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Pierce Conran

Lead cast: Kim Hyang-gi, Cha Hak-yeon, Kim Jae-hyun, Son Jeong-hyeok, Kim Dong-kyu
The worlds of glossy high school comedy and steamy BL (boys’ love) melodrama collide in the breezy new drama Absolute Value of Romance.
Kim Hyang-gi (Cashero) plays Yeo Ui-ju, a high school student in the idyllic old town of Jeonju who spends her evenings at home hunched over her laptop, secretly churning out web novels.
Her genre is BL, a popular phenomenon that focuses on the romantic misunderstandings and misadventures of handsome young men. The genre is generally produced and consumed by heterosexual women, despite the homoerotic entanglements at the core of these stories.


Ui-ju is a passionate BL devotee. Unfortunately, as a writer, she has no fans of her own, as the chapters she slaves over night after night receive neither clicks nor comments.
One morning on the way to school, her jaw drops when she witnesses four beautiful young men stretching and laughing together on a neighbouring balcony.
Spying on them around the neighbourhood and hearing snatches of their conversations out of context, she is delighted to have fuel for her BL fantasies. That is until one of them, Ga Woo-su (Cha Hak-yeon, Castaway Diva), catches her in the act and confronts her.
Her mortification deepens when she arrives at school, where she discovers that her hunky new neighbours are the school’s newest teaching hires. What is worse, Woo-su is her new homeroom teacher, and he seems to have it out for her.

While all her classmates fawn over Woo-su and his flatmates, Ui-ju dreads turning up to class. However, merely being in their presence helps get her creative juices flowing, and before she knows it, she has started working on a new BL web novel featuring characters modelled on them, using dialogue she has overheard from their conversations.
She briefly worries whether her latest tome hews too close to reality, but the creative pull is too strong. She publishes the first chapter and thinks no more of it. However, the next time she logs in to her web novel portal, she is unable to find her book at the bottom of the rankings – because it has shot all the way to number one.
Bewildered by the response, she sets to work on the next chapters. Thankfully, owing to her many run-ins with Woo-su and his friends, inspiration is not in short supply. But how long can Ui-ju keep this up until someone realises her protagonists are based on her neighbours, and will her anonymous pen name shield her when that day comes?
Ui-ju and Woo-su’s relationship is already being set up for a dramatic revelation. Woo-su is serious and seems unduly harsh. However, as Ui-ju learns the various reasons behind his strict demeanour, he steadily becomes more vulnerable in her eyes.

He clashes with her at first, but his subsequent behaviour, though stern, comes from a desire to help her, or at least to teach her to help herself.
Early in the series, she accidentally steps on his glasses and lies about it. That lie begins to torment her, feeding her guilt until she is forced to come clean.
Realising her heart was in the right place, Woo-su forgives her, and it becomes a bonding moment for the unlikely teacher-student pair. But if and when her extracurricular activities come to light, will that cautious bond survive?
Woo-su is not exactly a fully formed character, but his relationship with Ui-ju does provide him with a grounding arc.
On the other hand, his fellow teachers – language teacher Noh Da-ju (Kim Jae-hyun of the boy band N.Flying), PE teacher Jung Ki-jeon (Son Jeong-hyeok, Perfect Crown) and literature teacher Yoon Dong-ju (Kim Dong-kyu, Moon River) – are pure eye candy and fodder for Ui-ju’s imagination.

In the show’s most stylised scenes, Ui-ju’s writing jumps off the screen. Her fantasy BL world comes to life with hazy lighting, smoky eyes and styled hair, with her characters getting up close and personal and breathing sweet nothings into each other’s ears when they are not fighting with one another.
Sometimes Ui-ju feels she is going too far, as she imagines herself being arrested by the web novel police for her outrageously tawdry storylines, a daydream born out of the shame she feels for her secret passion.
But, bolstered by her newfound success, perhaps she will be emboldened to embrace her desires – clearly her readers would love her for it.
Absolute Value of Romance is streaming on Prime Video.


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Kim Hyang-gi as Yeo Ui-ju, a high school student who writes boys’ love web novels featuring characters based on her attractive teachers, in a still from the new Prime Video K-drama Absolute Value of Romance.

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Kim Hyang-gi as high school student Yeo Ui-ju in a still from Absolute Value of Romance.

Cha Hak-yeon (left) as Ga Woo-su and Kim Dong-kyu as literature teacher Yoon Dong-ju in a still from Absolute Value of Romance.

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Kim Hyang-gi stars as a high school student and BL web novel author for whom four hot teachers bring inspiration and big moral dilemmas


Kim Hyang-gi stars as a high school student and BL web novel author for whom four hot teachers bring inspiration and big moral dilemmas.


Prime Video K-drama Absolute Value of Romance: high school comedy with a boys’ love twist

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Kim Hyang-gi stars as a high school student and BL web novel author for whom four hot teachers bring inspiration and big moral dilemmas

Kim Hyang-gi stars as a high school student and BL web novel author for whom four hot teachers bring inspiration and big moral dilemmas