on canon vs. non-canon wlw ships ft. hdyr

[bboya]

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i am now making dw posts about 2521…we all saw this coming sadly bc my 2521 brainrot has been never-ending. i’ll make a more complete post about the characters and their relationships after the drama finishes airing but i’ve been thinking a lot about this particular topic after talking about it with j and wei so…here is an incoherent thought dump.

to start off maybe it was just because i’ve followed this drama religiously ever since jiyeon got casted for go yoorim but—the fact that hdyr aren’t the main love line or endgame doesn’t bother me as much as i see it bothering other people? i mean going into this i knew that ktr and njh were the leads and was perfectly happy to lap up any scraps of queerbaiting kwon doeun had to offer me; as i’ve probably said too many times on main & priv, i was expecting to overanalyse two seconds of prolonged eye contact and instead got fencing rivals literally obsessed with each other, every wlw trope under the sun, “every moment was us for me” etc etc…besides hdyr being with other people just gives us more angst potential <3

i think this tweet pretty much sums up my thoughts:

my representation hot take is canon Board Approved gay scenes in big corporation media will never be as good or authentic as scraps of queerbaiting that lgbt creators managed to sneak past the radar

— Mari Costa (@marinscos) March 19, 2022

as a fic writer too, this isn’t limited to just wlw ships—i’ve honestly always preferred non-canon ships (and even in kpop rpf, i’ve noticed i tend to be attracted more to pairings that aren’t like…the well-fed big ships). with canon ships i feel more like i’m in the backseat and i’m being taken along for the ride and with non-canon ships i’m in the driver’s seat (with oomfs in the passenger seat frequently reaching over to wrench the wheel from me) driving the car off a fucking cliff. it’s nice to have your ship realised in canon and representation is of course well and good but non-canon ships will always be spicier for me because they fuel so much yearning and uncertainty and angst potential. canon is nice but the hdyr queerbait makes me go positively feral.

maybe it’s because oomfs and i are all hags™ and we’re used to little representation and shipping women who aren’t canon but…the rivalry and tension and the depth of affection between heedo and yoorim and the way they revolve around and parallel each other are honestly far more important to me than whether they’re officially canon or not. if this were an actual gl ship in a big budget drama like 2521 lbr they probably would have toned a lot of it down, limited their scenes etc etc. if i had to sacrifice any of that and get a bland version of them for them to be canon…i’d rather not.

ending this with my fave quotes from j and wei on this topic that triggered this brain dump:

wei

j.

in small print i am going to say people quoting hdyr tweets with stuff like “they could be powerful like soljiwan if they were canon” are kind of annoying me…i saw them all over the 双镜 youtube comments too it's a plague at this point do not touch or perceive my beloved milf and her emotionally constipated assassin gf Or my himbo fencer and her (formerly) emotionally constipated rival please.

• i’ve noticed a lot of these tend to be (no one is surprised) western tumblr/twitter gays that bulldoze past cultural context and have a very face-value interpretation of the ship (i.e. just liking them because they’re gay—which is understandable! it’s valid to want wlw representation, but it just makes sense that these people are then usually like “these ships should be canon or they have no value at all”.)
• i’ve kind of resigned myself to the fact that on content of east asian wlw ships these people will be there like “omggg they’re just like soljiwan” when they’re really nothing alike (when i say the 双镜 youtube comments were giving me ten different aneurysms) so…yeah

in smaller print i will also confess to being a bit disappointed by threads with just hdyr moments in the show going around although i can’t put into words why this bothers me

• edit: it's 2am and i am now attempting to put it into words
• again it's understandable people want rep (read: don't come for me) but—i was saying to oomf that a lot of these people end up fishing for gay moments Only without really appreciating the ship for what they are...it just becomes your average wlw ship with gay moments instead of, yknow, na heedo and go yoorim. it's like...appreciation for hdyr as who they are (and why wouldn't you want to appreciate hdyr for who they are? rivals who revolve around and parallel each other and are kind of obsessed with each other and unintentionally inspired each other to fence till they became the best fencers in the nation because they wanted to beat each other? every moment was us for me? let the whole world watch our game?) vs. turning them into some bland wlw tumblr ship with like idk coffee shop aus
• again it's understandable to just want gay moments and i don't blame people for it bc we're always starved for representation etc etc...i just think it's a bit regrettable when a ship gets reduced to this, especially one so rich as hdyr. and ofc you miss the growth these characters go through in non-hdyr scenes (CAN WE TALK ABOUT GO YOORIM IN THE ENTIRETY OF EP 14? i would set the world on fire for her i'm so serious) but also i respect that not everyone has the time or commitment to watch a long ass kdrama and sometimes you just want to be a casual enjoyer without getting too much into the ship...valid too

