Squid Game, Blackpink, K-pop and K-drama make South Korea a cultural superpower

Full House, a North Korean romcom about two strangers who are forced to share a residence, was a 14-year-old Evan Barringer romcom.

He assumed it was an Eastern remake of a cherished British comedy from the 1980s while sitting in his home in Memphis. He didn’t realize they had anything in common until the next event until they realized that the name was all he had. But he was hooked.

He had a career change caused by that unintended alternative. He is an English instructor in South Korea for 12 years, and he claims to enjoys it:” I have to consider all the products I’ve seen in K-dramas, and I’ve got to see a number of K-pop performers in concerts whose songs I used to analyze Korean.

North Korean pleasure was a speck in the nation’s attention when Evan discovered Full House in 2012. Psy’s Gangnam Style was the best-known Asian music trade at the time.

Today, there are more than an estimated 220 million fans of Korean entertainment around the world – that’s four times the population of South Korea. Squid Game, Netflix’s most popular show ever, has just returned for a much-anticipated second season.

How did we get these?

The so-called Asian Wave swept the world, experts say, when the success of streaming met American-inspired production price. And Asian entertainment was prepared for it, too, from popular culture and mushy dramas to well-known hits based on common themes.

On the international music scene, BTS and Blackpink are now well-known names. Folks adore sentimental K-dramas from Dubai to India to Singapore. All of this Korean information, including video games, is now for billions of dollars.

Next month, after 53-year-old artist and writer Han Kang won the Nobel Prize for her books, online sheets were full of cartoons noting South Korea’s” Culture Victory” — a guide to the popular video game series Civilisation.

And there were gags about how the country had succeeded in achieving the vision of its founder, Kim Koo, who famously declared that he wanted Korea to be a land of tradition rather than a might.

As it turns out, this was a long-awaited event.

After the end of South Korea’s military dictatorship in 1987, fewer TV programs were established and fewer were launched. According to Hye Seung Chung, associate professor of Korean movie studies at the University of Buffalo, there was immediately a generation of authors who had grown up idolizing Hollywood and hip-hop.

Around the same moment, South Korea quickly grew rich, benefitting from an export growth in cars and technology. And income from companies, or chaebols as they are known, flowed into video and TV manufacturing, giving it a Hollywood-like shine.

They came to possess much of the business, from generation to theater. So they were willing to spend money on making videos without little hope for financial gain, says Prof. Chung.

K-pop, however, had become a private trend in the mid-90s, propelling the success of organizations such as HOT and Shinhwa.

This sparked firms ‘ desire to imitate the gruesome control system for Japanese artists.

Scout youthful talent, usually in their youth, and mark them onto years-long deals through which they become “perfect” gods, with squeaky clean pictures and hyper-managed public personalities. As the program took hold, it transformed K-pop, creating more and more deities.

Asian Television shows and K-pop were popular in East and South East Asia by the 2000s. However, it was streaming that brought them to the earth and into anyone’s life using a smartphone.

The suggestion engine took over when that happened and it has been instrumental in introducing Asian culture fans, moving them from one show to the next across a range of genres and yet platforms.

Evan says he binged the 16 hour-long incidents of Full House. He loved the way it took its time to build the relationship, from bickering conversation to interest, unlike the British shows he knew.

” I was fascinated by each social change I saw- I noticed that they don’t use boots in the house”, he recalls. But he took up Netflix’s ideas for more Asian romcoms. Immediately, he found himself humming to the music of the displays, and was drawn to K-pop.

He has then started watching variety shows, a reality TV style in which comedians come through a series of difficulties all at once.

As they work their way through the recommendations, fans are immersed in a world that feels international still familiar – one that ultimately includes kimchi jiggae, a savory kimchi soup, and kalguksu, a shrimp and algae pasta broth.

When Mary Gedda second traveled to South Korea, she discovered kimchi jjigae in a dish after seeing the actors perform it frequently on television.

” I was crying]as I ate it ]. It was so spicy”, she says. ” I thought, why did I get this? They “eat it” but simply in every show.

Mary, an aspiring European artist, now lives in Seoul. Formerly a K-pop lover, she finally discovered K-dramas and heard Asian. She has also appeared in a few film roles. ” I got lucky and I absolutely love it”, she says.

Food was a major part of the appeal for Mary because she saw so many different versions of it on K-dramas. She recalls how figures develop relationships when they do meals because they were raised in the European countryside in Burgundy.

There is also a relationship potential, which Marie Namur emigrated from Belgium to South Korea. After visiting South Korea, she began watching K-dramas on whim, but she claims to have kept going because she was “pretty much drawn to all those gorgeous Asian people.”

“]They ] are impossible love stories between a super-rich guy and a girl who is usually poor, and, you know, the guy is there to save her and it really sells you a dream”.

But it is Asian people who are writing most of these shows – so it is their creativity, or dream, that is capturing the attention ( and souls ) of other people across the world.

In Seoul, Marie said she was” treated like a lady”, which hadn’t happened “in a very long time”, but her “dating practice is not simply as I expected it to be”.

” I do not want to be a wife. I want to stay working. I want to get free. Even though I’m married or in a marriage, I want to go clubbing with my wives if I choose, which many men in this country oppose.

According to Prof. Chung, foreign fans frequently search for an alternate world after being let down by their own society.

The prim tales, with beautiful, caring and noble heroes, are drawing a female crowd turning away from what they see as sexual American pleasure. And when social injustice became a more important topic in Vietnamese movies and television shows like Parasite and Squid Game, it attracted international viewers who were dissatisfied with socialism and the growing wealth gap in their nations.

The development of a global market has also presented challenges. Some K-pop artists have been criticized for their increasing usage of English phrases.

And the less beautiful side of the business is now in more of a light. The vast pressure stars experience to be ideal, for example, and the demands of a hyper-competitive business. Blockbuster show makers have filed allegations of abuse and have complained about receiving unfair compensation.

However, it’s great to see the universe pay attention to Korea, Prof Chung says. She was raised in a restrictive South Korea, where accusations of war against the authorities were frequently made known. She escaped into American shows.

She noticed on the eyes of other viewers the same wonder she felt when she watched Hollywood movies as a child when Parasite first appeared in the small American city where she lives:” Our like is returned.”