Powerful Opponents: kdrama in which the two top members of their year in the bodyguard academy (who feud with each other) get assigned to the troublemaker son of the South Korean president. People talk about it as a romance-action, but it's really much more a family-action, with really cool explorations of what it means to be a family and the role of family in individual life. And it has a fantastic OT3, which means slashiness galore, along with pretty awesome het.
BloodyMonday (2 seasons): jdrama about a high school boy who's basically the most accomplished hacker in Japan. It has oh so many issues (including killing off way too many of its women), but I adore almost all of the characters, the hacking imagery/music is melodramatically awesome, and Takagi uses Linux.
Galileo: jdrama about a rookie cop who teams up with an obnoxious but very effective scientist to solve crime. She mocks his social skills and he mocks her (lack of) rationality, and, okay, it's totally stereotypical (his "scientific" explanations are always right), but they're both actually pretty amazing despite all of that. Just...turn off the part of your brain that knows actual math the minute Yukawa-sensei starts scribbling.
Tale of Genji: I've talked about this a lot, but, basically, a foundational book of the Japanese canon (54 chapters, but to write about many of the main characters you only need the first two thirds), with a huge array of wonderful characters having complicated relationships, an image of classical Japan that still dominates our understanding today, and fanfiction written by a major literary scholar from the late 1700s (untranslated yet, of course).
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Powerful Opponents: kdrama in which the two top members of their year in the bodyguard academy (who feud with each other) get assigned to the troublemaker son of the South Korean president. People talk about it as a romance-action, but it's really much more a family-action, with really cool explorations of what it means to be a family and the role of family in individual life. And it has a fantastic OT3, which means slashiness galore, along with pretty awesome het.
Bloody Monday (2 seasons): jdrama about a high school boy who's basically the most accomplished hacker in Japan. It has oh so many issues (including killing off way too many of its women), but I adore almost all of the characters, the hacking imagery/music is melodramatically awesome, and Takagi uses Linux.
Galileo: jdrama about a rookie cop who teams up with an obnoxious but very effective scientist to solve crime. She mocks his social skills and he mocks her (lack of) rationality, and, okay, it's totally stereotypical (his "scientific" explanations are always right), but they're both actually pretty amazing despite all of that. Just...turn off the part of your brain that knows actual math the minute Yukawa-sensei starts scribbling.
Tale of Genji: I've talked about this a lot, but, basically, a foundational book of the Japanese canon (54 chapters, but to write about many of the main characters you only need the first two thirds), with a huge array of wonderful characters having complicated relationships, an image of classical Japan that still dominates our understanding today, and fanfiction written by a major literary scholar from the late 1700s (untranslated yet, of course).