This is the third and final article of my multi-part series investigating the continued fetishization of Asian culture by the West, and it will explore how broader fetishization of Asian culture slowly disfigures the way Asian individuals can navigate their own identities.

• Asian Fetishization in Western Society: A Brief History
• Commercializing Cultures: Asian Fetishization in the Modern World

• The Control of Our Fabled Fetishes

Throughout the course of humanity, our ability to deal in abstractions and grasp that which is intangible has allowed for us to develop powerful ways to communicate the complexities of living in the world. The complex dramas, mythologies, and religious stories that have developed in every human culture to date (even in our modern era) have allowed for us to transfer important information from generation to generation.

As a process of this storytelling, literary devices that utilize ways to encapsulate the abstract have become pivotal methods of communication. Taking this process further outside of just storytelling, the abstract is often encapsulated by concrete “things” whether it be an idea, word, or object. This process of effectively packaging the abstract into concrete terms is called reification, and it is a complex idea that has been explored most notably by George Lukacs and Karl Marx in their use of reification in social contexts within capitalist systems.

Fetishization is a process that also deals with the transformation of the abstract and concrete. It can be thought of a similar process reification as it is the process of imbuing concrete “things” with abstract significance. To further elaborate on the differences, reification tries to simplify the abstract by using concrete and static forms to represent it, while fetishization is the attachment of abstract concepts to concrete things.

But the way that fetishization occurs is not just random, but rather a propagation of cultural norms that simplifies the complexity of the world. Although this process is unavoidable (we all place some non-intrinsic meaning into the “things” of the world based on our experiences and culture), the power that is given to fetishes leads them to effectively have power over us, leading to a distilled, fragmented, and alienated view of the world.

• Crafting the Asian Fetish

Fetishization of physical things is common, but this process also occurs with completely abstract concepts. Cultures are also subject to fetishization, which often leads to misrepresentation in the forms of stereotypes and caricatures. Asian fetishization by the West is most prominently represented in the archaic ideas of Orientalism that are still integrated immensely within Western culture some 200 years later.

To briefly summarize Orientalism (I go into much greater depth on this topic in my first article of the series), it is an artistic movement from the 19th century that sought to portray Asia. However, these portrayals veered away from accuracy, falling prey to fetishism as the East was depicted as an alluring place where one could fulfill their deepest fantasies (especially sexual ones). In this artistic movement, the broader Western perception of Asia adopted these fetishizations.

However, as the world progressed to become increasingly globalized and interconnected throughout the 20th and 21st century, Asian countries have been able to directly export their media and broader culture to the Western sphere (this is the scope of my second article). But even with this direct form of cultural interaction, the lingering vestiges of Orientalism, along with newer fetishizations of modern Asian culture, still remain.

With individuals of Asian descent now aggregating in communities abroad in the West, the fetishization of Asian culture in general is now beginning to see its alienating distillations projected directly onto Asians themselves. Whether its their surface level looks, internal motivations and desires, and their fundamental humanity, the overarching prominence of Asian fetishization spans broad aspects of Asian identity at all levels.

• Surfaces of Beauty

Given that the complex and abstract aspects of our identity are largely hidden, external appearance is the most accessible way that one’s sociological identity is seen. In a world where outward appearances are supremely important, the importance of beauty and its role in encapsulating identity is becoming much more prominent.

Beauty often seems to be both subjective and relatively superficial (especially in the age of the internet), but it is a universally important concept across cultures and a consequence of reification and subsequent fetishization. What is considered “beautiful” in a given culture is almost directly correlated with abstracted notions that are considered morally good. For example, having fairer and whiter skin is considered beautiful in Chinese culture as it is historically associated with higher status and being a noble (as opposed to a suntanned laborer). Status and hierarchy is an important aspect of Chinese values and is thus reified in beauty standards. This process occurs almost universally in every culture, with beauty standards emphasizing cultural values.

Beauty standards differ significantly, but they all engage in this reification process as abstracted and morally good cultural values are represented by certain attributes. Fetishization can thus be born out of this reification, with the newly reified attributes now being directly representative of the abstract qualities themselves. For example, having light skin is fetishized in China (and many Asian countries) as it is seen to be directly representative of higher moral purity and social status (this process is largely subconscious).

