Learning More About Telenovelas

 I signed up for this FYOS because I watch a lot of Korean dramas and I love watching "spicy" shows so I thought I'd give it a try. Also, watching dramas help me vent out my bottled-up emotions, whether it be crying along with a character or getting angry at the antagonist.

Before going into this class, the knowledge I had on telenovelas was surface level. I just knew that they had very dramatic scene transitions and the characters had very complicated family trees. But after the first two classes, I learned that there was more to telenovelas than just the cheesy scenes: there's a lot of interesting history behind each telenovela, along with the telenovela writers. Also, I found that kdramas are very similar to telenovelas. As for the plot, there's usually always a love triangle, a nasty character that makes everybody very mad and irritated, and a Cinderella story, where the poor girl from the countryside meets a very wealthy boy in the city; it's almost always very predictable. When I saw the graph of the typical telenovela timeline, I noticed how similar it was to kdramas: the line keeps going up and down throughout the development of the show, causing the viewers to be on the edge of their seats, watching very anxiously. 

Due to the many similarities, this led me to think that these drama plots are timeless—they're archetypal. The reason why so many of us are able to predict what's going to happen next is because we've seen this type of plot unfold before—there's nothing new to these storylines, though occasionally, there are unpredictable plot twists.

I'm very excited to learn more about telenovelas, including the history, and am ready to put many telenovelas on my list of shows I need to watch!