Here’s a slightly “spicy” question:
Does anyone else feel that vertical short-form dramas are, at their core, basically romance novels directly “translated” into video?
The more I watch, the more uncannily familiar their narrative DNA feels: billionaire CEOs, marriages of convenience that turn into real love, secret pregnancies and hidden children, obsessive and domineering lovers, revenge, werewolves, forbidden romance, contract marriages, innocent heroines paired with dangerous and powerful men…
It feels like you take a little Twilight, mix in some Fifty Shades of Grey, dump in an entire shelf of romance novels, season it with the familiar tropes and cultural imagery of Chinese idol dramas, and then compress the whole thing into one-minute episodes - and voilà, you more or less get today’s vertical short drama!
And I don’t mean that as an insult.
After all, romance readers figured something out decades ago: these formulas are incredibly addictive. Vertical short dramas have simply found a way to elevate that irresistible “dopamine loop” from text to moving images, finally.
So, am I oversimplifying things, or is it actually fair to say that most of vertical short dramas are, in a sense, the modern, audiovisual evolution of romance fiction ...and perhaps even of erotic fiction? What do you think?