K-Dramas Helped Me Find Community, Online and in the Real World

At the hotel, I collapsed onto my bed squealing with delight. “I can’t believe I met Jung Hae-in!” In the confines of our hotel room, I changed from a forty-plus-year-old into a preteen fan-girling over a man who is 10 years younger. Jennay laughed at me. In Fall 2023 we had dropped hundreds of dollars to see my favorite Korean actor. “I can’t believe I met my ‘ozzbandt.” That was where Jennay drew the line. “No! He’s mine!” she responded.

We giggled like preteens as we recalled the events of the night: watching Jung Hae-in use his arms to form the trunk of an elephant, spinning ten times, and then tossing a beanbag into the cornhole board; wondering who told him that “Stand by Your Man” was appropriate for a U.S. audience; how Mr. Jung took my cell phone and snapped a selfie of us despite ire commands from the microphone; his graciously stepping down to the first row to take a picture with us since the stage was not handicap accessible; him seeing my African print duster and thanking me “for coming all this way” to see him.

As a proud Black Nigerian American in her forties, I would never allow other friends and family to catch me fawning over him. Yet with my “K-drama Besties,” I easily referred to Mr. Jung as my “ozzbandt,” imitating how Yoruba language speakers adorably insert and remove “h” sounds from English words. I had only met Jennay in person twice before, but she knew a lot of my deepest, darkest secrets, including our shared adoration of Jung Hae-in.

We met online in 2021 when I joined the audio social media app Clubhouse. I had discovered Korean dramas during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns while living alone in my studio apartment and taking a break from white Hollywood’s plethora of Black oppression shows. I joined The Kdramatics, a community of over 12,000 K-drama fans led by millennials and Gen Z-ers, including several Black women. They hosted watch parties for new hit dramas and held Q&As with producers of K-dramas. One of the most memorable events was the “versus” in which we debated whom we liked more, Hyun Bin (Crash Landing on You, Memories of the Alhambra) or Gong Yoo (Goblin, Coffee Prince). Gong Yoo won. These rooms on Clubhouse eased the loneliness of the lockdowns.

We enjoyed the decentering of whiteness in which East Asians dressed sharply in high fashion brands while swapping bodies with people of a different gender, entering a temporary “contract marriage” before falling in love, or retelling the Cinderella story with an heir to a Samsung/Hyundai/LG-like conglomerate. Some of us were enamored with being swept away to pre-modern Korea, where court officials are always plotting to oust the Crown Prince.

Hollywood’s mantra that “sex sells” did not work for those of us living in intergenerational households with older parents and children. Few of us were comfortable watching sex scenes with them. Several of us agreed with Kat Turner, a Korean-American adoptee, who pointed out her boredom with Hollywood studios repeating the same stories.

As series largely written by and for women, Korean dramas feature female characters who are multifaceted and overcome odds to lead their best lives. This is difficult to accomplish in the male-dominated Hollywood writers’ rooms. Korean-American K-drama Besties mentioned how striking it was to see Asian men as strong, handsome, and stylish — the opposite of Western stereotypes and depictions. This resonated with my feelings watching Nollywood films in which Blackness and Africanness were taken for granted outside of a majority white society. While patriarchy is alive and well in Korean dramas, we appreciated the departure from “hard” Western norms of masculinity. Instead, we enjoyed a more “Flower Boy” aesthetic in which straight men were allowed to be openly emotional, gifted with language and good-looking to the point of being pretty.

Many of us also enjoyed Korea’s growing Boys’ Love or BL series, a genre that Thailand has dominated for many years. BL fans enjoy romance without the gender inequality of hetero relationships. In addition, for people who are attracted to men, there is the bonus of watching not one, but two hot men on screen.

For those who have non-Western backgrounds or come from communities that are marginalized or minoritized in the West, Korean dramas offered familiar themes: the importance of maintaining and respecting status in social interactions; the centrality of family ties; a more communal approach to society; and even the worship of sons over daughters. These ideas resonated with many of us who experienced this in Black communities or other communities of color. It also appealed to white viewers who appreciated a different approach to life in highly individualized societies.

