Not only to sip sugar in pure love dramas, but also to follow the heroine in the revenge drama to be jealous like hatred, the recent audience in the drama boom, not only busy but also a little "divided". Known as the "turning year" of the industry, 2023, now that Q1 has passed, the craze of the anti-black criminal investigation drama "Crazy" in the drama market has just blewed, and pure love dramas and revenge dramas have begun to take over, and the popularity has both risen.
On the one hand, "The Way Home", which has a popularity value of 8,500 on iQiyi Station, has won the crown of satellite TV live broadcast attention many times after its launch, and has become a masterpiece of domestic pure love dramas. On the other hand, the second season of "Dark Glory" topped the ratings lists of many places around the world in just one day, and even on the domestic Weibo entertainment hot search list, and continued to produce topics related to it for several days. Interestingly, the romantic love imagination derived from pure love dramas and the emotional satisfaction achieved by the "wicked" advanced in revenge dramas, these two completely different narrative styles, but they seem to imply some similar motivations and creative laws of watching dramas.
Whoever wins women wins the world
Pure love drama has never ebbed
For pure love dramas and pure love films, there is currently no clear definition in the industry, if it is disassembled literally, we can understand it as "a type of story told around pure love", that is, the emotions between the male and female protagonists are more simple, not affected by other factors such as economy and family, and the narrative style is quite romantic and beautiful.
Since about the 90s of last century, the Japanese film "Love Letter" and the earliest Korean drama "Blue Life and Death Love" familiar to Chinese audiences have set off a trend of watching pure love genre works in Asia, and even for a long time, the plot routines such as car accidents, amnesia, and terminal illness leading to life and death separation involved in these works have affected the narrative direction of many subsequent love film and television works.
In terms of domestic pure love dramas, "pure love + ancient dolls" and "pure love + current dolls" are more common, such as a series of costume fairy works adapted from online novels that the audience is more familiar with, or "Kra Lover" and "Why Sheng Xiao Silent" that were popular in the early years. Until this year, from "Summer Flower", which just ended not long ago, to "Return", which recently started, it is obvious that they are trying to "purify" this type of work, and their pure love style is becoming more and more obvious, or in other words, closer to the romantic sense created by earlier Japanese and Korean works.
"Summer Flower" emphasizes the psychological description of the characters under the narrative choice of weakening the main line, and even uses the psychological state of the hero and heroine to advance the narrative, so the placement of white space is undoubtedly very bold. This work uses the relatively dim lighting in the barbershop at the beginning, the details of the sun and rain that Xiao Han sends He Ran home with an umbrella, and even the dressing and matching of the hero and heroine, all of which create an expression of atmosphere that young audiences often emphasize, and the word "atmosphere" is very consistent with the narrative principle of pure love drama.
"The Way Home", which is expected to be "the first sweet and pure love drama on the satellite TV platform since the beginning of 2023", tells the story of a reunion of first loves after a long absence, where there is romance from school uniforms to wedding dresses, and there is also a sense of fateful re-falling in love with someone. This work is adapted from Mo Bao Feibao's novel of the same name, and the author himself wrote the screenplay, so it has indeed won the recognition of many audiences in the restoration of the famous scenes of the story. What is more noteworthy is that the love between the hero and heroine, the special police captain and the investment bank elite, not only boosts the curiosity of the audience, but also makes the entire pure love work have more realistic expression through details such as explosive disposal work and strict training methods.
"Homecoming" not only retains the sugar in sweet love, but also adds the hero's ambition and pride to guard his home country, and no matter what the circumstances, Gui Xiao firmly chooses Lu Yanchen, this unswerving commitment is the emotional core of pure love works, just like the classic dialogue in the play:
"It's not that you don't know, I eat the most apology, you say I'm sorry, I'll be fine."
"I'm sorry."
It can be seen from this that the current creators' exploration of pure love dramas has initially revealed the creative characteristics of actively catering to the audience and being closer to real life, which is the inevitable transformation of the marketization of a type of work, and it is also the result of the continuous cultivation of the drama market in different themes.
The subject dimension needs to be expanded
New changes in women's consciousness under the theme of revenge
Recently, due to the high popularity of the Korean drama "Dark Glory", a lot of content creation discussions on revenge dramas have emerged in the industry. Generally speaking, the protagonist's revenge task in the play will become the focus of performance, and the protagonist's revenge emotions and behaviors will also become the driving force that directly promotes the development of the story. Starting from the works that are more familiar to most audiences, such as "Deep Rain", the setting of "Nemesis" Yiping is to take revenge on her father's daughter, although the whole film is more focused on the telling of the love story of the hero and heroine, but Yiping's ideological foundation of "revenge" also lays a major foreshadowing for the subsequent narrative turn of the entire work.