• A Sexual Dichotomy

Binary beauty standards for men and women are the most predominant standards, with individuals of the respective sex assigned their attractiveness according to what is considered masculine and feminine in a given culture. Although there exists large overlap of what is considered attractive for both genders, the finer details of what is considered beautiful for each sex is almost entirely culturally driven and also usually opposites.

In the West, the overarching standard for masculinity is defined in terms of qualities such as being dominant, strong, and protective, while femininity is represented with opposing qualities (obedient, soft, and caring). These qualities, although shifting, still remain as a rigid part of traditional Western values and culture. Translating this to beauty standards, masculine traits include prominent jawlines and brow ridges, muscularity, and an imposing stature, while femininity emphasizes softer/rounded features, slenderness, and an overall smaller stature.

Beauty is a holistic mixture of qualities and is more than just “this trait is masculine or feminine.” But through the general binary and commodified form of beauty that is represented in beauty standards, beauty in a modern Western context has become extremely simplified and superficial. As is the case with every other aspect of beauty, certain characteristics have been characterized as inherently masculine or feminine, and this has become a prominent issue in the realm of Asian fetishization.

Physical fetishization of Asians is most prominent for East and Southeast Asians due to their more “feminine” features. On average, Asian men and women are shorter in stature, have softer features, and are generally skinnier than people from other ethnicities. As a result, East and South East Asians are physically fetishized as more feminine, leading Asian women to be generalized as hyperfeminine and Asian men to be generalized as less masculine. Resulting from this physical alignment with Western beauty standards, Asian women have become extremely fetishized as their bodies are seen as supremely feminine, submissive, and exotic.

“Whites stereotype both Asian men and women as being less masculine and more feminine than other racial groups, as well as being more feminine than masculine” — Wilkins et al.

Physical fetishization of Asians is coupled with the general fetishization of Asian culture itself, leading Asians and their identities to become highly fetishized in the modern West.

• The Exotic Other

The Asian fetish is a common term used to describe this generally unhealthy obsession with Asian culture. Although there is a broader fetishization of Asian culture, the Asian fetish is particularly pernicious in its distillation of Asian individuals into fetishized packages.

Asian sexualization has become an obvious result of this fetishization. Throughout general Western media, Asian women have been portrayed in various stereotypes that all add hints of sexual allure and fantasy. Porn statistics reveal the true extent of this sexualization as the “Asian” porn category consistently ranks in the top 3 most popular categories for men and women for the past few years (it is the most popular racial category by a wide margin).

This sexualization of Asian women has become such a prominent issue that some men even engage in sex tourism (this is very niche but still mindbogglingly degenerate), a practice tinged with aspects of colonialism where men from the West will travel to poorer regions in Asia (Thailand, Cambodia, etc.) and pay for local prostitutes and escorts. The Old Orientalist idea that the East is an exotic place to fulfill your most deepest fantasies has found itself unfortunately fulfilled in the form of these passport freaks. But even beyond this pure physical sexualization, the Asian fetish goes much deeper.

• Dissolution of Humanity

Although Asians retain a “positive” stereotype in the concept of the model minority, Asians are still othered, considered separate from what is normal. The Asian fetish springs out of this process of othering, creating an objectified landscape that transforms Asians into vessels for their “exotic” culture.

Asian passivity and subordinate obedience are key traits that have become embedded into the concept of the Asian fetish. Although concepts of respect, reserved humility, and perseverance are key parts of many Asian cultures, these values become morphed into blatant passivity in the Western eye.

Asians are seen as subservient to the desires of the West. Many people with an Asian “preference” note that they perceive Asians (men and women) to be more loyal and caring, willing to do more to please and accommodate, and are more traditional than Western women. The Asian fetish deems Asians to be able in fulfilling the fantasies of Westerners.

