Japanese drama guilty pleasure

Today, I completed watching a Japanese drama TV series called Hana Nochi Hare. It’s a teenage high school soap opera about a poor (lower-middle class) girl and 2 super rich, handsome, and talented boys who have a crush on her and “fight” over her.

When I first started getting into Asian drams, I watched both a Korean and a Japanese version of the original, which this series is a sequel side story to. (The original is called Hana Yori Dango, or Boys Before Flowers in English.) This story takes place 10 years after the original with a new group of high school students at the same high school, and has a very similar plot line.

This is really the first drama where I cared for both guys in the love triangle, and actually favored the secondary boy who ultimately gets his heart broken. He was really cool, and actually modeled values that I care for. The primary boy was immature and talked down to people. But he was the one who grew the most as a character. So I couldn’t hate him.

I think one reason I really enjoyed this show is because it took clichés of the genre, and subverted them in little ways, while still maintaining the overarching plots that make this a fun fantasy. (Either that, or I haven’t watched the kind of show with these tropes in a while, which made it both fresh and nostalgic.)