Stop asking Holland About Ships
Something I’ve been wanting to write about for a while is the toxic discourse surrounding “shipping.” Shipping—where fans imagine two idols are actually in love or dating—has been part of K-Pop fan culture going back to the days of H.O.T., as you can see for yourself in the drama Reply 1997. For better or worse, it’s become a standard part of the K-Pop kayfabe, with idols strongly encouraged by the companies to stir up fans’ emotional investment in these “ships.” That could be anything from the performance of fan service (touching, hugging, tender looks), selective editing by the company to push particular narratives, and actually writing the “ships” into canon by having the idols perform in dramas together.
In previous years, we saw things like the winking nod to the GD and TOP (GTOP) ship in BigBang’s parody of the K-Drama Secret Garden:
But things take a darker turn when the fictional and real are blended. TVXQ’s Yunjae ship started harmlessly enough as something fun done by the members themselves but then the company started using it as an explicit promotional tool. (You can read an excellent summary of the Rise and Fall of Yunjae over here.) More and more fans believed it was real.
Hybe née BigHit really did pave new ground with BTS and their fictional “Hwa Yang Yeon Hwa” (“The Most Beautiful Moment in Life”; known to most fans as HYYH) series that blended fiction and reality, not only explicitly pushing various ships but also confusing fans, especially foreign fans, about what was true about the BTS members and their families and what wasn’t. The HYYH series planted clues to the ships and encouraged fan investment in trying to figure out the (fictional) narratives.
As an isolated fan practice, there’s nothing wrong with shipping. It’s something I’ve participated in myself. I’ve read GTOP fics, among others, and enjoyed them. I’ve cheered on fan service at a concert. Shipping is titillating. It’s a bit of escapist fantasy. And it’s fun.
The problem comes in with the conflation of the real and the kayfabe. When fans start taking their gaping omega butthole fan art out of dedicated fan spaces where it can be appreciated by fellow fans on its own (fictional) merits and putting it on a pride flag to take to a concert, that’s a big problem. A red rainbow flag, if you will. We theorized on my last episode (Episode 68) that K-Pop was swiftly headed towards its own “Larry Stylinson” Babygate moment. That moment may be arriving sooner than we thought, judging by the reaction of fans when openly gay idol Holland told them to stop asking him about “ships.”
“Please don’t ask me about whether ‘taekook’ or any other K-pop male idols are gay or dating. It can be disrespectful to them, and it makes me uncomfortable. I don’t want to know who might be LGBTQ+ in the K-pop industry, and even if I did, I wouldn’t want to discuss it.”
And here we get to the uncomfortable truths:
1) These idols are not your gay spirit animals.
2) Shipping and BL themes are concepts explicitly sold to you, the viewer, by the companies, as titillating material to encourage fan investment ($$$$) and have nothing to do with the actual lives of LGBTQ idols or of LGBTQ people living in Korea (or anywhere else in the world).
What used to be a niche fandom practice has now been ramped up and mainstreamed to the point where groups like OnlyOneOf are straight up making BL dramas and up and coming group ZB1’s entire concept is just… shipping. Like Chihiro’s parents in Spirited Away turned into pigs at the trough, fans eagerly stuff their faces with all of the shipping and BL that companies can put in front of them with no thoughts to the consequences—whether or not the idols themselves are comfortable with it. And word on the street from an anonymous 2021 video of an idol trainer is that many of them aren’t but they’re very strongly encouraged to play along because fans spend big money on ships.
And it’s this conflation of shipping and BL concepts with real life that has been an incredibly toxic addition to English-language fan spaces, directly leading to the harassment of the rare openly gay idol like Holland for not feeding into the BL fantasy.
Is that “Queering K-Pop” or exploitation?
The definition of “queering,” as I understand it, is to give an alternate reading of a source material that doesn’t assume heterosexuality as a default. Something like the Bosom Friends Affair which threw a bomb into the Anne of Green Gables community by reading the text in a way that suggested Anne and her “bosom friend” Diana were actually lesbians.
So far, so academic.
But is it “queering” a text when you read it in exactly the way you are supposed to be reading it? When you find the “shipping” content and clues deliberately placed in a text by the company for you the fan to find is that a queer reading or is it just regular old consumerism?
If seeing an idol styled in a gender non-conforming way helps a fan understand something about themselves, that’s a good thing. There’s a scene in Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine where a teenaged male character has what seems to be something of a sexual awakening to a photograph of a glammed up Jonathan Rhys Myers. If seeing Amber in her tomboy look or watching Taemin dance slinkily in lace causes the same reaction for a K-Pop fan… well, that’s great!
But here’s the part that has been forgotten—just because you feel something, doesn’t mean that the idol on your phone screen also feels the exact same thing. The video on your phone is a lens, not a mirror. A tomboy look is just that, a look. Amber has stated multiple times on the record that she is not a lesbian and is sexually interested in men to the point of doubling down and kissing a man in a music video. I’m not particularly an Amber fan so I don’t follow everything she’s ever done but from what I have seen, it looks to me like she’s been trying for years to push back against the lesbian narrative she’s been boxed into because of her gender non-conforming style. I shouldn’t have to spell it out but: Tomboys with short hair can like dick. I’ve personally known women exactly like that. Not everything is a heteropatriarchal conspiracy.
Putting eyeshadow on a man doesn’t turn him into a sensitive BL-trope twink; it turns him into a man wearing eyeshadow. That man in eyeshadow may be very pretty and he may pat the ass of his coworker on stage but off stage he’s the same person he was before he put on the make-up. Just look at the visual kei scene in Japan. Pretty men in make-up with a history of committing sexual assault against women.
What it comes down to is that you may think that you know these idols but you don’t. Remember that K-Pop is kayfabe. These idols are all playing a role. That role may be close to their real personality or it may not be. Shipping can be fun for fans (and for the idols) but it can also be extremely exploitative and, in the worst cases, non-consensual. Korea is far from an LGBTQ paradise but that doesn’t mean that it’s “homophobia” to understand that a fan-favorite ship isn’t real or that you’re anti-Queer for understanding that companies use shipping as a promotional tool and that most of these idols engaging in BL content and shipping—not all, but most—are heterosexual men selling you a fantasy.
TL;DR stop asking Holland about ships.