Westerners hunting for Asian wives (particularly East and southeast Asian) has become its own popular trend in recent times. Asian women are seen as the perfect wives because they embody Asian fetishizations of subservience, exotic beauty, and unwavering obedience and loyalty. The desire to find an Asian husband or boyfriend has also been on the rise due to the popularity of Asian media such as K-pop, which reinforces similar stereotyping (a traditional, obedient, and caring partner). Below is an excerpt from a medium article aimed at helping Western men find Asian wives:

The charm of Asian women, in particular, stands out significantly on the global dating scene. Their allure isn’t just a matter of subjective opinion but is often highlighted by relationship experts and enthusiasts alike. With their striking looks and commendable personality traits, Asian women have long been celebrated as ideal partners. — Rico Gibson Jr

Rather than being perceived as individuals with autonomy, Asians are objectified through the Asian fetish as their identities are morphed into alluring fetishized packages that are subservient to the desires of others and must be meticulously unwrapped and explored so that their exotic beauty can be found.

• Buying into the Fetish

Popularized on social media during the pandemic, the RCTA (race change to another) movement became a trend that saw many non-Asians trying to adopt Asian identity. Thanks to the greater interest in Korean and Japanese culture (due to their modern cultural exports), many people (particularly women) began altering their appearance and learning about certain Asian cultures so that they could successfully “change races.”

Yet, this “race change” is intensely problematic as it does not represent a genuine understanding of Asian culture, nor does it present as a mixture of Eastern and Western values. This desire to change into an Asian is the desire to embody (and unfortunately reinforce) the fetishized values (exoticism, uniqueness, beauty) of Asian identity.

• Maimed in the Name of Acceptance

Up until this point I have described external fetishization of Asian identity, but self-fetishization has become increasingly prominent in Asians born in Western countries. This form of fetishization is particularly pervasive as many Asians in the West have come to embody and propagate the larger fetishizations that have existed in Western culture. Asian self-fetishization in reference to “positive” stereotypes such as being the model minority is an example of this and is deeply dangerous. It strips away individual experiences that define how we as Asians can craft our own identities.

Self-fetishization is just a redefining of unique experiences in Asian culture with the broader Asian fetishizations that have been crafted from an outsider’s lens. Rather than using cultural differences as a way to communicate more nuanced aspects of the human experience, self-fetishization discards the finer nuances of one’s culture and identity.

• Painting the Human Experience

Although this three-part series has been an investigation of just Asian fetishization in the West, cultural and racial fetishization in general occurs in every cultural collision following similar issues that I have explored as a part of general Asian fetishization (Caucasian fetishization in the East is just as big of an issue as Asian fetishization in the West).

Fetishization as a whole is a universal part of the human experience and the broader societies that exist in the world. In every single cultural collision in every single direction, cultures will be misunderstood, misrepresented, and consequently fetishized into both positive and negative terms so that they can be simplified and understood.

However, this process of simplification diminishes the nuances that individuals embody, leading unique experiences to be discarded. Despite being in an age where we are exposed to so many more cultures than ever before, our societies still cling to the archaic fetishizations that destroys the possibility for further cultural understanding and connection.

Rather than seeing individual differences as avenues to explore perspectives in the broader pool of our collective human experience, cultural fetishization implores us to use these differences to separate and alienate others.

But even with our differences in appearance, values, and life experiences, we all are a humans. Like the small tiles that form into a beautiful mosaic, each of the colorful lives we live coalesce with one another to form the broader complexity of the human experience. Although the full canvas of human experience is impossible for us to experience alone, it is through continued collisions, thoughtful reflection, and meaningful understanding that each one of us can begin to see greater and greater portions of this collective human experience.

Seeing larger swaths of the human experience allows us to truly value and appreciate each other, even if we each harbor wicked and dangerous faults. But even more importantly, being able to subsume the experiences of others allows us better navigate our evolving identities and the true place that we inhabit in this world.

Degrading Humanity: Asian Fetishization in the Modern West was originally published in Counter Arts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Here is what struck me as odd: it was not like the usual rollercoaster emotional rides of classic cinema where you shed a spontaneous tear or joyful cry, it was a lot more. It was lasting, organic, raw, and almost empirically experiential.

