“The Writer Has No Creativity At All”, Part 1
A tale of defying and complying to romance tropes in KDramas: The Main ‘Extras’ Edition
Tags: #ExtraordinaryYou #kdrama #RomanceTropes #LoveTriangle #Manhwa #Webtoon #Series
Imagine you’re watching a romance drama: the Poor Girl can only attend the elite high school thanks to the scholarship from the family of the Rich Boy. Poor Girl is naïve, clumsy, and constantly gets bullied yet she is also effortlessly beautiful and a little shy. Rich Boy is cold and mean to everyone and yet still somehow has the entire school wrapped around his finger. Rich Boy, of course, has a best friend who, as the Second Lead, is probably equally rich but neither mean nor full of himself.
Inevitably, our three characters fall into a love triangle. However, Rich Boy would never think he was in love with Poor Girl if it wasn’t for the Second Lead trying to get closer to her. The story must also allow for conflicts including the over-protective parent of Rich Boy, who wants the son to marry someone of equal status and not some low life ‘Cinderella’ (a huge trope throughout the series), rescuing Poor Girl on more than one occasion to get that victory hug (come on, if it’s a KDrama, they don’t kiss until episode 12), tainted friendships because of the mutual crush on Poor Girl, and Rich Boy somehow messing it up or doing something that leads to a break-up only to come up with a grand gesture in front of all their acquaintances.
Obviously, don’t forget to sprinkle in some ‘romance’ including the ‘accidentally falling on you with my lips’, the ‘forceful wrist grab’, the ‘putting the shoe on her’, and ‘confessing undying love in front of a large audience’ while essentially making Poor Girl a prize to be won. In the end, despite Rich Boy being a walking red flag, and despite Second Lead usually being much more caring and nicer to Poor Girl, she will end up with Rich Boy. He is the lead protagonist, after all, while the Second Lead is forced to watch from afar pretending he is so cool with them together and just wants them both to be happy. We’ve seen it before, and we will probably see it again and again and again; just think about: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Boys Over Flowers (1995), Good Morning Call (1997-2002), Gilmore Girls (2000-2007), Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), Fruits Basket (2001), The Twilight Saga (2005-2008), City of Bones (2007), Hunger Games (2008-2010), Vampire Diaries (2009-2017), Cheese in the Trap (2016), To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before (2018), Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018-2020), Love Alarm (2019-2021), the list really goes on.
Now imagine the very same drama but with a plot twist: characters have become aware that they are, in fact, mere puppets of a comic book writer. Not only that, they soon find out that, contrary to their belief, they are not the protagonists of the story at all, but mere extras written to act as the bridge between the main leading cast. This is, in essence, what happens in the webtoon turned KDrama Extraordinary You (2019). As you are probably imagining, this leads to a whole host of meta plays on popular and overused drama tropes while simultaneously leading the audience to question characters’ sense of self and agency.
Extraordinary You separates the characters and their actions into two sets: the Stage and the Shadow. While on the Stage, the characters are subject to the whims of the unnamed author of the romance comic Secret. They cannot move freely, must say lines that can directly counter what they think, and occasionally experience foreign emotions. In the Shadow, all the characters live and breathe, but only once they gain the elusive Ego, do they remember anything between Stages. The show gets very meta, very quickly.
“My character really sucks” (Dan Oh, Ep 1)
This is what we know: Eun Dan Oh comes from a wealthy family, lost her mother when she was a child, suffers from a heart disease, and is currently engaged to her childhood friend Kyung. This sounds like a set-up for a main character in a webtoon. However, Dan Oh, the protagonist of Extraordinary You, is merely a sidekick in Secret. So, when we look at her personality, it gets a little more complicated, as her Ego sits in stark contrast to her Stage-self.
