On days when I take my chemo pills, er, targeted therapy pills, I have to rest in the hours afterward. It just sucks the energy out of me. I have an alarm set for noon to take my pills, so I rush through the morning getting as much done as I can because I know my energy will be sapped in the afternoon. That’s when I get into my recliner and find a movie or a TV show and nap with the cats on my lap or, if I’ve paid for my once-a-month weekly subscription to a reels app, watch an Asian short film.

I’ve watched quite a few reels by now. The stories are very predictable and follow many of the same tropes, but I don’t mind. Some of the tropes are super silly, but then again, aren’t secret babies and amnesia in Western romances?

The transmigration trope is the most hilarious. Women who previously were meek or stupid are now replaced in their bodies with women who are highly educated doctors or engineers from the future. They know the past of the woman they’ve replaced and now can navigate the politics inside the emperor’s court masterfully. They thwart the evil concubines or empresses and win the good guy by the end. If they had an abusive husband, he really, really gets what’s coming to him.

The violence is astounding. Secondary characters drop by the dozen around our heroine, victims of stabbings and poisonings. Our intrepid heroine moves past having close friends and family and servants being murdered around her with barely an acknowledgement. They can be equally as ruthless, but still so endearingly innocent when they find the man who is willing to give up his own life for hers or move mountains to make her happy.

Buckets of fake blood are spit up at canings, moments of high stress (not sure why), and poisonings. Blood makes everything more serious.

I still snicker over the medical professionals taking pulses to determine what poisons were used to sicken a character or tell whether someone is pregnant. Prick a finger and drop the man’s blood into a bowl of water along with a drop of a secret baby’s blood, and you know instantly whether that child is his.

So far, my favorite tropes (common recurring themes) in these Asian reels are:

• Transmigration of a modern woman into a dead woman’s body in a feudal empire
• A heroine defending herself from a concubine working with a cheating husband to murder our heroine so she can be the “wife”
• A sexy general who is cold and heartless but gradually melts like butter after he meets the woman fated for him
• A woman forced by a family who trades their daughter’s future for power (but who always get either murdered or cut out of her life after she rises to empress)
• A female general who is as ruthless and cunning as our hero who saves the empire and gets her man

For a chance to win a $5 Amazon Amazon gift card, tell me your favorite romance tropes. Some common ones in Western romances are: secret babies, enemies to lovers, fated mates, secretly rich, etc. Have fun with it!