Between Sturdiness and Fragility of Love and Marriage was originally published in Counter Arts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Not Waving But Drowning, by twentieth century English poet Stevie Smith, is a short wry, sad reflection on semiotic confusion and the ambiguity of signs and signals (1). It resonates with me because people think I’ve got a weird habit and I’m beginning to feel misunderstood. I spend 90% of my TV time watching Korean Drama and while I’m warmly waving to all and sundry to communicate my excitement, everybody thinks I’m drowning. My partner believes it’s a strange obsession and we now watch TV mostly apart. When I try and talk about K-drama to other English people, they tend to glaze over, BUT … I study drama and I promise you there are rational reasons why Korean drama is worth an English speaker’s attention. Allow me to explain.

Earlier the same year as Chun Doo-hwan’s arrest, while South Koreans were still coming to terms with the legacy of nearly thirty years of effective dictatorship and media censorship, national TV network SBS broadcast Sandglass, a 24-episode drama written by Song Ji-na and directed by Kim Jong-hak. Astonishingly popular, with a peak rating of 64% of the population and emptying cafes and public transport during its broadcast slot, Sandglass was an epic melodrama about a tragic love triangle between a gangster, a prosecutor and a beautiful woman whose father owned a casino. It also delved deep into the national psychological trauma of the dictatorships of the 1970s and 80s and is noted for an extended recreation of the Gwangju uprising spliced with documentary footage of the actual events. There have been several artistic works reflecting on this incident; Human Acts, a novel by this year’s surprise Nobel prize winner Han Kang, and K-drama Youth of May are notable recent examples. The popularity of Sandglass in 1995 is partly to do with its role as a catalyst for a badly needed national conversation about recent history, but also the skill with which such a critical perspective is meshed with the great strengths of Korean popular TV storytelling, from its thunderous original soundtrack to the trope-ish but gripping vocabulary of romantic melodrama.

In British dramatic history, melodrama is most closely associated with a form of Victorian theatrical presentation. Notable features include lavish scenery and stage effects, complex incident filled plots, a rhetorical emotive acting style, and a gallery of ‘larger than life’ characters, such as rapacious landlords, vulnerable widows, naive young women and so on. What we forget is that this basket of melodrama stereotypes were very much an actual feature of nineteenth century urban living for lower middle and working class people. Eye-watering levels of prostitution and mercenary landlords throwing penniless women, whose husbands were off to sea, out on the street were real, common, and not unconnected things (2). In the twenty-first century, TV soaps are the last bastion of melodrama in British culture and tend to be tolerated by the media elite as a necessary evil. Considering enormously popular shows like EastEnders and Coronation Street, it’s clear that melodrama in the UK remains rooted in class consciousness, as producers seem hell bent on squeezing the fun and excess out of the melodrama form. Take the way Coronation Street, for example, has been slowly stripped of its humour and vitality while zeitgeisty structural criticism is substituted for a catalogue of modish ‘issues’.

The term ‘hallyu’, usually rendered as Korean Wave in English, originates in Chinese state broadcasting in the 1990s with a mildly pejorative connotation, using the terminology of spring tides and Tsunamis to imply we’re going to be overwhelmed or washed away by Korean cultural imports. Apart from crummy puns around waves, Stevie Smith’s poem evokes the subject of Korean drama for me because she was writing subjectively about mental health at a time, the 1950s, when it was a taboo subject. As a solo activity, watching TV can also act as a psychological salve and, for reasons we’ll come on to, Korean drama is particularly effective as a covert therapy. I was reminded of this by a Medium article that caught my eye recently, titled watching k-drama because telling people i’m not doing well feels so wrong (3), which is part of a thoughtful series of reflections on the mental health of the writer.

Mental health is a popular subject in Korean drama and a broad and balanced approach to such content reveals a lot about why K-dramas tend to be healing. Dissociative identity disorder is a thriller trope in Western film and TV but it’s getting a nuanced romantic comedy treatment in the newly premiered Dear Hyeri staring Shin Hye-sun (Mr Queen). It’s Okay to Not Be Okay is a classic romance from 2020 in which the female lead (Seo Ye-ji) is a famous children’s author with borderline personality disorder. Depression is forensically dissected alongside a romance inside a mental health unit when Park Bo-young’s character, a mental health nurse, gets a crippling case of it in Daily Dose of Sunshine. As far as mental health goes, Korean creatives have clearly decided they’re not going to allow the topic to drown in a sea of misunderstanding for want of some waving. I started watching Korean dramas during the first COVID lock-down but, on reflection, I think this was a coincidence rather than a reaction. Korean dramas can certainly be very absorbing and it’s possible to be caught up in the story and get relief from any particular anxieties that may be troubling you. While I find those qualities appealing, it’s the reasons why K-dramas are so engaging that interests me, because they’re related to the reasons why Western dramas, which generally eschew the mechanisms involved, are not.

