In conjunction with subtly explicit conversation, I was carefully exposed to material that glorified relationships between characters with significant age differences. There was one film in particular he made me watch called The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the last line of which is: ‘Give me a girl at an impressible age, and she is mine for life’.”
Grace Tame, Australian of the Year and sexual abuse survivor
Note: This piece has been slightly edited since it was first published. There was concern from some readers that it implied that this is a specifically Korean problem or that I was making a comment about Korean culture generally. I apologise to anyone who was upset by the original version of the post and hope the edits are sufficient to allay your concerns. Please let me know if they are not.
In 2017, Korean produced a blockbuster drama that imprinted itself on popular culture like no other drama since My Love From the Star or Boys Overs Flowers. It was a sweeping epic second chance drama about an immortal man looking for redemption. And an equally epic reincarnation romance between an 1000 year old man and a vulnerable, impoverished, orphaned, school-uniform-clad girl child.
This disturbing ode to paedophilia was called Goblin and it ended with a romantic reunion between our male lead and his reincarnated child bride once again in her school uniform. The visuals itself were not just the main issue with Goblin (Gong Yoo at the time was around 37 and Kim Go-eun around 25 but their characters of course have an unfathomably vast age difference). The “romance” unfolded as a set of creepy Sugar Daddy scenarios involving him offering a vulnerable teen shelter, material goods and grooming statements about her being his foretold Goblin Bride. It was basically a Paedophile’s How To Guide.
Or if that word is too strong for you, let’s just say that Kdrama has an ongoing issue with romanticising liaisons that involve sexualising children and sexualising especially the school uniform. This was particularly stark in the controversial 2020 drama Backstreet Rookie, which not only upskirt highschoolers but had one launching herself at an older man. Although Japan’s sexualising of girls in school uniforms is arguably much worse, Japan is not known for sweeping epic sagas where these romances are portrayed as destined, inevitable or even desirable.
But Goblin is hardly the sole or even the seminal text of a romance between a powerful, wealthy older man and an infantilised and vulnerable child. The trope is rife across Korean dramas in various forms to the point where they might be said to have a paedophilia problem generally. And while this post is about the casual and offhand paedophilia in Korean dramas, it could easily be about incest as well. Yes, I’m still traumatised by Alice and its cohabitation romcom between a man and his mother.
And who could forget the love triangle in Reply 1997 where a teacher wants to date the school-age younger sister of his dead fiance who is also one of his students. The show not only portrays him as a viable romantic partner but the question of who she chooses is not resolved till the final episode.
Romance, for shows like Goblin, is when a more powerful, older and wealthier male takes care of your material needs in exchange for complete physical and emotional servitude. If I wanted to tiptoe possibly across the fine line I’m treading here, I could argue that these texts themselves are a form of social and cultural grooming.
These dramas are often couched in terms of epic fantasy. The 2021 (still airing) drama, My Roommate is a Gumiho, is the somewhat lightweight version of Goblin. In it, a University student accidentally ingests the Fox Bead of a 1000 year old Gumiho (Nine Tailed Fox). He becomes responsible for her physical wellbeing, moving her into his mansion and setting strict rules of behaviour for her to take care of his ‘seed’. She refers to him as Orishin, a term of deep respect for a much older person. It’s not as bad as Kim Go-eun lisping “I love you, Ajusshi” in a gratingly coy little girl voice in Goblin. But it’s pretty damn close.
In exchange for his care, she gives him her body, love and will, of course, eventually be the vehicle by which he attains his humanity. This will no doubt be of great physical cost to her but she will do it out of love. In later episodes, he takes the role of her University professor and develops a uncontrollable borderline-rapey desire to consume her. Since a relationship between a student and her professor isn’t any less predatory than the one between an ancient powerful being and the teen he’s accidentally impregnated, this was the point at which I decided to drop.
As I should have with the 2016 medical drama Doctors, which begins with the female lead in highschool forming a close mentoring relationship with her teacher. He’s a former Doctor who, we discover, is romantically interested in her and is just waiting for her to grow up. Which of course she eventually does.
In many ways though, it’s the casual drive-by paedophilia that is most upsetting. The lisping little girl voices, aegyo and coy childlike responses to skinship and intimacy embedded into almost every text. The otherwise enjoyable 2020 drama (also about a Gumiho) Tale of the Nine-Tailed has periodic romantic flashbacks to the ancient male lead’s ‘first love’ as a 7 year old. These flashbacks to him being a grown man (and mountain God) and her being a precocious child are presented as pink-tinged nostalgia of his romantic past. And of course when he finds his reincarnated love again, she is a similar age.
“Are you her?” he asks a pre-pubescent little girl. Is this child his destined love? Guess he just has to wait till she grows up.
The irony of course is that Tale of the Nine Tailed is quite an enjoyable drama once you jettison both the creepy paedo flashbacks and the implication that true love is waiting for a man if he just waits for a nearby child to be legal. But it’s hard to get over just how casual the paedophilia is.
Just as it is in the 2013 mega hit My Love From The Star (My Love From Another Star). This Hallyu hit featured a very shippable romance between a star actor and a 600 year old alien waiting in Seoul for the chance to return home. But there was another romance buried in the show, one that’s easy to forget. This is the romance between Kim Soo-hyun’s alien Do Min-joon and his ‘first love’ back in the Joseon era. Of course his modern era love interest Cheon Song-yi (Jun Ji-hyun) is this character’s latest incarnation but that changes little about the optics of flashbacks to her barely-pubescent counterpart and the fact she met him again at a similar age.
Not to say that Korea is alone in sexualising girl children, normalising large age gaps with older men and younger girls, and promoting childlike behaviour as a desirable quality in a woman. The quote that began this piece comes from Grace Tame, an Australian woman who was manipulated into a relationship with – and subsequently raped by – her middle-aged teacher when she was in highschool. The texts she is referring to are not Korean or even Asian. So it’s definitely not a uniquely Korean issue, although it does present in romance dramas in a particularly romantic way.
Many of the examples in this post are extreme and obvious and they don’t convey the way in which the dynamics of these relationships with their power imbalances, ethical violations and emotional manipulations are threaded through dramas in more subtle and pernicious ways. Even the constant aegyo cry of “Oppa” itself embodies a hierarchical power structure in relationships with the man in the more powerful position. Noona romances are often heralded as such simply because putting the woman in that position of comparative social power is considered subversive.
It’s 2021 and shows with these plotlines are still being made. Goblin remains one of the popular dramas of all time, It would be interesting to know whether audiences are embracing these problematic plotlines or are, like me with Tale of the Nine-Tailed, just putting them aside to enjoy the larger drama. My Love From the Star, for example, is a very enjoyable drama and you can squint and pretend his past relationship was one of paternal care and affection rather than romance. And there is a large body of work that doesn’t have sudden detours into sexualising children.
But when it does happen in a romantic drama it can be jarring. And for now it seems these problematic plotlines are here to stay.
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