Spill the Beans: Sweet boyfriends and a fanmeeting rigamarole

by javabeans

I love reading these addiction stories, because if anything it proves to us that no matter how weird we think we are, or how alone we think we are in our quirks, somewhere out there you can still find your people.

ayosh may have gone to some extremes for Seung-gi, but I don’t think she’s alone in her fangirling.

Brilliant Legacy is not my favorite drama, but what happened behind my addiction to Lee Seung-gi probably won’t be forgotten anytime soon from my mind. I watched Brilliant Legacy when I was still in high school, and found the existence of Lee Seung-gi. Now that I look back, Brilliant Legacy was super makjang but it could make me angry, sad, laugh, and squeal because Lee Seung-gi as a jerk was uber hot.

Months later, I heard news of Lee Seung-gi coming to my country for a fanmeet which means I needed to go… no, I had to go no matter what. It could be the first and the last time I see him in real life! The problems were that first, my protective parents definitely wouldn’t allow me because the fanmeet would be held in the capital city 1000 km far from where I lived, plus they didn’t know I was obsessed with K-drama, plus I planned to go with a friend I knew via Internet. Second, I didn’t have enough money to purchase the tix or transportation fee.

Secretly behind my parents’ back, I hooked up with another Lee Seung-gi fan I met online that we’d go to the city together. Later I gathered money by finishing my friends’ homework, walking to school as well as avoiding eating out which fortunately could cover everything I needed.

One day before the fanmeet, I lied to my parents that my sport club had a training workshop so I’d sleep over at a nearby resort for 2 days to manage the event, when in fact I met up with my online friend at the train station and left for the city. The trip took a pretty long time, almost a half day later we arrived in the city, grabbed any taxi available then ran to the venue. While queuing before entering the gate my Dad texted me: “Where are you staying? I’m hunting for photos near the resort now.”

I almost went crazy because I couldn’t make any more excuses so I turned off my phone. I entered the hall and the fanmeet was amazing.

The next day I arrived home while murmuring that the event was delayed, blah blah blah, so I was late. I noticed my mom sitting in front of the TV watching entertainment news when I realized they aired a snippet of their coverage from Lee Seung-gi fanmeet yesterday!! Oh no. I remembered someone interviewed a group of fangirls including me about how excited we were. However I didn’t know we were filmed, heck I didn’t know which station they were from and I didn’t think that far, that a glimpse of my face probably appeared!

From the snippet I recognized the place, the hall, the queue, the crowd… I definitely couldn’t let my mom watch this coverage. In the end I quietly turned off the electricity after I ran fast to the front of my house. Now years after it happened, I was sorry I fooled my parents even though the secret is still safe with me.

lone_addict had to think fast on her feet for an excuse to cover up her addiction:

As my ID says I’m a lone drama watcher because in my country (Italy), Korean dramas are mostly unknown here and mangas and Japanese animes are much more popular: I grew up watching Tiger Man and City Hunter at my gramps’ and I completely ignored their existence, at least until that fateful evening…

I had started watching animes on animecrazy because on TV they only showed old episodes (argh broadcasting rights!!), when for some reason a new window popped up: The site was very similar only it was called “dramacrazy.” Innocently I started looking through the list of episodes and went to the link “City Hunter ep 19 new!” lured by nostalgia. What I found was not an eighties private eye with a penchant for female lingerie, but Lee Min-ho, a handsome lethal weapon with a heart of gold, in a show that was a perfect mixture of epic action, squee-inducing badassery/romance, heart-wrenching daddy issues…

And then started the days of my addiction, with all the good and bad things they bring along: the excitement of waiting for your newest crack-show to air, your witty hilarious spot-on recaps, the comments of the other watchers. I can proudly say that, with 70+ dramas under my belt, I can almost understand Korean and my English skills improved enormously… but also then started my days of sleepless nights, dangerously low attendance (only at times now that I’m at university… really! I swear!!).

Still, I went to great lengths to hide my obsession from my friends and family, afraid of being treated like a freak, or worse, to be separated from my PC or smartphone!!

