For a long time, “Descendants of the Sun” and its main stars, Song Joong-ki and Song Hye Kyo, ruled South Korean TV and even Chinese video streaming platform. Until early December, the 16-episode military-medical drama was still sweeping awards in the country and region, with the latest the Best Drama Award at the Asian Television Awards in Singapore.
However, when KBS made available online voting for its KBS Drama Awards scheduled on Dec. 31, the results for the four major awards showed “Descendants of the Sun” and its main stars were consistently in third place for Best Drama, Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Couple on Monday.
What was surprising is the strong showing of “W Two Worlds,” the webtoon. Latest figure shows “W” still topping the voting, although its share slightly went down to 38.83 percent on Tuesday from 39.18 percent on Monday. “Doctors” also logged a slight decrease to 23.61 percent from 24.46 percent, while “Descendants of the Sun” increased a bit to 21.35 percent from 19.99 percent.
The situation is similar for the Best Actor, still led by Lee Jong-suk of “W” with 40.06 percent, but Song Joong-ki is now second place with 17.82 percent and Kim Rae-won in third place with 16.3 percent. In the Best Actress, Han Hyo-joo of “W” is first place with 38.46 percent, followed by Park Shin-hye with 25.74 percent and Song Hye-kyo 24.3 percent.
In Best Couple, “W’s” Lee Jong-suk and Han Hyo-joo leads with 39.14 percent, followed by Kim Rae-won and Park Shin-hye with 24.38 percent and the SongSong couple with 21.27 percent.
The trend seems to be the first placer has almost double the votes of the second and third placers which have quite close scores. Song Joong-ki moving up to second place is not surprising since he is still considered the Best Model of Korean Brands. One more trend is that the fourth up to the 15th place have negligible votes.
However, since there are still 19 days left until the 2016 KBA Drama Awards on Dec. 31, fans could still boost their favorite star’s ranking since one vote per category is allowed daily. Song Hye Kyo was in a similar situation a few months ago when her ranking for the “Goddess of Asia” title she won in late September she was moving up and down during the early days of the online contest.
Meanwhile, Soompi reported that “Goblin,” a drama has beaten the previous record of “Descendants of the Sun” in reaching first place as a buzzworthy TV drama by scoring 12,500 points on its first week of airing. It took “Descendants of the Sun” five weeks to reach the same score, while on its second week, “Goblin” got double the amount of “Descendants of the Sun’s” achievement.
However, it should be noted that the writer of “Goblins,” which airs every Friday and Saturday, is Kim Eun Sook who also wrote “Descendants of the Sun.”