I was talking with a friend about what K-pop groups we'd been following, and we ended up on something: each generation of girl groups, the standout member feels completely different from the one before. Not just looks — in terms of energy, vibe, what she's supposed to represent.
Every generation has one — that person you instinctively focus on when you look at the group, the one who reads as the main character. But what that person carries keeps shifting.
Using the Korean and Japanese fan community's standard breakdown: Gen 4 is BLACKPINK and TWICE, Gen 5 is the whole stretch from ITZY and AESPA through to IVE, LE SSERAFIM, and NewJeans, and Gen 6 is BABYMONSTER and ILLIT. Looking at who the "main character" is across these three generations — and what she represents — turns out to be more complicated than it sounds. Gen 5 in particular: the same generation produced four or five mutually contradictory definitions of what the ideal woman should look like.
Gen 4: Two Templates Get Built at Once
Gen 4 did something no K-pop generation had fully managed before: it sold K-pop to the entire world.
TWICE's route was approachability. No single overwhelming visual center, but Tzuyu carried the most visible symbol of it — tall, beautiful in a way that keeps a certain distance, a Taiwanese face building what became the pan-Asian "standard beauty" in the Korean idol industry. Nayeon is a different kind of center: warm, explosive, always at full capacity. Her main character quality isn't her face — it's a natural ability to occupy space. On stage you just look at her first.
BLACKPINK was completely different.
Lisa is a center in the performance sense. The kind where once she starts moving, everyone's eyes follow without deciding to. The technical ability is real, but harder to replicate is the sustained density of "look at me" she radiates — it doesn't turn off.
Jennie is something else. She doesn't move much, but you watch her anyway. More precisely: an active indifference. She's not competing for attention; attention just comes. The "Human Chanel" nickname makes sense not because she's the best-looking, but because there's an internal consistency between her and those fashion houses — an aesthetic self-coherence that reads as real.
Before Jennie, the K-pop girl group "main character" came in two basic types: best vocalist, or best-looking. Jennie created a third type: attitude as a standalone main character property. This reverberated through the next two generations.
Gen 4's double legacy: TWICE built "approachability + visual standard," BLACKPINK built "attitude + presence." The groups that came after largely chose a lane from these two — or tried to break out of them entirely.
Gen 5: One Generation, Four or Five Different Answers
Gen 5 is the most interesting part of this. From ITZY and AESPA all the way through to IVE, LE SSERAFIM, and NewJeans, the Korean and Japanese fan communities classify all of these as the same generation. But put their center figures side by side and you'll find them almost actively contradicting each other.
Start with the earlier part of Gen 5.
AESPA's Karina is what "perfection" looks like when pushed to an extreme. Her face has a quieting quality — you don't think "she's pretty," you think "how is a person allowed to look like this." SM put her in a virtual world concept where she and META-KARINA are mirror images of each other, which turns out to be an accurate metaphor: her presence has never felt entirely human. It's a perfection that tips into unreal, like something CGI-rendered.
ITZY's Yuna went a different direction — not Karina's "beyond-human perfection," but "good-looking without trying." She debuted at 17, tall, clean features, and the visible strain of years of trainee training just wasn't there. Instead: a natural kind of aggressiveness. Girl crush before her was sometimes effortful; she made it look like it required nothing.
But both Karina and Yuna were still operating within the "perfection" framework — just in different registers.
Then IVE's Wonyoung came out and pushed that framework to another extreme.
175cm, proportions that don't make sense, holding a coffee cup like she's in a fashion editorial. She built something called "Wonyoung-ism": always cut food into small pieces, maintain elegance at all times, stay composed even when sick. It became a meme, and it became a question — is this actually how she lives, or a persona engineered by her team?
That question started being asked seriously because, in the same generation, NewJeans came out and gave the completely opposite answer.
NewJeans debuted in 2022. Minji had thick bangs, no heavily-trained idol quality to her face, dressed like she borrowed from an older sibling's closet. The "Attention" MV looked like found footage. Haerin's disinterested look at camera — by previous K-pop standards, she'd never pass evaluation. This was a kind of direct challenge to Wonyoung-ism: not that one is right and the other wrong, but that two definitions of "ideal woman" were colliding head-on within the same generation. Extreme polish on one side. Deliberate removal of polish on the other.
But "natural" is still designed. The shade of the bangs, the camera angle, which photos get released — there's still a complete packaging system underneath. What NewJeans did was make the packaging invisible. The center standard shifted from "you know she's an idol" to "you'd almost think she isn't."
LE SSERAFIM went a third direction. Kazuha was a professional ballet dancer before K-pop, and she carries herself like one. No single overwhelming visual center in the group, but a collective energy that reads as "strong" — not posturing girl-crush hard, but something more grounded and physical.
Gen 5 is the most template-fragmented generation in K-pop girl group history. Karina's AI quality, Wonyoung's extreme perfectionism, Minji's deliberate naturalness, Kazuha's professional physical strength — these aren't products of different eras. They're different answers given by the same generation, at the same time. "What is a main character?" — Gen 5 had no consensus. Everyone had their own answer.
Gen 6: Still Looking
BABYMONSTER and ILLIT are Gen 6. Too early to finalize conclusions, but some things are visible.
You can't find one overwhelming center in BABYMONSTER — all seven have real strengths, nobody clearly dominates. Rora's visuals are top-tier; Ahyeon's creative ability is above what you'd normally expect from a girl group member. But there's no single focal point for the overall narrative. Maybe YG deliberately avoided centralizing, but it also means the general audience has a harder time attaching to a specific person.
ILLIT's biggest problem is how much it looks like NewJeans. Min Hee-jin said so publicly. This reveals something: NewJeans built a new "center template" in Gen 5, and that template got copied in Gen 6, which immediately undermined the authenticity that made the template work. Classic K-pop industry problem — new style arrives, gets replicated immediately, gets diluted.
Gen 6's overall feel: inheriting fragments from Gen 5, but hasn't found anything new of its own yet.
The Through-Line
Gen 4's Jennie made attitude a standalone center property. Lisa established that performance density can be the overwhelming core of a group's presence. Those are the starting points.
Gen 5 is where the question exploded. Karina pushed perfection to its limit. Wonyoung turned perfection into a philosophy of living. Minji went in the opposite direction entirely. Same generation, three mutually contradictory answers — that's what makes Gen 5 genuinely interesting, not any single person but the collective fragmentation itself.
Gen 6 is still searching.
My personal favorite? Still Minji's kind of presence. Not because she's most natural, but because she was the first K-pop center where I felt like I was watching someone exist without exhausting herself. Even if that effortlessness was carefully engineered — the fact that you can engineer that feeling is itself impressive.
And Jennie can't be skipped. She defined what "attitude as a center property" looks like in K-pop girl groups. Before her, that position was basically empty.
Which generation's center sticks with you? Curious what people think.