Week 9: Beautiful Ghost

14 October 2019 – 20 October 2019

• Literary Analysis of Goblin & Hotel Del Luna (treatment of death in K-dramas)

For this week’s blog update, I embarked on the task of writing about K-dramas, namely Goblin and Hotel del Luna. When I first watched the two dramas, I thought about how interesting it will be to compare them side by side because they do share a lot of common themes and I am glad that this assignment gave me a chance to do so.

Since the topic will revolve around ghosts a lot, I decided to name this update after NU’EST’s song, “Beautiful Ghost”. It is surprising how despite the obvious parallels between the two dramas, not many people have written something that makes comparisons of the two. Luckily, I was able to find a blog post written by a blog user, “packmule3”. The user and a friend, another blog user, “growing_beautifully” discussed some of the commonalities between the two dramas while inserting some of their own candid comments within the post. The post was a joy to read and it provided an extremely helpful framework for me when I began writing my own comparison piece as well.

As a start, I made a collage of the posters for the two dramas and used it as a featured image for the blog post. The next step was to come up with an overall structure for the post. For this, while packmule3’s blog post offered a good entry point into a comparison of the two dramas, some organisation and elaboration is needed for better presentation because the comments were quite brief.

After consolidating my own ideas, I categorised them into separate subsections and made an effort to give them each an attractive sub-header that can best encapsulate the main points of the various parts. I had aimed to make my post more readable and fun as readers can break up the reading into smaller bite-sized pieces. 

I think for this task, the challenge was to be able to find screenshots of the key moments that can accurately illustrate the ideas in the different subsections. I consulted many online sources like Soompi, drama recap blogs and for cases when there were no readily available screencaps of a particular scene I would like to talk about, I went to rewatch the episode where that specific moment was in just so that I could make my own screen capture.  

This concludes the last themed assignment for the individual project and I would really like to thank the many K-drama addicts like me out there who provided useful sources along the way. I am happy that I was able to fulfil a longstanding wish of mine as I had always wanted to do my own drama analysis. Being able to do it for the two dramas I had thoroughly enjoyed watching was the icing on the cake. Furthermore, I realised that these dramas pose poignant questions about the meaning behind life and death that is important for us to think about. In fact, writing about Hotel del Luna was actually sad at times because Sulli, the idol-actress who made a cameo in episode 10 was recently announced to have passed away on 14 October. Thus, the drama’s messages could not come at a better time and they seem more relevant than ever. I sincerely hope that future K-dramas can continue this trend of including insightful ideas besides just being visually and aesthetically pleasing.