We Watch Challenge 2024

1st challenge:

Hello Jojo77. I've looked through your drama list and while you've watched most of my list that applies to your preferance I hope some of these recommendations fit. Otherwise send a dm and I'll dive deeper for knowledge ヾ(≧ ▽ ≦)ゝ

1. Twinkling Watermelon 16 ep 1h 10min - a youth serie with music, family and love at it's core. Takes place in the present and the past with some flash-backs to connect the stories. It's refreshing with some tears and heartstrings attached but a perfect spring/early summer watch.
2. Summer guys 10 ep 30min - a web series with summer vibes with relationships at it's core. Softer romance and a fun watch without too much investment mentally. Love goes around a bit so if rooting for the wrong ship is too heartaching maybe pass, but pretty clear which they want you to pair.
3. Innocent (bl) 4 ep 23min - a very different story that puts light on childhood trauma, split persona (mdl says DID) and unusual relationship dynamic at the beginning. Really short and budget tight but a good short watch for something different. TW: SA

Bonus from your PTW that doesn't fit the previous profile but may work as stand in if intresting enough:
4. Mr. Heart (bl) 8 ep 11min - two cute characters that really likes to run. A bit like A breeze of Love but less aggression with more understanding and a lot cuter (imo).
5. My School President (bl) 12 ep 55min - you haven't seen cute until you've watched this. Youth in school with a crush and pining at it's most adorable stage. Funny, cute (and even sometimes childish) to the point of a tooth ache. But it is young love and really embraces the thai concept and clichés. You really have to have the right mood for it and generally appreciate the acting to really like it. Don't go looking for a serious and profound plot here. It's for vibes only.

image link for bigger picture

Open for almost anything. No horror with dolls, ghosts or true story based  And no love triangle. But any origin and number of episodes. Bl, gl or straight is up to you. Give me a selection of your best watches. Thanks ^.^
Thank you for all the different recs Sweetsis. Most of them sounded really good, but I don't trust myself of not binge-watching a full length drama before exams. Therefore I accept Sweetsis recommendation of Gameboys. But some others will denfinietly go on PTW.

Status: Completed (2024-05-22)
Rating: 5.5

Thoughts: I feel kind of bad not liking this. It had all the components for me to like it, at least what I thought: Cute love story, good characters, realistic problems, cute interactions, relatable (due to corona), different concept (also due to corona). But I couldn't like it. Based on the circumstances it was a really good production and well made for all the limits it had. But I couldn't enjoy it. Maybe it was because I watched it with too much time between the pandemic and all that came with it, or that all I could think was that it all felt like a reenactment of just my conversations with a friend who lives far away. And I totally get people who do really enjoy it and find it relatable or comforted of the portaying of the struggles during that time, but it fell flat for me, and for that I apologize. But Cairos apology song and dance bumped it up at least to 5.5.

7th challenge complete and picture updated for the badge (sorry for taking so long) 

@Sweetsis I have a couple recommendations for you, I think you might enjoy. My go to rec would have been 3 Nen a Gumi which you already watched, but those are similar: 

• The Gifted (includes corruption, inequality and social differences and a student who fights the system) 
• Not Me (tackling social inequality and the fight for justice/revenge) 
• Girl From Nowhere (includes different misdeeds from students like rape, bullying and a girl that exposes them) 
• Hope (Movie that is based on the true story of a girl who was raped and the trauma it caused her and her family)

Open for recommendations. Preferably from my MDL Watch Challenge Custom List and something short but also open to other recs. Movie recs are welcome too, because I haven't watched many movies lately. Thank you! :) 

I accept the recommendation for Moonlight Chicken. I was saving it for a while but it's time to watch it. Thank you, Jojo! Your recommendations are always welcome, dear! :) 

Status: Completed

Rating: 8.5 

I think I'm still comparing every EarthMix drama with 1000 Stars and that is not benefiting the drama, which makes me sorry. I loved the drama for tackling serious topics and relationship problems but maybe I just wasn't watching this at the right time and in the right mood. The dialogues often felt too draggy for me and I struggled with some of the character's decisions. Nonetheless, it was a good watch and seeing Mix on screen makes me so happy, I can't help but smile. He once delivered such a great character and Earth too even though it was a stretch to make him play a 40-year old guy. Maybe 35 would've been a better aim. It can't quite reach the 9 rating for me, but I certainly don't regret it. And now I crave chicken... 