There are a couple of things to take from the Sandglass example. Korea has a culture that loves drama, really loves it, and prioritises it with time, money and effort. There are three broadcast channels and at least four major cable channels churning out premium dramas every night of the week. The government have put hard cash into it for decades. It drives South Korea’s soft power as the bedrock of the Korean Wave, K-pop is a johnny come lately, and TV market digital diversification has intensified its popularity if anything. Instead of the Korean love for drama, in the UK, I’m struggling to escape the feeling that, at best, we take drama for granted and sometimes secretly dislike it. Our greatest writer, Shakespeare, was a dramatist and while we’re content with his status as a global heritage asset, the works in performance are somewhat emasculated into an elite pastime useful for virtue signalling while actively despised or ignored by the majority. Even our TV drama could be described as a bit moribund: infrequent, narrow in scope, over genrefied and, as an industry, living off past glories. Whereas Korean TV drama is vital viewing to about half the world’s population and, crucially, critically engaged.

Just as with Victorian theatrical pot boilers, a broad critical perspective is baked into the structure of popular Korean melodramatic forms. Sandglass is significantly concerned with gangsters, which seems outlandish until you consider that the 1980s and 90s saw the breakneck expansion of Seoul through the wholesale clearance and redevelopment of slums and dilapidated areas, much of it facilitated by weak regulation and gangsters clearing entire zones of recalcitrant tenants through various methods of ‘persuasion’. Many poorer people would have come into contact with such types, who were also a cornerstone of the unregulated loans market. Gangster mores are also a juicy metaphor for the political expediency the dictatorship deployed to power the ‘miracle on the Han’, as South Korea’s rapid post Korean War economic development is known.

You can see criticality and melodramatic excess merged within K-drama through the figure of the chaebol. A Korean word for a powerful, family-owned business conglomerate, such as Samsung or department store empire Lotte, in the twenty-first century chaebol is shorthand for a rich heir to that kind of mind-boggling corporate fortune. On the one hand, in many romances a chaebol is a fantasy figure, akin to a prince or princess in medieval folk tales, who tends to get emotionally entangled with the poor, hardworking honest protagonist. However, chaebol characters, whatever their plot function, are also a lightning rod for general discontent in Korean society over inequality, nepotism, corruption, and the many forms of injustice that are driven by extreme wealth. Consequently, the romance is often contextualised with other aspects such as revenge, thriller elements, succession wars, unbridled entitlement, parental disapproval, snobbery and general bad behaviour. While princes seem exotic now, in medieval Europe, fractured into hundreds of ‘kingdoms’, princes were more abundant and their appearance in folklore is similarly double edged; both a fantasy of wealth but also an up-close encounter with arbitrary absolute power familiar to many common people. Cinderella is a folk tale that contains both the wish fulfillment and the cruelty.

As Clifford Geertz observed, “man (sic) is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun” and culture is the substance of those webs. I don’t think there’s anything more ‘webby’ in our cultural lives than television. In some ways, all cultural production is interpreted for most people through television, even TV itself. Gogglebox, a British reality TV show featuring people watching television, is the ultimate example of a culture medium consuming itself. It’s a self-perpetuating truism that the television we watch defines us. In Britain, where class is an overwhelming obsession of all culture, a recent report finding that less than 8% of workers in TV are from working class backgrounds has prompted plenty of hand-wringing commentary on the class balance of British TV output (4). The argument reiterated therein is that working class people are poorly served by British TV because they don’t see themselves adequately represented.

