Sadness and Healing: A Study on the Cultural Psychology and Audience Reception of the “BE Aesthetic” in East Asian Romance Films

Heng Zhang
Additional contact information
Heng Zhang: Cheongju University, South Korea

Journal of Research in Social Science and Humanities, 2025, vol. 4, issue 9, 30-40

Abstract: This study examines the aesthetic phenomenon of the “Bad Ending” (BE) in East Asian romance cinema. Departing from Hollywood’s conventional “happy-ending” paradigm, East Asian BE romances elicit powerful emotional resonance and aesthetic pleasure by thematizing regret, loss, and sacrifice. Adopting a cross-cultural perspective, the research integrates Western tragic aesthetics with East Asian cultural-psychological traditions—mono no aware and yūgen in Japan, han in Korea, and Confucian collectivism in China. Through close textual analyses of representative films (Christmas in August [1998], The Classic [2003], Love Letter [1995], Crying Out Love in the Center of the World [2004], Hello, Zhihua [2019], Comrades: Almost a Love Story [1996]), this study elucidates how BE aesthetics materialize via narrative strategies of time and memory, illness and death, and resistance to social structures and fate. Incorporating audience-reception theory, it further explains why contemporary youth discover “healing” within “sorrow,” arguing that BE delivers cathartic purification, safe experiential extremity through aesthetic distance, realistic identification with imperfection, and collective consolation via the culture of Yi Nan Ping (意难平). It concludes that the East Asian BE-aesthetic romance film synthesizes traditional cultural psychology with contemporary audience sensibilities, reflecting not only an aesthetic trend but also the distinctive emotional logic of modern East Asian societies.

Keywords: BE aesthetics; romance film; East Asian culture; mono no aware; emotional healing; tragic aesthetics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.pioneerpublisher.com/jrssh/article/view/1490/1394 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cvg:jrsshu:v:4:y:2025:i:9:p:30-40

DOI: 10.56397/JRSSH.2025.10.04

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Research in Social Science and Humanities from Pioneer Academic Publishing Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Editorial Office ().