Something's Strange About the Dramas in This Drama World
To me, dramas had always meant something significant.
My parents both worked, so they came home late every night, and once evening rolled around, the friends who'd play with me would vanish one by one. With no siblings to speak of either, I had to find my own way to soothe the loneliness.
I think that was around when it started — flipping through TV channels and stumbling, by chance, onto a hit drama.
That first drama hit me like a shockwave. Fun, emotion, even the occasional lesson woven through it — it felt like stepping into a whole new world. So of course I fell for dramas, hard.
Sitcoms had me laughing until I couldn't stop. Melodramas gave me vicarious thrills of romance. Family dramas let me feel the warmth of my hardworking parents in a way I hadn't before. If I stretched it a little, dramas were something like a benefactor to me.
And then…
"Could I write a drama like that someday?"
By the time I came to my senses, it had already become a dream.
Luckily I had a decent knack for writing, and through sheer bloody effort I managed to land a junior writer position at a fairly well-known production company. I started that job full of hope — only to discover, cruelly, that a junior writer's work barely deserved to be called writing at all. Like the bottom rung of any other profession, I mostly got stuck with the grueling grunt work.
Still, back then just watching the seniors put a drama together from the sidelines was fun enough.
"You actually wrote this?"
After three years of grinding myself into the ground, an opportunity dropped into my lap out of nowhere. It started when PD Kim Jincheol — the man who oversaw the entire drama planning and production department — happened to read a script I'd saved on my laptop.
That day, PD Kim spent the whole day racing around the broadcasting station with my laptop in hand, pitching the story to the director himself, insisting that with a plot like this, a hit was all but guaranteed.
Thanks to him, my life got insanely busy for a while. Not in a bad way, of course. How could I not be thrilled when the drama I'd dreamed of was finally being made?
But the joy didn't last. During production, a strange abdominal pain started creeping in. Sensing something was wrong, I rushed to a university hospital for tests — and they told me it was pancreatic cancer. Not stage one. Not stage two. Stage four.
"…Fuck."
The curse tore out of me out loud. Mid-twenties, hit with an incurable disease that had a 1.4 percent survival rate. Honestly, it felt like the entire world was out to screw me over.
But still…
What matters is a heart that doesn't break, right?
I carved that phrase into my chest, gritted through pain so bad I nearly blacked out, and somehow kept the production going.
Well.
Of course, my body couldn't hold out — I went down in glorious defeat the moment episode one aired. The one silver lining, maybe, was that I'd achieved what I'd dreamed of right before dying, so I left without any lingering regrets about life.
"…Huh?"
Except I'd been sure I was dead — so why were my eyes opening again?
"Shit. Is this the afterlife or something?"
But an afterlife with a bedroom ceiling felt a little off. And it wasn't even my ceiling — it was a strange one I'd never seen before.
I sat up to get a handle on the situation. For some reason my body felt lighter than usual. Come to think of it, my voice seemed different too — awkward, somehow, in a way it never had been. Kind of… elementary-schooler-ish…
Wait.
Elementary schooler?
"Come on~ no way."
I hurriedly scanned the room and spotted a mirror in the corner. I rushed over and checked my reflection.
The hair was a neat soft two-block, clearly well-maintained. The face was rather delicate, the skin fair and smooth. The face of a boy whose future looked reasonably bright.
Except…
"Who are you?"
No matter how I looked at it, it was a face I'd never seen in my life.
I only learned this later, but this world was the one inside A Couple Like Flowers — a drama that had been popular back when I was in elementary school. And I was an extra among extras, someone who hadn't even appeared in the show. Worse, I'd been dropped into the body of a boy named Seo Eunwoo who had just turned twelve.
A guy who loved dramas, falling into a world inside a drama… It was hard not to think of it as a truly twisted fate.
"…Well. What can you do."
Still, once I realized I'd been transmigrated, I adapted fast. That was thanks to the ironclad mental fortitude forged by years of over-the-top Korean melodramas.
But it didn't take long for that proud mental fortitude to take a serious hit — all because of a single line I happened to hear from a heroine in some drama.
…?
Yeah. Something's strange about the dramas in this drama world.
Someone once said that a drama is life with the boring parts cut out.
So does that mean a world inside a drama is some ideal place where every hour overflows with emotion and entertainment?