On stage, Dan Oh is obedient, frail, cries a lot, is blindly in love with her fiancé who treats her like crap, but she is also kind and caring and seems to be the only girl in school to be friends with the actual protagonist of Secret, Joo Da. She is often hospitalized, reduced to lying in bed, watched over by her father, her doctor, and reluctantly, her fiancé. Off stage, Dan Oh frequently calls out the writer for their poor character choices and lack of creativity when it comes to Dan Oh and her story, calling her Stage character a ‘pushover’, sounding ‘lame’, and ‘tacky’: “I’m always sick, get dumped and ignored by a guy … my character really sucks. The daughter of a wealthy family who has a fiancé. Are we in the 80s or what? A weak female protagonist who goes through hardship is so outdated. It’s so tacky” (Ep 1).
In the Shadow, Dan Oh is her ‘true’ self, the fierce leading lady of Extraordinary You, who is determined to change her fate with the help of Haru. On Stage, Dan Oh’s last wish is to just attend school normally with her classmates. She has accepted her death and wants to live out her last days in peace. Yet unlike the story in Secret, she spends the second-half of the series trying to fix or escape her heart disease, and the authors’ implied plans for her death.
On Stage, and in her description in the character list, Dan Oh is defined as ‘Kyung’s sick fiancé’ – existing mainly as a plot point for Kyung’s terrible homelife and all the drama surrounding it. She is aware of how ludicrous it is to have a crush on Kyung, a guy who verbally abuses and ignores her. As such, Dan Oh consistently challenges their relationship as soon as a scene ends. She rather seeks the company of her fellow self-aware friends, Haru and Do Hwa, once we enter the Shadow. Dan Oh escapes with a sassy comment in direct opposition to her Stage-self and abandons Kyung, often leaving him confused. Consequently, “instead of the Dan Oh who says and does what she has to, [she] want[s] to live as the Dan Oh who says and does what she wants” (Ep 5).
At the same time, as one would expect from the leading lady of a romance KDrama, Dan Oh echoes stereotypical tropes we find in the main story of Secret. In particular, she needs to be rescued, a lot: when she’s lost in the forest, when she slips in the forest, when she falls from the stairs in the main hall, when she falls from the ladder in the library, when she’s thrown in the pool, when Kyung threatens her, everytime her heart freaks out and she needs to sleep off a fainting spell in the nurse’s office; it’s a long list. But don’t you fret because Haru, as the actual male lead, is always there to save her. The two even get their own Cinderella moment after Dan Oh loses her shoe in a three-legged-race and Haru brings it to her.
Dan Oh, as the main character of Extraordinary You, has the most control over her Ego, while also able to influence her Stage-self thanks to Haru. Unlike their version of a wise wizard, Squid Fairy (allegedly an important enough extra character to receive a name in Secret), after gaining her Ego, she does not accept that the author’s poor writing is set in stone. Interestingly, her conversations with Kyung and Haru (on Stage and in Shadow) often mimic or are exact replicas of lines from the author’s previous work, Trumpet Creeper. This, inevitably, calls into question how far the characters in Extraordinary You are bound by previous incarnations, and are just puppets of the author(s), regardless of Ego, or whether they can genuinely influence their choices in the Shadow. Let’s not even get into the fact that the characters in a KDrama about comic book characters that are aware of the comic book, are not aware of the KDrama; (we told you it gets meta). It seems that while Dan Oh defies a lot of stereotypes, both on Stage and in Shadow, her character is frequently in need of rescue, and she is still bound by tropes that she cannot escape from.
“I don’t care what my set up is when it comes to protecting you” (Haru, Ep 10)
Haru’s story begins as a nameless extra in Secret, lacking a detailed face in the comic book. He doesn’t properly enter the Shadow until the end of episode two and doesn’t receive a name until episode four; before that he is simply ‘Number 13’. He doesn’t have a backstory, at first (or a house – he lives in the school library). It isn’t until Dan Oh gives him a name that he really has full self awareness.
