Why don’t K-dramas make us swoon like they used to?
Considering the speed with which streaming content is produced today, it comes as little surprise that K-dramas are reaching a point of cultural saturation. To add to it, demands for endless sequels and additional seasons designed to mine the popularity of hit shows have resulted in a departure from the tightly packaged 16-episode structure that made K-dramas special in the first place. Even die-hard fans of shows like Sweet Home, Taxi Driver and The Uncanny Counter can’t deny that multiple seasons were entirely avoidable.
It’s important to remember that the Hallyu fever reached its zenith during the pandemic—a time when the danger on the outside pushed us to look for comfort on the inside. And nobody can fault us for finding it in the beautiful men of K-drama, who could be fixed by a woman’s love, who made possessiveness look romantic, who presented marriage as the ultimate happy ending. In the years since, the tradwives emerged on Instagram, waxing eloquent about the virtues of serving their husbands, sacrificing their careers at the altar of motherhood and maintaining their homes and hourglass bodies. Retaliatory discourse, in return, erected ‘monstrously feminine women’, who bubble over with rage, lose control and morph into unruly beasts with freakish bodies. In 2026, women no longer aspire to be perfectly ladylike with alabaster skin and pin-straight hair who men will fall in love with at first sight (remember, having a boyfriend is embarrassing now); they’re happy to terrify men into respecting them since they won’t let them earn it.
It’s perhaps why Korean women themselves are puncturing the fantasy sold by K-dramas by subscribing to the feminist 4B movement that rejects the burden of capitalist gender roles placed on them. Characterised by the refusal to date (biyonae), marry (bihon), copulate (bisekseu) and procreate (bichulsan), this radical form of activism signals a complete withdrawal from the institutions that uphold heteropatriarchal Korean society. Partly inspired by a previous feminist campaign called Escape the Corset and Cho Nam-joo’s bestselling 2016 novel Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, it resulted in the country’s birth rate dropping to one of the lowest in the world.
