L O L, okay, first of all! This is all valid, because I GET it. I really, really do. You can go and find my tweets about it and I'll sound thoroughly unhinged about it.

But actually it's quite easy for me to create a lighthearted explanation for a fancy dinner date with a BFF, because it's something my best friend and I do, and have done. I will say it's not something I have tended to do with friends that I don't have a particularly strong connection with, but the friend I'm talking about I've known for 25 years, we've lived together, traveled together, been phenomenally drunk and then hungover together, attended funerals together, we have worked together at three different companies.

Amusingly, there was definitely a time in which I think people assumed we would start dating as we are both bisexual, but that just wasn't the nature of our relationship. We are both happily married to other people, and I think of her as a sister I'm quite lucky to have found. As we got older, lived apart, had different jobs, etc, we would plan a fancy dinner together, coincidentally often at the end of the year! We'd spend big money! There'd be candlelight! We'd wear fancy dresses! The whole nine yards!

In western society this is definitely I think something more common among female friendships, and I'll admit my blind spot to how wealthy best friends in SK spend their money but Jeonghan and Cheol have known each other for 10 years, have been through incredibly difficult and strained times together, and rely on each other a lot. So yeah. They in my mind it's like, "yep. Fancy date night with your best friend and not a significant other because sometimes you need a Friend Date Night." And Jeonghan is beautiful so if he takes a cunty selfie with an exposed clavicle it looks like he's trying to seduce Cheol and the whole world. And they share the pic because they are working idols and they're actively in the yaoi mines.

At the SAME time, my best friend and I did tend to put less effort into seeing each other in such fancy digs when we saw each other regularly (when living together or working together). So the first omakase date does kind of stick out a bit more (while the November fancy date is more like 'oh yeah of course').

(At the SAME SAME time we didn't have to deal with stalkers.)

(And finally at the SAME SAME SAME time, they're beautiful and I think they should be in love.)

hey! Yeah, I definitely know NOW but did have to some research to understand that there's a really different cultural significance with same sex affection, and frankly, taken completely on its own without context I really applaud and appreciate it. I'm someone who struggles a bit with physical affection with friends, but I'm trying to increase my comfort with it. Life is too short not to have a cuddle friends you deeply love and trust. Watching svt adore each other, support each other, and take energy from each other is really so sweet and healing. I'm delighted they don't have to feels self conscious about it.

I went into this a bit in my space, but in general I don't find skinship to be that noteworthy. I enjoy looking at it for multiple reasons: shippy reasons, these are two attractive people being attractive together reasons, god I wish that were me reasons, I really love seeing men express affection freely reasons. But like with clothes sharing, it's a universal, unremarkable aspect of idol life. I'm just glad Mingyu can hold hands with someone as often as he wants because it seems like it's genuinely a constant desire.

LOL! It's not significant, I mean not REALLY. YJH was pretty explicit about the fact that he was filming content to release during his enlistment and what the "fans who just happened to be at the same restaurant" said is that they were filming. Jeonghan and Cheol are frequent dinner partners, so it's not all that surprising or remarkable that they went to dinner in Berlin and filmed content.

On the OTHER, far more insane hand, Berlin was Jeonghan's last live performance before going on enlistment, and they have managed to still be A Lot lately, even when they don't have to because if Jeonghan wanted to he could just take two years to not work in the yaoi mines, so like, IDK, if they were going to hard launch don't you feel like filming a romantic dinner, right before enlistment, where they casually confess they love each other and then BAM. Suddenly the relationship is true, but not only that it's been true for two years so what are you gonna do about it. You know? No?

L O L I was literally screen caps of either comments made on tiktok or youtube and it was just someone describing how they used to watch svt streams pre-debut and how people don't know the half of what they got up to. To provide an example, they describe Seungkwan doing whatever he wanted to Vernon (including just slapping his butt repeatedly) and how Vernon was at first not even that interested in avoiding him, but finally Seungkwan goaded Vernon into a wrestle session that turned into a cuddle pile. To me it very much matches what I actually have seen of Seungkwan in the melona room which is that at that young age he already had the "there's a camera, time to do whatEVER I want" mentality, and that led to him being pretty unselfconscious about "pretending" to want to kiss/cuddle/flirt/initiate skinship.