Haru, as the most background of background characters (in Secret), can affect the Stage. Once Dan Oh realizes this, she enlists him to her cause – #TeamSaveDanOh. His importance depends on the level of story you are looking at; he might start as an extra and graduate to the supporting cast in Secret but Haru is a protagonist of Extraordinary You and Trumpet Creeper. Dan Oh is the Rich Girl and Haru is the Poor Boy for Extraordinary You, the inverse of the main Cinderella couple in Secret. Unlike the typical Rich Boy-Poor Girl pairing, their relationship is not based on problematic power dynamics and personality traits (Dan Oh does do the ‘wrist grab’ thing, though).
Haru is defined by his relationship to Dan Oh. Just as Dan Oh’s Stage-self doesn’t originally have a story without Kyung (through her meddling, her sickness takes center stage), Haru’s character cannot meaningfully exist without his relationship to Dan Oh, even in the Shadow. IN contrast, Dan Oh does not exist solely for her relationship with Haru. This defies many romance cliches where particularly women have no purpose without their male love interest.
In line with typical KDramas is the slow-build relationship between the male and female lead in Extraordinary You. While often it can be built on miscommunication or total lack of communication, Haru and Dan Oh’s relationship develops after spending months in the series working towards a common goal, talking to each other, and having common friends and doing things and being people. Haru acknowledges that he has feelings for Dan Oh in episode nine while it takes Dan Oh until episode ten; there are only sixteen episodes. She needs other characters to point out that blushing, having her heart race, thinking about someone, and wanting to spend time with them are physical responses of romantic emotions. Even then, she’s unsure of her feelings until she reads: "He definitely stood out to me among the numbers of people. When he approached me from a distance my heart began to ache a little. When the little things he did began to have big and small meanings to me, I finally realized that I'm in love with him" (Ep 10).
Given their relationship in Trumpet Creeper, it is difficult to determine if Haru and Dan Oh’s relationship is genuine due to their compatibility or a side effect of their previous incarnation and love triangle. At the beginning of Extraordinary You and Secret, Haru has nothing; no memory, no name, no lines, no purpose (and, again, no house!). Haru does stare at and draw many pictures of Dan Oh before he gains an Ego. It is verging on stalker-ish behaviour, though to his credit he doesn’t know why until much later. The author is punishing Haru, drawing him as a background character, for pulling Kyung and Dan Oh apart and seemingly influencing the intended storyline of Trumpet Creeper. It is not clear if they are acting under their own desires or if something carried over into Secret. As the audience, we can argue that this is due to fate. Again, it’s very meta. In the epilogue, they remember each other from Secret, continuing their past relationships, into the new unnamed comic. But why? What’s happening? Who are we?
“I’m a character who can’t say a word to my biological father who uses me as a tool because I don’t want to be abandoned” (Kyung, Ep 7)
Kyung is the typical bad boy character. His bad temper, anger issues, pettiness, and insecurities are rooted in a whole bunch of childhood trauma; he lost his mother when he was young, he is being abused by his father, and used as a business tool. On Stage, he is part of the main line-up; in the Shadow, he is more of an antagonist/anti-hero. He often calls Dan Oh ‘annoying’ and seemingly hates being connected to her in any way, going so far as to blame her for passing out and needing to be admitted to the hospital. At the same time, even when he becomes self-aware, he continues to say things about Dan Oh which are horrible. For example, during the Amnesia-Haru arc (Haru loses his memory and Ego in an attempt by the author to keep the storyline of Secret on track), he tells Haru his ‘secret’, that he is “just toying with [Dan Oh]” (Ep 6) or how giving Dan Oh presents is merely a strategy to make sure she doesn’t ‘bother’ him as much (Ep 7). You get the point; he’s not a healthy relationship choice.
