Jo Yong
BIOGRAPHY
Jo Yong (조용), also credited as Jo Dragon and JD, is a South Korean screenwriter with one of the strongest mainstream records on this site, and a 2026 slate that is almost entirely queer.
The earlier work is major Korean television. Jugglers (저글러스), sixteen episodes from 4 December 2017. The two episode After the Rain (옥란면옥, 2018). Then It’s Okay to Not Be Okay (사이코지만 괜찮아), sixteen episodes from 20 June 2020 on tvN, produced by Studio Dragon, on which Jo Yong holds both the writing and the creator credit. Then Mr. Plankton (Mr. 플랑크톤), ten episodes released by Netflix on 8 November 2024, again as writer and creator.
In 2026 the record changes shape entirely. Three ten episode series, all carried by wavve, all produced by the same three companies, OAK Company, KT Studio Genie and SAMBOK Production, and all adapted from web novels:
- The Prosecutor’s Proposal (검사실의 제안), from 25 June 2026, directed by Yang Kyeong-hui, adapted from a novel by Hebok. It went out on wavve, GagaOOLala and iQIYI International. Its keyword list is entirely crime and workplace, with no queer classification on record; the page notes the GagaOOLala distribution without drawing a conclusion from it.
- Summertime (하절기), from 27 August 2026, directed by Bae Yoon-seo, adapted from a novel by I Ro-mil. Classified gay romance and high school romance, with keywords running to obsession, jealousy and unrequited love. Two friends of nineteen years, one of whom knows exactly how carefully the other’s perfect image is maintained.
- Winter Season (동절기), ten episodes, in production. Directed by Lee Son Eum and adapted from another I Ro-mil novel. Classified boys’ love (bl). Two men meet again nine years later at a nightclub tied to organised crime.
The Korean titles of the last two are a matched pair: 하절기 is the summer season, 동절기 the winter.
TMDB records South Korea as place of birth and holds no birth date or biography. The record carries an IMDb id, nm9449670. A Wikipedia search returned unrelated results.
BLGLFlix editorial view
This page changes what this site has been saying about Korea all day, and we would rather say so directly than leave the earlier pages standing unqualified.
The argument we built across the Korean profiles went like this. Openly queer Korean drama gets made small: six episodes of ten minutes on a platform nobody has heard of, or a web series casting out of a reality show, or sixteen episodes that reach a name cast and still cannot get a broadcast slot. Meanwhile the resources go to work that is classified as bromance. On the Park Hyeon-seok profile we put it as bluntly as we could: Korea does not have a queer content problem, it has a labelling problem, and the label determines the budget.
Then this record. The writer of It’s Okay to Not Be Okay, a Studio Dragon production for tvN, and of a Netflix original, has written three ten episode series in a single year, at least two of them openly queer, all three for the same production consortium and the same national streaming service. KT Studio Genie is a telecom backed content studio. wavve is a national platform, not a curiosity. And two of the three are being sold internationally through GagaOOLala and iQIYI.
That is not a labelling workaround. It is a slate. Somebody in Korea decided in 2026 to commission a run of BL adaptations at ten episodes each, hire a writer with a Netflix credit and a tvN hit to do it, and put it on wavve. The earlier picture was accurate about 2022 to 2025. It appears to be going out of date while we are writing it.
Two details worth holding onto. First, the source material: all three are web novel adaptations, and two of them come from the same novelist, I Ro-mil, as a seasonal pair. Korea is doing what Japan does with manga and Thailand does with novels, running a pipeline out of published fiction, and the same author supplying summer and winter is a franchise structure rather than a one off.
Second, the writer did not stop doing anything else in order to do this. There is no visible career change here, only an addition. That is the same generalist pattern this site has now found in five countries, and it is the surest sign that a genre has stopped being a separate world.
PROFILE DETAILS
- Native Name
- 조용
- Real Name
- Jo Yong
- Nickname
- Jo Dragon
- Pronouns
- she/her
- Birthplace
- South Korea
- Gender
- Female
- Profession
- Nationality
- Debut
- 2017 — Jugglers (저글러스, 2017), as writer
- Years Active
- 2017 – present
- Languages
- Korean
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