K-pop girl groups have a tendency to kill men in their videos. (G)I-DLE are the most direct in their murdering of boyfriend’s/husbands: literally shooting the guy in the head in I WANT THAT, and we get a similar assassination in TOMBOY, and then MIYEON’s solo track RENO, in which he is poisoned, stuffed in the trunk and shot. Stuffing the lad in the trunk is a key image in this genre.
Our earliest example of man-killing here is 2NE1 in 2010 ramming the abusive guy’s racing car to cause it to skid, roll and finally explode on the track. They celebrate quietly afterwards. Another early example is WONDER GIRLS who beat and humiliate the boyfriend, and stuff him into the trunk, before blowing him up with dynamite to the infectious reggae lilt of WHY SO LONELY.
Meanwhile typically of NewJeans, those girls don’t actually murder the boyfriend themselves but in telling a friend of theirs that he’s been cheating, this leads to him being stuffed into the trunk and potentially driven off a cliff.
BIBI is more direct. I mean, the track is called Vengeance, and BIBI dishes it out in spades at a mob boss, who after being tortured and humiliated is buried alive. She also takes out a whole underground gambling ring in KAZINO and is probably our scariest man-killer in the whole of K-pop.
Red Velvet have quite a history of attempting to murder each other in videos, but in Peek-A-Boo they level up into serial murderers of pizza delivery boys. Unlike all of our boyfriend killers and BIBI’s mafia venegeance fantasies, Red Velvet have turned man-killing into a recreational sport.
From here we move into the realm of girl groups we aren’t specifically killing one guy, but summarily massacring large groups of them. It’s not particularly personal, they just can’t help themselves: multi-generational super group REFUND SISTERS wipe out large quantities of them in DON’T TOUCH ME to demonstrate girl power. Also noteworthy is Dajeong of PIXY who takes out a whole elevator full of guys in the Villain video, seemingly without breaking a sweat, while LOONA’s Not Friends has an enormous headcount of men being casually gunned down.
Our final category is implicit man-killing. Red Velvet’s IRENE is very deliberately stalking the guy, and she catches up with him, but whether and how she takes him out while hanging from the ceiling is unclear, the video of Like A Flower continues unconcerned about the details of his demise. As a less-calculated murder, it seems likely that Sogumm of Balming Tiger dispatches one of her male colleagues in LOOP?, but then again it’s possible that the whole group are killing each other, not unlike a more frantic Red Velvet.
As a coda to all of this man-killing, a special mention should be made for BLACKPINK’s LISA, who along with Rosalía in NEW WOMAN, are so unconcerned about men that they repeatedly ignore two who are beating the living crap out of each other. Why murder men when left to their own devices they’ll probably kill each other given half a chance?