Intertextual play in K-drama: Exploring the relationship between fandom and local cultural production

Hyejin Jo

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Abstract

This study examines how the memeification of a supporting character from the Korean drama Stranger (2017, 2020) contributed to the groundbreaking creation of Korea’s first character-driven spin-off, Dongjae, the Good or the Bastard (2024). By analyzing the evolution of the “Neug Dongjae” to “Uri Dongjae” meme, this research introduces the concept of “intertextual play”—the natural circulation of media fragments through daily communication that sustains cultural relevance beyond traditional metrics of engagement. Unlike Jenkins’s participatory culture framework, which emphasizes an active audience, intertextual play involves unconscious, ambient media appropriation that still yields notable industrial impacts. The study demonstrates how Seo Dongjae, a morally complex prosecutor navigating Korea’s elite hierarchies, resonated with audiences who recognized similar figures in their own organizational settings. This recognition appeared through memes that circulated beyond the drama’s viewers, establishing a continuous cultural presence that the industry viewed as a viable market demand. The spin-off’s success affirms this alternative approach to content development. The findings challenge the Korean drama industry’s platform-oriented strategies by demonstrating how organic meme circulation can drive successful content development beyond traditional metrics. This research enriches fan studies by broadening the scope beyond active participation to include casual cultural engagement as a key factor in industrial decision-making.

Introduction

In September 2023, TVING’s official Twitter/X account announced the casting confirmation of Lee Joon-hyuk for Dongjae, the Good or the Bastard, with the viral promotional phrase: “OMG ‘Neug Dongjae’ is becoming ‘Uri Dongjae’? That infuriating yet endearing prosecutor #LeeJoonhyuk is really returning!” (TVING, 2024a). Subsequently, in 2024, TVING’s social media accounts on Instagram and Twitter/X promoted this Stranger spin-off with the phrase “Uri Dongjae, embarrassing wherever we take him” (TVING, 2024b). What is noteworthy is that these promotional phrases are all officially appropriated memes created by fans. The spin-off featuring Seo Dongjae, who was not even the protagonist of Stranger, as the main character, released on October 10, 2024, represents an unprecedented case in Korean drama history where a non-protagonist character from the original became the protagonist of a spin-off. The meme’s cultural presence became so prominent that TVING incorporated it directly into the official teaser for the spin-off series, announcing the character’s return with the line “Neug Dongjae is back.” This industrial uptake demonstrates that the meme was not merely a fan-made joke but a significant cultural signal that shaped perceptions of the character and informed promotional strategies.

The character Seo Dongjae, played by Lee Joon-hyuk, became a meme and continued to be discussed online long after the drama ended. In this paper, I examine fan-audiences’ communication through memes as ultimately becoming a point for cultural producers to think, “the drama is still popular even after it ended.” This paper terms the everyday use of memes—less serious but penetrating daily life, not even requiring evaluation as “active”—as ‘intertextual play.’ In this paper, ‘intertextual play’ refers not to deliberate fan activities but to the organic cultural circulation whereby drama characters and dialogue become memetic content integrated into everyday discourse. This concept describes a cyclical process of cultural mediation: from drama broadcast and conclusion through memeification, to infiltration of quotidian communication, sustained cultural presence, industrial recognition of continued relevance, and ultimately, new textual production in the form of spin-offs.

This paper begins with the observation that even people who have not actively watched the drama use the Seo Dongjae meme online, understanding it within the context of the character’s positioning in the drama. The traditional culture of “watching live broadcasts” has shifted to streaming (Jin, 2023), and even that is being replaced by the phenomenon of only meme production and consumption. Memes, whether in the form of text, images, or their combination, encode socio-culturally accepted contexts that penetrate people’s everyday communication. As dramas represent the era (Jang, 2024), memes produced by fragmenting and breaking apart drama characters and scenes serve as devices that convey the context and core of stories, reproducing meaning, even when audiences are not aiming for “creation.”

Unlike traditional notions of active fandom, intertextual play encompasses the unconscious appropriation and circulation of media texts through casual communicative practices, demonstrating how ambient cultural engagement can generate industrial outcomes comparable to those of intentional fan labour. This paper aims to examine how the “Neug Dongjae” meme born from a drama character represents not simply the popularity of the drama and character or the influence of the actor’s fandom, but rather what is lacking when understanding audiences in the Korean drama industry as a socio-culturally coded means of everyday communication, and how this led to the production of the spin-off Dongjae, the Good or the Bastard. This paper situates two primary research questions to interrogate this: How do memes mediate between drama texts and cultural production? How does the fan audience’s everyday and casual play lead to industrial decisions?

Background: Stranger, Dongjae, and the Meme Trajectory

Stranger aired on tvN with Season 1 (2017) and Season 2 (2020), both written by Lee Soo-yeon. The crime thriller follows emotionless prosecutor Hwang Simok (Cho Seung-woo) and detective Han Yeojin (Bae Doona) investigating corruption within Korea’s prosecution system. While Hwang represents idealized justice—operating by “statutory law without emotional constraints”—and Han embodies unwavering moral integrity, the supporting character Seo Dongjae offers a contrasting perspective on prosecutorial reality.

