Last week, I spent a morning with students at Meta Litfest discussing a mutual love: K-drama or Korean drama series. Some roll their eyes at K-drama as being escapist, from their prisons of realism and so-called rationality. K-dramas come wrapped in the unreal beauty of their stars, melodrama, humour and voluptuous fantasy. They are written with a novelistic attentiveness to human relationships and draw us into a world saturated with emotion. Humiliation, abandonment, failure, loneliness are feelings we are taught to conceal and associate with shame. The shows confront these deepest wounds on our behalf, often embodied in an orphan figure (once common in Indian films too)—someone alone or neglected—who journeys to kinship, caring, affection and love.

In the cult show Crash Landing on You, an entire North Korean village becomes a loving community for a South Korean woman, snobbish but alone. Her intimacy with a handsome soldier who shelters her is romantic, but also compassionate, featuring a scene where he braids her hair with a parental tenderness. In Start-up, an old hard-up woman shelters an orphaned young man in her small shop, before he sets off to make his way in the world. Each of us is a start-up who needs the angel-investment of loving care, not just venture capital. In Guardian, a man-god marooned in immortality across eras is, as the EE Cummings poem goes, “made of nothing but loneliness”, for he must repeatedly watch the people he loves go from childhood to old age and then death, while he remains ageless and alone, ridged with loss. In My Liberation Notes, a woman in a dead-end job and an alcoholic, form a piercing, unsettling relationship when she says to him: Love isn’t enough. Worship me. In Crash Course in Romance, a man who is an efficient success-machine cannot eat—until he re-encounters food once given to him at his loneliest moment.