Journalists love to get Korea wrong. Some are paid to share explosive takes that feed into the subsconscoius orientalist views of the wider world; others just do it for the social media clout. And you only realize how wrong they are when you get off the internet and spend an afternoon in Sokcho, Daegu, or Chuncheon. For anyone that does this, something becomes immediately apparent. Korea isn’t actually that bad. (Or great). The people get along. The kids go to school. The young people date. And everyone drinks ice americano. There is a weird sensation that comes from watching someone deliver a sociological autopsy of a nation in a 14-minute YouTube video essay. Perhaps it’s just the new era where the average internet user is operating under the delusion that a Netflix subscription is functionally equivalent to a PhD. However it arises, the narrative they’ve constructed is a sort of paint-by-numbers cyberpunk dystopia. The chaebol function as overlords, capitalism has been cranked up to some terminal level of suffering, and joy is lowkey against the law. Every Korean male is a to