Crash Landing on You#
A division, romanticised into a plot device#
Today’s drama#
Crash Landing on You (사랑의 불시착) — a South Korean heiress stranded in North Korea, and a romance built out of the accident.
The most-watched drama on this syllabus outside Korea — largely because the premise is legible without context.
Three questions#
- How has the division of Korea shaped Korean identity, on both sides of the border and in the diaspora?
- What is romanticised or simplified for the sake of the love story?
- How should we separate fiction from historical and political reality when the fiction is this persuasive?
A division built on a war, a border, and seven decades of separate development can look, in a drama, like a misunderstanding waiting to be resolved by love.
Take from this week#
- the Korean War as the event the division follows from, not a footnote
- the division as an ongoing condition, not a past event
- what’s actually different, day to day, north and south of the border
- propaganda and representation, on both sides
Before next week#
Watch the assigned When Life Gives You Tangerines episodes. Bring one expectation placed on a parent or child that a later generation no longer accepts.