Beloved K-Drama Gets Blasted For “Creepy” Intimate Scene

Korean viewers are repulsed.
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Serah S. Cherrie
Serah S. Cherrie

The ongoing JTBC K-Drama, We Are All Trying Here, has been steadily winning over its global viewers since its premiere. However, its latest episode has triggered heated backlash, predominantly from its Korean viewership.

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The backlash centers on a scene in a recently aired episode in which the female lead, Eun Ah (played by Go Youn Jung), lifts her sweater and lets the male lead, Dong Man (played by Koo Kyo Hwan), slip inside as she wraps him in a comforting hug. The scene takes place while the two characters are in a comic book café.

Judging by the discourse on social media, there appears to be a two-fold criticism of this scene. Firstly, many argued that if the director’s intention was to portray a comforting moment, it could have been executed more effectively. The way the hug was choreographed rather muddied that intention by injecting the male gaze into it.

Fine. I’ll grant you the benefit of the doubt a hundred times over and assume it was an act of pity.

But how, exactly…

“Pity for an Old Man”

➡️ Lifting up one’s clothes, deliberately tucking another person’s head inside, and then—with painstaking effort—guiding it all the way through to the other side just to wrap them up…how is *that* train of thought even remotely possible?

I suppose they were trying to portray something like a mother’s maternal love embracing her son…

But honestly? It just comes across as creepy.

— The post above

The deeper criticism, however, concerns how the female lead was made into a “mother” figure for the male lead, even though he was almost a decade older than her in the story. Many Korean female viewers noted that it was a recurring theme in director Park Hae Young’s works, including K-Dramas like My Mister. Korean netizens expressed their exhaustion with this problematic trend of centering the man’s struggles in the story while using the woman as a tool to comfort or fix him.

Park Hae Young, the writer behind My Mister, how long are you going to keep producing works like this? Stop putting scenes like this out into the media.

It depicts a working woman in her early thirties falling in love with an unemployed man in his forties out of pity, and the way she chooses to comfort him is by lifting up her clothes, tucking him underneath, and wrapping her arms around him.

— The post above

Why is it always the woman who has to coddle the older man?

— The post above

It’s staged to look like a woman in her 30s is adopting a man in his 40s. It’s absolutely ridiculous.

— The post above

Overall, I feel repulsed by this author’s works because her desperate desire to embrace and comfort men is so obvious.

— The post above

The criticism, however, didn’t cross over much to the international viewers’ side, as many actually praised the depiction of intimacy between Eun Ah and Dong Man in that particular scene.

What are your thoughts on this scene?

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