When I wasn’t feeling well and mostly confined to bed or my lift chair/recliner, I spent a lot of time doomscrolling through Bluesky, Threads, and Twitter. When I needed a little lighter fare, I hit Instagram. That’s where I met my new guilty pleasure.
At first, the ads for all these short-reel movies interrupting my IG feed annoyed the hell out of me. Werewolves finding their fated mates, while I love writing them, seemed silly in these short, episodic films. Secret billionaire women scorned by their husbands and out for revenge—silly, silly, silly. However, what caught my eye and kept me watching as many of those free episodes as they teased on Instagram were the Japanese romances set in olden times, where men and women wore skirts and silky kimonos.
I bit the bullet and downloaded a DramaBox reel. The heroine was a modern-day woman, an award-winning cook, I think, who died by getting hit in the head with a light fixture during an awards show and “transmigrated” (their term) into the body of a woman in ancient Japan who had been killed by a jealous cousin a few weeks before her death. Soooo, naturally, the modern woman, with all the other woman’s memories intact, must fix things so she doesn’t get murdered. Along the way, she meets a hero—not the man she was engaged to, who helped her cousin kill her—who becomes her love interest. The fun part about this is that the woman is taking control of her destiny while finding a man who appreciates her strength and independence. Yeah, the reel had cheesy music and subtitles, but I was hooked.
That was the start. It proved supremely annoying trying to buy “coins” to keep watching the episodes until the end. I think I spent $20 to get to The End of that particular story. I thought, never again. What a scam.
Only, another reel entered my feed. Same timeframe, same cheesy music, this one dubbed. This time, I bit the bullet and bought a week’s subscription to watch as many reels as I could. This first story was something about a woman with magical healing powers who wangles her way into the emperor’s palace. But it had the same tropes—a “transmigrating” female lead, a stern man in rice cake makeup with black hair to his butt but who somehow looks hot as hell in his silk robes, a mission to right the woman’s wrongs so she doesn’t end up murdered, and lots of swordfights, gallons of fake blood spit up during canings or killings, whining cousins who look pretty in their silk gowns until they open their mouths and have the most annoying, whining voices.
Every doctor can tell by a patient’s pulse what rare disease they carry, whether they are pregnant and what the sex of the child will be, and what kind of poison was slipped into the character’s drink or food (there are lots and lots of poisonings!). The hero is always a martial arts expert, and many of the females are as well.
What I really love are the Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon-style fights where the combatants fly through the air at each other. My daughter shakes her head when she comes upon me and hears the Asian music and voices. I’ve shown her some of the fights, but she just doesn’t get why I love it. I can’t explain it either.
And yeah, the guys look like Korean K-pop singers or Anime heroes, but who doesn’t like a ruthless man who will kill simply because the heroine gives him a subtle nod that it’s okay to permanently remove the threat to her safety?
At $20 for a week’s subscription, and in order to get some work done, I’m only allowing myself one week of subscription per month. My monthly gift to myself. In the meantime, while I doomscroll, I make a list of the reel apps (there are so many!) and movies I want to watch when my week comes. Yeah, it’s an obsession—a silly one—but don’t judge me!
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Have you tried the online drama/reels apps? Do you have a “flavor” of story you enjoy? Do you have another guilty pleasure you’d like to tell everyone about?
