in english speaking fandom spaces people often equate being flamboyant and physically affectionate to being lgbt. this is something i’ve seen mentioned multiple times by people more knowledgeable in korean cultura than i am as simply being regular male culture in sk and not a social signifier of non-platonic interest
given that korean culture is very conservative and not very accepting of lgbt people (with exceptions etc you know the drill, and this claim is easily researcheable), if flamboyance was equal to queerness, a queer person in the public eye would, probably, avoid such behavior so as to not be outed and have their career ruined
in my experience, a lot of people in fandom have a certain experience of queerness that is very sheltered, one where the homophobia they might suffer is unlikely to put their lives or livelihood at risk (myself included in this, though i am a nb lesbian and am never, for example, have a straight-passing relationship, so my experience is also different than that of a bi or pan woman dating a man, for example) which seems to me to end up reflected in the fact that the places where they perceive queerness are very shallow behaviors (being physically affectionate towards same gender, for instance). this part of this topic i am not willing to elaborate on for an anonymous person but am happy to discuss via dms or in replies
the repeated pattern of lgbt behaviors that i’ve seen from amab queer friends i grew up with were that of avoiding these things that the fandom deems as “gay” so they could avoid bullying and violence and being ostracized by cishet boys who held social power in these circles (and like, every other ever), so i find it reductive, unrealistic and upsetting to say a man who wears a skirt and make up on a stage for a performance and isn’t afraid to display affection towards his friends is queer if that’s the only thing the person points to to call them gay (noted that you can just point at anyone who’s existing in their daily lives and claim they’re gay for funsies instead of relying on harmful stereotypes that hurt your community by reinforcing these ideas)

i’m mostly involved in the secngjccng side of fandom and see tweets about other members mostly from my friends and mutuals who are respectful to them so i don’t have an objective opinion to give in this regard. i think ateez itself plays a lot into the mommy thing, also by design, which has given a lot of leeway to fans to take this to an extreme degree which they back up with “but ateez does it” and “but i’m queer and this is queer culture”. another one of these things there’s not much to do about

and ofc!! i’m glad it could be of some help, it took me almost a week to get to it because it felt like a good opportunity to share all those thoughts i had piling up, so thank you for giving me that chance :>

☝️
i agree with you and other people from my circle have mentioned similar feelings, that the way they get reduced to an unidimensional persona can be quite unappealing. it depends on the experience you wanna have, but if we're dealing with real people i find the least we can do is actually put in the effort to recognize multiple sides of them.
i understand that for some people the familiarity of certain tropes is what they seek out in fandom and that's a valid experience, just not for me. and i think if people opened up to explore these thoughts, reflect on why they prefer one thing or the other, whether what they're creating is bordering on stereotypes, they could learn a lot about themselves and we could have more honest conversations about all these things without it making the state of the fandom rancid to be in

i have a few thoughts regarding this happening to the most popular ships but i'm gonna save some words for another day lmao it's well observed though!!
thank you for reading my thoughts and sharing yours 💕

here is everything i think about this topic. don't take my words out of context, the context being the entire text which has roughly 2k words. you don't have to read it but you don't get to form an opinion on my opinion if you don't

in my other life i'm a gom for ateez, which means i'm somewhat aware of the popularity of each member in my country and in countries where i usually buy from (sk, jp, usa and a good chunk of europe). i'm also aware of the price range and rarity of almost all photocards in existence. i know, for instance, that some people pay 60-150usd for that photocard of seonghwa with pink hair and the milk box, while the same photocard of other members doesn't go for more than 20, maybe 30. seonghwa is, currently, within the fandom, the most popular member. he's the one people are crazier about and the one that became the most expensive to collect.
i personally believe this is by design. this is seonghwa's conscious choice to service fans as much as he possibly can, and somewhere around deja vu he seems to have cracked a code that he keeps honing. he has always been willing to experiment for the sake of entertaining, which tells me then that he's passionate about his job as an entertainer. and then as a domino effect more people are drawn to him, more people wanna collect him, supply and demand, etc. none of this is bad. at all

so moving to the next part, every once in a while we get polls and tweets and whatnots about how people wanna see their fave beaten up traumatized being taken care of subbing and bottoming, so seonghwa being more people's fave consequently results in a bigger chunk of the fandom making him the bottom. this isn't backed up by science cause i'm not sure anyone did the research "relationship between favorite characters and taking it up the ass," but i've been in fandoms a long time and you must have been in fandoms a long time as well, we can tell this is, more often than not, true.