Many K-drama Besties heavily overlapped with the world of Kpop. BTS fans, known as ARMY, shared Billboard’s alleged strategies to knock BTS from the top single spot, likely due to racism and xenophobia. That was when I first realized the sextet had been a part of a “hidden mainstream” that was invisible to those of us relegated to only English-language music and radio stations. Since 2019, they had already been selling out U.S. stadiums, yet I had not heard of them. ARMY Korean drama fans informed me of BTS’ $1 million donation to the Black Lives Matter organization in 2020 and how ARMY had matched it in almost 24 hours. ARMY K-drama fans contextualized their anti-racist Twitter activism against #BlueLivesMatter, #WhiteLivesMatter, and President Trump. Despite occasionally coming across as proselytizing, their pride in being a part of something greater than themselves was admirable. They also taught me to respect Kpop idols and their fandom.

I started paying attention to the names, pictures, and profiles and started to befriend people in the rooms. I recognized the voice of one of the organizers of The Kdrama Club, Bina Lee, author of K-POP A To Z: The Definitive K-Pop Encyclopedia and culture writer for Soompi, a website for all things Korean wave. I soon realized that Marisa and Jen, the YouTubers known as The K-Three, were also regular attendees in these rooms. I religiously watched their videos about Korean dramas throughout 2021.

I also laughed along with Jeanie Chang aka Noona’s Noonchi, one of the organizers who incorporates Korean dramas into her work as a licensed therapist, speaker, and author. Through these connections, I became a fan of Black Girl Seoul, a podcast by Song Rae and Something Else, two U.S. Black women sharing their thoughts about K-dramas. I also listened as Kat Turner linked the overwhelming presence of orphan main leads in Korean dramas to her own experiences as one of thousands of Korean adoptees living abroad. These women all became part of my community of K-drama watchers.

During our conversations, we shared the dramas we were currently watching as well as old and new favorites. I learned that Elle has a blanket strictly for watching K-dramas with her favorite actor’s face on it. I found out that Jenn and I both adored Flower of Evil, a crime thriller. Torontonian Bina teasingly encouraged me to break down and finally purchase a pillow emblazoned with Jung Hae-in’s face. They all knew and respected that Jung Hae-in was my pseudo-social boyfriend.

When it came to fellow Black women, I respected Tracy’s love of Park Bo-gum (Reply 1988, Encounter, Record of Youth) and Kerris’ displeasure with any harsh talk about Park Seo-joon (What’s Wrong with Secretary Kim, Itaewon Class, The Marvels) or anyone on her “list” of Korean Kings and Queens. Jennay and Kerris humored my eagerness to debate the success at world-building in shows like King: Eternal Monarch. Its star, Lee Min-ho had also starred in the highly influential Boys Over Flowers. But due to the very strong feelings — both positive and negative — he elicited, no one was allowed to discuss him at length.

Establishing community with other Korean drama fans can also be complicated. Spending time in white majority spaces meant a higher likelihood of listening to women gush over fictionalized versions of Korean men. Since I appreciate Black men as well as men across colors, I purposely avoid Koreaboos who fetishize Korean men. I also tried not to be mistaken for a Black woman with “yellow fever” who “prefers” Asian men or cultures over her own. Seeing Black women use pseudonyms or have separate social media accounts devoted to Korean fandom makes me think I am not the only one.

For this reason, despite meeting many Black women in person who watch Korean dramas, I think it remains an “inconspicuous consumption.” In the sociologist Thorstein Veblen’s notion of “conspicuous consumption,” we spend lavishly on luxurious items to signal our economic status. As inconspicuous consumers, several of us Black women buy K-drama memorabilia, attend pricey fan meets, purchase subscriptions to stream Asian content, and even travel to South Korea. Korean fandom, including K-drama Bestie communities, allowed us to give in to the pull of their media and share our love for Jung Hae-in without having our Black card revoked.

A year and a half later, I was now driving with Jennay to meet him in person. She had coincidentally moved to Maryland three months prior. Initially, we were going to meet in a public location in Maryland. However, I had forgotten that we had both attended the same Black church in Northeast Philadelphia and were friends with Ekemini Uwan, esteemed Christian author and speaker. When I realized Jennay was a sister in many senses of the word, I invited her to my home near Washington, D.C. As two Black women, we could enjoy our “inconspicuous consumption” in a safe, non-judgmental environment. The first time I met her in person, I gave her a hug. Then, like so many times before, we shared what we were currently watching.

Dr. Chinyere Osuji is the author of Boundaries of Love: Interracial Marriage and the Meaning of Race with NYU Press.  She is writing a book about her time in Korean drama fandom and a book about African immigrants in the nursing profession.