This blog post documents our experience of this first podcast collab. If you’d like us to share our written review of Love All Play, please message us on Instagram/Twitter (@mia2kpodcast) and we’ll make it happen!

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Can someone pinch us please?!

From the moment we opened our Instagram account, we started following podcasts that were also commenting on K-Pop, K-Dramas, or any South Korean topic that interested us. One of the very first accounts to catch our attention was ATC Daebak Rambles Podcast. Jess and Rico are two Latin podcast hosts much like ourselves, who have a long-running movie review podcast called Always The Critic, and ATC Daebak is the spinoff younger sibling that lets Jess (primarily) watch and discuss the top K-Dramas in the spotlight.

We were blown away by Jess and Rico (+ guests) on their podcast, as they sound like long-established radio personalities. They have a great structure with no-spoilers territory to give people a small taste of the K-Dramas they review (in case the listener is still deciding whether to watch), they cover the IMDB of the main actors and directors involved, and they give an overall score based on Soju bottles- all before getting into the nitty gritty episode detail and in depth commentary for the second half of the show.

You can imagine how we felt when Jess (after months of friendly banter across our social media accounts) reached out to us and asked us to review a K-Drama on her podcast!

Us?!

We didn’t feel ready.

But Jess gracefully gave us a few months to prepare, and so we said yes to the… first collab? Which was undoubtedly on our list of long-term goals, but we never saw coming so soon.

Love All Play

The ATC Daebak Rambles Podcast is on its third season, and Jess chose a sports/romance drama to review with us. Love All Play (also called Going To You at a Speed of 493KM) is a South Korean K-Drama starring Park Ju-hyun, Chae Jong-hyeop, Park Ji-hyun, Kim Mu-jun and Seo Ji-hye. The series depicts a hot sports romance in a badminton business team with deep dark secrets, lots of sports scenes/championship action, and a cute plot fit for fans of romance television.

Laura has been avidly consuming K-Dramas since early 2020 (webtoons were her entry point into the world of South Korean entertainment), but Kathy has been just as avidly resisting the charm of K-Dramas despite Laura’s many pleas and literally everyone else pushing her to watch. Why? Because Kathy already commits all her free time to being a K-Pop multistan, and adding K-Dramas to her list would render her as useless as the p in raspberry (thank you Kevin Moon for that one).

The main reason for our apprehension to accept Jess’ collaboration invitation was really Kathy’s fear of not knowing enough about K-Dramas and saying something silly that any K-Drama fan would know without needing to research (or some other irrational thought like fears tend to be). Here’s the kicker though: Love All Play is centered around the sport of badminton, and even though Kathy is probably the least sporty or athletic person you’ll ever speak to, she DID actually win a badminton tournament in a Dominican Republic resort back in 2001. And this was the nudge she needed to feel comfortable enough to join Laura in accepting Jess’ request and review the K-Drama together.

Episode Recording & Release

To prepare for the episode recording, we both took COPIOUS notes, and it was funny how our personalities showed through on our notes:

• Kathy did an itemized/bulleted list of big moments/events per episode so she could easily recall what happened when, while
• Laura took down her impressions and opinions of how she felt about each of the characters, their arcs, and dynamics.

And this is why we work so well together! We think similarly but also have a different approach to things, so we complement and supplement each other across the board.

The only unfortunate part of this whole experience, was that Kathy ended up with a bad case of bronchitis, rhinitis, and sinusitis all at once on the week of the recording, and so she sounded terrible and it sucks that her nasal/congested voice will forever be stamped on the recording. (Jess offered to reschedule, but Kathy felt well enough to record and there was no actual certainty of when she would be 100% better, so we just went for it).

We had so much fun and laughed so much during the recording! Jess is truly an incredible host and we got to see how the magic of her episodes comes to life. Despite some technical difficulties with her mic (quite a bit of Murphy’s Law going on that week), we still managed to talk at length about all our thoughts and opinions, and you should definitely listen because unlike with most of our episodes where you see our 96% compatibility shine, when it comes to K-Dramas, the 4% is p-r-e-s-e-n-t.

Here are all the links so you can not only enjoy the episode, but also engage with the social media posts Jess ideates for the shows she reviews!

1. Podcast Episode (choose your preferred listening platform)
2. Love All Play drinking game (play at your own risk!)
3. Quotes from the show (could make a nice phone background!)
4. TikTok with the clip where Kathy shares her badminton past!

We’d like to thank Jess for this awesome opportunity to be on her podcast, and for graciously accepting our invitation to join us on ours to discuss ALL things K-Dramas!

We hope you enjoy both episodes! Hooray #MIATCollab 🙌