now there's something that is a bit trickier that has been on my mind. a lot of people's relationships with their favorite character comes with some level of identification/connection, and projection at times. from some aus and fics and scenarios i see around, i tend to feel like people use seonghwa to reaffirm their (don't take this out of the context of the whole entire text) femininity and feel good about it.
but lately, and pretty often, it seems as if people also want to insert him into idealized heteronormative (don't take this out of the context of the whole entire text) relationships with borderline abusive boyfriends and having to learn to grow confident and stand up for himself etc, and here is where it starts to become a problem to me. this is only a fraction of the works and scenarios created, and it's one that's come into my radar multiple times, but the mix of things people see on their timelines is gonna be different so this isn't an universal experience

i was drawn to kpop in part because it made me feel better about my gender. i'm a nb lesbian whose style tends to go more towards "androgynous"*/masc styles (this is a big discussion i have written an entire scientific paper about the relationship between gender neutral and masc styles and will trust reader to see more nuance than i'm bringing into it right now since this is not the focus) and i used to think for example that i would look too fem if i wore (don't take this out of the context of the whole entire text) make up and i didn't want to be perceived this way, and with kpop i saw that there were ways to wear make up and certain "feminine" clothes that didn't look exclusively feminine. this is my personal experience with gender and not a judgement of value regarding genders and styles. so yeah, for me it's easy to understand a fem presenting person will see someone they admire wearing cutout shirts and skirts and having colorful trinkets in their hair and feel good and valued for how they like to present themselves, because i feel the same with a different range of things

now to go back to your vent my dear anon, i too grew very tired of the "subtle" bottom (don't take this out of the context of the whole entire text)seonghwa agenda that seems to be permeating the fandom at large. the worst part to me is that it often (not always) comes with an undertone of mockery that just makes it seem misogynistic (like he's often put in misogynistic scenarios in fics and aus as well) and nobody is addressing that and it's all fun and games because he's challenging gender norms or something, but this can be twisted every which way to fit anyone's agenda and nobody is willing to have any deeper discussion regarding it because, well goddammit look at how long this fucking thing is already and i haven't even said anything of substance, and twitter only allows for half a paragraph of all this at a time, and when you try to sum it into one tweet even if it's well worded and thoughtful people will still "OH SO YOU HATE WAFFLES" because the fandom experience is not anymore about sharing, but about being right, so diverging opinions are taken as a personal attack (this is the result of capitalistic mindset and consumerism in fandom spaces but maybe let's also leave this one aside for now)

so. lately i've been a bit IA from twitter because it just became too annoying to be here. none of this interests me. it wouldn't interest me if it was happening to any other member. i find it genuinely tiring to be somewhere where if i see 1 frame of seonghwa where he looks a certain way i can predict all tweets i'm gonna see on my tl that day, and i'm gonna say, i like bottom seonghwa but it's so rare that it's anything that feels fresh and fun to me
this past week for some reason i'm seeing a little less of those "agenda" tweets and i don't know why, maybe it's a temporary thing. it's whatever. but because people are so aggressive towards anyone who doesn't share their views, i'm also shy about tweeting anything ever because i've been misinterpreted and demonized quite a few times for tweets that everyone else seems to make, just it's another member there so it's alright for them but when it's me it's assumed to be antagonistic or inflammatory even when all their rage comes from things they assume i'm saying and not things i actually said

