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Gone are the days when cuteness was worthy of even token respect from the powerful consumer group that our children have become. Now a sneer sells better than a thousand smiles, and all the fun is in what our own parents used to call ¡°language.¡±
Thus a stationery brand doing a roaring trade among little disgruntled Koreans is called ¡°SSBA,¡± a transparent allusion to a well-known Korean swearword. Its bluntness as much as the trendy design of the products has helped the company gain a big chunk of a stationery market until recently dominated by the cutesy ¡°Hello Kitty¡± and ¡°Blue Bear¡± brands.
Where their goods favored cheery tags like, ¡°Good job¡± or ¡°Well done,¡± SSBA prefers a more jaded ¡°Yeah, right,¡± or ¡°Mind your own business,¡± apparently to the delight of the diminutive cynics. An employee in Kyobo Book Store¡¯s stationery department says she has not come across one customer who protests against such seemingly brutal phrases.
Cynical kids, in fact, are everywhere in trendy Korean culture. An exhibition of works by Nara Yoshitomo that ran from June to August and was one of this year¡¯s most successful in Korea was filled with chilling pictures of coldly smiling children. Flying in the face of the comforting stereotype that children are innocent and happy, it drew a record 85,000 visitors to the Rodin Gallery.
Children¡¯s books are another area where hackneyed notions can be demolished. A Santa Claus without friends and a gang of angry Santas avenging themselves on children are two examples of the trend, while the soaring popularity of the original fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, gruesome punishments and all, also testifies to an atmosphere where Disney-style happy endings feel out of place.
Sung Young-sin, a psychologist at Korea University, says society increasingly values standing out among the crowd, attacks on established notions have found their way even into marketing targeting children. Some see the trend positively since a diversity of ideas adds to the culture¡¯s creativity.
But there are dangers. What to adults may look like a barbed sense of humor can color children¡¯s entire attitude to the world. Sung says children consider fictional and cartoon characters as conversation partners, and if they are constantly exposed to rebellious and perverse creatures, it can taint their worldview just as if they had fallen into bad company.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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