Barely a week after its unveiling, a South Korean television drama centred on a forbidden romance between a teacher and her 12-year-old student was cancelled, following a torrent of public outrage that laid bare the uneasy intersection of storytelling, social responsibility and child safety in the nation’s booming media industry.
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The series – tentatively titled The Elementary School Student I Love – was to be based on a webtoon of the same name and had only just been announced in late June when it was met with immediate and overwhelming condemnation. Within days, educators, civic groups and ordinary viewers had united in calls for its cancellation, denouncing the premise as a dangerous romanticisation of abuse.
By July 4, production company Meta New Line had bowed to public pressure, saying in a statement it would “suspend the production and planning” of the drama, citing “changing social sensitivities”.
At the centre of the storm was a plot in which a woman in her twenties developed romantic feelings for one of her students – a storyline many critics likened to a glorification of grooming.
Far from being an isolated artistic misjudgment, the controversy has spurred a broader reckoning within South Korea’s thriving webtoon and television industries, raising urgent questions about where the line should be drawn between storytelling and social harm, especially in an era when Korean content is finding a global audience.
Normalising the ‘unacceptable’