준며들다

Origin

‘Junmyeodeulda’ fuses the name ‘Choi Jun’ with ‘seumyeodeulda’, to seep in. It names the state of finding something cringeworthy and overbearing at first, then realising you are hooked.

Choi Jun is an alter ego played by the comedian Kim Hae-jun on the YouTube channel Psick Univ: a 34-year-old café owner. He appeared as the first date in ‘B-daemyeon Date’, a video-call blind-date format devised for the period when COVID-19 made meeting in person difficult. The video is ‘[B-daemyeon Date] First Date, Choi Jun / 34 / café owner’, uploaded on November 27th, 2020. His oily delivery, unfounded confidence and refusal to be deterred by whether his date laughed produced the reaction ‘I genuinely hate this and I cannot stop watching’, and it passed 400,000 views within three weeks.

Spread

That sensation — revulsion and absorption arriving at once — is what the single word ‘junmyeodeulda’ compressed. Viewers began using it in comments and on social media, it became the standard phrase, and it followed Choi Jun onto every other programme he appeared on.

Psick Univ passed a million subscribers in April 2021, and Kim Hae-jun carried the Choi Jun persona into advertising and charity work, even publishing a book under the character’s name in 2021. It is a case of an alter ego outgrowing its performer, and a representative example of the period when YouTube comedy characters were imported back into terrestrial variety television.

Usage

Of something you disliked at first and now keep going back to — ‘I think I’ve been junmyeodeul-ed’
When a character is oily or excessive yet somehow appealing
Extended beyond Choi Jun himself to any charm with the same structure

The key is that it does not simply mean liking something; it contains the process of your own resistance collapsing. It is not used for something you liked from the start.