Spill the Beans: The drama ate my homework

by javabeans

Last week, we put out a call for your Korean drama addiction stories, and you guys sure came through, filling our inboxes with hilarious and relatable stories about what you’ve done in the name of Korean drama.

To absolutely nobody’s surprise, you’re not alone in giving up your free time, your sleep, and in particular your school hours — so much so that we can actually theme this batch of stories all around dramas and school. To sum up: We’d all probably have better grades without dramas in our lives… but where would the giddy, heart-fluttery, squee-filled emotional goodness go? I may be biased, but I think it’s a fair trade-off.

But before we get to the new stories, in case you missed seeing the updates posted in the last thread, we had a couple of addicts drop in, five years after first sending in their stories.

Remember pabo ceo reom, whose Hawaii vacation with her boyfriend was hilariously/tragically cut short by a Coffee Prince misunderstanding?

I can’t believe it’s been five years… I cringe reading my own story again lol. I’ve been back to Hawaii since then with my girlfriends and this time I’m happy to report they all understood my kdrama addiction. It’s part of who I am!

 
And bleu, who had the cute neighbor with the free drama vouchers who ended up her husband?

Didn’t even realize it’s been 5 years!! It’s been a good 5 years for me. My cute guy is still cute, only pout when I drag our little one to cuddle in front of my beloved drama. “Stop infecting her mind with that non-curable addiction of yours” he would say.

As always, I would say “go away!” And he’ll be “again???!!”

 
And now on to the new entries, such as this comment by realraul2307:

Oh my these tales are so hilarious! Hahaha they give me hope that I’m not that bad of a K-drama addict! The worst I have ever done was cut classes for a week, making my attendance rate drop, eventually retaking the module. I looked like a raccoon with my eye bags and had a lot of explaining to do to my parents, but that was how much love I had for Gu Jun-pyo. They couldn’t understand why I was so addicted to Korean dramas, being Indian myself. Hahaha and also a few years ago I marathoned King 2 Hearts. I cried so hard that my parents thought I was mad. I cried myself sick and had fever for a few days. I still remember the look on my mom’s face when she came into my room and I was sobbing into a towel when [REDACTED FOR SPOILER] died. She almost sent me for therapy for depression (which I was over a drama). Hahaha oh man those were the times.

 
Here’s reader-addict ohmymoo’s experience:

So it was my freshman year of college and I was attending a college in upstate NY, which was a huge change from living in NYC for most of my life. I found it hard to make friends since every person I met was either really into sports or really into their studies. While I was interested in things like anime, manga, and video games. I told my best friend from high school about how lonely and sad I felt, and she recommended me to watch a drama called I Hear Your Voice. I had watched K-dramas although I’m not Asian I went to a high school with a lot of Asians so they heavily influenced the things I was interested in. I had seen the popular things like Secret Garden, City Hunter, etc., but I hadn’t really been so obsessed that I went out looking for dramas on my own.

Anyways I began watching I Hear Your Voice and I was told to watch it on Viki so I can also see comments from other people as I watched. And I got sucked in immediately. I would stay up all night long binge-watching every episode. I even skipped some of my classes for the first time because I literally could not leave my room and remove my face from my laptop screen. I felt so attached to everyone in the drama as if I knew them in real life and it made the loneliness that came from not having any friends in college completely disappear.

I remember when I did leave my room for classes once, while I was walking I was listening to music on my way to class and the song “I’ll be there” by the Jackson 5 started playing because I had it in my list of songs and I literally started freaking out and I dropped my phone on the floor and my headphones yanked out (luckily there was no one around) and I had to remove the song from my phone even though I had loved the song so much before. Now every time I hear that song I think Min Joon-kook is hiding somewhere close by.

Also whenever I took public transportation I would try not to think at all in fear that someone on the bus or train was actually secretly reading my mind.

