Tradurre passioni: l’estetica social(e) in manga, manhwa e webtoon

South Korea and Japan are currently among the leading producers of media content consumed by those who, in the Western world, feel like outsiders within their own culture. While the cultural consumption associated with these countries is globally framed in terms of inclusivity and mutual support, the narratives themselves often depict the dynamics of “shame-based cultures” where prevailing semantic oppositions include: obligation vs freedom; tradition vs modernity; Confucian values vs individualism; harmony vs conflict; sacrifice vs self-interest; joy vs sadness; success vs failure. Within this framework, the “we” dominates by blaming the “them,” in texts where shame is simultaneously a passion and a cultural imperative. To analyze this transversal phenomenon, a selection of transformation narratives has been examined through the lens of social aesthetics, where mythical systems and concomitant, intertextual, and paradigmatic transformation algorithms are brought into discourse. This allows for the articulation of a doctrine of sensibility and its forms within a corpus composed of Japanese manga and Korean manhwa and webtoon. Across these narratives – often subject to intersemiotic translation – the essay investigates modes of representing a pedagogy of beauty as harmony and ceremonial order, interpreted metadiscursively as a semiotics of social shame, semantically structured between inclusion and exclusion.