Girls & Korean Romance Drama (Reception Analysis of Girl Teenage Audiences on Korean Romance Drama)

Korean romantic dramas have become a very popular phenomenon among Indonesian teenage girls, sparking an interest in researching their impact and perceptions. This article is motivated by previous research which states that these dramas are considered to lack quality due to the dominance of love stories that are too idealised and do not match the reality of everyday life. Previous research also criticised the construction of love and romance in Korean dramas that tend not to reflect real life. The researcher in this article explores how Indonesian teenage girls' meanings of watching Korean romantic dramas. The researcher uses ethnography as a method to get answers to these questions. In addition, to understand how the informants like Korean dramas, the researcher used Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory of subject formation. As a result, the researcher found that the act of reading from Korean drama viewers is a momentary release from patriarchal demands by imagining themselves as characters in the drama. However, on the other hand, the researcher found a contradiction where the act of watching Korean dramas is a form of resistance to patriarchy, but the narratives presented in Korean romantic dramas often support patriarchy by emphasising women's happiness through relationships with men. Limitation of this study is the limited number of informants involved, causing the results of the interpretation to be less diverse. Therefore, for future research, it is recommended to broaden the scope by increasing the number of informants, to provide a broader and deeper perspective.