I eventually finished the drama and I began researching other K-dramas to watch. And I decided to go for Master’s Sun which came right after IHYV. And after those two amazing dramas I have never watched American shows again!

 
Prathyusha shares:

Hey!

I don’t know if my story is one of the crazier ones, but I thought I’d share anyway. 🙂 I came to Toronto from India for university when I was barely 17 and got addicted to K-dramas as a way of coping with loneliness and social anxiety. I would skip classes and watch dramas, stay up all night finishing a drama and sleeping through the day. I’d only go out of my room to buy food and spent all the remaining time watching dramas, making it through my courses by virtue of last-minute cramming before the exams and assignments. When I finally made a friend, she was a Korean girl who was in my group for a project. I only made the effort to actually try to talk to her because she was Korean and I wanted to practice the Korean I’d been picking up from the dramas. She wasn’t as crazy about dramas as I am, but we clicked from the first and now we’re besties! I gradually became less dependent on dramas (which is good, because I was running out of good rom-coms to binge-watch) and ventured out in to the world more (and actually studied for a change). To me, K-dramas were what got me through university and I will never ever give them up!!

P.S. Of course, my family back home had no idea about all my issues and just thought I was having trouble making friends… So when my mom decided to come visit me and stay for 6 months, I had to think fast to prevent her from bugging me about my drama addiction. Now she’s watching her 11th K-drama in a row, and instead of “Don’t tell me you’re watching Korean stuff again,” I get “Which drama do you think I should watch next? Are there any with So Ji-sub?” from her!! Yes, I am proud to say I now have her addicted to K-dramas as well! Like they say, all’s well that ends well! 😉

 
Miho likes to call her addiction “love” instead:

The most amazing event in my life was being introduced to K-dramas. It happened a few years back. When I was in my second year of graduation. My best friend gave me my very first drama saved in a pen drive. Playful Kiss ? And I was sold right in the first minute. Was it Kim Hyun-joong oppa? Don’t ask. I can’t tell. But up to this day, it’s one of my favourite dramas. I think it took me two nights to finish the drama. Well, it was a 4gb pen drive, so obviously it couldn’t contain all the episodes in one go. I swear I never stayed up so late even during my exams. But after I started watching K-dramas, I hardly got any sleep. And sleep, was apparently my favourite thing on earth back then.

The rest of my college life was more about Korean dramas and oppas than it was about engineering. Analog and digital communication classes were all about F4 and City Hunter. One might say, it’s a bad thing. But I know ? I know how much happiness, love, hope and strength they’ve given me. Addiction has a better name — love. Dramaland has given me all that I could possibly never find in the real world. And anyone or anything related to this virtual world means a lot me me. Even all the people out there who love Korean dramas, whom I’ve never met.

I love everyone who loves dramas. I don’t have any siblings but I consider all the girls who love dramas as my sisters. Dramas are what connects people of different countries, religions and traditions. And bonds them in a bond that’s unexplainable and unbreakable.

 
Ha, talk about dramas “giving both the illness and the medicine,” as Meow experienced firsthand:

My crackfactor-induced crazy addiction was Ojakgyo Brothers and it’s all Joo-won’s fault.

I discovered OB on your recommendation actually (ratings list) and then once I started I COULD NOT STOP OMG. It was in the beginning of my final year in high school. I hadn’t gone to school on Thursday because I had a cold and I watched the first episode and I didn’t sleep the whole night, and then I did the same thing again the next day and that went on till Sunday night (Monday morning) at 5 AM, when I finally finished episode 58. I had only slept a grand total of 4 hours in 4 days and man I was wiped. I’m an insomniac and I sleep for like 2-3 hours every night but this was a new record for me. xD Thanks to the lack of sleep the cold I had went into full force with a fever. After that I didn’t go to school on Monday and Tuesday either. 8D Never regretted it tho. My cats watched the whole thing with me. I guess Joo-won has that effect on people and cats. xD I even completed Level 7 Civil Servant just because of him.

