⚪️ · 4d
hiii i’m on here bc i’m usually priv but i really like this discussion about people here on nsfw talking about hj as if he’s borderline abusive and cold i wanna contribute :3 i think a lot of it comes from a misinterpretation of the members joking about how he yells at them and that he has a lot of anger and clips of him dodging physical contact like a disgruntled cat with what could be interpreted as an annoyed face but is really just a joke for everyone around. i see this more with domtophj people so forgive me if i’m wrong but all of the above also coupled with people’s misconception that doms are cold insensitive mean and abusive outside of sex also and how domtophj/subbtmsh fics/accs are weirdly heteronormative (seriously their fics sometimes reads like badly written wattpad fic from 2014) lead to this wide misconception of how hj is irl when he’s just a little silly caring guy with disgruntled cat tendencies. a lot of it probably comes from this weird tendency they have of overly feminising sh and the need to have a Masculine Alpha Male that often falls on hj as it’s his most popular pairing, it’s so toxic and uncomfortable to witness esp when they’re talking about real people. sorry for rambling i’m a little passionate about this topic :3
i always wonder if this perception comes from those jokes. from the way some people talk about it it gives me the impression that it relates to stage persona as well, which is interesting given that they all have the same type of persona i guess and yet hongjoong is the only one i see this happen with? ofc my poll is very limited as my tl is 80% seongjoong, so maybe in other circles there are other members to whom this happens
i also get the impression that a lot of people interpret him as cold solely because the way he shows affection is not the most conventional (like physical touch or being very open about his love verbally) and therefore it gets reduced to Not being there at all, which i find very sad
i have complicated thoughts surrounding the other things you mentioned.
at one point i had this long talk with someone who told me that people mischaracterize the members to fit what they like "just because" and that it's not their interpretation of the real person because that's not an aspect of rpf they're interested in. to me, it's very hard to see things through this point of view because in the end, even though we're using characters we made up, it's still supposed to be associated with this real person, so i don't get what aspect of it can be fun if you're gonna disregard literally every aspect of who they are. to me it's easier to believe that people have different interpretations, but i may be wrong
i don't know how old you are, but some of the "misreadings" that i think people do of members i believe may be lack of experience which leads to less nuance, which certainly gives some of the thoughts/works a "wattpad"-y feel. it happens, younger people need room for these explorations and i'm free to curate my online space so we don't cross paths, because i'm not interested in those as i'm not interested in any fiction made by throwing their personalities out the window to fulfill a certain view (this is based on what the person i had a conversation with before said). but, again, people are gonna have different views of their personalities because the analysis we make of them are based on our experiences. i talk a lot to a lot of people about my perspectives on the members and they share theirs too and it's never been a 1:1 match, even if we agree on a lot of things, there's gonna be some element that they see differently. and this all has got to be valid, i'm free to play with my dolls how i want as are others, but the problem for me lies in when this starts getting to some level of unkindness which is what i've been seeing happen to hongjoong
the heteronormativity is a big problem to me but i've been killed for that before so i've decided to not talk about it in public and simply curate the tl while reminding myself that everyone is out here to have fun and maybe work out some thought/feeling through fiction and hopefully feel good about themselves while doing it. i certainly portray all members in ways that would piss at least 1 person on the world wide web off if not multiple, so idk. like i really don't know fdjisfdiasjf. i've seen a lot of people say that a gay relationship portrayed in media could never be heteronormative, and i don't know what i think about that. as a queer person who's never quite "passed" i would say a lot of the things i see portrayed don't reflect any of my or my close friends' experiences with queerness, but who am i to pass judgment?
but either way, to me, the unkindness is something objective. if you show those tweets to a neutral person who doesn't know either of them, all the elements are there to understand those as negative interpretations. while the whole rest of the discussion can be subjective
