Okay, confession time—although I’m sure I’m not the only one tripping on these addicting online AI mini romances and telenovelas with hunks and beauties that put their human counterparts to shame. In recent weeks, I’ve learned that many friends of mine, of all genders, now turn to these short online mini-series to get to sleep or entertain themselves.
Why not? It’s escapism at its quickest and finest, available on your phone, even if it’s loaded with every stereotype in the book, er, app. The heroine—Claire? Elena? Sophia?—is blonde or dark-haired, with gorgeous locks, a 22-inch waist, size 36D breasts, and wears a beaded evening gown even to board meetings and to pick up her kid at school. Sometimes, she does have a cute kid, and is secretly a respected forensic accountant (a common hidden occupation, the better to tear apart her cheating husband’s money laundering) or has an MBA from Wharton.
DramaBox’s crime drama ‘A Million Regrets for Her Scattered Bones’—but I don’t want to pay to see the ending!
Meanwhile, the offending male—Ethan? Nolan? Grant?—who can’t believe she wants a divorce after she caught him canoodling with the equally endowed Vanessa (or Chloe or Valerie), is usually an heir to a family fortune and sits in a huge office with big glass windows overlooking New York/Chicago/Seattle. He has brooding eyes, a chiseled jaw, wears charcoal gray suits, and is not above kneeling to ask for forgiveness after learning that his low-key, long-suffering wife is heiress to a billion-dollar family fortune (Sterling? Whitmore? Harrington?). Oh, and lest you think this is misogynistic, I’ve watched a few where the cheating wife is the asshole who regrets everything in the end.
You inevitably get to the point where you’re asked to pay to find out what happens in the end. Then again, the tropes are so familiar, you can guess where it’s going. If you’re lucky, and the algorithm blesses you, the episodes come into your feed in installments, all the way to the conclusion. If you can’t wait, though, and you’re stuck with a cliffhanger, that’s when you can pay for a subscription, for specific periods (a week, a year). That’s how some apps—DramaBox, GoodNovel, GoodShort—ended up on my phone, although I haven’t coughed up a cent yet. I really don’t need to guess if the maid who took a bullet for the tattooed Moretti mafia Don’s charming Italian mother ends up marrying him. Well, after their hands keep brushing against each other—of course it’s “electric,” silly—and she dares to answer back even if “he can bring the temperature down by walking into a room,” you know where it’s headed.
A screenshot from GoodShort’s ‘Forbidden Touch: Taming My Stepfather’
There are basically two kinds of material, I’ve learned. There are AI clips that lead you to a story you can read—and which you can read to the end, but with a multitude of irritating, repetitious ads you have to sit through—or purely visual stories, where the creators really go to town with the AI. While reading through one prose version, I actually got to the end to find instructions (to the writer, I suppose) on additional character and plot development, which the uploaders probably forgot to delete. Hmmm, do I smell a sideline?
There are well-made dramas, with very human-looking characters, with extreme close-ups of eyes, even pores and swallowing throats, and complete with resounding slaps—yes, indeed, oooh, ang daming sampalan, and it’s cathartic to have the savior billionaire father/husband walk in just as his daughter/wife has been humiliated by the villain. So heroine slaps mistress, gets slapped by evil mother-in-law, and father/husband slaps mother-in-law; the cheeks even redden before your eyes! State-of-the-art cinematic technology!
Meanwhile, for the cheaper versions, the faces of celebrities have been appropriated—I’ve seen Sylvester Stallone, Jason Momoa, Henry Cavill, and Tom Brady, as well as Emma Stone and Elle Fanning. How do they even get away with that? Or do they pay any royalties for the music playing in the background? (Christina Perri’s A Thousand Years is a favorite.) Sometimes, the dialogue hilariously doesn’t match the lip movements, and a little boy could be talking in the mafia Don’s voice. Words on documents or signs are not spelled properly, or mispronounced in the dubbing; in one mafia story, the Bellini family was consistently called the Baloney family. I wonder if the dubber is still alive, as per mafia justice? Then again, when you read that most of these creators are Chinese or Singaporean companies, it makes sense—the massacred English, as well as the idealized protagonists.
