Fact Check: Did HYBE Really Study A List Of Popular Gay K-Pop Ships?
Recently, HYBE’s internal documents have been a hot topic, as many groups outside the company were discussed.
As the many details of these documents circulated, a viral tweet claimed that a list of “ships” was included in the documents. “Ship” are romantic pairings that fans of a group or media make between members or characters in the same content.
In the context of K-Pop, “ships” are very often between members of the same group and homosexual in nature. The tweet contained a list of “ships” from groups that included aespa, NCT, BTS, SEVENTEEN, and more.
Fans’ enjoyment of the closeness and relationships between group members could potentially affect a group’s popularity, but is this the entire story?
In the set of documents from HYBE, fanfiction was discussed more than once. First, it was seemingly discovered that one of TXT‘s releases was inspired by fan fiction that featured Yeonjun and Beomgyu together romantically.
Secondly, the documents discussed how some group’s fans engaged in fan fiction, focusing on NCT.
Recently, I came across information that when you search for popular fanfics on Postype, the top rankings are mostly NC (adult-rated) fanfics. In particular, NCT has been holding the number one spot consistently. This kind of excessive immersion, where fandoms are based on pseudo-romantic engagement, feels like an outdated form of fangirling. It seems like this is the core essence of the SM fandom, being stuck in that mindset.
— HYBE Internal Documents
Postype is a Korean site comparable to Wattpad, an English language platform for fan written content. This passage seems to add legitimacy to the claim made in the viral tweet.
However, the list is actually from a tweet made in August 2024 that simply revealed the top pairings on Postype, along with the number of fan fictions written.
It is possible that HYBE studied these ships, but this specific list was not leaked in the mentioned internal documents.
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