Sep ’25 – Sep ’26

This year I started the R/Fantasy reading challenge from Reddit and I’ve enjoyed the prompt aspect of the board. As I’ve been struggling to watch dramas, despite wanting to watch them, I thought it would be fun to make my own year long challenge.

Thus, DR/AsianDramas has been born 🙌

I decided to combine both ‘genres’ and ‘tropes’ to make up the board, which means I’m aiming to watch 25 dramas between September 2025 and September 2026. I’m putting some dramas that I’m anticipating for each section, but if you have any recommendations, let me know in the comments!

I think it might also be helpful to have this challenge match the academic year in the UK (I work in the higher education sphere so it’s a structure I’m very familiar with) and could also take some pressure off challenges that are strictly from January to December.

---

🌸🌸🌸

Middle Square

2015 K-Drama – I started this blog in 2015 with K-Drama episode recaps. I honestly don’t know how I had the patience to do those! In honour of 2015, the middle square is to watch a drama that came out that year. I’m thinking of actually finishing The Scholar Who Walks The Night which is a drama that I started to re-cap but abandoned because of life circumstances.

🌸🌸🌸

Genres

My favourite genre to watch is ‘Romance‘ and to be honest I like to have romance in pretty much everything I watch and read where possible. I’m a sucker for romance despite having none 😂

When it comes to Asian dramas, I also love the ‘Crime‘ genre. Unfortunately, I’m a baby and a lot of Asian dramas (especially the ones I love…) have psychological elements and the victims are generally women. There’s also the issue of if there’s a seriously creepy killer, I may not be able to watch anything else they’re in and I mean that – Huh Joon Ho, sorry babes, but I’m never watching anything you’re in after watching Come and Hug Me.

I’ve also put ‘Lawyer/Prosecutor‘ in its own square, separate from crime, because I truly think it’s its own genre. I really enjoy a Prosecutor. Do I understand why they’re basically lawyer detectives and out here solving crimes? no. Do I care? Also no. Favourites of mine are Suspicious Partner and Vampire Prosecutor (I’m still heartbroken that we didn’t get a s3 of VP 😭).

‘Action‘ isn’t really something I gravitate towards, so I think this will be a harder prompt to fulfil. The same goes for ‘Horror‘ – again I’m a baby – and ‘Medical‘ dramas. One of my first favourite dramas was Heart to Heart which I re-capped way back in 2015! I’ll probably be looking more into that type of medical drama rather than the stereotypical type, as I hate watching things about sick and dying people. Or alternatively something super cute like Love Lasts Forever!

Other genres I don’t really watch are ‘Slice of Life‘, ‘Daily Drama‘ and ‘Melodrama‘. These three genres tend to be quite time consuming and also require a lot of emotional commitment that I may not have to spare! This is also quite true of ‘Sageuks‘ because it’s not a good sageuk if I’m not crying in the first episode. I love a sageuk that will both break my heart and have me feral for the main couple – I still think about The Princess’ Man to this day.

A lot of ‘Comedy‘ dramas that I consume are also romantic in nature, so this shouldn’t be too hard to fill! The same goes for ‘Fantasy‘ as I have a particular one in mind, plus it’s coming up to Autumn which is a great time to watch these types of dramas. The one in mind is The First Night With the Duke as I love the idea of falling into a novel. It’s why I loved Lost Romance so much!

Lastly, I want to get back into watching ‘BL‘ and ‘GL‘ dramas. I watched a lot of these pre-2021 and I’m not really sure why I stopped, other than I just slowed down quite a lot with watching anything in general.

Anticipated:

🌸🌸🌸

Tropes

We all love a good trope!

I love a fictional Chaebol, so the ‘Rich Boy, Poor Girl‘ trope is dear to my heart. It’s one of my most watched tropes and it was also the plotline of a lot of the shoujo manga I read as a pre-teen!

Following on from this, a lot of the tropes are related to romance as this is my favourite genre to watch. And where there is romance, there is ‘Second Lead Syndrome‘, ‘Hate to Love‘ and the stunning ‘Love Confession in the Rain‘.

I don’t often watch ‘Friends to Lovers‘ or ‘Noona Romance‘, but the ones I have watched I have enjoyed – One Spring Night is one of my favourite K-Drama’s of all time 💕. I also don’t really watch any ‘Time Travel‘ dramas, the only one I can think of is Splash Splash Love (which I loved).

I have seen and been devasted by the ‘Truck of Doom‘ many times in my life and it’s a prevalent that trope that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Another topic that is very much a staple of K-Drama’s in particular is ‘Amnesia‘. I’ve seen a couple, most notably Fated to Love You and Find Me in Your Memory. Apparently, I love this trope to cause me pain…

Anticipated:

---

Thank you for reading!

I hope you’re having a lovely day and staying safe ♥