Exploring how a seminal Korean drama writer reframes emotion in the AI era

Kim Eun-sook, a leading Korean television writer, has industrialized the language of emotion for two decades. Beginning with Paris Lovers in 2004, her so-called “Kim Eun-sook grammar” expanded through Secret Garden, The Heirs, Goblin, Mr. Sunshine, and The Glory, reaching a 2025 apex in What Will Be Achieved? The world she created has long hinged on cycles of love, power, memory, and salvation, becoming a brand that helped globalize Korean melodrama.

What Will Be Achieved? serves as both the pinnacle and turning point of this brand. Through the fantasy of a lamp- genie and an AI-like setting in which emotions can disappear, Eun-sook tackles the emotional crisis of the 21st century. The series asks anew: can love still save humanity, and are emotions still human in an age of artificial intelligence?

Her storytelling has historically thrived on emotion’s excess, with dialogue that rhymes and love presented as a fated force. Yet this empire is now wavering. What Will Be Achieved? is a self-dissolving drama born at the moment of its empire’s collapse. The Dokkaebi and Memory, two of her landmark works, and the data-driven premise of What Will Be Achieved? illustrate how her emotional imagination has evolved from transcendence to historical recollection and, more recently, to the social economy of emotions.

Ga-Young, the figure at the center of the series, embodies a psycho whose emotions are data-driven. Her company markets emotion as a platform product, collecting others’ feelings and simulating sorrow, thereby offering a stark critique of emotion labor and platform capitalism. The series poses a provocative question: in an age where feelings are monetized, are we still human?

In this new era, emotions are not treated as transcendence but as restoration. The show suggests that emotions must be learned or reconstituted, and that the absence of feeling is not evil but a symptom of a time when empathic performance is demanded by digital platforms. Eun-sook’s writing and Suzy’s restrained performance converge to emphasize a静寂 aesthetic, where silence and stillness convey emotional density more than tears.

Overall, What Will Be Achieved? marks a bold shift: from a romance-centered, emotionally saturated universe to a drama that interrogates the ethics of feeling in a world where algorithms measure, simulate, and monetize human experience. It stands as both a landmark in Eun-sook’s career and a reflection on the evolving landscape of Korean women’s storytelling in the age of data.

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