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Supernatural and fantasy elements have become a staple in Korean dramas more so in recent years, with many distinguishing characters possessing superpower capabilities that make them unique and memorable. Let’s review the various types of superpowers that help make our favorite dramas that much more enticing.
Psychic Connections
The Devil (2007)
The heroine of this drama is a quiet librarian who possesses the uncanny ability for psychometry and is knowledgeable about tarot cards. She can perform psychic reading on an object to uncover its history. She uses her powers to help the hero solve the serious of deaths and find their common links.
See Past and Future
The Great Seer (2012)
One of the most powerful abilities is to be able to see into people’s pasts and futures. This is exactly what the hero possesses. The drama goes into length to show how he uses it to his advantage — becoming a scholar of divination, a reader of geography, faces, and fortunes, and ultimately a “king-maker” who holds the key to major political shift that changed history.
Mind Reading
I Can Hear Your Voice (2013)
A favorite superpower of mine in general is mind reading, because knowing what the other person’s truly thinking is indeed quite powerful. But I Can Hear Your Voice smartly uses this unique power to facilitate both the crime-solving aspect as well as to advance the romance between our lead couple.
Stop Time
My Love From the Star (2013)
Being an alien who is unexpectedly trapped on earth for a few hundred years, our hero looks human but has the ability to pause time. The drama leverages his ability at the perfect moments to deliver some of the sweetest love confessions and romantic scenes unbeknownst to the heroine.
Detect Death
Aftermath (2013)
The quiet high school student hero suddenly develops the superpower to predict the identities of a killer and a victim. Those who appear to have red eyes are destined to die soon, while those with blue eyes are about to commit murder. He use this power to save lives and becomes an unexpected hero for the people.
Read Worries
Sweden Laundry (2014)
The bright heroine of this drama can read people’s worries in life by simply touching their clothing, and communicates with her grandmother through her dreams. This makes her laundromat business a perfect setup for her to help solve problems for others around her and create a heartwarming drama.
See Smells
The Girl Who Sees Smells (2015)
To be honest, my initial reaction to this superpower was “how lame”. But the drama pleasantly surprised me by giving the heroine a valid use of her powers — to help uncover a serial murder case. She’s essentially like a much more intelligent police dog, chasing the suspect by tracking the scent that he leaves behind.
Self-healing
One of the most prominent reasons for the antihero to be so keen on artificially creating vampires in this drama is due to the self-healing abilities of this breed, as demonstrated by our hero and villains alike frequently throughout the drama. This superpower also became one of key clues to revealing the hero’s true identity.
Fly
Among the superhuman traits of our Wolverine-like superhero is the ability to fly. There are several advantages of this power to a modern human as our hero proves to us — avoiding traffic, dodging bad guys, climbing towers, and taking the girlfriend for a romantic soar.
Expel Ghosts
This is not the first drama to have characters that can see ghosts. However, it’s the one that puts this superpower to good use. Rather than just avoiding and dodging these dark and creepy souls, our hero teams up with his ghost girlfriend to rid the evil spirits for good, and make a bit of cash on the side.
Perfect Memory
Remember – War of the Son (2016)
The hero in this drama has a special condition called Hyperthymesia that allows him to remember every day and moment in perfect detail, much more powerful even than photographic memory. He uses it to prove his own innocence to the heroine at their unpleasant initial encounter, and to save his father from a wrongful accusation.
Traverse Alternate Worlds
The main characters of this drama can all go in and out of the real world and the fictional webtoon world created by the heroine’s cartoonist father. The creators of the world can keep creating, erasing, and changing the alternate dimension by drawing the webtoon story, while the hero ultimately discovers that he can traverse between the worlds at will, without being bound to the initial rules.
Control Dark Magic
This is a superpower naturally used more by the evil characters. In the case of this drama, black magic served multiple purposes to lay the foundation of the storyline. It was used by shamans to conceive and transfer twin babies to the Queen, cast a lasting curse, and transfer the curse entirely onto one baby. And so, the journey to lifting the curse becomes our heroine’s primary mission.
Immortality
Goblin: The Lonely and Great God (2017)
Our hero is a 939-year-old immortal goblin who doesn’t age and cannot die. To many, eternal life may seem like a great superpower to have. But after living on earth for nearly a thousand years and seeing things come and go, it can be a lonely journey. That why the point of the drama is finding the goblin bride who can send him to peace in the afterlife.
Super Hearing
Voice (2017)
The heroine in this drama is a tough policewoman who is gifted with perfect psycho-acoustics skills, which she acquired when she was young after an eye-injury caused her hearing to compensate. She teams up with the hero, another detective, and uses her super hearing abilities to solve cases and chase after the serial killer that took the lives of their loved ones.
Erase Memory
The Legend of the Blue Sea (2017)
The mermaids in this story are another non-human species with a unique power, erasing specific memories by simply kissing the person. At first, it’s a protective ability to help mermaids remain unknown to humans, but here, our heroine uses it several times for the sake of her beloved, which makes for an ultra interesting love story.
Travel in Time
Tomorrow with You (2017)
In most other time-traveling dramas, it’s a strange occurrence by chance. However, in this drama, our hero is a time-traveler with the ability to journey to the future and back via a subway, by his own volition. He foresees his future-self living miserably, so he decides to affect relationships in the present to change that fate.
Super Strength
Strong Woman Do Bong Soon (2017)
Super strength is not uncommon in fantasy dramas at this point, but it’s rarely seen on a young lady. Our heroine is born with this gift and often breaks everything she touches if she’s not careful. Her abilities also landed her a job as a bodyguard to a spoiled rich heir, who turns out to be her future romantic partner.
What’s your favorite use of superpower in a Kdrama and did we miss any other awesome ones? Be sure to let us know in the comments section below.
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