재벌이라는 이름의 판타지: 현실의 생존 전략부터 미디어 속 대리 만족까지 > K-wave Trends

Chaebols in the real world live very different lives from the characters in the fancy banquet halls we see in dramas. According to the testimony of experts who have watched the every move of the heads of large corporations, their lives are so urgent and desperate that the expression 'battlefield' is most appropriate. For those who move enormous capital and are responsible for the livelihood of tens of thousands of people, health is not managed as a personal hobby, but as a key strategic asset that determines the fate of a company. Even in the forced march that lasts from dawn until late at night, they continue to exercise in short intervals. This is a fierce survival routine that goes beyond physical training to maintain mental composure and ensure the best judgment. In the end, it has great implications for us that the source of the power of a chaebol is not a special secret, but thorough self-discipline and systematic habits to maintain a body and mind that do not break down under any circumstances.

However, while real-life chaebols are ruthless business commanders, chaebols in popular culture play the role of 'dopamine generators' in a completely different sense. Recently, chaebol narratives reproduced through webtoons and dramas go beyond simply showing off wealth and are gaining explosive popularity by combining fantasy settings such as ordinary individuals returning to the position of chaebols or their souls being changed. As works such as 'New Employee Chairman Kang' show, the process of digging into the inside of a large, closed organization called a large corporation and the protagonist's rise to power within it provides powerful vicarious satisfaction to the public. This can be interpreted as a process of relieving the stuffiness modern people experience in social life and safely expressing through the media their secret desire to stand on top of the system and move the world according to their own will.

The popularity of chaebol narratives gives off an even more strange and creepy charm when combined with the romance genre. Like the recent drama starring Park Eun-bin and Yang Se-jong, the setting of adding the occult element of 'seeing ghosts' to the typical power structure of a chaebol heiress and a prosecutor appears to be an attempt to break away from the rigid image of the chaebol subject. Now, the public wants not only the perfect and cold appearance of a chaebol, but also dynamic characters who solve mysterious cases or human agony that holds supernatural secrets. These changes prove that the subject matter of conglomerates has passed the stage of being simply consumed as a symbol of wealth, and is increasing the density of narratives and securing wider public scalability through genre variations.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes of international affairs, conglomerates prove their influence by mediating conflicts between countries or appearing as diplomatic messengers. The case in which Russia's emerging oligarch Roman Abramovich attempted to serve as a bridge for peace negotiations between the warring Ukrainian and Russian presidents clearly demonstrates the power of the global network of conglomerates. Of course, these attempts are not always successful, and sometimes they are exposed to political risks, such as being ignored by absolute power figures such as Putin or losing assets due to pressure from the international community. Nevertheless, the fact that they can become a medium of negotiation in the gap between state power suggests that conglomerates are acting as variables that cannot be ignored in complex modern international relations beyond simple economic entities.