What Is Love?

Lore & Background

In the broader mythology of the Twice world, love is rarely a simple emotion. It is entangled with obligation, memory, and the specific way each character has been shaped by loss or duty. The "What Is Love?" arc draws on that tradition, plunging the group into a situation where the usual rules—loyalty to the team, the weight of past promises, the cost of power or choice—collide violently with the characters' private desires. The result is a period where alliances wobble like loose floorboards, confessions feel like stepping onto a minefield, and the line between caring for someone and needing them dissolves into a gray smear. The arc's emotional architecture relies on jarring contrast. Scenes of quiet, domestic tenderness—a shared blanket, a half-eaten bowl of ramen—sit beside moments of sharp, almost cruel honesty. Characters who have spent the story performing strength are given space to be petty, jealous, or afraid. The narrative treats these not as failures but as the actual texture of being human in a world that constantly demands they be more than human. By the arc's close, no single character has a tidy resolution. Instead, the group carries forward a shared, unspoken understanding: that what they owe each other is not a fixed contract but a living negotiation, and that asking the question is itself a form of commitment—messy, unfinished, and achingly real.

In Their Own Story

The rain had been falling for three days when the kitchen finally went quiet. No one had spoken in a while—not the sharp, performative silence of a fight, but the soft, exhausted kind that comes after you've said the thing you were terrified to say and the other person just… nodded. A cup sat half-finished on the counter, steam long gone. Someone's hand rested on the back of a chair, not quite touching the person sitting in it. Outside, the city lights smeared through the glass in long amber lines. No one moved to turn them off. No one moved to leave. And for the first time in a long while, the silence didn't feel like a wall. It felt like a door, left open just a crack, waiting for someone to decide whether to walk through.

Reader's Guide

The arc opens with a low-stakes, almost comedic episode that establishes the emotional temperature: the group is together, comfortable, but something is off. Small frictions accumulate—missed words, aching silences, a joke that lands wrong. This matters because it signals to the audience that the next beat is coming. The turning point arrives when a character is forced to choose between a duty they've defined their identity around and a person they've been quietly protecting. The choice isn't dramatic in a spectacle sense; it's small, private, and irreversible. This reframes every prior interaction in the arc retroactively. The final beat is not a grand reconciliation. It's a quiet, imperfect acknowledgment—someone says "I don't know what this is yet," and the others let them. That sentence becomes the emotional thesis the rest of the series builds on. [SPOILER: Later seasons revisit the arc's unresolved threads, and at least one character's choice here is revealed to have long-term consequences for the group's cohesion. Early viewers should not expect the arc's ending to be the final word.]

Did You Know?

• "What Is Love?" was written and composed by Park Jin-young, who previously produced "Signal", and arranged by Lee Woo-min "collapsedone", who co-produced "Knock Knock" and "Candy Pop".
• The music video features members of Twice portraying characters from famous films including The Princess Diaries, Ghost, La Boum, Pulp Fiction, Romeo + Juliet, Love Letter, La La Land, and Léon: The Professional.
• In February 2023, "What Is Love?" became Twice's first music video to reach 700 million views on YouTube.
• The song surpassed 100 million streams in October 2019, becoming Twice's third consecutive Platinum certification single for streaming from the Korea Music Content Association (KMCA).
• In 2021, "What Is Love?" re-charted on several music streaming services after going viral on TikTok, with over 1 million videos on TikTok using the song as their background music.