anyway. i once tweeted on my priv that "i wish there were more pyeongies on nsfw twitter so we could have more bottom hongjoong" to which someone subtweeted me saying "i like bottom hongjoong or seonghwa more depending on which side of the fandom is more annoying" which is a crazy take to me, because you're telling me that a side of the fandom that has like 30 people is annoying you more by just existing than one that has like maybe ten thousand??? because the side you like best is definitely gonna annoy you less. there's this shame in partiality for things that don't matter that we should get rid of, because it's like being ashamed to admit you like strawberry ice cream better than pineapple ice cream like What. who the fuck cares. nowadays for some reason people seem to think it's tacky to say they have a preference for dynamic, so they say they're switch/vers enthusiasts but then feel very partial to one thing to the point where the switch/versness doesn't seem to show much

the trickier part of all of this i think is the fact that we're creating works surrounding a real person, so the line of what is ok to do, how much it is ok to twist their selves to fit our fiction is drawn at different points to different people. i've talked more about this in another RS (https://retrospring.net/@peachykhj/a/112708278790380885), that to some people, everything is game and ateez are just vessels (this is not meant derogatorily) that they can put anything into. to me, and to the people that surround me in the fandom (adding this to showcase that in a way i'm in a bubble as almost everyone is in their own), taking their personalities and their stories and their beings into consideration is that fun part of creating fictional works. but then, what if my perception is simply different from someone who, to them, takes their personalities into consideration, but then in their works ateez are just unrecognizable to me? (as in my works they might be unrecognizable to them)
like, for instance, i see a looooot of works where seonghwa stutters a lot and gets flustered, when canonically, in interviews and lives and varieties, seonghwa very rarely stutters. he stutters a lot less than hongjoong, for example. this is an objective thing that can be observed, and that i'm not gonna overlook in my works because this is the whole reason why i have fun with this, it's putting the puzzle together, but this isn't the case for everyone. and while that is ok, it seems a lot of people are invested in emasculating him (by mocking him when he's acting/looking masc, even when he clearly likes it) which i have an issue with, where the fictional view is so important that it interferes with how much personhood he's allowed to have. but this is because the line is drawn for me in one place that is not universal so i don't know how to weight this issue well

as a side note, the funny thing is...all the while people will say that those who like bottom hongjoong only like it because they're stereotyping hongjoong for being short.... as if the case cannot be made that seonghwa is being stereotyped for being feminine. but i digress. this is another one of those things that people will twist however they like so long as it serves their purpose of being Correct about LIKING STRAWBERRY ICE CREAM

i also think that in part this comes just from the fact that this content is popular, so people will make more of it because it's easy notes grab. i think a lot of the switch/verse people who don't seem like switch/verse enthusiasts may simply be swayed by what's gonna make the number go up easier, so it snowballs. i think on sfw this is what happens for a lot of the cases. because (this is unrelated to the seonghwa thing) there are some big accounts you can see post almost the exact same thing three times on the same week with slightly different wording, or rewording and cropping a bit differently an image from another tweet that got popular, just to see what sticks. and we know some things are gonna stick easier than others. it's how social networks work

summing it up: popularity makes it so more people are projecting or relating to certain aspects of seonghwa which are the parts of him that get highlighted in both observations of his self (sfw tweets) and works of fiction. a chunk of the fandom is fine ignoring his personhood, or has a different perception of who he is. all we can do to avoid what we don't wanna see is to not be shy of muting/blocking/sbing people. i feel you, i find it annoying, it's probably gonna be like this from now on because seonghwa is never gonna be less popular if he plays his cards right and oh brother is he good at the game!!! i'm genuinely excited to see where he's gonna go as an entertainer and i refuse to let the fandom interfere with this for me, so what i do is think too much, write unnecessarily long analysis that nobody is gonna read in full except maybe for my gf who's contractually obligated to, and mute people who don't have anything to offer that i actually want