The most prominent character trope concerning disability in the Korean mediascape (Appadurai, 2000, p. 27–47, 33) is autism with savant syndrome. Around 80 percent of the Korean media works that have characters with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) depict them as also having savant syndrome (Hwang, 2023). However, according to the SSM Health Trefferet Center, only 1 percent of autistic people have savant syndrome in reality.
One example of such a depiction is Extraordinary Attorney Woo, a highly successful 2022 drama, produced by Yoo In-Shik and written by Moon Ji-won, that first aired on June 29, 2022 (South Korea) on a brand-new network, ENA. The “수목드라마 [drama series that airs every Wednesday and Thursday]” ended on August 18, 2022. Extraordinary Attorney Woo recorded a South Korean viewership rating of 0.9% in the first episode, proving its popularity by surpassing 10% in just five episodes. The final episode was a moment of pride, as Woo Young-woo became an official lawyer at Hanbada Law Firm, and her romantic relationship with Lee Jun-ho (Kang Tae-oh) was strong. The show achieved a successful conclusion by recording its highest viewership rating of 17.5%, meaning 17.5% of the households owning a television watched the show in real time (Nielsen Korea). In addition, it ranked first among non-English Netflix works for four weeks in a row and became a global phenomenon by ranking in the Netflix Top 10 in 54 countries, including several Asian countries plus Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Greece, and Egypt (Noh, 2022b). The drama’s production company is known to have turned down Netflix’s offer to produce it into a Netflix original series and only gave publishing rights to the platform, which meant that each episode was also available on Netflix an hour and a half after its official airing in Korean broadcasting system (Nam, 2022).
Although a diagnosis is not explicitly mentioned, the protagonist, Woo Young-woo, is portrayed as an autistic individual with savant syndrome; her traits associated with savant syndrome, such as counting before entering a revolving door or having a remarkable memory, are frequently shown throughout the TV show (Lee, 2022). The show depicts her as a superhero-like character, as she is an attorney at one of the biggest law firms in South Korea, has an IQ of 164, and has graduated summa cum laude from the most prestigious university in South Korea. Considering that 76% of the Korean population believe that one’s academic success, more specifically the “ranking” of one’s university, decides one’s life (Byun, 2014), Young-woo’s uncommon trait, though not a faithful representation of autism, happens to be the most esteemed quality in the culture she is in. In an interview with Catchy Korea (Son, 2022), non-disabled actor Park Eunbin, who played the drama’s protagonist, said, “I’m grateful that viewers and I are exploring this unfamiliar world together.” The use of the word “unfamiliar” indicates how disability is represented in the Korean mainstream mediascape: it is limited to creating exotic, unfamiliar characters. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson traces the culmination of this process in hypervisibility: the “extraordinary body,” which both stigmatizes and symbolizes, drawing fascination while enforcing control (Garland-Thomson, 1997). Further, it indicates that even though the series has an autistic character as a protagonist, autistic people and allies who are familiar with autism were not expected to be its audiences.
However, activist groups and film festivals have recently been innovating the media representation of disabilities. People with disabilities have been central to reshaping the Korean disability mediascape, not simply passive recipients of better representation. For instance, ESTAS, one of two neurodivergent activist collectives in Korea, issued a public statement criticizing Extraordinary Attorney Woo even before its release, objecting to the continued use of terms like “Asperger’s syndrome” and warning that a genius lawyer protagonist could reinforce unrealistic and objectifying expectations of autistic people.
Resistance also appears within the series itself. In episode 10, members of Nemo and Semo—a theatre group and nonprofit association of clinical drama therapists and psychologists that works with people with developmental disabilities—are cast as the eoullim, a fictional self‑advocacy association of disabled people who confront Woo Young‑woo’s law firm. On screen, they appear not as background decoration but as a collective who speak back to paternalistic charity and insist on their own agenda, briefly shifting the show’s center of gravity from neurotypical professionals to disabled organizers.
This sequence is one local instance of a broader shift in disability media led by what Simi Linton calls the “criperati”: disabled cultural producers such as Stephen Dwoskin, Jordan Lord, Salome Chasnoff, Carolyn Lazard, and Rodney Evans, whose work has moved disability cinema away from exoticized “special” characters and toward accountable, collaborative, disabled‑driven aesthetics. In that sense, the presence of Nemo and Semo inside a mainstream K‑drama connects Extraordinary Attorney Woo to transnational currents of disability activism and media innovation rather than treating it as an isolated, purely Korean phenomenon.
