Want desperately to move to South Korea to find your ‘oppa’? ‘XO Kitty’ is a must-watch for you. It crosses the lines of delusion to the extent that it almost brings cloud castles to the land.
Koreaboo: a non-Korean so obsessed with Korean culture that they think they are a part of it.
Exhibit a: that one K-Boo side character
I knew XO Kitty would be extremely problematic and bad when in the first episode itself there was a scene where Kitty, the titular character, asks an American white girl about something in English and the girl replies in Korean, very randomly.
Each time this character appeared on the screen it was evident that the existence of this series was for people like her. What we call this specimen is ‘Koreaboos’, something that all fans of K-Pop or any other K culture like dramas, webtoons, beauty, or food are extremely wary of. Our image in the eyes of the general public which also permeates to how media and press views us has become this: a non-Korean screaming and losing it over hot Korean visuals. All credit to the existence of Koreaboos who largely evade media space with a public showcase of this kind of behavior that slander the name of the rest of us who want to learn about the culture out of respect and often out of the want to understand our idols/fav actors or actresses better.
The importance that this character has been shown in the show made me wanna gouge my eyes out. A white girl randomly breaks into Korean at random points in time. Oh yes honey u love K-Pop, don’t you? Do u want a Korean hot boy as your oppa as an award for that?
What happens is that representation of such when placed in such a mainstream Netflix series pushes for people to believe that this is normal and completely okay behavior, while thousands of Korean netizens condemn this each day.
Sometime around late 2022, a video went viral in ARMY stan Twitter circles where a bunch of Koreaboos like such rounded a Korean woman who had come to visit Mumbai and was just peacefully spending her time on the Juhu beach. The video featured around 10-12 young girls forcing the woman into singing BTS songs, dancing with them, and posing finger hearts with them. The video was called out for its disturbing content and many ARMYs, most of the Indian ones, condemned such behavior as this in no way represented fan etiquette.
Making one feel like they are an exhibit in a museum and hackling them into shooting such a video is also a product of that this kind of behavior has been normalized by the media and now thanks to XO Kitty there are even more people thinking this is perfectly normal.
Exhibit b: Korea is not all that certain rosey K-Dramas show you
XO Kitty arrived just at the time when news about Seoul Pride being canceled and replaced with a Christian religious propaganda event made rounds on the internet. Korean society has not shown empathy to queerness, only there are glimpses of hope but even they are so dim that they flicker and vanish in the air to be replaced by a bigger cloud of dust. Conservative Christianism has a stronghold in the peninsula and thus also rules how people process things that are against the beliefs of the Church, a common case for most Western regions too where religious fanaticism has a grip.
Many of my queer friends from Korea, with whom I have built friendships across many Fellowships and global programs I have attended, have told me the same story of expulsion, discrimination, hatred, violence, and much more as a reaction to coming out as queer.
No matter how much of a rosey world some K-Dramas, especially with the growing number of K-BL Dramas with one releasing every month due to high demand, the truth still doesn’t change that Korean society much like many other societies (take for example how Indian general public reacted to the marriage equality hearings) is still way too conservative to be having this school in existence. Imagine having publicly open queer relationships, who also kiss in libraries?
A simple Google search about ‘Is it safe being a queer foreigner in Korea?’ brings about multiple Quora answers about the harsh reality that is on the ground. Watching a series like Merry Queer also makes it crystal clear what the ground reality is despite what we are consuming largely in cute BL rom-coms.
Seoul Pride 2023 was canceled to host a Christian religious fanaticism propaganda event and you want me to believe that there are public queer relationships like this in Seoul? Maybe don’t live in clouds?
Delulu: a slang famous amongst online K-pop fan communities, means delusional. Refers to someone who builds fantasies in their head.
Exhibit c: Fetishization is a real issue, don’t ignore
A few weeks back, an Indian girl studying probably in an international school tweeted “Guys, we have a new transfer kid in my class and he’s Korean. Like he’s actually Korean. I am so excited???” The tweet caused a ripple effect on stantwt with sane K-pop stans pointing out how this attitude is a marker of clear fetishization of a culture based on what you have seen online or on the screen.
As a Genz who’s chronically online and is a BTS stan who has a very updated account on Armytwt, something that does help in increasing my screen time, this conversation is a regular to look through.
The world that XO Kitty is set in brushes very strongly on these lines, where no amount of delulu behavior is wrong. The whole storyline of that K-celeb played by Ok Taecyeon and whatever mess that additional curveball that was to the plot felt like the perfect example of delulu behavior I am referring to here.