The hit TV series "The Temptation to Go Home", which was once broadcast on Hunan Satellite TV, has always been the representative of female revenge dramas, and this work uses the classic narrative model of "cheating friends - planning revenge - achieving goals" to tell the rebirth story of urban housewife Lin Pinru. Lin Pinru in the play targeted Ellie in order to avenge the "hatred of taking her husband", and after Ellie's company went bankrupt, she chose to destroy her relationship with Hong Shixian again. At this time, the perspective of "women opposing women" in revenge works was pulled to the extreme. In the next two or three years, many works such as "The Return of a Thousand Gold", "Because of How Beautiful Love" and "Love You, Inextricably Stranded" seized the popularity of revenge dramas and chased after victory, setting off a wave of small climax.
Later, in the narration of domestic women's revenge dramas, we found a very obvious narrative turn. For example, the short sentence "Deadly Woman" broadcast last year focuses more on female empathy, incorporating knowledge points in psychological directions such as the "gaslight effect", and trying to emphasize the plight of women from a more objective perspective.
Similarly, as mentioned above, the creation of pure love dramas has turned, and domestic revenge dramas have also begun to highlight strong realism. In the play, from the life situation of the heroine Wen Qi to her mother, as well as the extension of the relationship between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, they all try to pull the perspective of early "female opposing women" back to a neutral position, and begin to call for more women to know how to love themselves from the perspective of their own relationship with the sexes, and even uncover the pain of equal rights for women today.
In addition to the depth of the theme, we can try to look at the theme of overseas revenge, from "Dark Glory" which focuses on school violence, "First Blood" which focuses on the real plight of retired soldiers, "The Little Son of the Chaebol Family" and "Penthouse" where the struggle between chaebols fights, to "Little People" against gangster forces, etc., its content range is relatively broad. In domestic works, most of them are extended around marriage and family stories, and at this point, domestic revenge dramas obviously have a lot of room for improvement.
The pull of tradition and awakening
Real life and plot creation are also trending
In recent years, with the rise of the "she economy", the drama market has begun to further cater to the preferences of female audiences, creating many works that are narrated from a female perspective, and the role shaping of women has also shown the characteristics of continuous advancement. If interpreted from the audience's viewing needs, it is not difficult to understand the rising popularity of pure love dramas and revenge dramas this time, that is, under the pressure of real life, the audience's emotional concepts are easy to differentiate into two poles: one is to choose to use extremely high concentrations of intimacy to satisfy their dream imagination, and the function of pure love stories is in the middle; The second is to try to avoid the emergence of intimate relationships, for example, many audiences support the main line of revenge dramas or the characters' focus on careers, and even say that they will choose to abandon the drama if there are too many love scenes.
It can be imagined that in the process of watching revenge dramas, female audiences empathize with the avengers and hate the behavior of the perpetrators, and as the series develops, the protagonist will often turn against the wind, and the audience will also reap the relief of anxiety and the catharsis of negative emotions. But when the story ends and returns to real life, the audience's revenge will be dissolved by the details of life, and the expectation of sweet love will be turned to the expectation of sweet love, so the demand for watching pure love dramas will rise. 、
Previously, the book "Reading Romance Novels" has disassembled around the soothing role of romance novels on women's lives, proposing that readers choose to read romance novels and achieve the purpose of escaping reality and edifying themselves through it, thinking carefully about the function of pure love dramas, and even together with revenge dramas, standing at the two poles of the audience's psychology, meeting the needs of different audiences or different psychological stages of the same audience.
Finally, let's put aside the psychological motivation of the audience and review it from the creative perspective of the content industry. The current popularity of pure love dramas and revenge dramas can undoubtedly play a big role in promoting the innovation of genre dramas. Specifically, it is to use a set of narrative rules that have been fully tested and proven by the market to further integrate into the needs of the audience in the current era to achieve a win-win situation of popularity and word-of-mouth.
In other words, drama innovation is to observe, dig deep in the subtleties of human nature, and maintain the rhythm of "one step faster" than the audience, so that you can grasp the focus of the current traffic. From this perspective, in the near future, more "genre drama + new value concepts" will emerge, and the emotions and emotional speculations of the dramas will also move towards diversification simultaneously.