In my purely personal opinion — no.
Just look at this world of A Couple Like Flowers that I'd fallen into without a clue why. For an extra like me, life here was ordinary — not all that different from my previous life.
Still, landing in a warm family, even if we weren't exactly rolling in money, was something to be grateful for. Having people to lean on when things got hard beat being an orphan by a long shot.
Anyway — enough rambling. Let me talk for a moment about the dramas of this drama world.
This happened on the third day after I'd realized I'd been transmigrated.
That evening I stepped out to the living room for a quick drink of water, and the TV my mother and older sister were watching naturally caught my eye. What was airing was a drama titled The Warm Princess — a title even I, someone fairly well-versed in dramas, found completely unfamiliar. My sister said it was the finale, and curiosity got the better of me, so I sat down beside them and watched.
It didn't take long for that infamous line to drop.
…What the fuck?
A legendary line so bad it could give the listener cancer. And this was what the heroine delivered at the climax?
Even more absurd — not long after, the heroine actually died of cancer, and the drama slammed to an abrupt ending.
Fuck. Whose brain did that scenario crawl out of?
As someone who'd died of pancreatic cancer in my previous life, it was a bizarre ending I could neither accept nor understand. What kind of terrestrial broadcast airing at 10 p.m. was this garbage?!
The slot between 8 and 10 p.m. is generally called prime time. A drama airing then is already halfway to success just by existing. But no matter how I looked at it, dumping something like that into such a precious time slot was a little…
And yet, ironically, the people of this drama world watched that kind of show and still found it entertaining. For example…
I skimmed the drama-related comments on my phone and that was the state of things.
They watched that and felt a lasting impression? These kids needed one proper taste of real K-drama before they started talking like that…
I even looked up related articles and found the average viewership for that drama was a full 10 percent. It had done well enough to make me laugh out loud in disbelief.
I'm actually going insane…
I lay blankly on my bed, staring up at the ceiling. An empty feeling, like my soul was slipping out of my body.
Adaptation could wait — first I had no choice but to dig into everything related to the dramas of this world. And the conclusion I reached was that most of them weren't much different in feel from The Warm Princess.
In my previous life, watching dramas had been both my hobby and my happiness. At this rate I was going to lose both.
But what could a twelve-year-old do about it? All I could do was pin my hopes on the dramas still to come. Masterpieces are forged through countless hardships and adversity, after all.
Hahaha.
"Fuck!!! Do the production companies here not have a single shred of crisis awareness?"
And yet three full years passed after that, and still no drama appeared that could quench my thirst.
For someone who loved dramas, the complete lack of progress was a bleak enough situation to bring tears to your eyes. Bleak enough that I got a secondhand taste of what depression actually felt like.
"Hey, Seo Eunwoo. How do you solve this one?"
But the guy who called himself my friend had zero grasp of what I was going through, and was cheerfully demanding answers from a math workbook.
"You thick-headed or what? Midterms are tomorrow — what are you gonna do if you can't even memorize the Pythagorean theorem?"
"Whoa~ so that's how you solve it. Guess the guys who hang around the top of the school rankings really do have different brains."
Different brains, huh…
It might look that way to him, but all I was doing was peeking at the answer key ahead of time and memorizing the solutions in a row. In theory, "I've got a previous life's experience — studying should be a piece of cake!" should have come naturally. But the second I'd become an adult in my past life, middle and high school material had long since been wiped from my brain.
Still, I'd learned the hard way just how important studying was, so I was clinging to it by force if nothing else.
Anyway.
"Come on! How about this — you solve the problem, knock on the desk once for answer one, twice for answer two, that kind of thing? Just help a guy out?"
"Oh. For a scheme that came out of your head, this one's actually pretty creative."
"Right?"
"Yeah. So shut your trap and if you can't solve it, just pick at random."
"Haha. Close one."
I casually ignored my friend smacking his lips in disappointment and turned my eyes back to the workbook.
We were currently in a café, studying for tomorrow's midterms. Ordinarily I could've just gone home and done it there, but the guy sitting across from me had offered to buy drinks if I helped him study a little, so I was playing along for a bit.
Ding-a-ling—
That was when it happened.
A chime announced that someone had just walked into the café, and the friend sitting in front of me was staring in that direction with a blank look on his face.
…Just who was it, to make him react like that?