KJCKorea
Journal Central

This study proposes a new methodological framework for drama genre analysis in the OTT era, where genre hybridity has intensified. Drawing on Aristotle’s notion of catharsis and aligning it with Spinoza’s theory of affect, the study argues that affect offers a viable basis for defining subgenres. Through a case analysis of the melodrama The Red Sleeve, the research examines narrative sequences and affective transitions to demonstrate that the drama constructs a sorrow‑and‑love affective regime. Sorrow is sustained and intensified through love, producing a melodramatic affect that moralizes compassion, devotion, and sacrifice, and ultimately culminates in catharsis as sorrow is transformed into fulfilled love. These findings suggest that Spinozist affect theory can serve as an effective methodological tool for genre identification. While the study contributes by bridging structuralist and poststructuralist approaches, its reliance on a single case indicates the need for broader empirical validation.

This study approaches the narrative structures of streaming platform series as norms produced within platform environments. Focusing on Narco-Saints and Big-Bet, it examines how platform-specific modes of access, interfaces, and surrounding industrial-discursive conditions shape and formalize narrative organization. The analysis proceeds from the premise that platforms do more than distribute content: they also generate rules that arrange audience attention and induce re-entry. Drawing on discussions of Quality TV and Cinematic TV, the article first considers how streaming series mobilize cinematic experience alongside genre formulas and conventions to produce and modulate genre expectations. In Narco-Saints, paratexts surrounding the work—markers such as the director and cast, the “based on a true story” label, and promotional copy—prime interpretive orientations prior to viewing. The text itself activates genre schemas through strategies of evocation. Within the series, the management of narration encourages viewers to form and continually revise hypotheses, extending the time of inference and verification and thereby producing pleasures specific to serial narrative experience. Big-Bet demonstrates a structure in which seasons and episodes operate according to developmental rules established at the planning stage: each episode advances events while simultaneously producing the conditions that propel movement to the next. In particular, the combination of bundled episode release and sequential release organizes both rapid entry and sustained access, while release intervals create time for interpretation and discursive circulation, expanding the space for external devices such as recap clips to intervene. As micro-level behaviors—pausing, rewatching, and skipping—accumulate at the episode level, the series narrative is continuously reconstituted, structuring both the conditions for the accumulation of narrative information and the rhythms of access. Taken together, Narco-Saints builds its narrative by continually renewing reading practices through evocation and informational modulation, whereas Big-Bet constructs its narrative by organizing cycles of access and return through episode design and release strategy. These dynamics reveal how streaming platforms function as both structuring environments and operational units. Future research should compare shifts in platform interfaces and market strategies, intertextual relations, interpretive approaches to viewing data, and pathways of user circulation in order to more precisely capture the contemporary narrative structures that streaming platforms produce.

Among the proletarian plays of KAPF, Martin Who Lost a Leg has remained a virtually unknown work until now. This study, in the process of tracing its source, excavated the original text: Kasperle as a Spy(1922), a proletarian puppet play by the German author Kurt Tucholsky. Furthermore, the study identified Japanese translations and adaptations such as Kasperle as a Dog, Martin Who Lost a Leg, and Sam. Based on these findings, it was confirmed that Martin Who Lost a Leg, along with other previously unidentified works –such as Kasperle by the Hamhung Sohyeong-geukjang and the Megaphone, and Sam Who Lost a Leg by the Shingeonseol– were all based on the same original work. While the German original was created as part of the puppet theater movement for proletarian youth education, the Japanese versions were products of the PROT movement’s drive for the popularization of theater. This clearly demonstrates the influence of the “Proletarian Kasperl Puppet Theater” experiments from Germany’s Weimar Republic era on the Japanese. From the outset, KAPF attempted to produce this work as a stage play rather than a puppet show, suggesting that the federation prioritized the socio-educational impact over the puppet theater format itself. Furthermore, this work holds significance in that it reveals the possibility of clandestine performances and the attempt to integrate popular entertainment and Revue formats into theater. Consequently, this play serves as crucial evidence that illuminates the global historical context of the proletarian theater movement –stretching from Germany through Japan to KAPF– while proving that KAPF’s discourse on the popularization of theater was actively attempted through specific creative works.