Naturally, these dramas have insane clickbait titles like His Love Came After My Plane Crash, He Broke the Heart That Saved Him, Stand Down! She’s A Secret General, and the potentially award-winning The Next CEO Turns Out To Be My Gynecologist. I did not make that up.
Oh, and when a drama is labeled “hot” in DramaBox, it’s not just popular; it could mean there are sex scenes, which can be alarmingly vigorous. I swear I wasn’t searching for anything naughty, but I came across this story about a young girl who goes home to her mother’s ranch and gets seduced by her stepfather, whom she calls “Daddy” in bed (of course); after all, she’s wearing no panties under her micro-mini skirt when he takes her horseback riding (ouch). That snowballed into more hot series on my feed, including a gay love affair inspired by Heated Rivalry, with two hockey players making out everywhere. The app blurs any delicate parts, but you can still make out the outlines of a man’s behind.
Even the wolf stories of bonded Alphas and Lunas have gay versions, which is interesting. In one story, because the girl can’t join her future husband for one reason or another, her family opts to send her twin brother (eh?)—and he and future husband have a howling good time, pardon the pun.
I feel you, ate.
To be fair, some of this stuff is decently written, despite the most common tropes: wife leaves husband when he cheats and he finds out how rich she secretly is; woman or her child is treated badly at a family event, and woman cuts all payments for household expenses; maid or nurse saves a mafia Don’s mother/child/dog (that last one I love, though it’s always a big Cane Corso or Rottweiler, as mafia Dons apparently don’t do Bichon Frisés), and they fall in love after a shoot-out where his enemies try to hurt her. In one story where the heroine cuts all contact with her abusive family, she muses, “Memories are not contracts. They do not require us to keep surrendering our future to honor the past.” O, di ba?
Unfortunately, when the written stories belabor convoluted relationships (somebody belatedly discovers who his/her parent or sibling is) and loyalties, you can only take so much of those overused names. There’s always an Ethan Cole or an Eleanor Vale somewhere, or a Don named Alessandro or Dominic, or his brother or right-hand man named Luca or Marco.
What if…?
Then there are unique, albeit sometimes morbid, plots, like the mom who trains her daughter to literal death because of her own track-and-field frustrations. Unfortunately, it gets hammy when Mom falls, hits her head, and can now somehow see dead daughter’s ghost, who won’t accept Mom’s apology. I was actually following one (I Refused Deep-Sea Rescue for My Ex’s Daughter, DramaBox) where a professional rescue diver’s son perished in a submersible because her ultra-rich husband wouldn’t authorize the son’s retrieval. Ten years later, now ex-husband’s daughter with his new wife is stuck in the same situation, and he finds out the only rescuer who can do it is his ex-wife. There’s also A Million Regrets for Her Scattered Bones, where Mom and Dad favor their sociopath older daughter over the younger one. When the younger one is brutally dismembered by a serial killer, Mom, the coroner who autopsies the headless body, doesn’t know who it is. I’m dying to see how this ends, but nope, still not paying.
Suddenly everybody’s related to the Sterling family!
As our friend Annie said, she’s positive Filipinos could make a killing exploiting this medium, since we’re so wonderful at drama. Pinoys are already having a lot of fun on social media (check out the accompanying images). There are numerous posts on the Sterling family, and a friend of mine, a respectable straight male, even AI-ed himself into the poster of Step Back! I’m The Hidden King!
Other than the little time I lose sneaking in an episode or two, the respite is welcome. If only the criminals and corrupt politicos around us were caught and disposed of as quickly and efficiently as the bad guys in AI dramas. Then again, that’s why they’re escapist.