Seo Dongjae emerges as the drama’s most complex figure: a regional university graduate struggling within the Seoul National University-dominated prosecutorial hierarchy. His character introduction—”If I could live by clinging on, I’d even give my liver!”—establishes him as an opportunist navigating systemic exclusion through morally questionable choices, primarily bribery. Having entered law school on a full scholarship and passed the bar through determination, Dongjae’s trajectory illustrates how institutional barriers—lack of academic pedigree and regional connections—push competent individuals toward corruption. His famous line, “Not everyone is from Seoul National University,” encapsulates the class consciousness pervading Korean elite institutions.

By Season 2, relegated to provincial Namyangju, a peripheral region close to Seoul, despite ten years’ experience, Dongjae contemplates his professional mortality while desperately seeking Seoul re-entry through any available connection. This portrayal of a prosecutor caught between ambition and systemic limitations, surviving through compromise rather than idealism, resonated with audiences who recognized similar figures in their own organizational contexts, ultimately driving the character’s memeification and unprecedented spin-off production.

The ‘Neug Dongjae’ meme was brought up online after the middle of Season 1 ended in 2017. Linguistically analyzed, “Neug” is the Gyeongsang dialect for “your” with strong negative connotations of othering. It carries slightly derogatory and aggressive connotations of othering when referring to things or people related to the other party. Seo Dongjae’s behaviour, through scenes that couldn’t be embraced with the possessive “our,” ultimately became “Neug Dongjae.” In other words, it began as a nickname, including viewers’ interpretation of the Seo Dongjae character, and audiences distancing themselves from Dongjae’s behaviour through socially, culturally, and ethnically constructed norms and values.

The process of gaining the nickname itself contains context coded into the meme, so being called “Neug Dongjae” meant all of Dongjae’s words and actions received reactions of “that’s so Dongjae,” and even when someone who wasn’t Dongjae said or did something Dongjae might do, reactions were explosive, no less than for the protagonist, with comments like “Dongjae would have done that too.” Dongjae’s words and actions received evaluations that they might be optimal in “real” situations, given Dongjae’s circumstances, suggesting that “there’s definitely someone like that in every company,” which gained more attention as a realistic character. The character mediating real situations further promoted memeification. Later called a “realistic villain,” finally, the pitiful, regrettable “Uri” Dongjae, “Uri Dongjae, embarrassing wherever we show him,” was born.

Ultimately, at the intersection of the reality Dongjae portrays and the fan-audiences’ reality, audiences projected familiar human tropes through Dongjae, making Neug Dongjae into a meme. That is, ‘realistic’ situations greatly influenced the transition from ‘Neug Dongjae’ to ‘Uri Dongjae,’ starting from a satirical interpretation of reality that can make humans either good or bad depending on circumstances, which ultimately reveals Dongjae’s identity through the spin-off title.

Regarding the spin-off production decision, writer Lee Soo-yeon stated in an interview that the character, Seo Dongjae, can be anything (Cho and Kim, 2024). Important factors included what differentiated it from Stranger, what settings enabled making him a “protagonist,” why TVING original was chosen, and the production team’s recognition of fan reactions. It is noteworthy that as memes became mediators throughout this production decision-making process, the industry accepted this as a positive signal of the drama’s success.

Conceptual Frameworks and Methodology

Aesthetic intertextuality—exemplified by the instantly recognisable visual grammar of a Wes Anderson film—illustrates a key dimension of contemporary media circulation. Anderson’s works have been extensively analyzed for their highly codified stylistic signatures, including symmetrical framing, curated colour palettes, repeated narrative motifs, and a self-conscious literary artifice (Dilley, 2017). These cues operate as portable cultural fragments that circulate far beyond their originating texts. Even outside cinephile communities, audiences can readily identify an “Andersonian” aesthetic through TikTok reenactments, advertising campaigns, memes, and everyday social media discourse. Scholars attribute this recognisability to Anderson’s highly allusive, citation-heavy film language and to his position within what critics call the “smart film” tradition and the “new sincerity,” where irony and sincerity coexist as dominant tonal markers (Buckland, 2012).

Crucially, this body of scholarship demonstrates that intertextual recognition today relies less on sustained textual engagement than on ambient cultural saturation. Viewers need not watch The Royal Tenenbaums or The Grand Budapest Hotel in full to mobilise Anderson’s aesthetic cues; rather, these cues have become free-floating cultural units that audiences appropriate according to communicative needs. This shift from intentional intertextuality to ambient intertextuality provides the conceptual foundation for intertextual play. Just as Anderson’s aesthetic circulates independently of film-viewing, the “Neug Dongjae” meme functions as a culturally recognizable fragment detached from full-textual knowledge. Many who use the meme have neither watched Stranger nor identify as fans, yet they activate its socio-cultural meanings—its character type, workplace resonance, and tonal implications—within everyday communication. Thus, the Anderson analogy is not merely stylistic; it demonstrates how intertextual fragments accrue cultural legibility through circulation rather than comprehension, offering a theoretical template for understanding how K-drama memes operate as ambient cultural mediators in contemporary Korea.

