After the K-pop dance music videos have become a huge phenomenon amongst those YouTube viewers across the world, the fandoms of each K-pop idol groups began to make reaction videos for their fan groups. This was another a huge wave risen in the YouTube culture as a byproduct of the K-pop popularity. A lot of YouTubers began to create various reaction videos: videos reacting to the dance covers, viral parodies of the K-pop music videos, or to the “Jikcam,” which are the videos taken individually by the fans of a certain idol member of the group, and etc.
What’s more interesting is that these reaction videos are recently started to aim Korean movies too. As K-pop industry expands throughout the teenagers around the world, Hallyu began to strike the world and made people turn their interest into various other Korean cultures, and the Korean cinema has been taking a big part of it. Park Chan Wook is a Korean movie director well renowned for his previous work Oldboy (2003) and Thirst (2009). He had also founded his own movie production company, the Moho Film, in 2002. This company has been marketing their movies in an aggressive way, and YouTube was one of their significant marketing methods. There is this clip of two people reacting to one of Park’s movie trailers, The Handmaiden (2016), and these two show how the transnationalism is starting to become real.
The woman in the video says, “We had those dolls when I was growing up” (at 3:36), or “My girls used to go through over that” (at 7:23), which clearly show that she can somehow connect to these scenes with her Asianness. Although there are many other non-Asian YouTubers reacting to Korean movies, they still can somehow share the commons when watching the video since the universality of human emotion leads people to sympathize easily with the movies when they portray cross-cultural themes in the scenes. Through reacting, people feel a sense of kinship, and a pure satisfaction by receiving a confirmation from others that what they are feeling right now are exactly what others are feeling right now too. This is how people re-identify themselves, and further re-unify with others through watching the scenes, and this is where the transnationalism begins to extend since the borders of nationality are blurring off through people’s empathies.
Further, the author of Pop Cosmopolitics and K-pop Video Culture, Michell Cho, says in her reading, “The talent agency YG entertainment shows no hesitation to give away content for free on YouTube knowing that the sort of devotion that marshals the resources evident in the dance cover video leads to acts of consumption far greater than the purchase of pop singles as commodities” (254). Just like YG, the Moho Film is trying the same thing for its movies like, distributing several clips of the movie for free along with the trailer in the YouTube, before the movie launches officially in the market. By doing this, the YouTubers who react to Korean movies get to have a chance to do more of their reaction videos besides the trailer, and those who watch YouTube movie trailer reaction videos will get to have another chance to look up the other various clips of the movie that they are interested in.
The whole combination of the dynamics of intimacy and the various commodification methods are helping this Korean cinema industry to actualize the transnationalism more than ever. Thus, people from other countries start to look at the historical backgrounds of the Korean movie. The Handmaiden, for instance, people start to pay attention why people in Korea were wearing all the mixed versions of Japanese traditional clothes and the Korean’s, or why all the interiors of the Korean houses are jumbled up with the Japanese and European styles, and why the movie has the scenes of a Korean man trying to entertain Japanese aristocrats. Then, at the end of the movie, people finally realize that it was actually in the period of Japanese colonial, and there was a history where some opportunists in Korea earned a lot of money through enacting pro-Japanese actions, and justifying the Japanese annexation of Korea.
The whole nationalistic idea that is portrayed in the Korean movies are making people who make reaction videos and people who are watching their reaction videos to be more curious about the Korean history and culture, and gradually question themselves how to accept the cultural intentions put into the Korean movie industry, and further expand their personal ideas transnationally. Commodifying the Korean movies through the accessible, affordable, and dramatic marketing device like YouTube, has led to the production of various reaction videos for the Korean movie trailers, and these reaction videos have also led the interconnection of individuals and groups beyond the state boundaries to be more close than ever, and commodified the people’s empathies in a smart way, which finally played a huge role in expanding the essence of Korean nationality under Hallyu-hwa.
The Politics of K-Pop 