Subverting Tropes in Haru Found by Chance

Welcome to my little corner of Pensive Purgatory - I've been thinking about Haru Found by Chance (or Extraordinary You, if you're a sheep) a whole lot since it started airing, and now these thoughts need to come out. I have three essays planned, but for starters, let's talk about how it subverts rom-com tropes, and tropes associated with Korean dramas in general. You can imagine, that as a story about storytelling, Haru Found by Chance is about as meta-fictional as it can get. The first half focuses on this consistently, while the second half is more preoccupied with seeing through the narrative stakes. Nevertheless, there is still plenty to say, so shall we dance?

The setting is most important in this topic - Haru Found by Chance is set primarily within a school for rich kids. It's a pretty typical drama setting, nothing surprising there. Except, of course, the twist is that we are within the world of a manhwa, and all the students are just characters playing roles. And the team has fun with this - the manhwa's story is essentially a retelling of Boys Over Flowers, and parodies its most remembered cliches endlessly (the scene on the left, for example, mirrors the F4 walk). Satirising the past of Korean dramas and the medium being aware of itself could be a good thing - it implies that writers are tired of working inside such a narrow framework and are desperate to start creating and stop paying homage. And yes, to an extent, homage is due - without Boys Over Flowers, without the 'rich boy meets poor girl' set-up, we may not have even experienced the hallyu wave. But clinging to those tropes because they've been successful in the past is cowardly, and the audience has outgrown them.

The way in which Haru Found by chance subverts these classic tropes is most visible through our protagonists, and since there are a lot of little insignificant instances, it's easier to just focus on these two for now. First, Dan-oh, who is easily my favourite heroine of the year (here's a few shots of her being her awesome self). The joke is that Eun Dan-oh isn't your typical heroine, of course, because the conceit of the show revolves around her discovery that she is an "extra" character in a rom-com story and her desire to break free of those chains. Unlike the sweet but decidedly one-note manhwa heroine Yeo Ju-da (who represents our downtrodden but hard-working 'candy' archetype), Dan-oh is defined by her layers. Kim Hye-yoon plays her with such vibrant energy - since the first two episodes introduce her alone, her big colourful personality is excellently showcased, and she is unstoppable in every scene.
Haru is significant in an entirely opposite way. Where Dan-oh's presence is immediate and overwhelming, Haru has little to no presence until perhaps the third episode? Even then, he doesn't immediately speak either - the initial hook of his character is his mysteriousness. I find it almost revolutionary to introduce your male lead two episodes in, after previously introducing many suitable male characters for that role, only to have him not resemble a male lead whatsoever. Of course, Haru grows into his character, and I want to talk about that more in other essays, but my point here is that Dan-oh and Haru's surprise chemistry is one of the drama's biggest strengths. To point out the flaws of more classic pairings and then produce an easily superior couple is no small feat.

Unfortunately, in a pitfall that some satire falls into, Haru Found by Chance became prey to the tropes it was initially mocking. Although there was still a little meta commentary later in the show, it was lost under this insistence to repeat the same conflicts over and over. For instance, did the writers forget my Dan-oh scoffs in the face of overcompensating boys, because for conveniences sake she is occasionally demoted to a toy that the men can fight over. Wrist grabs galore, like something out of Heirs. Look how little of her is in this shot compared to the boys towering over her! It makes me so mad. Haru Found by Chance essentially forgot that the motif of our protagonists all being 'extras' was narrative gold and took the story in a direction that made them the heroes. Shifting the story towards a more conventional path of reincarnations, fated love, and forced separations didn't necessarily ruin this story, but I will always think about what might have been.