Week 3: Crash Landing on You: Korean Division, North and South
A romance across the DMZ, and what it romanticises about a division that isn't a plot device
8 March 2027
Crash Landing on You (사랑의 불시착) strands a South Korean heiress in North Korea and builds a romance out of the accident. It’s the most-watched drama on this syllabus outside Korea, largely because the premise is legible without context — which is also the risk: 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 two people falling in love.
Questions#
- How has the division of Korea shaped Korean identity, on both sides of the border and in the diaspora?
- What differences between North and South Korea does the drama actually represent, and which does it flatten?
- 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?
What to take from this week#
- the Korean War as the event the division follows from, not a footnote to it
- the division of Korea 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, and how a drama can reproduce either without meaning to
- national identity as something the division itself keeps reshaping
Teaching team
- May Rhee — convenor