In their book Disability and the Media (2015), Katie Ellis and Gerard Goggin explain, “Public presence can expand the range of the bodies we expect to see and broaden the terrain where we expect to see such bodies” (p. 9). During an interview with the YouTube channel Creal (2022), Cho Miyoung, a mother of a neurodivergent person, praised the role that Extraordinary Attorney Woo played in raising awareness of neurodivergence:
Regardless of what other people say, I welcome a drama that addresses ASD. If someone asks, “Are all people with ASD like Woo Young-woo?” I can answer, “No, ASD is very diverse, and cases like Woo Young-woo aren’t the norm.” The fact that I get a chance to even say this means a lot. (Creal, 2022, 10:43)
Despite its apparent flaws, such as not casting an autistic actor as attorney Woo, Extraordinary Attorney Woo is part of a long journey toward what Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp call crip futurity, which is a disability world that “use[s] ingenuity and innovation, centering the demands and ideas of disabled people and their allies” (Ginsburg & Rapp, 2024, p. 213).
To begin with, Extraordinary Attorney Woo incorporates an innovative representation of disabilities using a computer-generated image (CGI) whale. Whenever Woo Young-woo experiences an epiphany while working as an attorney, her favorite animal, the whale, appears on the screen, often as if it is floating in the sky outside a window. As the image makes clear, Woo Young-woo’s obsession with the species includes narwhals, belugas, and blue and killer whales. In her interview with Catchy Korea, Hwang Jin-hye, who oversaw the production of Woo Young-woo’s whale CGI, said, “Young-woo is a character who cannot express her emotions, so we thought the whale could represent that. We expressed the whale’s emotions through its movements and eyes” (Son, 2022). The TV show nudges the audience to put themselves in Young-woo’s mind.
What’s more, Extraordinary Attorney Woo does an exceptional job of depicting the relationships Woo Young-woo has with other people in her life. Disability media scholars emphasize this as a key and necessary innovation in crip futurity. In their book Representing Disability: Activism and Agency in the Museum, Richard Sandell, Jocelyn Dodd, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson underscore the importance of showing these points of connection. According to them, disability, perhaps more than any other subject, is relational. Even the authority to define one’s disability is dispersed across family, community, the state, and healthcare providers. Needs and accommodation are met through interdependent negotiations. People with disabilities live in a web of relationships (Sandell et al., 2013, p. 273). Woo Young-woo has two best friends, Dong Geurami and Choi Sooyeon, as well as a loving father who always takes care of her. As the story evolves, other major characters learn to love and embrace Woo Young-woo as she is, including her supervisor at the workplace, Jung Myung-Suk, and Kwon Min Woo, her workplace “frenemy.” One of the drama’s most popular and prominent themes was Woo Young-woo’s love story with her boyfriend, Lee Jun-ho, an employee of the Hanbada Law Firm. Each character comes from different places and life situations, but throughout the drama, they all learn to accept Woo Young-woo as a friend and a co-worker. What’s even more innovative about the drama is that it also captures moments where Young-woo learns to be part of the community. In the sixteenth episode of the drama, Young-woo uses the metaphor of the diversity of whales to explain her sense of living with neurotypicals.
I am like a narwhal in a pod of belugas. Narwhals have a modified tooth that looks like the horn on a unicorn’s forehead. I have seen a lost narwhal coexisting with a pod of belugas in a documentary. I am … like that narwhal … I live in an unfamiliar ocean with unfamiliar belugas. Because everyone is different from me, it is not easy to adjust … and there are lots of whales that hate me too. But it is okay because this is my life. Though my life … is unusual and peculiar, it is valuable … and beautiful. (Yoo, 2022, 57:56)
Through this dialogue, the drama puts value on the extraordinary kind of relationships autistic people can have with their loved ones.
Furthermore, the drama’s successful incorporation of intersectionality in the storyline demonstrates how disability media can become relevant to a broader range of audiences. Columnist Kim Jeeson (2022) stated that as Extraordinary Attorney Woo dealt with issues of prejudice and discrimination experienced by the LGBTQ+ community, women, and North Korean defectors, it successfully drew attention to such matters in solemn yet humorous ways. The reason such depiction of different marginalized communities in crip media is crucial is that it creates different entry points for the audience. As Slava Greenberg (2022) stated in his article “The General Audience Talks Back: Code of the Freaks and the Evolution of Hollywood Shaming Documentaries,” one of the problems crip media faces is that it is mainly used for educational purposes at schools, so it receives less attention from the neurotypical audience. This subgenre has long been known by film and media educators and those from marginalized communities. However, by dealing with other marginalized categories in society, the drama successfully reminds the audience of the importance of community in resolving issues of discrimination and marginalization. That is, it gives the neurotypical audience a reason to watch the film and also sees Young-woo’s problem not as a problem that comes from disability, but as a problem that anyone can face in society. Thus, the show depicts how different marginalized communities put together in one series can have a much more immediate effect on its audience and increase the scope of their interest in the media project.
The 2022 Korean drama series Extraordinary Attorney Woo is a giant leap forward in the disability media field in South Korea due to its innovative representation of neurodivergence, its focus on relationships, and its appreciation for intersectionality. Although there remains room for improvement, it is a genuine and innovative work created by the allies of disabled people that endeavors to “reimagine kinship, community, home, and care, essential to what we think of as crip futurity” (Ginsburg & Rapp, 2024, p. 213).
Works Cited
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