Cliches: Relationships with Friends and Family

Family is a central theme in any k-drama. Whether it's avenging a dead relative or complications with living ones, the hero and heroine will most likely have do deal with these cliches:

1. Either the heroine or hero, or maybe both, will have a parent who has died, often during childhood.
2. Korean fathers are domineering and do not pay attention to the desires of their children. If the father does not fit this mold, he most likely will die at some point in the drama.
3. Korean mothers are unreasonably possessive and restrictive when it comes to the woman their son marries. When they are wealthy, they prefer him to have a loveless, strategic merger for a marriage rather than to end up with someone who makes him a better person and loves him and not his money. Even if they aren’t wealthy, her son’s bride must not be adopted, divorced, illegitimate or an unwed mother.
4. Unless you are fabulously rich, your in-laws will hate you. Even if everyone else in the family loves you and/or you cure an incurable illness.
5. Whether you are rich or not, there will always be someone who opposes the hero and heroine’s relationship.
6. It is typical for parents to beat their children when they’re being rebellious or upsetting. Often it will be done in front of someone else.
7. Someone in your family will have a long-lost sibling. 
8. If you have a step-sibling, they will hate you and actively work to destroy your life, even if they pretend the opposite.
9. The elderly relative will always be wise, respected and RIGHT. 
10. When scolded by an elder, you should never argue or defend your actions, but should instead agree with what they are saying and apologize profusely, with your gaze averted downward. 
11. If someone needs to apologize to an elder, it will be done kneeling.
12. Even if, as a mother, you are okay with and accepting of someone from your family doing something that will cause a social stigma (like have a child out of wedlock), you will strenuously object to your son having a relationship with a woman in that same situation. 
13. A woman from a good family who is everything you could hope for in a daughter will be unacceptable if you discover that she is adopted, because you don’t know what type of family she is from. You can hold it against the woman’s parent(s) for not telling you the daughter is adopted, even though the daughter had no idea. 
14. A woman should never, ever designate someone as her Oppa. This means that he will never fall in love with her, even if she is madly in love with him and has been obvious with her feelings for a while.