In 2025, South Korea (hereon, “Korea”) ushered in a new liberal president, Lee Jae-myeong – but also appointed Ahn Chang-ho, known for his anti-LGBTQ stance, as the next chairman for the National Human Rights Commission of Korea. This is just one of the many paradoxes that complicate conversations on queerness in Korea, and by proxy, its expansive multinational media industry as well. In keeping with the theme, “Queer Animation,” I will thus look at two viral Korean web animation series – There She Is!! (2003-2008) and Alien Stage (2022-2025) – both of which prominently “sexual minorities” (songsosuja) and are equally invested in finding audiences outside of Korea. Together, they illustrate the push-and-pull of Korean queerness, which flits between hypervisibility versus invisibility, as mediated through the entangled web of Korean multimedia on the international stage.

I choose these two particular web series primarily because of their appeals to queer resistance and international popularity. Alien Stage is a viral YouTube series directed by user VIVINOS and her nonbinary partner, QMENG. In this alternative universe, humans must compete in a survival audition show for an extraterrestrial audience. Same-sex competitors sing to the death with their crushes and lovers before a bloodthirsty alien crowd… until the pink-haired protagonist, Mizi, outperforms her lover, Sua, and decides that enough is enough. Over the course of six Rounds, 29 original songs, and extra worldbuilding content since 2022, Alien Stage has grown a multimillion subscriber base with over 180 million views on YouTube alone.

At first glance, this queer, Korean international viral sensation recalls an earlier online web series, There She Is!! by three-person collective SamBakZa. This five-part Flash animation series had been originally uploaded on animation/game hub Newgrounds.com on April 20, 2003, where it remained a top-rated Flash movie for 11 years. Here, Doki, a female rabbit, falls madly and stubbornly in love with Nabi, a male cat. As their romantic coupling becomes more visible to the citizens of Seoul, however, societal disapproval becomes palpable. Their personal relationship becomes a public matter: people protest for and against interspecies love; the couple gets harassed on the streets; restaurants and cafes reject them on the grounds of prejudice. It is only from here that the two can figure out how to keep their love alive in a world of hate.

Though one could argue that There She Is!! is more of a metaphor for interracial (rather than non-heteronormative) love, we see an underlying theme of the “personal is political” in both series. In both series, the very act of loving someone beyond heteronormative (or species-normative) bounds becomes not a personal relationship between two individuals, but rather, blows up into an act of resistance (as in Alien Stage) or a societal issue (There She Is!!). This, understandably, upsets the queer protagonists involved – Sua and Mizi, Doki and Nabi – as they dream for nothing more than a quiet life together.

Their yearning for an inconspicuous romance persists in literature on queer Korean studies. In the edited collection Queer Korea, John (Song Pae) Cho describes the multitude of terms used to identify and self-identify queer folks in Korean: “ghosts” and pogal (a reversal of kalbo, the most vulgar term used for sex workers in Korea) after the Korean War, and after the 1990s, “gay” (a loan word from English), and iban (“different” or “second-class”, in comparison to ilban, or that is, “general” or cisgender, heterosexual people) (Cho 271-274). Todd A. Henry also notes the collective culpability that befalls not just those who publicly identify as queer, but also, those who are immediately affiliated with them. In this variant of “guilt by association” (yonjwaje) – a term previously used to associate and punish family members of alleged communists following the Korean War (1950-53) – there persists a social stigma that marginalizes the kin of sexual minorities as well (Henry 3). In other words, the individual act of openly engaging in queer sexual and/or romantic relations implicates not just the people involved, but their immediate familial community as well. As a result, LGBTQ-identifying folks often opt to stay “invisible” instead, to protect their relatives from social isolation or in deference of Confucian values (Shin 304-311).

