The balance of a slow burn romance.

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After watching My ID is Gangnam Beauty, I understood how important it was to build an effective slow-burn romance. It’s a challenging task because on one end, the romance can feel too quick to be classified as a slow burn, and on the slower end, it can feel dragged out, adding tension and unwanted drama to avoid boredom. Today, I’ll discuss the balance needed between these two extremes. There is a craft involved, like writing any romance, but an audience needs to feel connected to these characters and be interested in the story before any romance trope can be considered successful.

Setting up the romance is the most important part of a slow burn because if people aren’t invested in the romance, they won’t be invested in the slow burn. There needs to be a portrayal of what these two characters are like separately before building upon the romance and slow burn elements. If the characters have nothing to build upon, there is nothing to make people want to watch the development. If there is no chemistry, it can become unrealistic and make people not want to keep watching for the slow burn aspect. For example, Fruits Basket shows the life of Tohru in a way that makes the audience empathise with her, and with the setup in the first episode, the audience can see what they are getting into.

Having a balance between not making the romance too quick and not dragging it out is the challenge of writing a…