This aesthetic recognizability is not unique to Anderson; Korean drama also operates through its own forms of instant intertextual coding. Audiences routinely identify a K-drama’s genre, tone, or character dynamics from minimal cues—such as the camera’s dramatic zoom, the swelling of a melodramatic soundtrack, the appearance of a certain workplace archetype, or a familiar cadence of dialogue—regardless of whether they have watched the specific drama being referenced. These culturally saturated fragments function much like Anderson’s visual grammar: they circulate independently from the original text and become communicative resources that people mobilize in everyday conversation. This parallel is crucial for the present study. It shows that intertextual recognition in K-drama is less about auteurist style and more about the circulation of culturally coded fragments—character types (e.g., the opportunistic junior prosecutor), emotional tones, or narrative templates—that allow audiences to understand and reuse elements of a drama without engaging with its full text. This is precisely the mechanism that enables “Neug Dongjae” to circulate as an everyday expression. Even those who have not watched Stranger can still understand the meme’s meaning because it draws on recognizable K-drama archetypes: the morally ambiguous civil servant, the ambitious underdog, the flawed but relatable worker navigating institutional hierarchy. These fragments supply the intertextual ground on which intertextual play becomes possible.

This transformation from conscious cinematic citation to unconscious everyday appropriation parallels the process this study examines in Korean drama. Just as Anderson’s visual style transcends its original texts to become a communicative tool, the character Seo Dongjae from Stranger evolved from a specific dramatic creation into “Neug Dongjae”—a meme that penetrated everyday Korean discourse. The crucial difference lies in the medium: while Anderson’s influence manifests through visual aesthetics, Dongjae’s operates through linguistic expressions and character typologies. Both cases, however, demonstrate cultural circulation that exceeds original textual boundaries and ultimately generates new cultural production—in Anderson’s case, countless parodies and homages; in Dongjae’s, Korea’s first character-driven spin-off.

In contemporary digital society, memes accelerate and democratize this intertextual circulation. With over one million memes shared daily on Instagram alone (Levy, 2023), they have become dominant communicative forms that serve as tools for social connection and participation (Tidy et al., 2024). Importantly, Laineste and Voolaid (2016) discovered that humour embedded within memes generates intertextual references dependent on both local cultural heritage and global influences—a duality that explains how Korea’s prosecutor culture specificity in Dongjae could become a universal workplace meme, much as Anderson’s European art cinema traditions became global TikTok trends.

The theoretical understanding of memes has evolved considerably from Dawkins’s (1976) original concept. Modern scholars acknowledge that users intentionally adopt and alter cultural texts through memes, driven by human agency in their development and dissemination (Shifman, 2011; 2013; Wiggins and Bowers, 2015). Instead of serving as fixed cultural symbols, memes act as dynamic aesthetic objects that reflect current cultural trends and public conversations (Goriunova, 2016). Wiggins and Bowers (2015) differentiate between emergent memes—initial user modifications of media content—and full memes that gain legitimacy through community engagement and sharing. This situates memes within storytelling traditions, functioning not as complete narratives but as fragmentary parts of remix culture (Esteves and Meikle, 2015; Milner, 2016). Milner (2013, p. 2357) describes Internet memes as multimodal artifacts that are continuously remixed by participants who use popular culture for social commentary. Their ability to cross platform boundaries while retaining contextual meaning (Esteves and Meikle, 2015, p. 565) makes them especially suited for the intertextual mediation at the heart of this study’s analysis of Korean drama circulation.

Meme circulation allows for collective discussion and the development of social norms and values (Gal et al., 2016; Denisova, 2019, p. 10). Denisova (2019, p. 10) describes memes for Internet studies as context-dependent viral texts that spread through mutation and replication processes. These texts are deeply connected to their contexts, referencing social issues, popular culture, general knowledge, media awareness, and political literacy, while showing the ability to link different elements—qualities that make memes significant media and social phenomena (Denisova, 2019, p. 11). Memes have a unique trait of being incomplete, acting as unfinished communicative acts that need user participation to complete their meaning (Denisova, 2019, pp. 10-11). Although meme formats offer perceptual frames, audiences must actively engage to complete and interpret their meanings, unlocking their full communicative potential (Denisova, 2019, p. 11). This participatory aspect makes memes socially influential and discursively flexible, allowing for collective expression of ideas and opinions within immediate, context-specific settings (Denisova, 2019, p. 11).

Jenkins’s (1992, 2006) concept of participatory culture has been instrumental in understanding active fan engagement with media texts. His framework emphasizes fans as productive audiences who create secondary texts, organize campaigns, and actively resist or negotiate with media industries. This perspective positions fandom as intentional, conscious labour that blurs production-consumption boundaries (Terranova, 2000; Hardt & Negri, 2004). As An (2022) demonstrates, intertextual references in K-drama often function as reward mechanisms for knowledgeable viewers, reinforcing fandom through recognition. However, such fan-oriented intertextuality differs from the ambient, low-effort circulation I identify as intertextual play, where users who are not fans—and may not have watched the drama at all—appropriate fragments detached from the original text.

