Why rules of time travel don't matter in Twinkling Watermelon

a video essay edition

I’ve been working on this one for a while.

2023 has been interestingly heavy in time travel dramas. Not just in K-dramaland but in c-dramas as well.

The one interesting commonality I found amongst them is the general lack of any explanation for how the time travel happens. The answer is either magic or no answer at all.

With a drama like Perfect Marriage Revenge we got a no explanation time travel, while with Twinkling Watermelon and Tale of the Nine Tailed 1938 we accepted that it was magic.

I don’t think anyone was overly upset at the lack of hard rules.

But looking back, we have also had dramas like A Time Called You, Kairos, Signal, and many more which absolutely had iron-clad rules around time travel, and whose stakes mostly came from those rules.

In this video I look into why fans obsess over the semantics of some time travel dramas while they are happy to overlook the details for others.

(This is a nearly 30 minute video, so come back to it later if you don’t have the time now!)

Hugs!
Paroma