#korean stuff

So.. I made a Korean version of Scarecrow? It started as curiosity, and became detailed long story?

Korean Scarecrows are called “허수아비 (Fake-o-father, or man)”, and it started as religious figure, so this story is strongly influenced by those two facts.

Caution for mention of murder, shamanism-based religion.

(Visualization)

idc abt rpf rlly cause celebrities are fucking rich and they can just refrain from reading ppls fantasies on the internet and it doesnt affect them, but!! real, regular korean ppl in the diaspora are affected by the way kpop fandom talks about and writes about korean characters. obviously were not a monolith and some korean ppl dont rlly care but its deeply hurtful to me, as one queer korean american.

the writer in question runs a very enjoyable trans porn writing blog, but they recently made a post to check on interest in them posting some of their kpop fandom writing, with the names removed, but specifically because they wanted to use words like hyung and unnie. they said they wouldnt be fetishizing koreans or korean honorifics because they are actively studying korean.

studying our language and using our words correctly doesnt make cherry picking cute korean words for an otherwise english fic not fetishization, whether its porn or sfw. fetishization is not sexualization. it can be sexual, but fetishization is about the removal of pieces of a culture you think are cute or exotic or fascinating or what have you and using them for your purposes without the context of the people of that culture, their customs, their history, their lives, and their personhood. writing fic using korean words is literally just for aesthetic. its like kpop artists stealing black aesthetics and styles. its like nonblack people putting on aave to sound cool while disrespecting actual black people and having the ability to code switch back to sounding "respectable" and having the privilege from doing so.

writing vapid stories about supposedly korean characters where the only reason people know theyre korean is their names and a sprinkling of korean words is fetishization! its pasting a korean aesthetic on characters you have otherwise put no thought and research into.

and like. at the end of the day its not that huge a deal in fanfic spheres. ppl writing for fun on ao3 does not really materially affect the korean diaspora, a fic doesnt rlly need to be as heavily researched as a for profit novel going through a commercial publisher. but its incredibly alienating to find a space that is comfortable for my trans identity and then find that its weirdly obsessed with the aesthetic of my ethnicity. if they go forward with posting their fics im sure ill find other blogs, tho ill def miss their writing style and good trans porn is slim pickings already lol. like ill live. but its one more thing. one more thing in an ongoing stream of alienation ive dealt with my whole life, you know?

im not gonna harass and fuck with ppl who wanna write their fun little fantasies on the internet, esp if its on ao3 and properly tagged. but like. i rlly wish the kpop fandom would think harder about how theyre conceptualizing korean people and how theyre presenting us to others, and about how we feel when we see them trying on our aesthetics while if we have too heavy an accent or our names are too foreign we lose out on jobs. i rlly wish theyd think abt the way they shape a view of koreans as milky skinned half moon eyed skinny pretty boys and long legged dream girls, while everyday non-celebrity koreans are discriminated against, and admitting were korean almost invariably results in people asking what we think of x kpop group or kdrama, when we are so much more as individuals.

fetishization is pervasive and can seem trivial, but it truly blocks our ability to be seen as people, our ability to talk about our struggles in the diaspora, and our day to day mental health.

I’m sure most people who are into kpop and Korean culture already know how to count age ~the Korean way~, but since it’s JK’s birthday in an hour and I’m feeling productive at home for once, I’m making this post for anyone who might be looking. 

So basically when a baby’s born, they are considered a year old. The most widely accepted explanation is that it’s because Koreans count the nine months spent in the womb as a year (I personally don’t buy it but that’s neither here nor there). 

Then you gain one year at the start of every solar new year, that is, January 1st. So technically, if you’re born at 11:59 pm, December 31st, after a minute, you’re 2 years old. 

But this system doesn’t really apply to babies under 4 years or so (international/normal age). Usually parents will say a baby is X months old until they have their first or second birthday. Then parents will either say their baby is one and a half or 15 months, depending on their preference. When you’re a baby, your birthdays are called ‘dol (돌)’. So when a parent says the baby just had their first dol/passed their second dol, you can assume the baby is one/two years old respectively (international/normal age).

After about 3-4 years your age gets counted “the adult way”, and you gain one year every January regardless of your actual birthday. Your classmates are all the same age as you are until you graduate high school (unless you flunk/skip a grade lol).

An exception to this are the ‘early birthdays’. This isn’t a thing anymore for kids born after 2006, but until then people born in January/February went to school with kids born from March to December in the year before them. This was because in Korea school starts in March, and they wanted kids enrolling in first grade to be of the same biological (=international/normal) age. But as I mentioned above, you start counting your age the adult Korean way after your 3rd/4th birthday, so this system just resulted in kids of varying Korean ages studying in the same grade. 

That was unnecessarily long....

Anyway. 

So we’ve covered two different ways of counting age in Korea - one is the traditional Korean way, when you turn older on January 1st and not on your birthday, and the other is the normal, globally accepted way, which is to count by your biological age starting from your actual birth date. The former is used in everyday life in Korea. You will most likely never hear a grown Korean in a conversation with another Korean telling their age any other way. The latter you can see being used in hospital charts and on your medicine prescriptions.

So when JK says he came to Seoul when he was 15 years old, or when he sings ‘Twenty-four, feels like I became an adult faster than anybody else’ in My Time, he’s using his usual Korean age, which is 13/14 and 22/23 in biological age. In Korea we call the first type of age “seneun nayi (세는 나이)”, which can be translated as “counting age”, and the second, globally used type of age “mahn nayi (만 나이)”, which is “full age”. So JK, born September 1st 1997, is 24 in “seneun nayi”, and will turn 23 in “mahn nayi” or turn “mahn 23”, on September 1st 2020. 

There’s a third way of counting age, which is basically starting at zero (same as biological/international age) and adding a year every January (same as traditional Korean age). This type is called “yeon nayi (연 나이)”, but it’s only used in limited instances. One of them is media - if a story of a person born October 5, 1990 gets news coverage on September 1, 2020, the article will refer to them as 30 years old, even if they’re already 31 in “seneun nayi” and still 29 in “mahn nayi”. 

˚◦⸵ ˬ̽. ̽ ⌦ ﹏ actress + soloist ↻ lee sung-kyung ⋅ .ˀˀ

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This is completely and utterly random but I think my city is very pretty

world - 세계

magic - 마법

who - 누구

you - 당신

horn- 뿔

heart - 마음

perfect - 완벽하다

cold - 냉정한

mayhem - 신체 상해

rising - 상승

crown - 왕관

wings - 날개

light - 빛

moment - 시점

salvation - 구원

loneliness - 외로움

suffering - 고통

deserted - 사람이 없는

monster - 괴물

Mirror - 거울

disappear - 사라지다

run - 뛰다

headaches - 두통

I don’t know - 몰라요

pain - 슬픔

dizzy - 어지러운

mad - 정신이상의

body - 몸