K-Drama for Every Season

I'll be honest with you. I'm Korean American, and I wasn't really into K-dramas. I know that sounds almost criminal to admit. There's this assumption that every Korean has seen every major show and can quote it by heart, but that's never been me. That started to change when Kingdom on Netflix surprised me, and then Squid Game changed my mind completely. Now watching K-Pop: Demon Hunters blow up globally, I feel excited about where Korean entertainment is headed. So here are a few K-dramas I think pair perfectly with each season.

Spring belongs to When Life Gives You Tangerines, a show about a woman from postwar Jeju who dreams of becoming a poet and the man who has loved her for years without saying it. The soft colors and blooming tangerine trees make it impossible to watch during any other season. It's the perfect show to put on when the weather finally starts to turn.

For summer I couldn't pick just one, so I'm giving you two. Our Beloved Summer is about two ex-lovers pulled back together when a documentary they filmed in high school suddenly goes viral. It's bright and a little messy, which is exactly what summer feels like. Summer Strike is about a woman who quits her job, leaves the city, and moves to a small coastal town with no real plan. It slows everything down in the best way, and it's the show you want on when the heat makes you too tired to do anything else.

Fall goes to Something in the Rain, about two people who probably shouldn't fall for each other but do anyway. The tone is mellow and the whole thing is a bit heavy, matching the season perfectly. Watching it feels like sitting by a window while the leaves come down outside.

Winter is made for I'll Visit You When the Weather Is Nice, about a woman who leaves Seoul for a snowy small town and reconnects with an old friend who runs a bookstore. It moves slowly and deliberately, and that's entirely the point. Go make yourself a cup of cocoa before you press play because this one makes you want to stay inside and stop being so hard on yourself for a while.

What I keep taking away from all of these shows is something deceptively simple: they make ordinary life feel worth paying attention to. None of these plots are outlandish. People fall in love, drift apart, miss chances, try again. But the writing never lets those moments feel small or forgettable. There's always something that stops you mid-scene, a look between characters that says more than the dialogue ever could, a throwaway moment that somehow becomes the one you think about later. A story doesn't need a grand premise to hold someone's attention. It just needs to make people feel like their own life is worth watching too.

Don't Judge a Writer by a Detector

It's a tricky time to be a writer. AI accusations are being thrown around constantly, and most of the time they're baseless. Writers are getting hurt by them, and I'd be lying if I said I haven't lost the will to write and asked myself, what am I even doing here? I fed a short story I wrote years before any of this started into a detector, and it came back as AI generated. And it's well known that the Star Spangled Banner came back as AI generated through these detectors too. These detectors need to go. Using AI to detect AI is one of the most flawed ideas out there, and frankly, flagging someone's writing by feeding it into a detector instead of actually reading it isn't all that different from using AI to write in the first place. Both are just shortcuts taken by people who can't be bothered.

To be clear, I do not condone AI generated writing, and those who use it to pass off work as their own aren't writers. They're thieves. But because of those few, please don't make the rest of us pay the price. Has it ever crossed your mind how ridiculous it is that AI was trained on human writing, and is now being used to flag writing that resembles what it was trained on, which is human writing? And sure, there are telltale signs of AI writing patterns, but is that really a true measurement of detecting AI, especially when those telltale signs came from human writing to begin with?

I don't have all the answers, as much as I wish I did, but for me the truest measure is whether I can feel human emotions in what I'm reading. Take Kim Eun-sook, one of the writers I admire with all my heart. If you're not familiar with her, she wrote the world famous Korean dramas like Mr. Sunshine, Lovers in Paris, and Descendants of the Sun. There's a scene in Mr. Sunshine where three male characters share a drink and walk home under cherry blossom trees. One of them jokes about killing the one walking next to him, and the other replies with a line that's difficult to translate into English: "If I die right now, it's hwa-sa." "Hwa" means flower and "sa" means death, so together it refers to flowers that have died and fallen from the trees. But "hwa-sa" also means beautiful. So in that single line, he's saying that dying among fallen flowers would be beautiful. And later in the story, that's exactly what happens. He dies protecting the woman he loves, and to him, there was no more beautiful way to go. That single sentence made my heart tingle and ache all at once. AI, even in its most advanced form, will never be able to write anything remotely close to something that makes you feel that.

For the longest time I believed she must be a genius. But in one interview, she said she doesn't believe she is. She writes 12 hours a day, every day, obsessively, because she believes that's the only way she can write well. Kim Eun-hee, another writer I adore, who wrote Signal and Kingdom, said something similar. She stays up all night thinking, and only when the sun is about to rise do ideas begin to form. Even she, someone who wrote pure masterpieces, lives with a constant fear that one day she might not be able to write anymore, and to shake that off, she works harder than anyone else. And as a result, they write something that makes people cry and laugh, that lifts them when they're down and gives them hope when they have none.

Blindly hating and boycotting AI won't make it go away because it's here to stay, and most likely here for good. If you really want to fight for creative work, the first step is to acknowledge that AI is just a tool and to learn and educate others on how to use it right. And as a writer, it would really help if readers didn't jump to conclusions and accuse writers of AI usage because they used an em dash, or because they used the word "tapestry" here and there, or because they wrote with metaphors and flowery sentences. If you read something and feel something real, something human, please give it the benefit of the doubt that human hard work is behind it. I pray from the bottom of my heart that writers thrive and never stop using their imagination to create beautiful stories, because I'm a firm believer that words are powerfully magical. Long live the human story that moves people.