1
AudienceofOne
Where Your Eyes Linger is a Korean BL, which makes it an extremely rare beast.
The premise is pretty simple and very Korean: a Candy/Chaebol romance that happens to be between two men.
The poor Kang Gook is the best friend and bodyguard of Chaebol heir and wannabe teen playboy Han Tae-joo, for whom he has secret feelings. The two live together, go to school together, do martial arts together. They're basically inseparable in a dynamic that harks back to feudal Joseon bromances. It's a dynamic that didn't entirely work for me at first due to the disturbing power imbalance between the two boys, and I found the first few episodes very rough.
However, once the show settles into itself and stops finding excuses for them to grapple with each other, it begins to deal quite realistically and even movingly with the emotions of the situation. Gook is Tae-joo's servant and nothing - not their feelings or their friendship or anything else - can change that. Instead of using this power dynamic to set up the somewhat uncomfortable and unequal relationship I started to fear, the show instead treats it as a barrier, which in real life it would be.
The show also makes a few more quality decisions, especially around its second female lead who is textually treated in the same way as a traditional kdrama second male lead. It's a refreshing decision, not just from a kdrama perspective but from a BL perspective as well.
As a web drama, Where Your Eyes Linger is far far too short and as such the narrative is rushed. It would have benefited from longer episode lengths.
But despite a rough start and the use of some truly questionable music decisions, this is a classic kdrama romance scenario that happens to have two men in it. And that's the best thing about it. It means that some of its peculiarly Korean narrative decisions worked for me when I would have found them tiresome in a standard drama. I think it's great that they made a drama that treats homosexual romance in exactly the same way as it would have treated heterosexual romance.
That alone puts it heads and shoulders above every other BL released this year.
The premise is pretty simple and very Korean: a Candy/Chaebol romance that happens to be between two men.
The poor Kang Gook is the best friend and bodyguard of Chaebol heir and wannabe teen playboy Han Tae-joo, for whom he has secret feelings. The two live together, go to school together, do martial arts together. They're basically inseparable in a dynamic that harks back to feudal Joseon bromances. It's a dynamic that didn't entirely work for me at first due to the disturbing power imbalance between the two boys, and I found the first few episodes very rough.
However, once the show settles into itself and stops finding excuses for them to grapple with each other, it begins to deal quite realistically and even movingly with the emotions of the situation. Gook is Tae-joo's servant and nothing - not their feelings or their friendship or anything else - can change that. Instead of using this power dynamic to set up the somewhat uncomfortable and unequal relationship I started to fear, the show instead treats it as a barrier, which in real life it would be.
The show also makes a few more quality decisions, especially around its second female lead who is textually treated in the same way as a traditional kdrama second male lead. It's a refreshing decision, not just from a kdrama perspective but from a BL perspective as well.
As a web drama, Where Your Eyes Linger is far far too short and as such the narrative is rushed. It would have benefited from longer episode lengths.
But despite a rough start and the use of some truly questionable music decisions, this is a classic kdrama romance scenario that happens to have two men in it. And that's the best thing about it. It means that some of its peculiarly Korean narrative decisions worked for me when I would have found them tiresome in a standard drama. I think it's great that they made a drama that treats homosexual romance in exactly the same way as it would have treated heterosexual romance.
That alone puts it heads and shoulders above every other BL released this year.
Was this review helpful to you?