Kyung also has major jealousy issues: he is offended when Dan Oh does not want to keep the random picture her friend took of him after their school trip, he shows up to the cinema three hours after standing Dan Oh up and then shames her for having fun without him, he splashes Haru and Dan Oh with water when he sees them having fun together near the pool, he destroys Haru’s journal because it featured drawings of Dan Oh, and he has a standoff with Haru after losing a tennis match against him in the Shadow. His jealousy often leads him to throw temper tantrums, seemingly more so in the Shadow than on Stage. While his attitude is first praised by the supporting cast and extras of the show, characters slowly start to turn on him and some even call him out for his poor choices. For example, after Do Hwa calls out Kyung’s Stage-self for pretending to like Dan Oh to please his father, Do Hwa asks Kyung if he liked “playing someone who betrays his fiancé” (ep 8) leaving Kyung speechless and contemplating his life choices. Additionally, both Haru and Dan Oh call him out for ‘bullying’ and ‘hurting’ their friends, and Haru confronts him saying “is there a reason behind that? You need to fix that” (Ep 9). We agree, and can recommend therapy.
It would probably also be beneficial to Kyung to give ‘He’s just not that into you’ a watch because, Dan Oh, quite frankly, is just not that into him. Or rather, she does not like him. Yet, Kyung keeps insisting that Dan Oh’s Stage-self and Shadow-self have the same feelings for him completely dismissing her real feelings; that she should just “quit playing this childish trick” and instead should continue to “be all smitten with [him] like [she’s] always been” (ep 4). This is despite Dan Oh continuously vocalising her discontent with him. In one interaction he asks how he can know what her true self is, in which she replies with “[her] true self never liked [him]” (Ep 7). In another confrontation, she emphasises “everything that Dan Oh does on stage from now on is all just what the writer wants. Nothing more, nothing less” (Ep 8). Kyung is the bad boy character the female protagonist usually ends up with, because she can change him. But in Extraordinary You, Dan Oh makes the healthy choice and acknowledges all the red flags that would make their relationship pretty goddamn miserable.
At the same time, Kyung also finds some agency and stands up for himself when confronting his abusive father in the Shadow. He calls him out for his hypocrisy, for using Dan Oh to get to the Eun Family’s fortune. This is really all the character growth that Kyung can focus on, and really all he should be doing, because his relationship with Dan Oh is toxic. While they were childhood friends, and have memories of growing up together, he also killed her in Trumpet Creeper, which they ALSO remember, (eventually). To get meta, that they can remember growing up together and are not able to know for certain whether they had agency over those actions, is kind of fucked up. If they ‘go to sleep’ when the comic ends, did those Trumpet Creeper memories actually happen? What about their childhood? Or did they pop-up as high schoolers with these fabricated pasts?
Conclusion
Although Extraordinary You often goes against romance tropes, it also ends up complying to certain stereotypical developments, dialogues, and characters. It is a romance drama after all, so fair enough. Expecting it to totally rewrite the genre is a little ambitious. The ways in which Extraordinary You is working against tacky writing tropes is particularly refreshing in the first half of the series. Unfortunately, these efforts fall short in the later half, leaning into the very same cliches it originally set out to defy.
Before we draw any further conclusions, we really need to assess the supporting ‘main’ cast in more detail. But given that this article is getting really long, you’ll have to wait for the bonus or maybe you did, and you can find it here. (This won’t work until we actually publish the bonus article). Until then, try not to think too much about the meta dimension of this show, it might just break your brain.
Edit: Part 2 is now live. Head over here to continue reading.
Image Source
MBC [@withMBC] (2019). "어하루 포스터 4종 사진 아니고 그림 맞죠? 보름 후면 우리 만나는거 맞죠? 시간이 눈치 없게 느리다 <#어쩌다발견한하루> 10월 2일 8시 55분 첫방송 #김혜윤 #로운 #이재욱 " 16 September, https://twitter.com/withmbc/status/1173461508946374656?fbclid=IwAR1PLVbLCSjt74TuTeg3UIzLcNx3vnXhtx7kfexJ49bRBkbNHmXxm1tSw48