Now I consider myself an expert at “streaming under the covers,” faking colds, or cramming before exams… But this summer I went very close to blowing my cover of “normal girl” when I recklessly decided to use my limited Korean to help some desperate tourists explain to the hotel staff that they needed information about a trip and other things… after I translated from Korean to Italian and vice versa the room went silent: I earned shocked looks from the young Korean couple, the entire hotel staff… and my parents who, with perfect K-drama timing, were listening behind me the whole time!! In a panic I tried to cover up my “secret identity” and ruthlessly, like the evil unni from Come! Jang Bo-ri, I made up a half-Korean sunbae from high school (actually she was half-Chinese… sorry Maria!!) who taught me a little over the years, and so my hidden life was safe… at least until they check the mysterious folder on my desktop named IHYV…

Nighthawk also impressed with her Korean language skills:

I got hooked on K-dramas after running across Coffee Prince (the gateway drug) while browsing on Hulu. I enjoyed them so much that when our family got an opportunity to do some world travel, Korea rose to the top of our destination picks.

Now I didn’t go to Seoul FOR dramas, no fan meetings or anything like that. Here’s where the addiction part comes in. I was watching Two Weeks at the time. Since we were there on the cheap, we didn’t have a TV in our room. I had to make friends with the bartenders in the smoky bar in the basement and beg them to let me get my Lee Jun-ki fix.

Since I was obviously watching it raw, one of the other bar-goers says, “Can you really understand that?”

“Oh yeah – Hey, brat why are you calling me Daddy?” (Translating.)

“Wow!” he goes. LOL, it was the only sentence in the whole episode I understood, but I pulled it off, so he didn’t think I was a crazy American lady just fan-girling on Lee Jun-ki.

The icing on the cake was that our room was literally right around the corner from the chicken shop filmed in I Hear Your Voice!

How many of you, like DeNile, have a hard drive full of dramas? Or two, or three, or more?

Allow me to confess two things: First, I am from Africa and second, the country I am in has zero piracy laws.

I am a huge fan of manga and anime so when a pal on twitter recommended that I watch the Taiwanese live-action of Itazura Na Kiss, I dived in and discovered the K-drama (which I did not like as much as the Taiwanese version) but then she went on to suggest The King 2 Hearts and from there I was a lost cause.

The internet I had at the time was terrible so I would beg another pal who had high speed internet to download dramas for me. I used to follow dramas by their actors so the first dramas I watched had Lee Seung-gi and Ha Ji-won (Secret Garden, My Girlfriend Is a Gumiho) and then I expanded.

Thanks to my friend who would download, my external drives got full. I had a 250GB then 320GB and finally a 1TB.

It did not end there.

My sister found me watching Coffee Prince. She knew of me and my interest in manga and anime but did not know it had spread to live-action. After poking fun at me, she sat down and watched the drama. You know the scene where Han-kyul is traumatised to find out Eun-chan is a girl? It had my sis in stitches and though she is not into the dramas, she’ll still watch them at times but none beats Coffee Prince for her.

So I got a new job and had to move to a different place. Better internet but there was also a video library close by with even better internet. The owner became my pal and I used to ask her to get for me the dramas when I was too busy. Once I ran out of space on my external drives, she started burning them to DVDs and I have over 200 DVDs now.

She was not interested in K-dramas, instead preferring a lot of Nigerian movies (they are big in my country) but I urged her to watch My Love From Another Star. The rest, as they say, is history, coz she wound up watching them and then ended up getting some customers interested in them after they found her watching them in the video library and she normally asks me which one to watch next or even recommends some for me.

twentyonebuds outlines the addiction phases pretty accurately, I think. Sounds like it’s under control… for now…

My addiction started with a free period in science. Our teacher let us use the school laptops to do whatever we wanted and this is when my friends introduced me to Boys Over Flowers!

At first, I wasn’t even so interested. But out of curiosity and boredom I ended up watching a few more episodes by myself later and at some point I was totally hooked! Back then, I didn’t have my own laptop so I had to sneak out into the living room in the middle of night (trying not to creak any doors or bump into anything in the darkness lest the rest of the house woke up!), and I watched episode after episode on our old boxy computer until dawn. When I heard my parents stirring I would shut down the computer super fast and run back to my room and pretend to be asleep! (I’m pretty sure they knew what I was up to anyway because they had to pay those internet bills after all!)