In other words, for Korean queers deeply embedded within Korean societal norms, the personal is political. This is clear from Doki and Nabi’s iban-like exile in There She Is!!: even as civilians, their choice to publicly pursue their relationship becomes politicized. In episode 4, “Paradise,” viewers familiar with South Korean daily life and virulent Christian opposition at pride protests in Korea will recoil at images of lecturing elders, opposition demonstrations, and public manhunts. The experience is further intensified by specific landmarks and subway signs demarcating real sites in Seoul. The intense social pressure eventually motivates Nabi to cave in to re-entering “normal” society, just so that he does not have to deal with the social optics of a non-normative romance.

For Alien Stage, however, the backdrop of the K-Pop survival audition program protects the visibly queer Mizi and Sua, alongside their other friends. With signboards, crowdshots, and teasers echoing real-world popular domestic survival K-Pop audition television programs like Sixteen (from which TWICE emerged), Alien Stage normalizes the spectatorial pleasure of watching “K(Q)ueerness” blossom on-screen. Jungmin Kwon defines “K(Q)ueerness” as the unique “aesthetics, imaginations, practices, performances, and ideas of K-Pop players…. [to] have the potential to disrupt the cishetpatriarchal structures of K-Pop and create a liberatory space with their unruly, deviant, anti-hegemonic, disturbing, and fluid qualities” (Kwon 55). Through the context of a music industry designed to maximize international sales and export, K(Q)ueerness enables for a highly visible mode for performers and followers to engage in queer discourse.

In this way, Alien Stage is a diegetic mirror and extension of Hallyu 2.0, otherwise dubbed the New Korean Wave. These terms refer to the governmental push from 2010 wherein Korean popular music, webtoons, digital games, and digital technologies have been actively tailored for export beyond the Asia Pacific. Alien Stage is produced by Studio LICO, a subsidiary creative hub under Naver Webtoon, which has aggressively developed globalization strategies since the early 2010s. Now, webtoons, alongside K-Pop, have exploded in international growth and outreach between 2010 to 2020, leading beyond more traditional cultural exports like Korean movies and television programs from Hallyu 1.0 (Jin 134-139).

The contrast between the two shows translates to a paradoxical invisibility/visibility paradigm of Korean queerness. In There She Is!!, queerness is made from the personal to the political. Within an international context, queerness becomes permissible, even if internally resistant, when spectated by a foreign, or “alien” audience. Furthermore, within the structure of the profit-driven Korean media industry, such hypervisibility is only permissible under the practical blessing of Korean cultural export as a part of Hallyu 2.0 / Korean New Wave, and through its popularity online. The K(Q)ueerness in viral web animation is indeed, a form of hypervisible resistance against the heteropatriarchy online -- but at the same time, remains invisible offline, safely out of sight and out of mind in the lived day-to-day lives of the average Korean civilian.

In conclusion: Where does that leave us Korean queers in the context of animation? Must we always look abroad to find peace? Is the Internet, or computer mediation, the only “safe space” in which we may be permitted to exist? I hope not. I turn to the last episode of both series here, where  Mizi and Nabi look inward to their true desires. The two characters draw the line when they realize that there is still time for them to have a change of heart, and in turn, change the fate of the communities surrounding them. It is only through courage of embracing those we love that we can declare the personal as political on our own terms – and allow us to continue to persist, resist, and live, not just long, for better days to come.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cho, John (Song Pae). “The Three Faces of South Korea’s Male Homosexuality: Pogal, Iban and Neoliberal Gay,” Queer Korea, ed. Todd A. Henry, Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.

Henry, Todd. “Queer Korea: Toward A Field of Engagement,” Queer Korea, ed. Todd A. Henry, Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.

Jin, Dal Yong. Understanding Korean Webtoon Culture: Transmedia Storytelling, Digital Platforms, and Genres. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Asia Center, 2023.

Kwon, Jungmin. “K(Q)ueer-Pop for Another World: Toward a Theorization of Gender and Sexuality in K-Pop,” International Journal of Communication 17 (2023), 52-71.

Shin, Layoung. “Avoiding T’ibu (Obvious Butchness): Invisibility as a Survival Strategy among Young queer Women in South Korea,” Queer Korea, ed. Todd A. Henry, Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.