No reasonable person would disagree that employment in the British TV and film industries is hopeless skewed against women and people from minority ethnic and / or working class backgrounds, but the onscreen representation argument needs closer analysis. Firstly, British TV programs are not usually created with identification in mind. We’re overrun with inflexible genre programming, particularly crime in both fiction and documentary, and viewers are not primarily invited to identify with endless detectives and criminals whatever their ethnic and class background. What is the value of representation without identification? Although there’s more to do, UK TV drama has reasonably diverse representation, but very little identification. I May Destroy You, written by and starring Michaela Cole, is a rare example of genre-fluid drama attempting both. Procedural thriller Bodyguard (2018, BBC), on the other hand, is closer to the norm showing plenty of representation, with several black female senior police officer characters for example, but little identification as the story experience is very far from black peoples’, or anybody else’s, typical encounters with the police. There’s a complex balance to be sought between representation and aspiration which shifts depending on the critical nature of the drama. Bodyguard suggests that the Metropolitan Police is a model employer in terms of diversity in all ranks whereas this is manifestly not the case.

Secondly, the representation argument proposes an inviolable link between a person’s identity and their viewing preferences, regardless of the fluidity of identity and the nature of curiosity, escape, distraction and the many other motivations for TV watching which may have much or little to do with how I think of myself at any given moment. I’m not black but I was totally absorbed by I May Destroy You. Succession is gripping TV despite the fact that nobody watching is a media tycoon. Likewise, Billions, Empire, Dynasty and, for older viewers, Dallas don’t rely on the super wealthy for their ratings. For that matter, how does one explain the popularity of Game of Thrones or The Mandalorian. Nevertheless, everyone in the TV industry seems to agree, in terms of class, race, and identity, you watch what you are.

Bred in the British cultural hothouse of form over content, it’s difficult for the English speaker to receive Korean drama as anything other than an encounter with a ‘strange’ culture to be sampled, ignored, mocked or absorbed, as if Korean TV was a unadulterated transposition of a traditional opaque Korean storytelling form like Pansori (5), rather than a revelation of our shared humanity. As if to mock this analogy Jeongnyeon: The Star Is Born, has just started on Disney +. Set in the 1950s, it’s a beautiful, brilliant drama starring Kim Tae-ri (The Handmaiden) about an all-female Gukgeuk company, an opera form based on Pansori. In any case, cultures are neither isolated nor static but hybridised and dynamic and reinvent themselves through fusions and influences almost second by second. The appropriation of hip hop by K-pop or zombies by Korean film and TV are living examples, while the Korean Wave is busy disseminating Korean culture in the opposite direction.

I’m using the idea of reception on two different levels. It has an everyday meaning by which a show like Squid Game becomes a hit out of ‘nowhere’ and Korean drama has a different profile in the USA or Australia, where there a significant Korean diaspora, than the UK where it’s still unusual to meet a Korean person. Reception has a more specific sense in critical theory which relates to how the meaning of an artistic work is uniquely created jointly by the artists who make it and the audiences who receive it. There is a collective encultured aspect to this, a so-called interpretative community, and also the specifically personal. For example, the 24-hour convenience store is a staple location in many contemporary set K-dramas. Backstreet Rookie is almost wholly set in one but main characters in virtually every romance will step in a CU or a GS25 at some point and usually drink and eat there as well. Such stores are prosaic in South Korea but in North America they chime with a common cultural stereotype where neighbourhood convenience stores are run by Korean immigrants, a trope played out in the Canadian sitcom Kim’s Convenience and somewhat pejoratively in the opening encounter of the film Falling Down with Michael Douglas. In the UK, this type of shop exists but, in the land of Tesco and Sainsburys, they’re not as culturally significant and in the UK, stereotypically, ‘mini-mart’ style shops are owned by South Asians. Hence the Korean convenience store has different connotations in Korea, where it speaks to the hectic hand-to-mouth lifestyle of the protagonist, from North America, where if anything it’s slightly othering, and the UK where hanging out in and around one would be odd. Meanwhile, your reception of What Comes After Love, currently showing in the UK on Viki, is likely to be individually calibrated by your own relationship history. With exquisite performances by Lee Se-young and Kentaro Sakaguchi, this intensely interior dissection of a Korean / Japanese cross-cultural affair features difficult and confusing conduct by both protagonists and a fair amount of collateral damage to the invested bystanders.

