• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.16 no.8
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• pp.640-650
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• 2016

This study analyzed the narratives of love of "delusional" characters in the works of Jungae Lee and Shijin Yoo, whose cartoon creations were prominent in the 1990s and the early 2000s. Their delusional characters can be characterized by excessive obsession with their objects of love, rejection of realistic logic, madness, and extreme selfishness. They make a type of characters whose traces have disappeared not only in the South Korean society of the 21st century, where love and dating are included in the discourse of self-development and dramatic pathos is regarded as the waste of feelings, but also in creative works. It is still, however, needed to pay attention to the selfishness and collapse of those delusional characters that reject the order of the world and focus only on their love because they make the audience betray the sentimentality of melodramas stimulated by the popular culture and reconsider the concept of "love" itself. While Jungae Lee displays the progress of delusional characters and their narratives of love toward collectivized compulsion with the Messiah motif of Christianity, Shijin Yoo presents a narrative of delusional characters with lost memories reacting to hysterical fantasies and eventually choosing their collapse. Their two narratives are significant in that they propose the archetype of personal desire eliminated by the narratives of love in melodramas.