For many international viewers, The Glory made Korean school bullying almost impossible to forget.
Keep watching K-dramas, though, and the pattern becomes wider: exclusion, assault, rumors, silent classmates, late-arriving adults and damage that follows a character years beyond graduation.
In Korea, school violence is often shortened to hakpok — from hakgyo pokryeok, school violence.
1. Hakpok Is Broader Than Physical Assault
Korea's Ministry of Education surveys multiple forms of school violence, including verbal abuse, physical violence, group exclusion and cyberbullying.
In the first 2026 nationwide survey, conducted among about 3.9 million enrolled students, 2.9% reported experiencing school violence, up from 2.5% in the first 2025 survey.
Compared with the first 2025 survey, the shares of verbal abuse and cyberbullying decreased, while group exclusion and physical violence increased. Verbal abuse remained the largest category across all school levels.
So when a drama depicts hakpok, watch more than the fight scene.
Who is isolated? Who spreads the rumor? Who records it? Who watches and says nothing?
2. A School Is a Small Society Already Built for Drama
School brings the same people together every day.
There are friendship groups, informal status, teachers, parents, seniority and witnesses. A victim may not be able to simply avoid the aggressor.
That lets a writer ask several questions at once:
Why do classmates stay silent?
What did the teacher know?
Can family money or status change the response?
What happens after someone reports it?
School bullying therefore becomes more than a conflict between a cruel student and a victim. It can expose class, power, complicity and institutional responsibility in one compact setting.
3. The Glory Made the Past Control the Adult Present
One of The Glory's strongest choices was refusing to leave the bullying in adolescence.
The violence continues to shape the victim's adult relationships, work and revenge plan.
The school scenes are therefore not simply backstory. They explain why the present story exists.
That structure travels well internationally because the basic idea is easy to understand: a teenage hierarchy can leave consequences long after school ends.
4. Why Hakpok Carries Weight Outside Drama Too
School-violence records have become part of real education policy.
For 2026 university admissions, Korean institutions were required to reflect school-violence disciplinary measures in admissions procedures.
That helps explain why the word hakpok carries weight far beyond a classroom argument.
But one distinction matters: an online allegation is not the same thing as an officially established school-violence disciplinary record.
That line matters in both education reporting and celebrity controversies.
5. K-Dramas Are Not a Statistical Picture of Korean School Life
Watching The Glory and assuming most Korean schools look like that would be like using a crime thriller as a census.
Drama selects conflict and intensifies it. It can make the perpetrator more extreme, extend the consequences and connect teachers, parents and institutions into one narrative.
Real data tell us the problem exists and receives serious public attention. They do not tell us that the most extreme television scenes represent an average school day.
Reality and dramatic compression have to stay separate.
6. Watch What Happens After the Violence
The best way to read a bullying drama is not to rank how brutal the scenes are.
Watch the reaction.
Who saw it?
Who reported it?
Why did friends move — or stay still?
How did teachers and parents respond?
What was recorded?
Did the harm follow the victim into adulthood?
The strongest hakpok dramas are often less about the act itself than the people and institutions surrounding it.
Why the Trope Is Unlikely to Disappear
School violence can open several layers of a story at once: teenage hierarchy, family influence, institutional responsibility, lasting trauma and adult justice.
It also remains a live policy and social issue in Korea.
So the next time another K-drama returns to a school bullying plot, try a more revealing question than “Why are they using this trope again?”
Ask who is made responsible, who stays silent and who is allowed to escape responsibility.
Sources
- Ministry of Education — 2026 first nationwide school-violence survey
- Ministry of Education — 2026 university admissions implementation plan
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