My addiction went through all the usual phases. I pretended to be sick (after all-nighters watching dramas) so I could stay at home and watch more dramas. My grades probably suffered, especially in those early days and I’m pretty sure my eyesight has gone bad from staring at my screen for way too long and sometimes in the dark! I started self-learning Korean and singing my garbled versions of OSTs in the shower. One wonderful day, I stumbled upon Dramabeans and it was like discovering treasure! Plus it was so great to find a whole community of addicts just like me^^

Although my obsession with dramas died down eventually — I keep it to about 2-4 episodes a week these days and drop a drama if it’s no good without hesitation — I ended up majoring in Korean Studies at university and even moving to Korea for a year (where I ironically watched zero dramas!). My friends often tease me that the only reason I went to uni was so I could watch dramas before subs came out and sometimes I think that might not be so far from the truth after all! But I love where dramas have taken my life and am proud to be a K-drama addict 🙂

Who doesn’t know Nanaki’s pain of watching something through thinking it would surely get better, only to find it didn’t?

I was living in Japan teaching under-16s at the time. I watched a couple of the J-dramas the kids would talk about and, while I quite enjoyed one or two, I thought, “There has got to be better television made in this country.” It might have been because I was living in the middle of nowhere, but I did not find better television. It was baseball (boring), variety (painful), or idol-led “drama/romance/comedies” with appalling production values and as much collective acting ability as that exhibited by a single goldfish.

So I turned to the wider internet. I flicked through several dramas that I don’t remember well, but the turning point was that Taiwanese show which had So! Much! Drama! (that one where Poor Doormat Girl and Rich Obnoxious Guy have a one-night stand of dubious consent and she gets pregnant). I just couldn’t anymore with the tears and the hysterics and the terrible life choices and even worse families and “friends.” In my desperate search for something fun to watch after a long day manipulating young hormonal minds, I saw a summary of Iljimae (the Lee Jun-ki one) on MySoju, an appropriately named but now sadly defunct streaming site. I was promised a Korean Zorro. I was promised humour, action, romance, and bad guys getting what they deserved. I was so happy. So filled with anticipation.

AHAHAHA. I marathoned that entire show. I couldn’t help myself. The suffering would end at some point. The tornado of freewheeling grief-rage-jealousy would SURELY calm into, at least, a light gale gusting due catharsis. By dawn I was huddled under my blankets, slumped in the puddle of my laptop’s cold light. I had never felt so betrayed by a show, or my own common sense, in my life. Not only had I intentionally not slept on a school night, I had used that precious sleep time on episode after episode of high-stakes misery, the total sum of which had failed to deliver on any of its promises (see the aforementioned romance, humour, and bad guys getting what they deserved). I vowed never to subject myself to such intense viewing again and, still slightly stunned, went into work early.

Of course, it was midwinter, and being the lone foreigner in a mountainous village, there was nothing for it when I got back home than to go straight back on MySoju. I would not be defeated. I refused to believe that the combined powers of the internet and much of Asia could not grant me a show that was fun. A show that would be worthy of my sleeping hours. I had picked Iljimae off the Most Watched list — I would just work my way down. Something on that list had to be my thing.

The second drama I selected was Coffee Prince. I haven’t looked back since.

I also started reading Dramabeans about this time, because I was clearly too naive and vulnerable to venture into this new world unguided. Thank you for your posts on Strongest Chil Woo, Javabeans — I knew then that I was not alone.

chibiusa, sounds like your boyfriend’s a sweetheart!

Me and my boyfriend are the opposite. I am a K-drama/kpop addict but he hates all about the Hallyu Wave because idols or romantic makjang are definitely not his taste. Sometimes he pisses me off by mocking my favorite dramas calling it ridiculous or making fun of my bias group, but other than that he is a warmhearted person. I often show him romantic/fluttering cliché scenes like wrist-grabbing, piggybacking, fast kiss etc. while saying, “This is what girls like…” Then I can see his devastated expression lol.

One day, we were alone together sitting on the sofa as I watched a drama and he read a book. A scene reminded me of something so I talked to my boyfriend, “Can you grab my wrist? I want to try.” He held my hand with his left hand and continue flipping book pages with his right hand. Sigh. This isn’t what I mean but what can I expect from an unromantic person? I brushed off his hand and got up, when suddenly he pulled my left wrist saying, “Like this?” so I ended up falling on top of him. Oh my days, where the hell did he learn that? Who taught him? What drama did he see?!!

Another time I was wearing stilettos and complained how tired my legs were when he interrupted, “Do you expect I will piggyback you? In your dreams.” He let me borrow his sneakers while he wore his friend’s flip flops adding, “Do you think only your virtual Korean guys can do it? I can do too. This shows how much I love you so you have to treat me better.” What surprised me the most is how he can remember all those K-drama references more than me when I just said I had stiff legs.

