8 K-Drama cliches you can predict after watching more than 10 shows: Umbrellas, amnesia and noble sacrifices

Ah, K-dramas and their beloved clichés. Would they even be K-dramas without a dramatic umbrella handover in the rain, ommas and ommonies plotting from the sidelines, or a last-minute twist courtesy of the infamous 'White Truck of Doom'? Probably not.

For all their innovation, K-dramas remain fiercely loyal to the tropes fans know by heart: The poor girl-rich boy romance, fake marriages that become all too real, enemies who inevitably fall in love, chaebol heirs throwing money at every problem, children left at orphanages and those mysterious childhood connections that somehow explain everything. The funny thing is, no matter how many times we see them, they still work. K-dramas have a knack for turning the most predictable clichés into binge-worthy magic.

Here are five more, that create the most discussion. They never fail to pull viewers deeper into the emotional spiral.

If you've binged your way through Korean dramas, you know that the favourite most exhausted trope, is, the love triangle. There was a time when K-Dramas could not do without it, and eventually, it would split the fandoms right down to the middle.

Usually, the second lead's presence would cause enough friction and tension between the leads, enough for the first lead to finally overcome his own reservations and blurt out his affections. Second lead suffers. Yikes.

In Boys over Flowers, Koo Hy-sun goes for the brattish, abrasive Lee Min-ho finally, despite that she had a very pleasant option in Kim Hyun-Joong. And then there was also True Beauty, earnest Cha Eun-woo or Hwang In-Youp? Moon Ga-Young's Lim Joo-Kyung was in love with Eun-woo's Su-ho, and most fans have never quite forgiven the choice.

They would've met, somehow, in childhood. Nobody usually can meet someone randomly, without having some link to their past. What's Wrong with Secretary Kim dials this up to the eleven: Our charismatic leads Park Seo-joon and Park Min-young, CEO and secretary in the present, had actually met each other as children, during a traumatising kidnapping. Of course, only one party knows this and doesn't reveal it for the first eleven episodes, because why not? Another show was also, It's Okay Not to be Okay, where Kim Soo-hyun's Gang Tae had already met Seo Ye-ji's Ka Moon-young as a child, fallen in love with 'her cold eyes' and been rejected---only to meet her years later. Unfortunately, here their pasts are linked in a particularly traumatic manner (Read: Excessively farfetched).

This is a universal trope, but K-Dramas crank up the drama to the nines. The leads always pull the noble sacrifice, so nobly, that they leave the other party in bitter, furious and heartbroken tears, while crying themselves. Straightforward communication is out of the question, and probably a "Hey, let's just sleep on this for a bit," isn't a solution.

Hyun Bin pretends he never loved Son Ye-Jin in the cold interrogation scene in Crash Landing on You. She doesn't quite believe him, because she knows that the man has taken a bullet for her, but nevertheless the devastation is so raw that she collapses outside the room. True Beauty pulls a similar angle, though really, for no reason at all: Eunwoo's Suho has to leave the country for his father's surgery. He is going to be away for a year. He doesn't want Joo-Kyung to keep waiting for him. So he breaks up with her tearily on the phone. In Heirs, Park Shin-hye leaves Lee Min-ho without telling him, because she realises that she can't ever fit into his family. She escapes to the nearest seaside town, and when he tracks her down, she begs him to leave her alone. Tears, tears and so many tears.

Endless sacrifices. But then where's the show without it?

Somehow, in most shows, Episode 14-15 is where a misunderstanding occurs, or somebody is pushing away the other. The episodes are spent in angst, sad songs, one of the leads walking down Seoul streets sobbing (Hello Park Bo-Gum from Encounter), remembering their good times. And then, by Episode 15, a realisation occurs. By the finale, they have realised their mistake, and rushed to reconcile with their loved ones, who is usually about to leave town, or sitting somewhere morosely contemplating their lives. Their phones are switched off, of course, so the lead has to remember, Where did they once say that their favourite place was?

The amnesia trope isn't going anywhere, anytime soon folks. It has persisted for years and will continue to do so, as Dynamite Kiss proved. K-Dramas love a good amnesia plotline. After building all the chemistry, tension for over 14 episodes and a possible reconciliation, one lead will suffer from amnesia and not recognise the love of their life, so it's up to the latter to rejig their memories through familiar objects and surroundings. They won't remember a thing of course, not unless something so significant happens that it jolts them out of their amnesia shock. In Boys over Flowers, Koo Hye-sun resorts to the worst scenario: Almost drowning so that Lee Min-ho jumps in to save her.

Cue flashbacks of all the times that she almost drowned, and he rescued her.

Normally, if you see a car coming and your friend is walking into the middle of the road, you pull them back gently. In the world of K-Drama that doesn't work. Nada. You need to jump in the middle of the street, cover them and push them to the side in slow motion. It happens so often in every K-Drama that even Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok-Joo parodied the trope. This move always brings the tension, as the leads stare at each other for several minutes, and cue: 'Oh he isn't such a cold fish after all, he does care about people'.