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!

Rating/feedback: This was hard to settle on a rating of, but I had to give it a 7 at the end of the day, well, week or more after finishing… the rest will be family (I am about to crash so it is long winded and messy-you can by all means ignore it)!

I really liked the original actress whose face had the scar, and I found the male lead entirely watchable and mostly enjoyable though some of it felt rushed/underdeveloped (the whole forest of booby traps/haunted stories fell flat for me, too much history omitted from the various power grubbing villains).… it was the main female lead who killed it for me. The dubbing is the other thing that I couldn’t, for her especially though it was also too evident for the second lead, really get past-she was too obviously not saying things the same way or with the same timing or pronunciation, and my brain locks in on that… I had to watch it on my phone’s small screen to get through it and have my eyes get less obvious mismatched words feeding into my brain, and that isn’t ideal with subtitles but is more bearable than nonstop hating of the editing and the mismatched speech (the male lead’s mostly lined up really well somehow-sure, I could tell bits of it were not timed right, but his mouth moved the way the words were uttered... just too many years working with people I have needed to read the lips of to be able to tune it out, but his I could forgive as some glitchy edits vs the whole thing feeling like a silent film with a third party talking over it reading the on-screen text. I don’t like people trying to make Charlie Chaplin talk, and dubbing feels like that… or like humans pretending to be muppets, their mouths moving too out of sync (the SML seemed to be mumbling the whole time when his mouth was moving, quite different from the sounds heard)… 

The other thing with the FL is that the acting was just hard to buy into. Regardless of how pretty she is, I never really felt moved watching her despite the scenes being written in a way that should be powerful-story wise, this is up my alley, but she didn’t feel like the same person as the first actress I was very sold on and loved the character of. Even the whole acting like the one she was in the body of thing felt totally weird-she just abandoned both personalities and got, well, dull (the first version, the one who did the whole body swap mess and barely ever ate so she could be that whole ‘anorexia and other painful sacrifices are the path to beauty’ thing that is so disturbing, was deplorable, so I couldn’t miss her, but she should have at least had a moment or few with her brother early on that would maybe make me feel sad for him, but nope, nothing). I wanted the personality that the first actress depicted to actually come through as the lead settled in and was in her element, but even during investigations, I felt like she was cosplaying-she just lacked the charisma and everything I loved about the actress whose body was killed bearing the wrong soul…

I don’t know if it would’ve been a far higher score without dubbing-certainly couldn’t be worsesince it is a peeve of mine that made this take over 3weeks to finish and had me in “almost drop” mode many times over… the female lead just didn’t seem very real/human so much of the show (it all felt like a middle school play when she was at the center of scenes), and I also found The action scenes of the second male lead quite unnatural... those two felt like idols or rookies who haven’t properly studied theatre and film and who were just hired to look pretty without enough regard to skill. The distance between the acting skill and believability (even though I don’t exactly love the ML‘s acting all the time and find political roles stuffy, he at least made sense even if some of his scenes had me cringing, mostly bc his facial expressions would give me pause and make me wonder if he knew the context of the lines he said or make me feel like he was told to be “extra” and very much was, even when he should be the more subdued guy seen more often-seemed like they didn’t get amazing direction though overall he seems like a pretty good actor, just one with a script or director or both that had his character inconsistent in ways that did not make sense several times-at leas his nitpicky moments were not so important, just misguided feeling here and there.

Oops, sorry that got way too long!  It wasn’t all bad, but I definitely won’t seek out anything with the FL or be able to join the costume drama fans so long as China’s supreme cultural gatekeepers demand textbook perfect formal speech with perfect neutral accents while also throwing people unable to deliver that into these roles. I just can’t enjoy dubbing much, and when they don’t even do their own, it feels lazy and makes me feel a bit offended-other actors in other nations have to work tirelessly to get all sorts of accents right, so China opting to throw pretty faces up that can’t carry the lines convincingly enough for their standards makes me generally feel they disregard audiences. Since I dislike watching on tiny screens, no more historical cdramas for me, I am afraid, at least not any with high production value.