this ended up being longer than i expected i just needed to dump my thoughts somewhere i'm sorry...obsessed with the way i said "ending this" then proceeded to double the length of the post icb i thought i could fit this in a tweet. if you read till the end i’m sorry this ended up becoming a rant please have a yoorim

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i have no self control and am adding a second edit weeks after i originally posted this. thank you to wei for sending me this post:

the tags on that post are my absolute favourite like...i was expecting to feel like a bad wlw for dissing canon rep but i feel so seen. so as to not clutter this post with screenshots and exhaust my dw image hosting limit i'll just dump my faves here:

• #it had all the actual substance but couldn't be put in the gay packaging #everything now is the packaging hollowed of substance #canon is so often performative and bland as not to offend the not-gay audience
• #i have a friend who has a tag that's "fighting the war against queerbaiting on the side of queerbaiting"
• #fighting with str8 ppl who "just don't see it" is most of the fun
• #sometimes limitations breed creativity #the writers are forced to actually give their characters chemistry rather than banking on bland canon relationships just for points #sometimes subtext is more enticing/compelling than straightforward text
• #this is how queer tv romance dies. under thunderous bland vanilla couples smh #no like it's great to have tons of canon queer rep in tv and movies etc etc but. you know? missing that 2000s flavour of insane subtext
• #we need text AND subtext for it to work #not to turn gay romances into those bland straight ones where the characters are shoved together with no conflict no chemistry no spice
• #how many underworlds have you gone to get your soulmate back #how many gods for your girlfriend

i was saying on priv...probably a good 7-8 years ago i was firmly in the baby gay "will watch anything if it's gay won't entertain anything that's queerbaiting and not canon" (tbf we really didn't have a lot back then) but i think this started to change around like...when wynonna earp came out (nothing against you personally wynonna earp im sorry). when lgbtq rep slowly started becoming more and more commonplace. a lot of canon queer couples since then have seemed so watered down / bland / generic and made palatable for a mainstream straight audience. which, i understand, because it's what's marketable or whatever. and which i guess means we have uh progressed. but no one bothers to give wlw ships all this insane subtext anymore because they can just make them kiss. like where is the yearning and the buildup...don't take me the wrong way i'm not saying Canon Always Bad or that we shouldn't have canon wlw ships (that's not what i'm saying at all), i just wish we wouldn't stick 2 queer characters together and make them smooch or give them a few moments and go #yass they're canon that's good rep let's call it a day.

now...bringing this back to hdyr because i've kind of gone off track. a while ago i read this sexy big-brained cc on kde and queerbaiting and i am holding whoever reads this at gunpoint to read it as well. fave lines:

• [kde] doesn’t necessarily want to *represent* queer characters, she’s after something different. I think she *wants* her women to be loved by male dreamboats whom they can keep at an arm’s length and I think she wants women to find their deepest fulfilment in the love of other women, and I also think she wants women to be alone.
• For my part I don’t think she’s writing for twenty year olds impatient with the fact that Hee-do and Yu-rim don’t kiss so much as the forty year olds who’re going to look back at their own lives and think, hey, I was gay for my best friend in school. I think she made that choice pretty deliberately.

again, i respect anyone who feels frustrated about the queerbaiting but i (personally) don't think hdyr in 2521 is as simple as "kde and tvn are cowards for not making them canon". borrowing the words of tumblr user lesbianjubilee do you think we would have all those bonkers yonkers heedo and yoorim moments if they were a safe-for-hetero-consumption gl ship on a mainstream network like tvn in south korea?