NeaRetrogamer

Stuff about me

How I got into Asian dramas

I only recently got more into Asian live action stuff. I had encountered some in the past, but mostly just some japanese and korean films and some chinese and korean tv series. The ones I enjoyed the most out of these were My Fair Princess (I really liked the character of Xiaoyanzi - I even named a kid in Tomodachi Life after her!) and Pinocchio, but I ended up dropping both as their episode length was quite tiring. From these I had generalised and gotten the impression that every such series was 50 mins. - 1 hour/episode, which seemed quite daunting to me, and thus didn't think I'd be able to get into them.

I thus got more into this type of thing after 2 things happened: First, I randomly found Densetsu no Okasan which was 29 minutes/episode, and thus the shorter length made me more willing to try it out, and I found it surprisingly enjoyable. Second, at around the same time I saw the announcement for the upcoming anime Fuuto Tantei and read it was actually the sequel to this live-action show called Kamen Rider W; I thought I'd check that out as well, especially as I like stuff with detectives, and also found it quite enjoyable.
So I thought I'd want to watch more shorter length series (10-30 minutes/episode) such as these, and decided to create this account to keep track of everything before I start losing count (which was the case with anime, that I'm a more experienced watcher of, before I joined anime sites), and to be able to discover new stuff to watch more easily.

Length and genre preferences

At least for the time being, it's clear that I prefer series with shorter episodes as opposed to longer ones, and I also don't really watch series with more than 50 episodes (specifically, ~50 eps. is the maximum I can tolerate, but I do tend to prefer series with 12-26 episodes max. when it comes to episode count).
As for genre preferences, what's certain so far is that I like action - I like action flicks a lot (e.g. I liked Gongjo very much), and tokusatsu also hits the spot for me action-wise; in general this stuff really mesmerizes me and hypes me up. :-) And it seems I like slice-of-life as well, a preference that apparently carried over from my anime watching, as I've enjoyed series of this genre in both anime and live-action.
In other media (western series and films for example) I also like seeing mystery and crime-solving stuff (I especially like Agatha Christie stuff, but in general I consider anything including solving crime cases, detectives/police and forensics pretty cool) - I haven't watched that much Asian stuff of this genre yet however.

Things that impact my enjoyment

One other thing I should note here is that my enjoyment of this live-action asian stuff is at times reduced by what I call "Asian-blindness". It's similar to colorblindness, in that like how colorblind people can't see certain colors, I often have a hard time distinguishing asian people amongst themselves, that is to my eyes often (especially when they're wearing school/work uniforms) they might as well be identical twins, since they look that similar. Indeed, more than a few times I confused one individual for another, and only later in the episode I realised I had wrongly identified the individual, which thus meant I also understood the affected scene(s) wrongly. I suffer from this less when they're all wearing different enough clothing and/or have different hair colors and hair styles (which also means however that I can get confused when a character has a haircut or changes their hairstyle, at times to the point where I don't recognize the character and think it's some other person instead). Hopefully, this will happen less as I start watching more such stuff.

(small addendum to this: turns out this affects quite a few people, and as a result has its own term: cross-race effect. This also means that I might indeed get better at telling asian people apart by more exposure to asian dramas)

Some notes about my ratings

It seems like the scores I give to stuff and what they mean to me diverge from what they mean to a lot of other people on this site - for example, I've seen people in reviews think that 7 is "average/bad", while for me it's "good, just not great" instead. So here's an explanation of what the scores I give mean:

• 10: A masterpiece.

• 9: Really, really, good/great. I rate thus shows that had either a really good plot/atmosphere/humor (depending on the genre), really emotionally impactful scenes that stayed in my memory or really good action that mesmerized me.

• 8: Very good. Usually less impactful than the ones rated 9, but I still enjoyed my time with them a lot. When they're as impactful (or even more impactful at times) as the ones rated 9, they had some other flaws that prevent me from giving a 9 instead.

• 7: Good, but less so than the ones rated 8.

• 6: Average. Was enjoyable while it lasted, but ultimately was nothing special. Some of these might have some flaws that made me enjoy them less that the above e.g. plotwise. Also a lot of shows might end up with this score if it's been a while since I watched them and they didn't leave me a lasting impression.

• 5: Like 6, but with more flaws that made me enjoy it less. At times, I might also give this score to stuff that was simply so average as to be downright forgettable.

• 4: Stuff with very few redeeming points - I'm not quite sure why I watched these.

• 3 and below: Maybe I shouldn't have watched these. I want my time back... (Thankfully haven't needed to use this so far..) 

I use the .5 increments to show when I enjoyed something slightly more or less than what the above denote (e.g. 6.5 is something that didn't feel to me as good as something I'd give a 7, but that also felt better than something I'd give a 6).
And there's also a lot of stuff I haven't rated, because I'm not quite sure how I feel about them e.g if they're average, I might not be sure just how average.

Other things about me

Other things I do in my free time, outside of watching dramas and tokusatsu, are listening to music, watching anime, reading webtoons and manga, and playing videogames. I also like history a whole lot, and have a preference towards Medieval history.
Some other stuff about me: My native language is Greek. I also have a near-native level fluency of English and French. My result on the Myers-Briggs personality test is INFP-T (thought I'd mention it, since other people do too).