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"I want the men to be perfect." Infantilisation, Fetishisation and the Utopia Myth in K-dramas

TOHBADDI

"Well, if I watch a kdrama, I want the men to be perfect. If I want to see men that aren't perfect, I'd watch an A24 or HBO production"

I saw this comment some weeks back, and I wanted to share some of my thoughts and subsequent discussion that came out of flagging this up.

At the risk of sounding "sensitive", this is a mixture of infantilisation of kdramas, and cultural utopianism with a splash of fetishisation. Like, this almost implies that kdramas are only there to cater to international audiences and their romantic fantasies. When I engaged further with the commenter, I got the sense that they were overly overstating our role and influence as an international audience.

The A24/HBO comparison was also very revealing. It dismisses a whole subsection of kdramas telling nuanced stories by pigeonholing them into this “pure” and sanitised space. These shows are not your escapist utopia. They represent real people and real culture. And while media can be used for escapism, I feel like it would be premature to assume all k-media must cater to that. 

I feel like this can be likened to the utopia-branding that takes place with Japan across social media, whereby any real socio-political and economic complexities are overlooked. Rather, there's a heavy romanticisation of technology, for example, creating a detached reality.


Funnily enough, I think if people took a step back and asked why isn't this expectation placed on Western media, they could see the flaw in their line of thinking. If kdramas must be "pure," what does that say about how we view them?

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isang18

The pressure for "purity" and "perfection" is still domestic. It's not the foreign market that's demanding utopian partners and obsessively forcing performers into parasocial relationships. However, it does attract audience segments from abroad that look for facets of precisely that and will promote itself accordingly. Your collocutor's sense of self-importance is exaggerated but not without any basis at all.

American and European audiences are buying these products because they meet our needs or desires in ways that current western productions do not. And the people who produce them are increasingly sensitive to the wishes of a broader audience but they're still slow to acquire a genuinely cosmopolitan mindset. And we are only slowly breaking free from the paradigms of our own cultural imperialism.

Some of us are not looking for socio-political or economic complexities. You have to leave us some room to idealise. Yes, we know that Tahiti (as an example outside of the MDL region) is a politically unstable hellhole full of poverty but we can still have a poster of its beaches on the wall like we've had for the last hundred years. Right? It doesn't make us insensitive monsters.

In the same way we can appreciate Korean storytelling without a lesson on Gwangju and despite the cognizance that women earn 70 cents on the dollar. We don't need to make Ode to My Father required viewing. And it's okay to admire the very pretty actors they produce.

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TOHBADDI

First of all, I appreciate this engagement. In terms of the need for sanitised media, I don't think anyone believes international audiences solely drive it. Its mere existence before international audiences were privy to kdramas is evidence of that. However, the byproduct of consuming such media has led to the adoption and subsequent maintenance of this demand.

There is a gap in the market for this type of media, which is why it has gained popularity over the years. However, my point is more that the industry cannot merely become an outlet for international fans' desires.

Although you can say that Western audiences are trying not to impose their cultural expectations, they are imposing a whole new set of expectations, which could be argued are even more insidious and dehumanising. The expectation is no longer about norms specific to a culture, good or bad, but instead a curated fantasy. "I am consuming you, so you must be perfect."

I mentioned that media could be used for escapism and wasn't necessarily trying to criticise that side of kdramas because that type of content has its place. However, all K-media can't be expected to reflect that alone, and the producers and writers shouldn't feel pressured to conform. Media is diverse, and to say that only the West should produce A24-style material, whatever that means, is to infantilise the industry.

Overall, the point isn’t that every drama needs to be political out of fear of fetishisation or that audiences must engage with kdramas outside of the romance genre. The issue is that, whether this expectation comes from domestic or international audiences when foreign audiences specifically require perfection in romantic characters all the time, it can only be rooted in fetishisation. They ultimately strip an entire group of people, reducing them to mere objects of consumption. 

If these characters were viewed as part of a piece of media or art, deviations from this fantasy wouldn't ignite annoyance because one would recognise that these portrayals are also valid. Similarly, just as most of us would find it reductive if African cinema were expected to solely focus on war and conflict, kdramas should not be confined. 

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