Robin's Random Rambles

 As Winter gave way to Spring, I followed the Sun, with Korea left behind for places further East.  AUGUST Destiny (2025) 9.5/10 I'm a real romcom junkie, so most of my C-Drama viewing feels like prospecting for gold: Sifting through enough stony rubbish to rebuild the Great Wall, hoping to find the occasional nugget. That bitter experience meant I started this one with low expectations, and was thus delighted when it surprised me. It had a lot going against it: VERY formulaic story, voice dubbing that was not a great match for the cast (a real bête noir for me!), but it overcame those by being funny, very sweet, and surprisingly intelligent. The dialogue really surprised me at times, much better than most of the 20 million High School/University C-Drama romances I've tried. The leads worked well together, and, possibly because it was a short Drama, there was good skinship. That last is not a given in full length contemporary C-Drama romances which are ...

2025 has been a very good year for me in East Asian drama viewing. I've completed at least 93, and the average score has ended up just over 8.1/10. So I'm taking a journey through the year's viewing, highlighting twenty-five dramas that were highlights of my 2025 viewing year. Around 40% of the Dramas I watched in 2025 were released in 2025, and that ratio is reflected here, with eleven of the twenty-five being from 2025. The year of release is in brackets after the title, along with the score I gave the Drama in my personal database.. JANUARY Good Partner (2024) 9.5/10 This was the second drama I watched in 2025 and it got the year off to a promising start. I scored it 9.5/10 because the story of female friendship and personal growth was a joy to watch. The two lead actors had real chemistry together - first as mentor and pupil, as colleagues, and finally, in a move that really impressed me, as strictly professional adversaries. I couldn't give ...

My Drama viewing got underway in real earnest in mid-winter , starting with   JULY    After School Doctor (2024) 10/10 This drama was a reminder of why I love J-Dramas. The premise was straightforward: A grumpy, blunt, tactless pediatrician gets reassigned from the hospital to fill in at an elementary school infirmary after a patient's parent complains about his handling of a case. The basic arc was predictable, but the nature of the journey was still remarkable. Especially in the first six episodes of the drama, the uncompromising, unsentimental and clear-eyed approach to serious health issues faced by the children was outstanding. From a first grader dealing with a congenital heart defect to a sixth grader having self-harm issues, this drama did not flinch. It did not talk down to the children, or about them, and the doctor's blunt honesty didn't change, even as he learned to broaden his perspective on what it took to look after children. The ...

A Second Chances Drama in 10 60-minute episodes    Writers: Chien Chi Feng, Sakamoto Yuji  Director: Lee Jae Hoon  Music editors: Cho Seung Woo, Mitsushima Hikari Secondary tropes include sisterhood, music, found family, and personal growth. EPISODES 1-2 The four leads were all in a band together in university. Dae Ji Won (Cho Seung Woo) was the pianist, Kiyohara Yui (Mitsushima Hikari) lead vocalist and writer, Lin Yi Tong (Ko Chia Yen) writer and backup vocalist, and Odagiri Shun (Sakaguchi Kentaro) vocalist and guitarist. In the best tradition of 70s groups like Fleetwood Mac and ABBA, a complicated roundabout of personal relationships saw the band disintegrate and personal ties dissolve for years. None of them kept in contact, going out of their way to put their past behind them. After the back story retrospectives, the drama picks up 15 years after university. Yui now works for a recording agency in the PR department's legal team and Yi Tong, a major SHI...

I never had any interest in watching the K-Drama version of Marry My Husband . I'm not the biggest fan of the lead actor Park Min Young, and through the course of the drama I read significantly mixed reviews about its progress. Most of them echoed a very common complaint about K-Dramas, that it lost its way in terms of plot toward the end. However when I heard that there was going to be a Japanese remake and that the remake would be a Japan/Korea co-production, I was fascinated. I was thrilled that the female lead role was to be played by an actor who had already impressed me in a couple of roles, and I was fascinated to see how the story would transfer to the shorter, tighter J-Drama format. It exceeded my expectations. At 10 episodes, with a runtime just a fraction under 10 hours, this series highlighted everything that I love about J-Dramas. Tight, taut storytelling with an absolute minimum of padding or fluff. However, it also benefited very much from the strengths of Kore...

  Continuing a nostalgic look back at OLD OST tracks from various KDramas, CDramas, JDramas and TWDramas I've watched - all released prior to 2010. This episode covers 2007-2008. Again, the Dramas are listed below grouped by year of release and sorted by the order in which I viewed them. 2007 Coffee Prince For me, 2007 was a VERY good year for Dramas. The first of several from then is a true CLASSIC  KDrama Coffee Prince . A very progressive romcom in many ways for its era it remains a VERY rare example of a KDrama romcom that was just that - no serial killers, no noble idiocy separations, no messy love triangles, just plenty of rom & com, with stellar performances across the board. Both the dialogue and the OST have since been referenced OFTEN in countless KDramas since and the actual coffee shop was long a tourist magnet. I don't care if you're an alien - just watch this!   ————   Capital Scandal My favourite Han Ji Min KDrama before Love Sco...

    Concluding  my nostalgic look back at old OST tracks from various KDramas, CDramas, JDramas and TWDramas I've watched - all released prior to 2010. This episode covers the final year of that period, 2009. The Dramas are listed in the order in which I viewed them. 2009 Take Care of the Young Lady   This Yoon Eun Hye starrer Korean Drama goes by several English names, the one I've used is how I watched it and is descriptive of the plot. The Drama was my  first introduction to Kwon Yul, and triggered a remarkably long-lasting antipathy toward him - he always seems to play characters that make my skin crawl. Even though I watched this twice almost back-to-back in my "brand new to KDramas, watch YEH" phase, I was pleased to see when preparing this post that even back then I scored it only 6/10. I doubt it would score that highly today! The MV attached is a favourite of mine for the truly bizarre rarity of an upbeat fun song from the Queens of teary melo, Da...