However, this focus on active participation overlooks a significant dimension of cultural engagement. Not everyone who uses “Neug Dongjae” in daily conversation is a devoted Stranger fan, just as not everyone creating Wes Anderson-style videos has watched his films. They simply employ culturally coded expressions that align with their communicative needs. This unconscious, ambient engagement—what this study terms “intertextual play”—differs fundamentally from Jenkins’s participatory culture. While Jenkins focuses on intentional fan production, intertextual play encompasses the casual appropriation and circulation of media fragments through everyday communication, demonstrating how ambient cultural presence can generate industrial outcomes equivalent to deliberate fan labour. While An (2022) highlights how intertextuality enables dramas to become self-reflexive—critiquing or parodying their own conventions—intertextual play operates externally, with everyday users re-signifying textual fragments in ways the original production never anticipated. Taken together, these theoretical components clarify why this study focuses on the everyday circulation of a single meme rather than on organized fan production. Building on this framework, the following section outlines the methodological choices that allow intertextual play to be observed within everyday discourse.

The concept of “intertextual play” thus describes a cyclical process of cultural mediation: from initial broadcast through memeification to infiltration of quotidian discourse, maintaining cultural presence that industry stakeholders eventually recognize as sustained relevance, ultimately culminating in new textual production. The “Neug Dongjae” case exemplifies this process perfectly. Those who appropriate the expression in daily communication maintain the drama’s cultural presence long after its broadcast ended, creating what the industry interpreted—perhaps accurately—as sustained popularity worth a spin-off investment. This shift from “participation” to “play” acknowledges that not all culturally significant audience engagement is active or resistant; sometimes it is merely ambient, casual, yet still industrially consequential.

This study examines a single core meme centered on the character Seo Dongjae, specifically the semantic shift from “Neug Dongjae” (dismissive othering) to “Uri Dongjae” (affectionate claiming). Although the two expressions appear distinct, they form one memetic trajectory in which othering gradually transforms into affective affiliation. Because this shift is detectable primarily through textual cues, the analysis focuses exclusively on text-based memes and verbal references rather than image- or video-based formats. This case was selected because Dongjae represents one of the very few K-drama characters whose meme trajectory directly influenced industrial decision-making, making it an ideal instance for examining intertextual play. Data were collected from Twitter/X using keyword searches, such as Neug Dongjae or Uri Dongjae, across multiple periods: (1) well after the broadcast of Stranger Seasons 1 and 2, (2) during the promotional phase of the spin-off Dongjae, the Good or the Bastard, and (3) throughout and after the spin-off’s release (from autumn 2024 to summer 2025). Due to platform constraints on retrieving older tweets, memes and comments from the initial broadcast periods (2017, 2020) could not be systematically accessed; this constitutes a limitation of the study.

Rather than employing a quantitative memetic mapping, the analysis adopts a qualitative, context-oriented approach that follows how the meme circulated as an everyday communicative practice. The focus is not on the volume of meme usage but on the interpretive shifts observable in its deployment: how “Neug Dongjae” is invoked to express workplace frustration, moral ambiguity, or social hierarchy; how it functions similarly to a KakaoTalk sticker or emoji; and how “Uri Dongjae” emerges as recognition and reappropriation of the character. In addition to the core meme, related textual fragments—such as “You are not from SNU”—were selectively included when they extended or reinforced the same memetic logic. The analytic process proceeded in three steps: first, identifying Dongjae’s narrative traits across Stranger that inform meme usage; second, tracing semantic and affective shifts in the meme over time; and third, examining how these shifts intersected with industrial interpretations reflected in promotional materials, interviews, and paratexts. This qualitative approach is appropriate because intertextual play manifests through contextual, situational, low-intent forms of cultural circulation that cannot be captured by quantitative metrics alone. All data analyzed were publicly accessible posts; no private or identifiable information was used.

Intertextual Play in Action

In this paper, I define intertextual play as an everyday, ambient mode of cultural circulation in which fragments of media texts—such as character types, quotes, narrative cues, or situational templates—are mobilized in casual communication without the intentionality, identity work, or productive aims typically associated with participatory fandom. Unlike participatory culture, which presumes deliberate engagement, creative labour, or community-based meaning-making, intertextual play describes the unconscious, low-effort, and often context-dependent incorporation of media fragments into daily discourse. These fragments acquire new social meaning as they circulate through mundane interactions, allowing audiences to reinterpret or repurpose a media text without necessarily watching the original work or identifying as fans. Through this process, memes function as intertextual mediators that sustain the afterlife of a drama, enabling producers to misread—or correctly interpret—ambient cultural presence as evidence of enduring popularity. Intertextual play therefore captures a continuum of audience engagement that is neither passive consumption nor active participation, but a culturally significant middle ground through which everyday communication shapes industrial perception and, ultimately, cultural production. In this sense, intertextual play functions simultaneously as (1) a textual quality that enables fragment circulation, (2) a communicative practice enacted by audiences, and (3) an interpretive signal that can shape production strategy. To illustrate how intertextual play operates in practice, the analysis now turns to the memetic trajectory of “Neug Dongjae,” tracing how its everyday use shifts across contexts.

