So, in one of my Reddit threads, r/kdramas, someone wrote a post about a scene from episode 7 of Phantom Lawyer (yes, I have caught up), in which we see the female lead’s sister get hit by a very nice red Mercedes that speeds up even though the car does not have the right of way. Not fully the Truck of Doom, but the same concept. The poster wrote that if they see this trope one more time, they will scream or something to that effect.
If you don’t know what the Truck of Doom trope is, then let me explain. In any given drama, you will see a happy person running across the street or driving along their merry way when all of a sudden, a white box truck will come out of nowhere and boom! Hit the person or the car, killing the victim(s). Usually, the victim(s) are in the right, the pedestrian was in the crosswalk crossing on the walk signal, and for the driver, they were driving on their green light, in their lane, when the truck t-bones them while speeding through a red light or drives into the opposing lane, killing the driver.
This trope is a plot device. It creates a pivot point for the lead, a rising action, or it provides the tragic backstory of the protagonist, the thing that fuels or drives him or her.
Is there some truth to this trope?
It is such a heavily used trope that if you have watched K-dramas for any amount of time, you get a small anxiety attack anytime you see your leads in a car or crossing the street. I recently had it while watching Boyfriend on Demand, when Jisoo’s character crosses the street to meet her real-life date. It is a traumatizing trope to say the least, and when the writers and directors really want to traumatize you, they will show the person’s body making contact with the car.
Anyway, the comments ranged from the trope doesn’t bother me, to I understand how and why it is used, to K-dramas overuse it, and it is poor writing, to other dramas from other places do the same thing with other tropes; why are we so harsh on K-dramas?
And the comments got me thinking, is there some truth behind this trope?
To Google.
I did a very unscientific Google search: pedestrian fatalities in South Korea.
The first item was an NBC News article from November 2025. In Seoul, a truck “plowed into pedestrians at an outdoor market,” killing two and injuring 18. It happened at 11 am local time, and the driver, a man in his 60s, was not under the influence of any alcohol or drugs. He claimed that the truck malfunctioned. It wasn’t the classic white truck, but it was those blue flatbed moving trucks that we see in dramas all the time. Hmmm, curious and curiouser still.
Then I found a blog post from law firm Feldman/Shepard. According to the post, the United States leads 27 other high-income countries in its number of pedestrian deaths and overall road traffic deaths. Between 2013 and 2022, the death rates increased 50% while other countries experienced a decrease, including South Korea. Where does South Korea fit? While the U.S. is #1, Japan is #2, and South Korea is #3 among these countries in pedestrian deaths and overall road fatalities.
If what this blog post says is correct, then the traffic fatalities seem common enough in the US that we should have more car accident tropes in our dramas as well. But let’s continue with South Korea.
I found a report from the International Transportation Forum, “Road Safety Country Profile: Korea 2023,” and the same report for the U.S. for 2024. The data is from 2022 for South Korea and from 2023 for the U.S.
This report is where the information gets interesting.
Let’s Crunch the Numbers
According to the report, at the time of the data collection (2022), South Korea had 51.7 million people. There are 28.6 million vehicles in South Korea. Of that number, 71% are cars (20.3 million), 8% are motorcycles (2.2 million), 13% are goods vehicles (including those box trucks, 3.7 million), and 3% are buses. In 2022, there were 2,735 road fatalities. Of that number, 35% were pedestrian fatalities (fatalities by road user), meaning someone got hit by a vehicle. That is a ginormous percentage-wise.
But it gets more interesting.
In 2012 in South Korea, there were 5, 392 road fatalities, 2, 027 were pedestrian fatalities, which is 34% of all road fatalities. As stated in 2022, there were 2,735 road fatalities, with 933 of those fatalities being pedestrian fatalities, which is still 34% of all road fatalities! So while all numbers have decreased by roughly over 50%, pedestrian fatalities are still 34% of the total number of road fatalities.
Moreover, based on population and vehicle numbers (excluding buses), most of South Korea’s population travels on foot, which makes this over-30 % figure consistently over 10 years even more startling.
So Now What
My conclusion…the trope has some teeth. While it may be an annoying plot device, there seems to be a real issue with pedestrian fatalities in the country. We have to keep in mind that K-dramas are not for a foreign audience. We can enjoy them, but the writers and directors are discussing issues that resonate with the average Korean citizen. Now we can always say that, given the way the director freezes and edits the shot, the victim seems to have time to move out of the way; nevertheless, the trope seems valid despite its overuse, and apparently is a topic that might touch more people’s lives than we as Americans could imagine.
Let me know what you think? Should K-dramas retire this trope, or should foreign viewers attempt to dive into Korean society more?
