younger, innocent version of Han Gyul's more adult angst in "Coffee Prince." It's really different from what you'd expect from a drama like this, with all of its little parts (most of them Eun Gyul's) that make up for what it's lacking story-wise.