@onecutekat okay so I’m honestly shocked you haven’t seen my 2950 posts about the hanahaki disease but (cw: mild body horror, I think?) ((also sorry this got long))
Basically it’s a fictional illness born of unrequited love where the victim’s love manifests in them coughing up flower petals which grow in number until they eventually choke/suffocate the victim and the victim dies. The only cure is for the victim’s love to become reciprocated. There’s a surgery that can remove the petals, but it also removes all feelings toward the person the victim loves. It sounds gruesome as hell but it can be gorgeous when written well.
It originated in a 2009 manga called Hanahaki Otome (The Girl Who Spits Flowers) but didn’t enter Western mainstream awareness until 2014 when fanfic writers started using it. And that’s why it’s one of my favorite cultural phenomena. There are no English translations of the manga that I could find. Until mid-2017, the Hanahaki’s fanlore page didn’t even list a source material. And Korean and Japanese fans who about it treated it as joke. But it was catapulted into western awareness singlehandedly by kpop fanfic authors, to the point that when I made my now-popular hanahaki appreciation post, it had even become common in Star Wars fanfic, which is crazy mainstream.
The other reason I love it is that people re-interpret it in so many ways. Because only a handful of people (at least until recently) had been able to find the source material, which means that most people probably assumed that however they first encountered it was its true form. But the hanahaki has already been reinterpreted so many times by the time it left kpop that the different variations and explorations of the concept are probably vast at this point. (My favorite interpretation is that the flowers literally grow within your lungs, or within a cavity in your chest explicitly meant for that purpose.)
I just think it’s really cool how the Hanahaki as it exists and is popular today is almost exclusively due to kpop and fanfic. It was a BTS fanfic author who wrote the first English hanahaki fic (and, indeed, the first hanahaki fic I could find in any language on AO3). People shit on both kpop and fanfic so often, to the point that someone commented on my hanahaki appreciation post solely to say “this didn’t originate in kpop” without bothering to tell me where it might have otherwise originated. But it’s kpop fanfic authors who are responsible for the current popularity of the hanahaki. And that’s fucking brilliant to me.
