Everyone Must Be... Something

Over time, I’ve noticed a pattern in Korean internet culture. Every few years, a new format takes over. It looks playful, sometimes unserious, sometimes oddly intense. But the more of these moments you see, the more they start to feel connected.

They may look like separate trends on the surface, but they often do the same thing underneath: they turn personality, compatibility, boundaries, attraction, or even fate into something smaller, faster, and easier to interpret. That is what makes them interesting to me—not because they are viral, but because they keep showing the same cultural instinct in new packaging.

A quick timeline makes the pattern obvious

• 2016–2018: Tangsuyuk (부먹 vs 찍먹) — A debate over whether sweet-and-sour pork should be eaten with the sauce poured over it or dipped separately.

• 2018–2019: Peach (딱복 vs 물복) — A split between people who prefer firm peaches and those who prefer soft, juicy ones.

• 2019–2022: MBTI — A personality test that became a major social shorthand in Korean dating, friendships, and everyday conversations.

• 2020–2021: K-drama ship wars — Major dramas like Start-Up and True Beauty sparked intense arguments over which male lead the heroine should choose. Team Seojun? Or Team Suho?

• 2021: Mint chocolate (민초 논쟁) — A playful but intense divide between mint chocolate lovers and haters.

• 2021–2023: Perilla leaf / Shrimp debates (깻잎 / 새우 논쟁) — Viral relationship hypotheticals asking whether helping someone else separate perilla leaves, or peel shrimp, is “too intimate.”

• 2022–2024: Personal colour (퍼스널 컬러) — A booming beauty trend where people get analysed into seasonal colour palettes like Spring Warm or Winter Cool.

• 2025: Teto vs Egen (테토 vs 에겐) — A viral shorthand used to label whether someone gives off a more bold, instinctive “Teto” vibe or a softer, emotional “Egen” one.

• 2025–2026: SJPJ / renewed Saju (사주팔자) — A newer wave of simplified “type” labels and aestheticized Saju content, especially among younger Korean users.

The format changes. The function stays surprisingly consistent.

These trends make it easier to place people

Part of why these trends keep returning is because they make people easier to place. Not fully understand, not deeply know—just place.

That distinction matters.

In a culture where social reading is often fast, layered, and dependent on subtle cues, these systems offer a shortcut. They give people a starting point, a quick frame, a way to make someone feel less ambiguous. That is part of why MBTI became so embedded in Korea compared to many other places. It wasn’t just treated as a fun quiz. It became genuinely useful.

It helped people build a rough social outline quickly. And that same function keeps showing up again and again, even when the format changes.

What looks trivial often carries a much bigger emotional conversation

This is where many of these moments get misread from the outside. The topic itself may look trivial, but the conversation underneath it often isn’t.

A small food scenario can quickly become a conversation about jealousy, emotional boundaries, loyalty, performative care, or what counts as inappropriate closeness. A fictional pairing can become a conversation about what people want in love, whether consistency matters more than chemistry, or what “good” romance should actually look like. A personality label can become a conversation about who feels emotionally safe, who seems hard to read, who feels compatible, or who makes sense to you.

That is why these trends travel so far. They are emotionally loaded, but socially indirect—and Korea is especially fluent in that kind of communication.

The pattern also shows what Korea is trying to decode

The pattern gets even clearer when you look at what each era is trying to understand. Over time, the focus keeps expanding:

• Taste 

• Romance 

• Personality 

• Presentation 

• Relational energy 

• Fate 

That progression says a lot.

The question slowly shifts from What do you like? to What kind of person are you? and then further into What kind of life are you living? That is a much bigger emotional territory.

Which is why the current return of Saju-related content feels especially telling. It suggests that the desire is no longer just to label people in social settings. It is also to make uncertainty feel more readable—to make life patterns, relationship outcomes, and personal tendencies feel less vague.

So while the formats may look trendy, what they are often doing is something much older and deeper: they are managing ambiguity.

What makes this feel especially Korean

What makes this feel especially Korean is that none of this is actually “new.” These formats feel modern and internet-native, but the instinct behind them doesn’t.

Korea has long had a cultural comfort with reading people through compact systems and small signals, whether through:

• Blood type personality logic 

• Saju

• Close attention to subtle behaviour

• Strong sensitivity to social context

• Interpreting people through cues rather than full self-disclosure

That is why newer formats don’t feel random. They feel familiar.

MBTI may be global, but Korea absorbed it into everyday life in a very Korean way. Teto vs Egen may be recent, but it still follows the same logic: take a complicated emotional or relational read and compress it into something socially usable. And the renewed packaging of Saju makes perfect sense in this context, too.

It is not a tradition disappearing. It is a tradition being reformatted for a generation already comfortable with labels, types, and quick systems of interpretation.

Why these trends matter more than they seem

They are not just memes, not just “Korean internet being funny again,” and not just harmless over-analysis.

Very often, they are functioning as:

• Social shortcuts 

• Emotional proxies 

• Compatibility tools 

• Low-risk ways to reveal values 

• Updated wrappers for older cultural habits 

That is what makes them so repeatable.

They work. They help people interpret each other faster, talk about difficult things more safely, and reduce uncertainty in a socially acceptable format. And in a culture where a lot is often understood before it is directly stated, that has real staying power.

The real story is never the trend itself

What matters is not the trend itself, but the repeated function behind it.

Across all of these formats, the same pattern keeps returning: Korea takes complicated emotional or social questions and compresses them into something easier to use. Something quicker to share. Something easier to understand in public.

That is why these trends keep resurfacing in different forms. They are not random internet habits. They are recurring social tools.

And that, to me, is what makes them worth paying attention to.

~Hiyaa Upadhhyay