It takes a little exposure to move profitably from the general sense of reception to the specific sense. There are certain shows, such as the excellent Kingdom, that can facilitate this shift because they feel more familiar to Western eyes. Kingdom is a historical / horror / thriller mash up about a man-made Zombie plague, but delivered in a naturalistic and psychologically complex style. Asian horror is a popular genre in the west which Netflix shows like Squid Game and Hellbound can exploit, especially as they’re atypically short. The TV drama industry in Korea generates over 100 prestige series a year dealing in everything from social realism (My Mister) through occult horror (Revenant) to escapist fantasy (Alchemy of Souls). K-drama has an interesting approach to genre, using labels in a generalised signposting way, but adopting a liberating disregard for any rules or conventions. If you want to put a thriller element and a ghost story in your medical drama, while still foregrounding a romance, go ahead (Ghost Doctor); or how about a timeslip metaphysical musing on fate mixed in with a high stakes Cinderella romance and a revenge thriller (Marry My Husband). Still, there’s no denying the bread and butter of K-drama output is the full bore contemporary romantic melodrama. It may be an acquired taste but it is really something to behold. I love frothy nonsense like ‘catering romance’ Wok of Love (“a love story hotter than the boiling oil in a sizzling hot wok”) and ‘opposites attract’ clueless older girl romance Do Do Sol Sol La La Sol (titles can be an issue), but for thrilling complexity Our Beloved Summer is hard to beat. Along with Nevertheless, it’s dedicated focus on the emotional interchange between a network of beautiful drawn characters demonstrates just how difficult and rewarding falling in love with another person can be.

For a range of further illustrative examples, I refer you to my writing on this platform, with the full list in my profile, Storyhog. There are articles on the K-drama fondness for tropes and their extensive vocabulary; the single and complete story treatment of the K-drama and the impact of western streamers; critical profiles of some of my favourite actors, such as Lee Sung-kyun, Jang Na-ra, Yoo In-na & Chae Soo-bin; aspects of the K-drama form like the Makjang (Potboiler), structural effects or the treatment of ambiguous endings; and also an in depth look at some exceptional shows like Little Women.

Sincerity could also describe the attitude of Korean drama makers to their audience. They make their best efforts and give you what you expect and deserve, in terms of quality but also in terms of the narrative content. There’s nuance, balance and complexity but a decent character who suffers terribly will gain a better position by the end. Lovers who deserve each other tend to end up with at least an understanding. Injustice is resolved, although not always with restitution, the revenge of protagonists mostly remains compassionate, and the palaces of the corrupt are usually revealed to be built on sand. In contrast, cynicism is the dominant ‘value’ of English language TV drama. Seminal 90s sitcom Seinfeld is famous for it’s “no hugging, no learning” mantra in a phrase coined by co-creator Larry David. Hugging is a pivotal trope in Korean melodrama distilling the process by which emotions slide from solitary obsessions to shared conundrums. The weary ‘same old shit’ landscape of much Western drama runs contrary to what we know about the world, which is that it’s constantly changing. Politicians understand this and, depending on where the fear to hope pendulum sits, try to present themselves as either the change or continuity candidate. If we’re alive, we learn all the time, both about ourselves and the world around us. Dramas that isolate themselves from that fact, either for comic effect or stylistic kudos, are ultimately condemning themselves to sterile irrelevance. For my money, a well-earned ‘happy ending’, dripping in sentiment and evoking compassionate feelings, is a better bet for human progress than a pessimistic and emotionally neutered proselytising of never changing despair.

(2) See Victorian journalist Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor for vivid first person contemporary narratives.

watching k-drama because telling people i’m not doing well feels so wrong

(5) Pansori is a traditional Korean form of sung storytelling, performed by a solo singer with a single drum accompaniment. In the opening credit sequence of Jeongnyeon: The Star Is Born, the main actors are announced on the stage by a celebrated Pansori performer.

The Korean Wave and the Cultural Force of Storytelling was originally published in Counter Arts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.