'Fool's Love' Gets Serious About Love And Discrimination

Usually when two men kiss in a k-drama it's played for laughs, but that doesn't mean that k-dramas don't take the subject of homosexual love seriously.

In "Personal Taste" the idea that Lee Min Ho's character is mistaken for a homosexual makes for some comic plot twists but the drama hints at how difficult it might be to openly declare your orientation. In "Coffee Prince" Gong Yoo is so in love that he decides that the sex of the person he loves doesn't matter. The person he loves turns out to be a girl disguised as a boy but the fact that he was willing to see beyond gender changes his understanding of what it means to love.

And for the first 12 episodes of "Fool's Love" the drama also used the premise of a man who thinks he's in love with another man to make things funnier. 2AM's Im Seulong plays Kang Byun Chul, a lawyer who thinks he's gay because he kissed a girl disguised as his male classmate. The person he kissed was his first love and he's never been able to recover. But he's operating under a false assumption. He rejects the person he really kissed to focus on thoughts of her brother. It's funny that he assumes he's gay.

Spoiler alert: But then in Episode 13, the plot takes a serious turn, all the more compelling for the amount of time it took to reach that point. Kang Byun Chul is defending a client in court. His client fired a man and that man filed a lawsuit claiming he was unfairly dismissed because he was gay.

Kang Byun Chul starts out by defending matrimony as a holy union between a man and woman. The claimant then says he would be married except that it is not the law in Korea. He asks Kang if he ever fell in love. Because if he had fallen in love he would know that it involves feelings that you cannot deny.

After hearing the claimant's words on love, Kang realizes the words could apply to him and he begins to cry.

The episode highlights both the discrimination that the lawsuit's claimant faced and the discrimination that Kang must then face for having lost the case and cried in court.

Immediately the rumors begin to spread that Kang cried because he is gay. He could lose his job. His colleagues smirk behind his back. He is afraid of what his parents might think.

"I'm scared," he says. "I'm scared that my life is going to fall apart."

And in that episode the drama makes a very serious point about the conflict between the reality of falling in love and the restrictions imposed by law.