I finished watching When Life Gives You Tangerines just last night, and of course, sobbed like a helpless child many times. The same happened when I watched Our Blues back in 2022, and It’s Okay Not To Be Okay in 2021 (my first K-drama experience). I have watched some fun ones too, but these three have wrung my heart the most.
It’s Okay Not To Be Okay (2020)
A psychiatric hospital and an ill elder brother, and a ‘need help, but don’t want it’ girl, all in the lap of a boy, while he struggles with his own inner demons. It’s quite dramatic to my taste, but since it was the first K-drama I ever watched, I needed all the elements.
The most poetic thing in the show is how the female protagonist’s clothing goes from all black to white by the end to show how she is healing.
Our Blues (2022)
Life of people living on Jeju Island, the struggles of love, life, loss, regret, yet still making the most of life with its limitations.
It’s not a love story, but many stories wrapped into one that we may notice around us every day too.
When Life Gives You Tangerines (2025)
The life of a couple from the age of 9 till the end of their lifetime. The struggles of being poor, and still staying resilient to give their children the best lives they could have. Set in Jeju Island from the 50s to 2025.
The execution is like the most beautiful painting, which makes you notice the colours of the story one by one, set in past and the present. I also noticed how it showed the struggles of each generation trying to make the next one live better since the beginning.
A love story between parents and children, a love story between life and humans.
They make us feel everything we have been putting on hold, and bring out the empathy in its most innocent form.
I am guilty of loving the sad ones more than the funny or just romantic ones. Simply because they depict real life in its rawest form.
We are so busy in our lives, and with everything happening on social media, that we forget what life is really about. These kinds of shows remind us that. They make us feel everything we have been putting on hold, and bring out the empathy in its most innocent form.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Soop kim on Unsplash
