gonna start venturing into cancellable opinion territory since that is the purpose of starting this blog lol first up: how objectified yunjae are as a gay couple in fanfiction, which i hope we can all agree on regardless of our appetite for the fics in discussion.

i read a lottt of yunjae fics, even ones that , and i've noticed the following general trend: authors who a) write in english, b) primarily speak a language other than english (LOTE), and c) ask for grace or understanding in their forewords about their LOTE status often get /really/ high engagement on their fics. this seems counterintuitive at first b.c, as someone whose primary language is english, this would turn me off from wanting to read. however, my theory is that the /readers/ of those fics are at a similar fluency level. they probably read in english yet primarily speak LOTE; so the tip-off in the foreword is an encouragement for them as the inconsistent grammar, unrefined syntax, misspellings, and other hallmarks of someone who isn’t that practised in communicating in english actually make it easier for them to read fics of their favourite couple.

while i personally don’t understand why authors and readers would try to write/read fics in something other than their native tongue, i am not here to cast judgement on the trend or even on the quality of writing. they have their niche of the fandom, i have mine, and we can all coexist. i /am/ going to cast judgement on something else though.

the other trend i’ve noticed is that these authors tend to write yunjae with the most hetero perspective on their relationship:

• yunjae are routinely referred to as "husband and wife", usually with jaej in the role of 'wife'.
• jaej always bottoms. the couple never switches positions, and i have read some version of the sentence "if jaejoong were a girl, he would get pregnant from this" far too often for it to not concern me.
  • honestly the way gay is portrayed in these fics (almost entirely penetrative, no/minimal /preparation, etc) should be enough to rest my case, but i will continue further.
• jaej is portrayed with extremely feminine affectations or characterisations, and this manifests in a number of ways:
  • if he’s not a blushing al schoolgirl then he’s a femme fatale or a doting mother or the damsel in distress or any number of female archetypes. i am not saying men cannot ever have feminine characteristics, but i /am/ saying that it’s weird jaej is the only one in the yunjae couple who gets them. of note, i have never encountered a genderbent yunjae fic where yunho is the one cast as a woman nor have i encountered an mpreg fic where yunho is the one carrying the child.
  • in fics where one of the two has a history of dating other men and the other's first relationship with a man is yunjae, these are typically jaej and yunho, respectively.
    • along the same lines, there are also countable instances of the narrative wherein yunho has the thought that perhaps he 'turned gay' for jaej (sometimes vice versa or both, but primarily yunho about jaej). i don't inherently take issue with the phrase[1], but when it appears in fics that contain some or all of the above, it is usually indicative of an ignorant perception of gay couples. it's the beige flag of gay fiction lol.
  • in fics that would be categorised as YA if they were published works, jaej is usually cast as the Strong Female Lead, by which i mean: if the fic isn't entirely from his pov outright, then he's the one with magic powers, or he's the one undergoing the journey (either personal growth or hero's). regardless of yunho's demographics in the story, when there is more to the plot than just falling in love, jaej is usually the main character. layering this knowlege with the fact that YA novels tend to feature female leads in order to help the primarily female readership demographic better see themselves reflected in the media they consume, what this tells me is that jaej isn't just feminised, he's viewed as a suitable proxy for the female perspective. they essentially turned jaej into a mary sue, someone they could more easily project upon, and i argue this happens to jaejoong precisely because these authors perceive uknow as 'the man' and jaejoong as 'the woman' in the fiction of yunjae.

again, they’re regularly written this way by people who seem to be from countries without high english speaking populations but still have frequent exposure or consumption of the english language. knowing that the majority of dbsk’s popularity is in asia, i am drawing a conclusion that these authors, and their readers, are primarily southeast asian[2] as east asian fans tend to produce and consume media solely in their native tongue.