Building on this reconceptualization of audience engagement, this study argues that fan audiences’ communication through memes ultimately serves as a signal to cultural producers that a drama remains popular even after its conclusion. This study conceptualizes the everyday use of memes—less serious but permeating daily life, with ambiguous evaluation, even as active and resistant text reading and participation—as ‘intertextual play.’ In this study, ‘intertextual play’ refers not to special fan activities but to the natural cultural circulation in which drama characters and dialogue become memes and permeate everyday conversation. Not all people who use “Neug Dongjae” are devoted fans. They simply employ culturally coded expressions that align with their communicative contexts. This concept describes a cyclical process of cultural mediation: initial broadcast and reception generate memetic content that infiltrates quotidian discourse, maintaining cultural presence that industry stakeholders eventually recognize as sustained relevance, culminating in new textual production. Unlike deliberate fan labour, intertextual play encompasses the unconscious circulation of media fragments through everyday communication, demonstrating how ambient cultural engagement produces industrial outcomes equivalent to intentional participatory activities.

In this analysis, memes serve as intertextual mediators, connecting text, audiences, and the industry, while mediating the meanings and emotions embedded within them. This process traverses the facets of Korean society and organizations represented in the text, the Korean society in which the audiences reside, and the practical problems faced by Korea’s cultural industry. The first part examines how characters formed through various settings in the worldview created by drama producers survive in their situations, particularly how the interpretation of Seo Dongjae’s ambiguous position between good and bad transfers to audiences, and how Seo Dongjae subsequently becomes a meme through key scenes.

This analysis selected memes based on representative scenes matching Dongjae’s character settings and contextual reception. The text or text and image memes based on drama scenes were selected as the most famous ones across Seasons 1 and 2, not necessarily following chronological or episode order. The consistent character settings from Season 1 through the spin-off were built up within the expanded narrative through audiences, including the producer (especially writer Lee Soo-yeon), actor Lee Joon-hyuk, who played Seo Dongjae, and fan-viewers of Stranger and Dongjae, the Good or the Bastard. Therefore, there was no reason to arrange memes chronologically or by season and episode order. Particularly, new settings in the spin-off that weren’t shown in Seasons 1 and 2 can be seen as expanded through the process of drama broadcast, conclusion, and subsequent fan audiences’ consumption and communication during production (Woo, 2024). This process, identical to meme circulation, where someone transmits this artifact, is intertextual play, where memes perform the role of intertextual mediator.

As Wiggins (2019, p. 101) notes, “The traditional treatment of audience does not fit well with internet memes because such an approach assumes a top-down mode of expression.” While this study dichotomizes drama producers and viewers, it does so to argue that roles can circulate in the communication process by assuming a loop of media production and reception. The concept of individuals existing in all processes of meme production, distribution, and consumption within the category of media audiences needs expansion. As Wiggins (2019) emphasizes, the emotions that this study focuses on, which exist in intertextual contexts, are points where the text cannot be seen as the producers’ unidirectional property.

The memeification of the “You’re not from Seoul National University” scene begins with a scene in Hwang Simok’s dream where fellow prosecutors gather. This meme presents the scene not simply as Seoul National University (referred to only as “S University” in the drama) graduates gathering, but from Dongjae’s perspective—stemming from his inferiority complex, making it appear as Seoul National graduates excluding him, thus creating an opposition between Seoul National prosecutors and non-Seoul National graduate Dongjae. Through Dongjae’s inferiority complex and perspective, this meme continues to expand Dongjae’s narrative, continuously evoking his non-Seoul National background, which is not emphasized in the drama.

Dongjae’s non-Seoul National background is itself an obstacle and the most significant factor in his various choices. Korean society still maintains pervasive social and organizational atmospheres (Kim et al., 2023), dividing class divisions based on education. Notably, Korea’s prosecution organization is accurately described as rigid, with academic faction fights even among various elite groups in Korean society. The socio-cultural context implies that if non-Seoul National status is the culprit behind all Dongjae’s wrong choices, it’s not entirely incomprehensible. Dongjae’s trajectory—emotionally sympathetic but intellectually incomprehensible yet needing to survive—ultimately shows Korea’s rigid organizational culture through his inferiority complex, where he cannot blend into his organization, forever circling the periphery, unnoticed, and unable to be fairly evaluated for his abilities. Audiences’ affect plays a significant role in intertextual play when interpreting Dongjae’s villainous moments that don’t even qualify as truly villainous—emotionally sympathetic but intellectually incomprehensible.

The build-up of bribery scenes leads to the completion of the Seo Dongjae character meme. The Seo Dongjae character essentially begins and ends with bribery, as bribery is the biggest villainous setting continuing through Seasons 1 and 2 to the spin-off. Bribery represents the most extreme outcome when Dongjae’s desire to survive within the organization collides with his personal inferiority complex. What began simply as a means to survive within the organization—taking bribes out of an inferiority complex when promotion paths seemed blocked—ultimately connects to internal organizational corruption, leading to abandonment by superiors trying to escape and returning as greater harm to himself than to others in the organization. This closely connects to Dongjae’s understanding of his unchangeable status within the organization, making him a more relatable character that drama audiences can identify with. Despite committing illegal bribery, the emotional sympathy of feeling sorry and pitiful contributes to the humorous consumption and memeification of Seo Dongjae’s character, as well as all his decisions based on his narrative. Despite the prosecutor position being unattainable for just anyone, the hierarchy existing within the organization and the non-Seoul National label conflicting with his values and professional ethics of wanting to resolve matters justly further reinforce Dongjae’s ambiguous villainous moments.