 
Not all drama addictions are homework-killers! Can you guess the drama that got gumihotales hooked?

When I was in college for graphic design one project I had for one semester was to create a fictional restaurant, theme, logo, menus, advertising, etc. At that time My Girlfriend Is a Gumiho started airing and I just fell in love with Shin Mina as Gu Mi-ho and how adorable she was and reminded me a bit of myself (you don’t stand between a girl and her meat!) Since I’m half-Korean as well, I went with a Korean restaurant theme called Gumiho Garden and pretty much based that entire project on the drama. I would watch the drama in class when a new episode would come out and if the teacher asked me what I was doing, I told him I was doing “research” for my restaurant. XD I also made sure on the menu to have a wide variety of beef options that would have made Mi-ho happy. My teacher loved the end result and thought it was really refreshing to see and ended up showcasing my project at the end of the semester. Not bad for my first semester at school!

This drama pretty much stuck with me throughout school and also ended up making a short animation for another one of my classes with a cute little gumiho in it and building up my branding which I ended up calling Fox Rain. <3 This drama was also the first recap I started to read on Dramabeans as well so if I was behind on my projects, I would come here to get the recap and watch the episode later when I had a chance 🙂

 
Losing sleep is a common theme, like in this story from Nerissa Anne:

Addiction…

The craziness of drama addiction kicked off during my college days. It was long after the release of Boys Before Flowers but in our hostel the series started distributing among the inmates like hot pancakes. I remember watching it for the first time and falling in love with the oppas of Dramaland. I still remember skipping classes to watch the entire series in one stretch and there after I was hooked.

I still remember, we used to watch dramas all night long. Our classmates used to stare us hostel girls like zombies with black circles around our eyes when we went to college in the morning. We used to make up our sleep during lectures and return to hostel “recharged” for the next drama marathoning. At least three or four girls would be in same room we used to turn off the lights in fear of getting caught by the warden. Our fangirling was shameless to the extreme. All of us learned Korean. In our breaks we used to discuss the drama plots. We used to play Kpop songs and danced to it. What to say? It was total madness. I am still a K-drama fan. But those college days were the extreme, we friends still relieve those good old days and become “the giggling fangirls” when we catch up with each other. For me K-dramas are a great part of the funny, crazy days of my college days.

 
And now, for a teacher’s perspective, from Minah:

I was watching K-dramas so much at home my husband got worried and suggested I try an AA meeting or something. I had to make a deal with him that I would only watch an episode a night. It was really hard so I found a way to watch at work.

I am World Studies teacher and I use my subject as an excuse to watch K-dramas at work. I’m also guilty of getting some of my students hooked, sometimes in trouble with their parents for watching too much. It all started during ‘Red Ribbon’ (anti-bullying) week at the beginning of the school year and I used the opening scenes of Boys Over Flowers to help teach about consequences of bullying. Needless to say, many students wanted to keep watching it and so I made a deal that we could watch it whenever we finish the days classwork. Watching Boys Over Flowers became a reward system for my class. Even the administrator was OK with it because I told them it was to teach about global culture and language. It also helps that I teach my students basic Korean.

My next addiction was [is] Running Man, we even watch it in class. I started creating lesson plans and activities based on Running Man inspired by the 100th episode, “War of the Gods.” I created a similar version with tags that need to be ripped off backs and superpowers. I teach about the 3 branches of government, Revolutionary War Spy vs. Spy, the Sun-Earth Relationship, and vocabulary reviews all based on Running Man. I tape vocabulary and definitions (color coded into teams) onto their backs. Then I take them outside and have them “collect” their team’s words and definitions before matching them up.

For our Halloween party we started watching Master’s Sun and then as rewards we watch student-requested dramas (from the aforementioned students).

If anyone asks, K-dramas are a great teaching tool.

 
Thanks to everyone who sent in stories! To submit, email us your stories, and we’ll keep sharing them as long as you guys keep sending them in.

 
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