It quite seems the dominant discourse of these days is the discourse on the hierarchy. After the IMF crisis, which brought the extensive change of the Korean society, the change largely influenced the emotion shared among the youth. 

The youth are no more a homogeneous group, and they no more see themselves as a homogeneous group. Rather, they compartmentalize themselves in more detailed way than the outsiders do. One of the characteristics of the youth group is their search for a sense of belonging, which is unsurprising, thus it’s natural for them to make a somewhat group with their close friends. 

However, as the local community is long gone and nothing is left to the life of the youth except the school and the study-supplementary cram schools, how much status and which status a person holds got to determine their group. By the criteria of looking better, having better grades, being richer, being physically better or something else, groups are sorted into a superior, an average or an inferior group, and the youth put themselves into such a group. Putting oneself into the hierarchy and taking the hierarchy as a part of one’s own identity – this is the dominant discourse of the youth group now. 

The setting and the story of Odd Girl Out by Morangg is a typical case of that. The protagonist Nari Oh was an average female teenager who thinks herself fat and not pretty. Her present assignment is making an easy school life. It is meaningful that she chose dieting for that. If she didn’t think herself as inferior or deficient, she wouldn’t need dieting. In other words, in consideration of that the self-conquest is done by the others’ validation as long as the self-awareness is carried out by the others’ eyes, the points that the criterion of the validation is ‘outer-uniform beauty’ and that the method of conquest is also the dieting, which is violent, microscopic and under the influence of the culture capital, and in particular that the choice is sufficiently probable for the readers as well, are meaningful. 

 

 

It also suggests a lot that the author declares that as the world of the girl.* I’m not going to tell you that such stratification or hierarchism of self-awareness is more unique to women. It better be understood as that more regulations are given to women. In other words, the elements regulating the hierarchy is more on women than men. To be prettier, to be leaner, to be dressed better, to be better at study, to make up themselves, to be more competent, to be more reasonable, to be richer, and so forth. On top of the elements of hierarchy common to both women and men, certain elements exclusively applied to women adds on. When a person recognizes oneself belongs to a hierarchy, it means that the more complex and diverse the elements of hierarchy are, the more complex and diverse the others whom the person should seek the validation from. Such a world is the world of the female teenager, rather than the world of the girl. Even inside the world of the teenager, there’s more room for compartmentalization for the world of women.

*T/N: the Korean title of this webtoon can be translated to The World of A Girl.

Of course, this work is well-made and fun. The character setting of a perfect but lonely swan and a good-hearted duckling can produce many episodes just by making variations of the setting. The plot is clear, and it sometimes shows a sophisticated sense of jokes. It distinguishes well when to make tension or relaxation for the readers, and it properly distinguishes things need to be expressed or not to be. Moreover, the picture of teenagers reproduced by the work is too meaningful to be missed. The self-narrative of Nari, the protagonist, is based on violence of discriminatory self-awareness of which she discriminates herself. And the fact that teenagers or young adults who went past their adolescence emphasize with it shows that such a discriminatory self-awareness is the currently dominant perception of the teenagers. I hope in the end Nari reaches the full understanding of others, beyond the discriminatory self-awareness. I hope, by that, she makes it to the full understanding, approval and respect for herself. Because if not, we will find ourselves living in a heartbreaking world where we discriminate ourselves.