Abstract

With love as the theme and mythology, ghosts and magic as elements, Korean fantasy TV dramas have set romantic and beautiful plots and attracted a large number of Chinese female audiences. Based on Melodramatic Imagination and Stuart Hall's theory of “encoding/decoding”, this paper investigated Chinese female audiences' motives of watching Korean fantasy TV dramas Hotel Druena through the form of focus group interviews to interpret reasons for the popularity of Korean fantasy TV dramas and Chinese women's overall cognition of Korean TV dramas from the perspective of female audiences. Thinking that South Korea's fantasy dramas are good at women's pursuit and desire for emotional elements, women who watch this type of south Korean TV dramas are temporarily relieving pressure of real life, thus satisfying the needs of female gaze and consumption.