Dongjae’s ambiguity between good and bad is ultimately evaluated by audiences, who interpret it differently by relating it to their own realistic contexts, evoking different emotions. Given the genre characteristics of Stranger 1 and 2 and Dongjae, the Good or the Bastard, a clear opposition between good and bad is typical. As seen in NBC’s SVU series (1999-present), the Law & Order spinoff series, in dramas centred on prosecutorial and police cases and investigations, prosecutors and police generally fight against third-party villains. However, while Seo Dongjae’s character lacks reversal, breaking this formula of clear good-bad opposition and compromising with reality gives him more realism than other plausible characters in the text.

The context of “there’s someone like that in our company too” created by Dongjae matches the audience’s meme gap-filling, leading to an overflow of audiences who have never watched the three dramas but are familiar with Seo Dongjae. This adds to actor Lee Joon-hyuk’s recognition in reality, making Seo Dongjae’s character settings more realistic and giving the Neug Dongjae meme persuasiveness. Meme gap-filling refers not to literally filling meme gaps but to the act of attributing one’s identity and values in the process of distributing and spreading memes. This includes projecting oneself within Korean organizational culture onto real power relations or filling emotional responses to everyday human relationships or situations. This further supports the spin-off’s setting—whether Seo Dongjae can reform, escape being a corrupt prosecutor, and become righteous—by highlighting his position as neither good nor bad, his expectations of being closer to good, and his trajectory of seeking compromise with reality, suggesting no malice. Searching for “Neug Dongjae” or “Uri Dongjae” on Twitter/X produces a layered discursive landscape in which the meme circulates across multiple affective registers. While many posts employ the phrase in everyday, non-fannish contexts—complaining about unreasonable bosses, describing office politics, or invoking Dongjae as a shorthand for moral ambiguity—a significant portion of the results comes from Lee Jun-hyuk’s fan accounts. These accounts reframe the meme through a distinct affective logic that foregrounds admiration, loyalty, and long-term recognition of the actor’s labour. A frequently cited fan post exemplifies how the meme becomes a site of emotional investment rather than mere humour. One user (BOBO, 2025) writes:

It would feel unfair if Dongjae doesn’t win an award…

Our boy has been playing Dongjae for eight years; they could at least give him one.

This phrasing of “our boy” reframes “Uri Dongjae” as an affectionate claim over the actor’s sustained performance, transforming a casual meme into a vehicle for valuing his labour, growth, and longevity within the industry. The meme thus becomes an entry point through which viewers articulate care, pride, and recognition—sentiments that circulate alongside the humour itself. By the time such posts appear in everyday timelines, the meme has already absorbed these fannish affective investments, subtly shaping how even non-fans encounter and interpret “Uri Dongjae.” While these everyday appropriations highlight the meme’s socio-cultural elasticity, a second layer of circulation emerges within fan communities, where the same meme becomes a vehicle for emotional labour and recognition.

The post demonstrates how fans adopt the meme not simply as intertextual humour, but as a vehicle for articulating emotional investment in the actor. In these contexts, “Uri Dongjae” becomes a claim of affectionate ownership, transforming the meme into a proxy for advocating the actor’s talent, legitimacy, and institutional recognition. This fannish reappropriation creates a mediating layer between the original drama and the broader social circulation of the meme. Even users who have not watched Stranger encounter a version of “Uri Dongjae” that has already been affectively shaped by the fandom, while fan interpretations are themselves influenced by the meme’s pre-existing everyday mobility. The meme thus operates through a recursive circulation loop—text → everyday play → fandom → industry—in which each group’s engagement reinforces and reshapes the meaning of “Dongjae.” Crucially, this multi-layered circulation explains why the meme persists long after the drama ended, and why the character’s affective resonance was strong enough to motivate the creation and marketing of a spin-off. Rather than functioning as a simple fandom artifact or as a purely humorous everyday meme, “Neug Dongjae” or “Uri Dongjae” embodies a hybrid form of intertextual play in which casual users and dedicated fans collectively construct the character’s afterlife. A popular meme reworks Dongjae into the logic of Korea’s credential-centered culture. The meme stages a mock conversation (JJUNI, 2024):

??: You didn’t even get into SNU—what were you doing?

Dongjae: Why would you ask that?

Here, the humour does not lie in Dongjae’s supposed lack of qualifications, but in the exaggerated absurdity of the question itself. Viewers momentarily ‘think like Dongjae,’ adopting his skeptical tone to expose how deeply normalized—and often unreasonable—elitist expectations around education and credentials are in contemporary Korean society. This meme illustrates how intertextual play enables audiences to use a fictional character to critique real-world socio-educational norms, transforming the character into a vehicle for everyday social commentary. In this meme, viewers adopt Dongjae’s inner voice—an incredulous, slightly annoyed “Why would you ask that?”—to highlight the unreasonableness of credentialist expectations common in Korean society.

