Your Honour: How to Write a Workplace Romance

When Your Honour started a few months ago, I was obviously going to watch it, since I would watch anything for Yoon Shi-yoon. I didn't expect to fall in love with it. But a straight review format would definitely not work for Your Honour - aside from mentioning the directorial genius in court-room scenes and the perfection of the soundtrack, I'd have to talk about the abandoned plot points, the wasted potential of the story, the underutilised actors and characters. I don't want to talk about any of that, because Your Honour is so good in spite of it all. So today I want to talk about one of the ways that the drama managed to be to satisfying.

Your Honour stars one of my favourite actors, Yoon Shi-yoon, in dual roles as twins who could not any more different. Han Kang-ho, a fiery-tempered gangster, ends up adopting his brother's role as a judge after he disappears. The twist is that he proves pretty damn good at it, inspiring the loyalty and admiration of judicial trainee Song So-eun along the way.

It wasn't until I watched Your Honour that I discovered the underlying problem I tend to have with workplace romance dramas - simply that, in reality, perhaps some of the advances of one party could have much bigger consequences than in any other setting. The grand romantic developments in What's Wrong With Secretary Kim, for example, made me uncomfortable because if I didn't know that the two had feelings for each other, these could be interpreted as acts of sexual harassment.
  Your Honour immediately, and boldly, dismisses workplace advances as appropriate when they are clearly not reciprocated. It does this in the form of a character I can only call Slimy Prosecutor (because I genuinely can't remember his name, and don't want to), who makes several disgusting sexual advances against So-eun in the first few episodes. He eventually receives his comeuppance for this, in the drama's way of proving that sexual  harassment and assault are inexcusable and should be treated with intolerance.

Establishing a romance within the workplace is difficult enough when the two workers are of the same status, meaning one doesn't carry superiority over the other. Kang-ho and So-eun's blossoming attraction could have easily been written wrong. After all, Kang-ho acts as So-eun's superior and thus there's an obvious power imbalance that could have been expressed. But Your Honour goes out of it's way to show that dominance in a relationship is toxic. After all, a man asserting his power over a woman happens within the narrative - in the form of So-eun's older sister being raped by someone with enough money to escape punishment for it - and the event is horrible and traumatising.
  But Kang-ho is far too nervous to approach So-eun romantically, since he considers her as someone 'too good' for him and doesn't think he is worthy of love. He admires her just as much as she admires him, and he would never do anything that may cause her actual discomfort. If you want an example of how he respects her, just note that, even after they become closer, he talks to her formally in jondaemal, like she does to him. They are on equal footing.
  This is a bit of a tangent, but on the note of equal footing, I'm so used to seeing heroines lose their story in favour of them just being there to induce growth in the male lead (The Best Hit, Hwayugi, and even to some extent my favourite drama I Hear Your Voice), but Your Honour does something more interesting. The drama mostly focuses on Kang-ho's perspective and his character arc, yes, but it also prioritises So-eun's happiness. The story can't end until she's in a happy place, and I'm so thankful for that. Lee Yoo-young was perfect for the role, and I'm happy that Yoon Shi-yoon was paired with someone just as talented as he is after working with Jin Se-yeon in Grand Prince.
  Anyhow, even after expressing his feelings for So-eun, Kang-ho doesn't force them on her. Only after she kisses his forehead, indicating reciprocation and consent, does he pursue her seriously. In the first place, their relationship wasn't really ever approached like one of colleagues - they were allies from the beginning, and maybe even friends.

God, I love this drama.