20/08/2026
YOU CAN'T BE THE PROBLEM AND THE SOLUTION
You can't be the problem and the solution
I recently found myself thinking about how many Asian romance dramas seem to have a particular formula: take a loud, silly, sometimes unintelligent and clumsy girl, pair her with a cool, emotionally unavailable genius, and then have her spend the majority of the story hopelessly in love with him until, eventually, he develops feelings for her.
And apparently, this is supposed to be romantic.
A C-drama that really emphasizes this point for me, although I did not have the grace to finish watching it, is The Princess Gambit. I might be judging it prematurely, and honestly, that is just my own bias, but Iâm pretty sure that, at this point, you can already tell why I didnât finish it.
Donât worry, Iâll definitely come back to our earlier conversation about The Princess Gambit.
For today, however, our case study is the K-drama Playful Kiss.
At some point in my consumption of K-dramas and C-dramas, I started noticing how often this particular character dynamic shows up. You have the pretty but clumsy girl who is terrible at almost everything, then you have the cool guy who is brilliant, attractive, emotionally constipated, and, naturally, the top student in the class, probably the whole school.
The girl falls hopelessly in love with him.
He does not like her.
She continues pursuing him.
He continues rejecting her.
And somehow, after enough suffering, persistence and dramatic background music, he falls in love with her.
Cue âAlmost Paradise.â
Congratulations. You have successfully turned emotional endurance into a love language.
In Playful Kiss, our female lead is pretty, clumsy and academically challenged. She is hopelessly in love with the cool guy, who also happens to be the top student in the class.
At the beginning of the show, our cool guy publicly embarrasses her by correcting and grading the love letter she wrote to him as though it were an English composition and then returning it to her in front of everyone.
Now the entire school knows about her unrequited crush and, as an added bonus, knows that she apparently cannot write a simple love letter to save her life.
Did this dissuade her from chasing him?
Absolutely not.
There were so many events after that which I will not get into because, honestly, I canât remember them all. They eventually end up married, and somewhere along the way, I think she develops an atom of self-respect while he becomes more expressive with his emotions.
And I had SO MANY issues with this storyline.
First of all, this man repeatedly ignores her and tells her that he doesnât like her, yet she continues to fervently chase him.
Where is the shame?
Where is the self-preservation?
Where is the tiny voice in her head saying, âBabe, perhaps we should leave this man aloneâ?
Apparently, giving a female lead a healthy sense of self-respect is too much to ask.
Why develop a life, personality, ambitions or sense of identity when your entire existence can revolve around loving an apathetic man until he eventually decides that you are worth loving?
And this is where the whole thing starts bothering me beyond the individual character.
There is a difference between persistence and ignoring rejection. There is a difference between romantic pursuit and repeatedly pursuing someone who has already told you they are not interested.
But romance dramas have a funny way of presenting persistence as proof of love.
He says no.
She keeps trying.
He says no again.
She keeps trying.
Eventually, he says yes.
And the audience is expected to think, âAwww, she never gave up.â
Never gave up on WHAT?
His boundaries?
His clearly communicated lack of interest?
What exactly are we celebrating here?
Then we have the cool guyâs mother.
This woman apparently appointed herself chairperson of the âGet My Son to Like This Girlâ committee.
She constantly encourages the female lead to pursue her son, assuring her that she has her back. And honestly, I donât remember her once stopping to consider how her own son actually felt about any of this.
Letâs be honest: she actively encourages this girl to invade her sonâs privacy and pursue him, regardless of how uncomfortable or irritated he might be.
Imagine if the genders were reversed.
Imagine a teenage boy repeatedly pursuing a girl who had clearly told him she wasnât interested, while her mother encouraged him to keep going because she thought they would make a cute couple.
Would we still be calling that adorable?
I highly doubt it.
Then there is the other guy.
You know the one.
The guy who genuinely likes our female lead but, for the sake of the plot, has to be made incompetent, morally questionable or downright villainous so that the cool guy can shine.
Because God forbid a decent man develops an interest in our female lead.
There are exceptions, of course. The second male lead is not always incompetent or villainous. Sometimes he is actually a perfectly decent human being, which only makes the situation worse because now I am sitting there wondering why the female lead isn't choosing him.
But the larger pattern is still there: everyone around the main couple is often written in a way that makes the male lead look like the obvious choice.
And that brings me to the female lead herself.
Why does she have to be so clumsy and incapable?
She is almost bad at everything she does. Academically, socially, practically you name it.
At some point, it becomes infuriating.
But my question isn't really, âWhy is she clumsy?â
My question is, why does the female character so often have to be incompetent for the male character to look impressive?
She is loud, so he is calm.
She is academically weak, so he is brilliant.
She is clumsy, so he is composed.
She is emotionally expressive, so he is emotionally restrained.
She chases, so he gets to be chased.
The contrast is so exaggerated that the male character's superiority is practically built into her inadequacies.
And I think that is one of the most frustrating things about this trope.
The woman is often written as someone who needs to be fixed, rescued, guided or tolerated, while the man is written as someone who simply needs to learn how to love.
She needs to become better.
He just needs to become softer.
And somehow, once he develops feelings for her, all his previous behavior is retroactively transformed into romance.
That is what really bothers me.
Because the problem isn't that a romance has an emotionally unavailable male lead. Characters are allowed to have flaws. The problem is when emotional unavailability is treated as depth, cruelty is treated as flirtation, persistence after rejection is treated as devotion, and the eventual reward of getting the man is presented as proof that the woman was right to endure everything.
This is where my bigger problem with these stories comes in.
These shows are often consumed by teenagers and young adultsâpeople who are still figuring out relationships, boundaries, attraction and what healthy love is supposed to look like.
So when you repeatedly show them that relentless pursuit eventually gets rewarded with love, you are teaching them something.
You are teaching them that rejection can be negotiated.
That emotional unavailability is attractive.
That a person who treats you poorly might simply need enough patience before they reveal their âtrue feelings.â
That suffering for love is romantic.
And, particularly for young women, that self-respect is something you can temporarily put aside if the man is attractive enough. The fine boy effect i suppose
And I donât like that.
Because there is nothing inherently romantic about convincing someone to love you.
There is nothing romantic about being humiliated and calling it character development.
There is nothing romantic about having to endure emotional neglect until the person finally decides to treat you properly.
I want romance where both people actually like each other.
I want women who have lives outside of the men they love.
I want female characters who can be goofy without being stupid, clumsy without being incompetent and vulnerable without being completely devoid of self-respect.
I want the second male lead to be allowed to be a decent human being without the writers immediately pulling out the villain card.
I want a woman to hear âI donât like youâ and occasionally respond with:
âOkay. Have a nice life.â
Because sometimes the most romantic thing a woman can do is leave.
And maybe that is my biggest problem with these stories.
You cannot spend an entire series showing me how miserable this man makes her and then convince me that he is also the solution to her misery.
You canât be the problem and the solution.
Alright, thatâs all for today.
Ngwanu, Byeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