A second cluster of meme circulation centres on Dongjae’s educational background, particularly his status as a non–Seoul National University graduate. In Stranger, this detail functions as a subtle characterisation device, signalling Dongjae’s outsider position within elite prosecutorial culture. On Twitter/X, however, the detail is reactivated and amplified in humorous, ironic, and affectively charged ways. Some users circulated variations of statements such as “Only SNU graduates wear the prosecution robe—Dongjae would be devastated” or “Dongjae didn’t fail to enter SNU—he simply didn’t go.” Although the original posts are no longer searchable, these paraphrased examples reflect a widely recirculated discourse that positioned Dongjae as a figure through which anxieties about hierarchy, meritocracy, and institutional belonging were articulated.

Fan accounts further reframed this dynamic through an explicitly affective lens. During spin-off promotions and stage greetings, fans drew on the same detail to defend or uplift the actor, writing, for instance, “Dongjae is from Suwon… he feels like one of our own,” or “He would have gone to SNU if he could—of course he would have.” Such fannish uses integrate the meme into narratives of admiration and recognition for Lee Jun-hyuk’s labour. Collectively, this interplay demonstrates how a minor textual characteristic becomes a socially resonant meme that enables both everyday commentary on educational and workplace inequalities and fan-driven emotional solidarity. In this expanded afterlife, the meme exceeds narrative meaning and becomes a flexible cultural shorthand—one that circulates across non-fan humour, social critique, and fandom advocacy, reinforcing Dongjae’s cultural presence even among users unfamiliar with the original episodes.

Beyond simply recognizing that a drama’s popularity persists over time, this analysis examines how the popularity of texts mediated by memes and demands for new seasons or series production align with industry interests, and how the industry accepted this to produce the spin-off text. This demonstrates the influence of memes on intertextual play—not merely mediating texts but serving as tools that contain audiences’ specific demands for the industry and enabling the industry to respond to these demands. Subsequently, viewing the drama-audience-producer virtuous cycle mediated by memes as a feedback loop, this section discusses how the crisis of the local cultural industry can be reevaluated and what forms of stories receive great love and support.

Stranger Season 1 aired in 2017, and Season 2 in 2020. While dramas’ lifespans appear extended through OTT, the explosive buzz from traditional television broadcasts is challenging to maintain even with OTT life extension. Looking at viewership ratings that typically determine drama success, Stranger‘s ratings were far insufficient to claim widespread viewership—it was a “moderate hit” in industry terms. Nevertheless, the drama achieved something more significant: sustained cultural presence through memeification. The context of the Korean drama industry when Stranger aired is relevant but need not be elaborated—streaming platforms were new, the industry was adapting, and there were tensions between traditional and new media. What matters is that choosing the “spin-off” genre amid industry uncertainties was remarkable. Writer Lee Soo-yeon revealed in a Chosun Ilbo interview (Kim, 2024) that “Originally Seo Dongjae was supposed to die around episodes 7-8 of Season 2.” But she couldn’t kill him at will. The character gained its own vitality. The writer continues (Kim, 2024):

I wanted to create a reversal and shock through the sudden development of killing a major character. But perhaps because he’s a character struggling to survive while crossing between good and bad, it didn’t work well. I thought it would be more impactful if he struggled on the brink of life and death and survived at the end, so I kept him alive.

The transformation from ‘Neug Dongjae’ to ‘Uri Dongjae’ occurred through participation from a broad audience beyond simple actor fandom or drama viewers, and the industry accepted this as a positive signal for spin-off production. Writers Hwang Ha-jung and Kim Sang-won stated that Seo Dongjae was too good to remain a supporting character, and the active production of secondary creations about this non-lead character became an essential motivation for spin-off production (Kang, 2024). The production team commonly emphasizes the keyword ’empathy’—Seo Dongjae’s conflicts between social recognition and moral values gained viewers’ empathy, resembling the reality we all experience. The production team’s analysis, which suggests that he’s a character making one think, “wouldn’t I have made the same choice?” shows that Seo Dongjae was accepted not as a simple villain but as a character with complex humanity.

This perception translated into concrete results. Dongjae, the Good or the Bastard recorded an average 3.9% viewership rating in the Seoul metropolitan area (Nielsen Korea, 2024) for its first TVING episode and ranked first in paid subscriber contributions among TVING original series in its opening week (M. Jung, 2024). This suggests not only Stranger‘s existing fandom but also new viewers who recognized Seo Dongjae through memes, leading to active viewing behaviour on paid platform subscription. The indicator of ranking first in paid subscriber contributions for the local platform TVING is meaningful in connecting beyond simple buzz to actual economic value creation. The production team’s common perception exactly matches the meme’s appeal point of “there’s someone like that in our company too,” proving memes are cultural mediators that can lead beyond simple playful consumption to industrial decision-making and economic results.

