3 - The Female Pygmalion in the Japanese, Taiwanese and Korean television series, Absolute Boyfriend

In Greek mythology, Pygmalion creates a female ivory sculpture, Galatea, and falls in love it. Hoping that his love could to live and be his bride, Pygmalion prays to Aphrodite for help. Aphrodite grants Pygmalion his wish by bringing the ivory sculpture to live after he kisses her. Reading the story from a feminist perspective, the Pygmalion story projects the male psyche of creating man’s ‘ideal perfect woman’.   The same notion still applies in the twenty-first century, however, instead of making sculptures, men create female robots and fall in love with them, and a prominent example will be Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2015). With the rising power of women in twenty-first century thanks to the three waves of feminist movement, more female voices appear in major media production. Seeing that female spectatorship always dominates the East Asian television markets, therefore, it is not surprising to see there are television dramas on Asian women creating their ideal robotic boyfriends and fall in love with them. This paper aims to investigate the notion of “female Pygmalion” in three East Asian television adaptations (the Japanese one in 2008, the Taiwanese one in 2012 and the Korean one in 2019) of a famous Japanese manga created by Yuu Watase, titled Absolute Boyfriend and to discuss the notions of humanism and posthumanism.