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

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.