I feel like ‘Pied Piper’ should be a mandatory listen as an assessment for these delulus.
Exhibit d: the dorm situation, the language situation
How delusional can a series be? You are telling me they assigned a girl to a boy’s dorm room just because Kitty wrote the name ‘Song’ on a form. First of all, ‘Song’ is a family name and not a name. I am pretty sure Song Hye Kyo and Song Hueng Min writing the name Song on a form won’t make people give them the same dorm if the dorms are divided by gender. I am pretty sure forms like this are particularly interesting in knowing all of your biodata possible, just because they can.
I feel bad for my friend who watched this series and now thinks they could randomly go to a hospital desk in Korea, strike up a conversation in English with the reception desk staff and expect them to not only understand it but also reciprocate fluently.
Dear friend, please learn basic, even broken native language, for an emergency in any foreign land. That’s among the cardinal rules of traveling anywhere that is alien to you. Don’t make Netflix fantasies ruin your safety.
K-: Billboard marked the beginning of this trend in the late 90s by coining K-Pop to now the attachment of K to all content that comes from Korea
Exhibit f: name dropping k drama, k fashion, k pop, k beauty.
The world, even when in South Korea, doesn’t revolve around it.
At some point, one needs to understand that you are losing the point by inserting “k-culture pieces” as random exhibits, much like mere product placements, just to make the audience feel like they are in that geographical setting won’t make the portrayal of Korea in this series as a culture and as a community somehow magically correct.
XO Kitty felt like a badly done advertisement for South Korea. It was like ‘Welcome America, see this is what it is’ and then get everything wrong and show all of it from a heavily myopic American lens. There was every aspect of why South Korea is such a hot topic and place amongst youngsters of today, from K-Pop to K-Food, but the need for this was almost nil because who is the audience for this, and even if it was to be done, it could have been much better.
Exhibit e: the whole Spotify K-Pop playlist was here
The way this series just played the whole Spotify k pop playlist of 70-80 songs in just 10 episodes is insane. For every scene in this drama, there was a completely off-the-track K-Pop song attached to and the marketing for this playlist as the “soundtrack” was done so much by the official accounts. The way people reacted would make one feel as if a wonderful thing was done but it was poorly done, I haven’t heard a worse soundtrack placement ever than this.
They randomly just pop up out of the blue, they almost annoy you with their zero connection to the scene. At some point, it felt as if the series wanted to remind us at a very high frequency through this playlist that we are in Korea because the content of the series and the plot surely made us forget that.
Oppa, saranghae: famous terms that you would never use randomly even if you are an avid Hallyu fan but do randomly break into if you are obsessed in the wrong way.
As someone who has researched into applying for undergraduate courses in Korean universities, considered applying to the South Korean study abroad program with India, and even went to the embassy to talk about it with officials, there is very little chance that Kitty could zone drop into a school in Korea for a year without even a proper minute of learning of the language. If I get into the details of the exam scores, the Korean courses you have to take, the visa questions you would need to answer and so much more that comes into play when one arrives at a decision to take up studying abroad in a country where the language is one which you have neither studied nor are fluent in, it’s almost impossible to place Kitty’s story even at an existential level of human understanding.
I don’t know how one can make sense of a series whose main character is not confused or conflicted about having a half-sibling somewhere in Korea (whom she had no clue about before this considering her mom had the child in Korea and now she is no more to tell her own story) than her not being able to tell her “boyfriend” about the same? At points like this, you understand that the perspective we are looking at this world which is through Kitty’s viewpoint is slowly deluded by how exactly kboos think.
There is so much more to unpack here, especially with how the world of XO Kitty looks at Korean culture as the rose-tinted glasses it uses for the same as if the world from a cheesy rom-com K-Drama has been metamorphosed and mixed messily into an American teen series to place Kitty’s story in. It is what a basic touch in fetishization with a humongous franchise funding backing you does.
It is indeed harmful as it pushes for a false narrative that some of my friends also built up in their heads to travel miles away. If XO Kitty is remade into a multiple-season franchise of its own, it will cause even more harm, and push for even more abnormal behavior towards cultures that have already been fetishized enough.
Do you know what the creators of the show should do to not mess up next time, God forbid if there is one? Watch Korean vlogs of actual Korean people living in Seoul daily for at least two or three months and then make a big list of how disjointed the series is and make you feel from reality.
XO Kitty is simply a show created to feed into delusional fantasies. A harmful fantasy not only to a community but one that goes much beyond. It is an indirect but big push for more fetishization. It gives Koreaboos concrete validation for their delulu mindset.