We Jung YI

10.18399/acta.2025.28.2.005

Apocalyptic horror MZ generation Netflix K-drama Webtoon zombie

This article examines the apocalyptic landscape of neoliberal South Korea through two postmillennial webtoons Sweet Home (스위트홈, 2020) and All of Us Are Dead (지금 우리 학교는, 2022), whose Netflix adaptations achieved global success during the COVID-19 lockdown. Through a comparative analysis of these zombie/monster horrors, the article challenges the existing discourse around the transnational, transmedia flow of Hallyu 韓流 (Korean wave). It does so by addressing the interconnected issues of genre, generation, and gender in these dystopic coming-of-age narratives, where endangered youths struggle for survival under a necropolitical order. The emergence of such zombified/monsterized subjects is linked to an aesthetics of relational survivance (hangjon 抗存) and to a vision of trans-species alliance, situated within Korea’s rapid neoliberalization and evolving popular protests. The article adopts a posthuman feminist perspective in tackling the affective dynamic running through the original webtoons, the participatory culture of the audience, and media convergence amid an antifeminist backlash in contemporary Korea. Alongside nuanced readings of graphic texts that elicit multisensory engagement and diverse viewer responses, its intersectional approach to the evolution of K-apocalypse, as inflected by Netflix, argues for the critical contextualization of the political, ethical, and ontological question of surviving as (non-)humans at the end of the world.