From fan to interviewing Hyun Bin: How Deema built the K-drama community she never had

Dubai: Deema Abu Naser was 11 when she started watching Korean dramas. For the next decade, she had almost nobody to talk to about them.

"Throughout my whole life, I didn't have any friends that liked them, so it felt like a bit lonely growing up, because I didn't have anyone to share my thoughts with about the shows that I was watching," she says. "Other people would talk about shows like Gossip Girl or How I Met Your Mother, and I would watch those too. But there was no one around me that I could share this love with."

Nearly seven years and more than 3,000 videos later, she has the largest K-drama community online, a global audience in the hundreds of thousands, and an interview with Hyun Bin behind her. She has also had a front-row view of something she never expected to see: the Gulf becoming one of the genre's most enthusiastic markets.

Palestinian-Canadian and born and raised in Dubai, Deema moved to Toronto for university and spent five years in Canada before coming home.

It was in her final year, stuck on what to do for a living, that the answer surfaced in her coursework.

"The only thing that would come to my mind is that every single university assignment I would do, I would do it about K-dramas," she says. In a writing class for her minor in professional writing and literature, students were asked to build a blog. Hers was about Korean dramas.

"I remember you had to be in teams of four to edit together, and the people in my group would be like, 'What are these shows? I've never heard of them before.' And I would get so excited to just explain."

She started Deema Loves Drama as she was about to graduate. Not as a career move, she says, but to find people.

The beginning was slower than anyone now discovering her account would guess.

"In the first two years, I actually only had 1,000 followers on Instagram for two full years, and I got to maybe 80,000 on TikTok. But that's genuinely two full years of working."

Her audience then was almost entirely North American. That changed when she moved back to Dubai and started appearing at events here.

"That's when I really saw that there was a UAE audience for Asian dramas," she says.

For anyone who grew up here watching Korean shows, her description of the old days will be relatable.

"When I was growing up, there was nothing. We only had one thing, which was KCon Abu Dhabi in 2016. BTS, Monsta X, they all came, but there wasn't anything else. The way that you would find a friend that likes K-dramas or K-pop was miniscule."

Now she points at the streaming charts as evidence of the shift. "If you look at the Netflix top 10, at least three of them are always K-dramas, and now Chinese dramas as well."

The audience is not only Emirati and expat viewers here, she adds. Saudi Arabia has become one of the biggest markets in the region, something she saw first-hand when TikTok invited her to Comic Con in Jeddah two years ago.

"The K-drama fans were wild. Like, there were so many. It was so fun to see."

The change she finds hardest to get used to is the existence of events at all. "Now we have things on ground, when beforehand I wouldn't have ever dreamed of having stuff like this here."

I asked her to date the turning point and she said: streaming, and lockdown.

"For K-dramas, the biggest boom was when Netflix started introducing K-dramas on their streaming service, and they did that during COVID," she says. Before that, viewers were using streaming sites rather than services.

"When they introduced things like It's Okay to Not Be Okay, Crash Landing on You, all of these things, that's when everyone and their mothers started watching, because they were also stuck indoors during COVID. They had nothing else to do."

She points the surge between 2020 and 2022.

On why Arab audiences in particular took to the genre, her answer starts with pace.

"There's always a slow burn. I love a slow burn, and a lot of people do too. I think all of us are kind of tired of the fast-paced life that we're all living. We just want to watch something that's good, makes us feel good, has a nice storyline, nice emotional values, nice family, but also a nice romance."

The craft matters as much as the content, she argues. "K-dramas in general have amazing stories that are told in such a beautiful way, from cinematography to dialogue to production sets. Everything about it is made so carefully."

And then there is the restraint that Western television largely abandoned. "They hold hands after six or 10 episodes. Beautiful, give me more. They have cliches and tropes that not many shows have these days."

Bigger budgets and global platforms have not been an unqualified win, in her view.

"It's a double-edged sword," she says. "Dramas before 2016 were so popular for a reason. People loved the good feeling that comes out of watching the drama. They're just cute. They're nice. You watch them, you forget about your day."

Now there is more scale, and more pressure. "When streaming services took over, a little bit of the essence of K-dramas did change. Like I said, it used to take them 10 or 12 episodes to hold hands. Now we're shortening that bit by bit. It's becoming a little bit more westernised, which I think a lot of K-drama watchers don't want to see."

The split, she notes, runs along how long you have been watching. Newer viewers often want exactly what longtime fans are mourning.

Alongside the content, she runs Dreamie Shop with her sister, who designs its original characters.

The idea came from a gap she kept noticing. "When it comes to merchandise, we don't have any. Sometimes people would make photo books after the drama, but there isn't original merch." It also came from a lifelong soft spot for Sanrio, Studio Ghibli and Snoopy.

The keychains and nameplates are made from wood, a deliberate choice on sustainability. International shipping is due to open in the coming months.

A group of fans on a K-drama tour in Korea bought more than 20 keychains, then photographed everyone on the tour holding them.

"So cute. I cried. I love seeing community together."

Six years in, the moment that undid her was meeting the actor she had been watching since childhood.

Deema interviewed Hyun Bin and Woo Do-hwan for Made in Korea Season 2, the Disney+ noir that wrapped its final episodes this month, and she describes it as her first in-person press junket.

"I have the biggest K-drama community, and this is the first time I got an in-person press junket," she says. "I was going out of my mind in excitement."

The fandom behind it goes back to childhood. Secret Garden was her first Hyun Bin drama. She has followed Woo Do-hwan since Mad Dog in 2017. A few years ago she flew to Switzerland to visit the filming locations from Crash Landing on You.

English did not feel like enough, so she prepared an introduction in Korean, despite not being fluent and not yet having started lessons.

She had three minutes.

"I did not want them to go to waste. I was very nervous going into the room, but I really tried to prepare my best and to make everyone else really proud online, because I knew as much as it meant to me, I knew it would mean so much to everyone else as well. So I didn't want to disappoint anyone, and I came in prepared."

Her account reads less like a brand and more like a group chat, which she says was never a strategy.

"This is my personality. I don't have patience to create something fake, and I don't have patience to put out an image that I don't believe in," she says.

"I really do believe that the best social media is the one that you don't have to try so hard at. I always wanted to have a long career, and I think that if I were pretending to be anything that I'm not, I would be so tired all the time, and it would show."

These days she splits the year between Dubai, Seoul and Los Angeles, with work taking her to all three. She has also launched a second account, Deema Loves Life, covering beauty, lifestyle and what a creator's days actually look like, after years of assuming nobody wanted that.

Her ambition is a step beyond recommending shows.

"I want to be known as the person that made her life into a drama," she says. "That means more interviews, more exclusive opportunities, more travel."

Her father put the goal more bluntly. "He was like, 'Deema, people look at your account at the end of their day to see what to watch, but your account should be the one that they look at the whole day.'"

Be your own cheerleader. "Sometimes maybe people around you don't understand your vision, and that's fine. You don't need everyone else's validation. You just need yourself."

Set goals, however small. "Maybe your goal is to post once this week, and that's fine."

Expect to be bad at first. "If you look at my first videos in 2019, they were horrific. But you need to actually put something out for it to even fail."

Don't absorb every comment. "As long as you believe in yourself and you believe in your own vision, constructive criticism you should take. Other than that, don't take it to heart."

Stop comparing. "It's a journey. It ain't a race. I truthfully never compared myself to anyone, and I think that's the only reason why I've been successful. There's 8 billion people on Earth. We all have space."