Hey, Forgotten_Words!! I didn't watch a lot of C-Dramas so my choices are going to be really basic. I picked those that I watched, but didn't see in your completed list. 

1. Lighter & Princess 

2.  When I Fly Towards You 

3. When We Were Young 

All of them are romance because I only have seen romance C-Dramas :c

I watch ANYTHING, but J-Dramas. They just never got me hooked so maybe the person after me could recommend me some. 

Or some K-Dramas that are hidden gems. 

What I decided to watch: Light on me 

Progress: Completed

Rating: 9/10

Note: I didnt know the actor from Black Knight had a BL. This random fact made it so much better. 

2nd Challenge

Hi Mart!

I've looked through your list and there were a few that I would recommend but decided on...

Clean with Passion for Now

You put on your list that this was a high priority. I really enjoyed the drama myself. It's a cute rom-com and not much angst.

The other dramas I've seen that I recommend are Marry My Husband, My Demon, and Tempted. However, there is angst and love triangles. You should definitely give them a try some time though.

As for a recommendation for myself, I enjoy romance the most (mostly what is on my list). I mainly watch Korean and Chinese but don't let that stop you from recommending from another country.

Thank you!

Thank you Leafless7 for your recommendations. They all look good. I am going to go with...

Healer

Park Min Young is my favorite actress, so I was excited to see her in it. I have heard good things about this drama so am looking forward to watching it.

Status: PTW CW Completed 6/30/24

I really liked this drama. I don't usually watch action dramas so it was a nice change. I now love the ML.

Rating 9/10

Thank you Leafless 7 for your recommendation!

Hello, leafless7! Since you said you wanted to watch tearjeaker but most of them which I watched you too watched it. I am giving you the kind of what you watched previously

I would love to recommend you:

• Breakup Probation, A Week: Since you watched Lovely Runner
• Unforgettable: Since you watched 20th Century Girl. ✓
  
• Watching: Since you watched Midnight 
• Target:  Since you watched Midnight
• Pyramid Game: Personal Favorite I think you would like.
• Extreme Job: Personal Favorite I think you would like.

I am open to any recommends :)

I accept neriya's recommendation of Tomorrow  

Status: Completed

Rating: 10/10

Thoughts: To be honest this was already in my On-Hold like I always start a new and then rest are in my On-Hold(Justice for my On-Hold dramas). I loved this drama way to much, it was a perfect cup for me, from Rowoon to back story to plot to like everything and hopefully this perfect drama didn't had a rush ending which I was thinking it would have in the half of last episode.

Challange 1

Hiiii neriya,

I completely understand how bad it is not to be able to find anything to watch, I recommend three titles that helped me get out of similar moments:

Last Twilight A small masterpiece. of an absurd power and delicacy. The actors outdid themselves. The ost has been on replay on my phone since the first listen, the story steals your soul.

Recommendation bonus:

2. Reply 1997 - The best installment in the reply series and one of my all time favorite. This drama has it all.

3. Weak Hero Class 1 - This drama has to be seen, there isn't much that can be put into words. I'm still crying.

As always open to everything as long as it has a happy ending and the absence of hateful characters that only make me nervous (I'm already stressed enough from work xD).
Even a good crime is fine if well done.

Challange #2

Accepted Recommendation From Jojo77 - Twinkling Watermelon

Status: Completed [ Started: 08/06/2024 ~ Completed : 19/06/2024]

Rating: 10/10 ⭐️

Well what can I say, beautiful. I loved everything. The characters, the settings, the themes, the ending. All! 

A solid 10 from me and I'm so happy that this was (according to mydramalist) my 1000th drama! It's been a very long time since I found a kdrama that reminded me of the sensations that we used to feel much more often when watching them and which, at least in my opinion, are being lost a little.