There were some fun moments like how he attempted to imitate tying my shoelace in embarrassment or I suggested him playing piano with candlelight dinner on my birthday (which of course didn’t happen) to see his cute reaction. I like how because of K-drama he tried to put up with me. Not that I demand it, but he has done unexpected stuff in contrast to his personality just to make me smile. I wonder if I didn’t like K-drama and he didn’t have any idea about it, will our relationship still be as fun as now?

As is infinitelyyours’ boyfriend:

I was a loner in high school. I didn’t have friend because of my extreme introvert personality. I was afraid to speak first, I couldn’t look at people’s eyes and I spent my teenage years going to school to home to school for 2 years. I had no fun life at all except K-drama. That stuff was basically my stress reliever and my mood-booster when I was sad.

During senior year, my class changed and I got new classmates. Once at free time when our teacher didn’t show up, I turned on my laptop to continue watching 49 Days. Suddenly a male classmate poked my back, “Are you watching 49 Days?”

I felt confused but a bit uncomfortable talking to him so I just nodded. He then sat down beside me and said that he watched it in one shot and I was startled, “Do men watch K-drama too? Woah.” I was so curious and found it fascinating that a man enjoyed watching K-drama since those all basically romance aimed for girls. So without me knowing I kept asking him questions while reacting to his words, answering longer than yes/no. From then on we continued speaking and become best friends till now. Basically he was my gateway from a lonely world as he introduced me to a lot of friends, hung out together, recommend each other dramas, etc.

K-drama was also one of the biggest turning point factors in my teenage life. I was watching Answer Me 1997 (I clearly remember it’s the episode where Shi-won had to separate with her parents to Seoul) in class and the story turned sad so I was sobbing hard. I tried to endure my tears since I didn’t want people to notice but it was too late. The girls started noticing and laughing cause I cried while watching K-drama. Totally embarrassing. A tall boy interrupted while handing tissue to me, “Why? Whats wrong with crying because of drama? It’s cute tho. Let her be.”

That tall boy is currently my boyfriend for 2 years. 🙂

Bushra calls it “The best addiction ever…”

So it was over 4 years ago… I was in my final year of medical school in Pakistan (where I’m from) and my parents suddenly decided to move to China. I was visiting them for my summer break that year when I came across this random drama episode on Youku (since Youtube doesn’t work here and I had nothing to watch). It was actually the 16th episode of Lie to Me. I ended up watching the whole thing, thinking it’s a Chinese drama, since at the time I spoke neither Chinese nor Korean. I found out later that it’s actually a Korean drama and found it with English subs and marathoned the entire thing like crazy. It wasn’t until I discovered Dramabeans that I realized that Lie to Me was one of the worst dramas that year! Lol. I was like if that was bad, please let me see the good stuff!

After browsing through Dramabeans and listening to many podcasts (especially the famous City Hunter one!), I discovered my all-time favorites: City Hunter, Personal Taste, Flower Boy Ramyun Shop, I Hear Your Voice, Queen In-hyun’s Man, You’re Beautiful, You From Another Star, Pinocchio, Healer, and the list goes on…

What has kept me hooked is that there is an unspoken and subtle beauty that you can always hope to find in them… There is a positive energy and quiet strength in the characters that is uplifting and inspires you. And the MUSIC… listening to Korean music is what got me through the tough years of USMLE! Also kpop and the hilariousness of good variety shows is another bonus.

A big thank you to Javabeans and Girlfriday for keeping the love alive. Here’s to staying addicted!

Music_magic says, “It taught me to be myself.”

It’s not really about my obsession with K-dramas (though really if I wrote about it, it would take pages) but how they taught me to love the person I am and not care about what others think.

Being an Indian with small eyes I have always been called Chinese. No offence to all my other Asian friends out there but being called something I am not and constantly teased by even your family members for it made me so irritated. I thought no one could understand me and then when I started watching Korean I was hooked line and sinker.

But that made others laugh even more because now they thought that I was watching my “native drams” which was not a bad thing but it just really made me mad. But heroines like Chun Song-yi, Chae Young-shin and Oh Ri-jin taught me that no matter what I look like or what I love, I am me and as long as I believe in myself, I don’t need to care about what others think because we all deserve love and respect regardless of our looks or tastes.

That thought made me a much happier person than I was so kudos to K-drama heroines for being as awesome as they are:)

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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