2,221 titles analysed/12 tropes mapped/Independent · not affiliated with any streaming appTrope explorer →
LightShortFind your next short drama.

Independent · Est. 2026

Find the
one you
actually want.

Vertical short drama runs on a handful of repeating setups. We read the titles of 2,221 of them across 6 platforms to work out which setups get made most — and which ones people actually watch. Those turn out to be different lists.

Explore the tropesStart with the basics
01

How we work

About this site

Most sites in this corner of the internet rank tropes by feel. We built a corpus instead — and we publish what is wrong with it.

01

One corpus, stated plainly

Everything we say about what gets made and what gets watched comes from 2,221 full-length uploads pulled from 10 official channels run by 7 short drama platforms, 88,296,607 views in total, collected on 2026-08-18. We measured the duration of all 2,974 videos we pulled and set aside 753 that ran under three minutes, because trailers and clips are not episodes.

02

Genres are theirs, not ours

The genre and trope labels you browse here are the ones the platforms apply to their own catalogue. We do not invent categories and then sort series into them, and we do not score series ourselves — nobody on this site has watched all of them, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

03

The limits travel with the numbers

Our trope classifier reads titles, so it makes mistakes we have not hand-checked. Any category holding fewer than 60 videos is marked as too small to conclude from. Channels cover different spans of time, so cross-channel medians are not directly comparable. And views measure how a title performs on YouTube, which is not the same as how it performs inside the app.

04

When we are wrong, we say so

Our first pass treated 446 uploads tagged Eng Sub as promotional clips. Measuring them showed a median runtime of 41 minutes — they were full episodes, and Eng Sub was a language tag. Correcting it moved real rankings: campus fell from a median of 20,823 views to 12,725. The tables on this site are the corrected ones.

The long version — who publishes here, how we use AI tools, copyright, funding and corrections — is in the editorial policy. Think one of these numbers is wrong? Tell us and we will publish the correction.

02

The lead

All guides
03

Made least, watched most

See the full map

These setups account for a below-average share of the catalogue, yet the median title in each one is watched more than the median title overall. Automated title matching on YouTube promo uploads — indicative of what gets attention, not proof of quality.

04

Tools

All tools
Flagship

Trope Explorer

Every recurring setup, sized by how much gets published against how the median title performs.

Database

Drama Finder

Filter all 1885 tracked series by platform, trope, length and status.

05

Latest

All guides

Everything we have published since launch, newest first — each piece says up front what we measured, where the number came from, and what we still do not know.