I have been watching a truly ridiculous amount of Asian dramas while “quarantined” so I figured I might as well write them up.
Le Coup de Foudre:
This was my favorite drama in the slice-of-life school days young romance genre (if that is a coherent enough description to be a genre). Like many other dramas that I watched in the last two months, it’s based on a web-novel (I Don’t Like The World, I Just Like You) but unlike the others, the book it’s based on is a non-fiction series of vignettes from the author’s married life. At least, that’s what I think it is. It reads like vignettes/blog posts from her daily life, and I saw one English-language source that indicated this was the case but my Chinese wasn’t good enough to hunt down a corroborating Chinese-language source. Most Internet descriptions weren’t clear on whether it is fiction or non-fiction.
Anyways, the book is a series of scenes from the author’s life, mostly describing her married life but a little bit about her and her husband in their youth (they were deskmates in high school, had a tiff, and didn’t speak for like four years before they reconnected), and a little bit about her other friends and their lives.
I particularly liked the book because was it was very slice-of-life-y and very realistic. There’s no Big Misunderstanding, no over-the-top hijinks. It’s little stories, like one time she was complaining to her BFF about a fight she had with her husband, but didn’t remember what he said that so infuriated her. So the next time they had a fight, she said “Wait,” pulled out her phone, hit record, and went “Now, continue”, to his utter bafflement.
Le Coup De Foudre is the dramatization of the book, but dialing up the melodrama 150%. Since the book is so low-key as a baseline, upping the drama level so much still ends up bearing out pretty good results. The drama follows the main couple through their high school days and beyond to when they reconnect. The very last episode is a series of scenes from their married life — every single one taken from the book.
The drama was very sweet, and I enjoyed it a lot (even though I had to roll my eyes sometimes at the female lead’s high school self sometimes when she was being a bit of a pushover) but because I checked it out fresh from finishing up the book, I couldn’t help but compare the two.
Dialing up the “drama factor” for the TV show makes a lot of sense in terms of getting a good story, but some of the choices worked better for me than others. (I’m not a huge fan of Big Misunderstandings, and of course the show had to add in a ton.)
For example, the TV show decided to give both the male and female leads angsty backstories, which just made me roll my eyes. In the book, the author notes that she grew up in a relatively cold/distant household (her parents divorced when she was young; her mother was too busy working to be around much; her dad was frankly a neglectful deadbeat — barely paid child support on time, had a new happy family at the earliest opportunity, said “oh” when she told him her about her wedding and didn’t actually attend), but her husband had a happy, “normal” family and childhood and she had to adjust to that the first time she met her future in-laws. In the TV show, he almost has her backstory (distant parents that I would frankly describe as neglectful, with a very contrived secret family subplot) whereas she has a relatively happy childhood with her mom and stepdad very much in love with each other — and then you find out about her bio-dad who the drama has ratcheted up from neglectful to physically abusive.
Angsty backstories are par for the course in Asian dramas and the show handled them pretty well, all things considered, but it still made me roll my eyes.
On the other hand, the drama added in this super over-the-top, only-on-TV scene that I still ate up with a spoon. During the separation, where the male lead is studying abroad in Cambridge, the TV show added a scene where the female lead visits Cambridge for a day, and even ends up staying in the same house as him. The whole day, they keep missing each other — he turns the corner right as she goes into a store; he leaves her scarf outside her bedroom door but has disappeared inside his room by the time she opens the door. At the end of the day, they’re separated by a wall as they each think about the other, unaware that the other is so close, and then she leaves the next morning and he never knows that she was there. It is cheesy. It is ridiculous. It is incredibly contrived. I loved the SHIT out of that scene. I spent the whole episode yelling at the TV for them to Just Open The Door or Just Look Up even though I knew that it wouldn’t happen — they make a point in the first episode about how they hadn’t seen each other in four years so you know they won’t.
So honestly, even though I still like the book better because it was refreshing reading a “love story” that felt so real (because it was real), I still wildly enjoyed the TV show.
The one thing that weirded me out a little was the idea that the book is about real people and the drama was basically writing RPF about those real people. The drama adds in a romance between the female lead’s BFF and the female lead’s twin brother — which makes a lot of sense in terms of planning a coherent subplot but also ... if my BFF were a writer, and suddenly they were making a TV show about her life but wrote in an angsty backstory for me AND wrote me marrying and having babies with my BFF’s twin brother (who presumably is happily married to somewhere else in RL in this hypothetical scenario), that would weird me out. And I wouldn’t even be making any money out of the situation!
Final Verdict: Would Recommend
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