In Boyfriend on Demand, Netflix’s glossy new Korean rom-com, Blackpink’s Jisoo stars as Seo Mi-rae, a 29-year-old woman who works as a producer at a small webtoon company in Seoul. As part of her job, Mi-rae oversees the platform’s most popular romance webtoon. But, in her personal life, she is uninterested in dating. She and her college sweetheart broke up in the transition to working life, and Mi-rae has never quite worked up the courage to try again. Plus, who has the time and energy to date in late stage capitalism?
When Mi-rae is approached by the creator of a new platform that offers users virtual reality dating on demand, she agrees to trial the experience and give her honest feedback as a webtoon producer. But she is slowly drawn in by the immersive simulations that make users the main character in popular romance tropes. When prickly work colleague Park Gyeong-nam (Death Game’s Seo In-guk) confesses his feelings for Mi-rae, she must choose between the neat, controllable love stories of the virtual world and the unpredictable chaos of a real-life relationship.
This kind of story set-up is usually framed as much darker in modern pop culture, with Western writers and directors leaning into the dystopian science fiction elements of how we are replacing relationships with one another with interactions with technology. Boyfriend on Demand, however, sticks to the beats of a rom-com and is not particularly interested in portraying the negative social consequences of a technology like this one. Instead, it prefers to explore the emotional contexts and consequences that surround the decisions women make in the attention economy, and in a world that demands so much.
Boyfriend on Demand’s treatment of its transformational tech reminds me of the function the holodeck often played in Star Trek: The Next Generation. While there were moments when the immersive quality of the classic sci-fi series’ simulation chamber impacted characters’ real-world…
