#38. Knowing your internet literature

Today, I was browsing the Korean websites as usual, when I came across the following post (which I re-create below for the ease of reading.)

Title: 놀이공원이 없는 마을에서 (In a village that has no amusement parks)
Text (very short): 이장님이 허락한 아이들의 유일한 마약 (The only drug that the mayor allowed the children to access)
Accompanying gif:

A lot of posts in Korean internet forums are very short, like this one. They are intended for a quick chuckle (or a quick fit of laughter, in many cases!) and you move on. The issue is that there's more to these posts than what's shown on the surface!

The post itself is fairly easy to understand (maybe the accompanying text is a bit bizarre, but I'll explain that below.) With a funny gif (that is not even Korean,) the Koreans enjoy creating the caption that goes with it. In our case here, they are imagining a village with no amusement parks, and the adults manually providing an amusement park-esque entertainment to the children.

Of course, that's only mildly funny, and I would not even break into a faint smile reading that.

What makes this post truly funny is the accompanying short text that says "이장님이 허락한 아이들의 유일한 마약."

I hope this text looks vaguely familiar! A very similar text made an appearance a while ago in one of my posts. In the post, a Korean teenager full of 허세 posted in his social media account (most likely Cyworld) that "음악만이 나라에서 허락한 유일한 마약 (music is the only drug allowed by the nation.)"

Although this original embarrassing post went viral at least 15 years ago, Koreans found it too funny to forget. And now they are paying tribute to this original post by modifying it and quoting it. And everyone reading it will be reminded of the original 허세 post.

This is one of the reasons that makes the Korean internet so difficult to navigate! Not only do you need to be fluent in the Korean language, you also need to understand the cultural context that lies behind it. It might date back only a decade or so like in this case, but in other cases, you need to know some Korean history to truly understand what's going on, as in knowing how to say that you're good with women, or when you're trying to pretend that you can read people's minds.