Foreign but Familiar

Abstract

The global rise of the South Korean entertainment industry, commonly described as the Korean wave or hallyu, has been the subject of scholarly study because it presents a challenge to Western media hegemony. This chapter uses mixed methods to assess how hybridized genre conventions and familiar storytelling structures in South Korean television dramas create a media product that is accessible to a diverse fandom. The Korean drama fandom extends beyond Eastern Asia and the Asian diaspora, and there is a dearth of research on this larger global audience. Theories of cultural proximity are insufficient to explain a popularity that transcends culture and language. The importance of a media text's structure is also under-studied in research on fandom. By combining survey data from Korean drama fans living outside of South Korea with a critical assessment of the use of melodrama and other genre conventions in Korean dramas, this chapter argues that the shared symbolic language of genre plays an important role in building a global fanbase.