in my opinion, this behaviour is concerning. ideation of two hot guys in a romantic-ual fictional relationship is rampant all over fandom, not just in southeast asia, but i’ve primarily seen the southeast asian community cast these very heteronormative tropes on their fictional gay couples. (besides kpop fanfiction, i’ve also seen it happen in the dramas these countries produce. we need to look no further than the infamy of thai bl dramas.) i will also go so far as to generalise the authors and readers as straight women—rather, it would be more inclusive to generalise that they are likely women who experience attraction to men. internalised homophobia still exists in bi and pan people—which makes this trend especially disconcerting to me. if these people wanted to read or write couples where one of them is ‘the woman’ or passive/submissive or where stereotypical top/bottom-seme/uke dynamics apply, they should stick to straight couples omfg. otherwise, they should bother doing some research on the different ways love flourishes and relationships develop between two men before contributing to or participating in the oeuvre.

i don't think this can be easily explained away by the concept of a guilty pleasure either. the archive of yunjae fanfiction across the internet seems to satisify every kink known to man (plus few more thrown in for good measure), but something about the prevalence and the consistency in the trends does not read to me like a subset of authors exploring and satisfying a kink. it reads like this is the way people genuinely view—not just yunjae—but many/most of their gay ships. through informal and unstructured investigation of a sample of these authors' profiles, when they grow out of the fandom and begin writing fanfiction for other gay couples, they either uniformly cast a heteronormative perspective on their future ships OR they gravitate to other couples that could fit this mould.

yunjae just happens to be my ship and the gay couple for whom i've read the most fanfiction, but i would not be surprised if i found that this is a recurring pattern across all gay romantic fanfiction written by straight southeast asian women. in previous drafts of this blog post, i used the term 'isation' in instead of 'objectification', but isation implies something different psychologically. what these authors and readers are doing is objectifying these real world men for their entertainment. arguably, all kpop fans—myself included—partake in their objectification; it is the nature of an industry that commodifies personality. however, the fanfic trends mentioned above far surpasses the level of objectification-that-they-agreed-to into a disrespectful and homophobic realm.

at this point, i will plainly state that i don't think inherently it's gross if yunjae shippers enjoy this content. i think it's gross if this is the only kind of yunjae content they produce or consume.

finally, i want to take this space to comment that—again, in my opinion—this objectification takes its rawest form in the emergence of the term ‘BL’. these media aren’t gay romances, they’re “”boys’ love””. the male characters aren’t necessarily gay or bi or anything, they’re just dating another man. there are so many instances of 'i'm not gay i only like you' stories. what this tells me is that the ual identity is an unnecessary or perhaps too-political complication to the romance. however, i find it extremely ignorant to write these stories without even acknowledging the existence of the ual identity of either character. doing so sociopolitically feeds into the reasons why being gay is still a death sentence in many nations. i am not saying that heteronormative yunjae fanfiction is the reason homophobia exists, but i /am/ saying that the mindset that the genre can at all be decoupled and abstracted from the real-world circumstances is part of why those real-world circumstances continue to prevail. social justice requires paradigm shifts, and it’s so easy to tell how people’s paradigms are configured based on the way they communicate—in this case, the way fans write romantic-ual relationships between men.

for transparency's sake, i will reveal that i am an aual, nonbinary person living in the west. while i try to think globally, i am of course influenced by my identity and the values of the society where i live.

[1] this phrase on its own is not a red flag b.c in societies without marriage equality, there remains a belief that being gay is a choice or a curse. yunjae fanfiction /could/ be set in such a society, and the fic /could/ explore one or both of them a) discovering an attraction to men through meeting each other and b) deconstructing their previous beliefs for the internalised homophobia it is over time while the characters embark on a journey of self-acceptance and romance. i've read fics where this is executed, and some are done very well.
[2] as an aside, i will bring up a funny story. a fellow 2nd-gen fan and i were reacting to a reel about terrible uses of english in kpop songs:
me: im half convinced that part of why kpop was able to become successful outside of korea is b.c the nonsense eng closely mirrored the english pidgin languages of southeast asia xD
friend: Honestly u might really b on to something with that. And it’s not so dissimilar to the nonsense English pop choruses we have
me: these two forces combined are the real kings of the hallyu wave 😌✊

published: 3.25.2024