Comment by mayd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mayd | Hacker News Reader

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I do agree that the "Deutschland 83/86/89" TV series was great espionage drama, but I also think your Eurocentric bias is showing. I have often wondered why Asia has been continuously overlooked in the espionage TV drama stakes. Even John LeCarré's "The Honourable Schoolboy" never got adapted to the screen. My conclusion is that it is not due to a lack of good material but due to political and cultural reasons. Westerners are uncomfortable with portraying Asian geopolitical adversaries such as Communist China and North Korea because they don't want to be accused of racism. When was the last time you saw or read a tale about Chinese spies? Sadly, this has resulted in a vast, unexplored region of espionage drama being totally ignored. I wonder if they make Asia-focussed spy drama in Japan?

Right now I am watching The Sympathizer, a Vietnamese drama about the Cold War, focussed on the Vietnamese take on the matter. Its on HBO Max. Weekly release so not yet finished. They just added the third episode, and I've almost finished that. Seems very much promising.

South Korea also has a cinema scene. I once saw a Korean horror and it was unlike anything I saw before. Like, really weird. But it had nothing to do with spy drama.

A lot of spy drama or action from the Cold War era is very over the top and/or propagandist/fear mongering. Drama is dramatized, but can easily be regarded as overdramatized, bending the truth too much in the process. At such point, a good documentary on the subject is probably preferred. The faith I have in a country like China or North Korea being authentic on such matters in documentary is near zero, and thus I assume their drama on the matter will equal the low effort American cinema we saw previous century.

That a band like Laibach was allowed to play in North Korea is very much telling to me.

I watched the first episode the Sympathiser last week. It occurs to me that South Korea is the only Asian country that has produced significant modern-era (i.e. Cold War and later) espionage dramas that have been widely distributed in the West: these with the two Koreas as protagonists, of course. The only other Asia-focussed espionage dramas that spring to mind are a few with pre-WWII era plots involving Imperial Japan.

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