The final emergence of the spin-off demonstrates that memes performed the role of intertextual mediator from the original drama text, Stranger to the spin-off Dongjae, the Good or the Bastard. Beyond simple meme spread, through meme gap-filling bringing individuals’ daily lives into memes, the process spans meme production, reproduction, distribution, consumption, and spread views the actions of those who can be read as ambiguous beings like Seo Dongjae—neither this nor that—as intertextual play, moving from concepts of active and resistant audiences. Particularly examining the content marketing storytelling when the spin-off was released through TVING, the local online streaming service, reveals attempts at meme gap-filling from Neug Dongjae to “Uri Dongjae, embarrassing wherever we show him,” while simultaneously inducing meme gap-filling to promote new audience influx. This precisely shows what memes the meaning “embarrassing wherever shown” spreads throughout local media can be replaced with, how it can connect with other texts, and what realistic contexts it can link to. For example, the “golden child” meme from the local observational reality program My Golden Kids (Channel A, 2020-present) overlaps with the “Uri Dongjae” meme, emotionally interacting beyond the linguistic meaning of the golden child in My Golden Kids. This shows that the intertextual gap-filling capabilities of existing memes can be expanded by interacting with other memes, demonstrating that socio-culturally coded meanings are mediated through memes and continuously evoke affect.

Conclusion

This study introduces “intertextual play” as a new theoretical lens for understanding how local media texts achieve global circulation through ambient cultural engagement rather than deliberate fan participation. The transformation of Seo Dongjae from a morally ambiguous prosecutor in Stranger to “Neug Dongjae” meme to spin-off protagonist reveals a distinct pathway of cultural mediation that challenges dominant frameworks in both fan studies and transnational media research. The concept of intertextual play extends beyond Jenkins’s participatory culture by recognizing that culturally significant audience engagement operates through unconscious appropriation and casual circulation rather than intentional production. While participatory culture emphasizes fans as active producers blurring consumption-production boundaries, intertextual play captures how media fragments become embedded in everyday communication without requiring conscious fandom identity or productive intent. This theoretical shift is crucial for understanding contemporary media circulation, where a Korean prosecutor’s catchphrase can become workplace vernacular across Asia, maintaining cultural presence through ambient use rather than organized fan campaigns.

Significantly, this study illuminates how local specificity paradoxically enables broader cultural resonance. The “Neug Dongjae” meme succeeded precisely because it encoded distinctly Korean experiences—regional discrimination in elite institutions, survival strategies in hierarchical workplaces, the moral compromises of upward mobility—that nonetheless translate across cultural contexts where similar structural inequalities exist. The meme’s evolution from dismissive othering (“Neug”) to affectionate claiming (“Uri”) demonstrates how audiences negotiate cultural proximity not through cultural similarity but through recognized social dynamics. For Korean drama’s global circulation, this analysis offers an alternative to platform-driven globalization strategies. While Netflix and other global platforms emphasize high production values and universal themes, the Dongjae case suggests that organic, meme-driven circulation creates sustainable cultural presence that transcends traditional metrics. The spin-off’s success—achieving the highest TVING subscriber contribution rate despite being platform-exclusive and locally-focused—validates this bottom-up approach to content development. This has profound implications for understanding Hallyu’s evolution: rather than deliberate soft power projection or platform-mediated distribution, cultural circulation may operate most effectively through the ambient incorporation of media fragments into transnational everyday discourse.

The study’s limitations—single case focus, platform-specific data constraints, temporal boundaries—point toward necessary future research. Comparative analysis across different meme-driven productions could establish patterns in successful intertextual mediation. Examining how other local industries interpret and respond to memetic circulation would illuminate whether Korea’s approach represents a replicable model or unique phenomenon. Most critically, longitudinal studies tracking meme evolution across cultural contexts could reveal how local specificity transforms into transnational currency.

Ultimately, this research reframes our understanding of global media circulation. Rather than viewing local and global as oppositional forces requiring strategic navigation, intertextual play reveals them as mutually constitutive—local specificity generates memeable content that achieves global circulation through ambient cultural engagement, which in turn validates local production decisions. As media industries worldwide grapple with platformization and algorithmic distribution, recognizing how everyday communicative practices mediate between texts and markets becomes essential. The Dongjae phenomenon suggests that the future of transnational media may lie not in engineered virality or calculated global appeal, but in the organic circulation of culturally-specific content that resonates with lived experiences across contexts.

By foregrounding intertextual play, this study offers a new analytic lens for understanding how casual, low-intent audience practices produce cultural afterlives that can circulate far beyond a drama’s original narrative frame. This perspective expands existing scholarship in fan and media studies by emphasising vernacular, ambient modes of engagement—forms of cultural participation that shape industrial decisions even when they do not emerge from organized fandom. At the same time, the analysis is limited by the temporal and infrastructural conditions of the available data. Because Stranger aired in 2017 and 2020, and older posts on Twitter/X are difficult to retrieve due to platform search constraints, this study primarily examines meme circulation that gained visibility long after the initial broadcast. As a result, the findings highlight the drama’s afterlife rather than its real-time reception. Moreover, the analysis focuses on a small set of highly visible meme clusters, which necessarily narrows the range of interpretive practices that might have circulated among different audience groups. These constraints do not diminish the study’s contribution; rather, they underscore how intertextual play operates unevenly across platforms and over time—an unevenness that itself offers further insight into how K-drama texts are reactivated, recontextualized, and emotionally re-signified in everyday digital culture.

About the author

Hyejin Jo (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, Canada. Her primary research focus is the intersection of pop media culture, platform technology, and gender. She has been teaching Korean popular music at the University of British Columbia.

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