Book Review: Two Tales of Emancipation: Madeline Miller’s Galatea and Kim Taehyung’s Winter Ahead

Madeline Miller’s Galatea is a tale of emancipation from a creator-husband who controlled her every will; a man who gazed at her as his own work of art. No agency. No voice. No choice. Until, at last, she reclaimed all her faculties in a cruel, shocking act that left me pondering justice, liberation, and the cost of becoming fully human.

Winter Ahead by Kim Taehyung (feat. Park Hyo Sin) explores a parallel theme, though the rebellion here is softer, quiet, humane, but no less liberating. The music video suggests references to the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea besides.

The lines:

I’ll be with you until the spring runs by

And the summer starts to burn

And I’ll be with you when autumn returns

Yes, when all the seasons turn

signal a different kind of subversion.

They imply: He will be with you through every change, but not at the cost of his own becoming.

A love that honours presence without demanding permanence. A devotion that refuses self-erasure.

In this way, Taehyung seems to gesture toward the K-pop industry’s traditional creator-captor dynamic, where idols are sculpted into images and deprived of agency. A modern Pygmalion myth. But BTS, across their career, have steadily subverted that narrative, becoming auteurs of their own art, identities, and stories.

And in Winter Ahead, Taehyung widens that subversion into something tender: an articulation of loving and being loved with freedom, with consent, and with the right to grow into one’s own form. A gentle rebellion and perhaps the most radical one of al