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crack_van2012-06-02 08:44 pm
outstretched) wrote in crack_van2012-06-02 08:44 pm
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Super Junior Fandom Overview
Super Junior is an amazing fandom willed with some absolutely fantastic fanfiction, but getting involved in it can be a little daunting—this fandom is huge and so is its canon. But don't worry! We're here to help.
Disclaimer: Obviously, I don't know how much you know about Super Junior, K-pop, fandom, or RPF. Therefore, these are the assumptions I'm working with:
- You like fandom, fanfiction, and at least tolerate slash.
- You're new to real people fandom (RPF), band, and K-pop fandom; you may not even really know what Super Junior is, and you definitely don't know who all the members are.
- You're a very busy person and you haven't got all day.
With that in mind, I've made some presentation choices in this guide that not everyone will find useful/need/agree with. Obviously your mileage may vary; skip over the parts that don't interest you, use the parts that do. Read the sections in any order you want. It's all good.
Additional disclaimer for older SJ fans: I am not only13, I don't have any otps, I love everybody, and I'm about as neutral as you're going to get. Feel free to PM me if you'd like to discuss something, however.
*Below the cut is embedded-video-heavy, but not super image-heavy.
Okay, let's get down to business (to defeat the Huns!).
- What is Super Junior, anyway?
1a. How the band was formed (aka How the k-pop industry works) - Who is Super Junior?
2a. Subgroups and Super Junior-M - Why should I care?
- Less talking, more videos!
4a. Songs/MVs
4b. Variety show appearances/Live performances/Fancams - A brief SJ fandom glossary
- All right, I'm sold! Where should I start my fandom adventures?
6a. General comms
6b. Fanfiction!
There are a lot of people who can answer this better than I can, up to and including Wikipedia, but since you're here, I'll explain briefly.
Name: Super Junior (슈퍼주니어)
Nicknames: SuJu (슈주), SJ
Parent Company: SM Entertainment (SM Ent)
Formation Date: November 2005
Super Junior is a 15-person boy band from South Korea. They were formed in 2005 by SM Entertainment, which is a "talent agency, producer, and publisher of K-pop" according to Wikipedia. Super Junior's members cover a wide array of talents in the entertainment industry, ranging from singers to dancers/choreographers to radio hosts to MCs to actors. Did I also mention that they're all incredibly lovable goofballs? Because they totally are. (We'll get to that in a minute, but for starters: just look at the picture above.)
Super Junior is so big in Asia that when I first started mentioning this band to my friends over there, they looked at me like I had grown a second head: "What do you mean you don't know who Super Junior is?" They've won a bunch of awards, they're the most popular male group, iirc, and certainly the largest boy band in the world because seriously who puts fifteen boys into one group, are you crazy. (Answer: yes, they are.)
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01a. How the band was formed (aka How the k-pop industry works)
In Korea, companies like SM Entertainment are always searching for people whom they can turn into idols. Each member of Super Junior was recruited to SM Entertainment, each in their own way; many of them were discovered through winning contests (some run by SM Entertainment and some not) and others were picked up off the street—one was even scouted in Los Angeles. Henry deserves special mention because he's originally from Toronto, and was recruited to SM through global auditions).
Once a potential idol is recruited and signs with their parent company, they enter a pre-debut training period. They're taught to sing, dance, and whatever else the company thinks they might be good at, and their image is shaped (losing weight, changing hairstyle, etc.). They may also be given a stage name. Stage names are given because most Korean pop stars use single-word names (ex: "Sungmin"). This is usually the person's first name. However, in some cases their name is already being used by another famous person, or it's too similar to someone else's name. So they get a stage name. Their stage name usually reflects on the person somehow; for example, "Kangin" means "Strong benevolence," while "Shindong" is a portmanteau of "Shin Donghee," his first and last names. (Han Geng's a little different: being Chinese, his name was converted to "Hankyung" to make it easier to say.)
The pre-debut period lasts longer for some than it does for others. Leeteuk, the leader of the group, was a trainee for six years, while Ryeowook (another member)'s training period was the shortest at two months.
Super Junior originally debuted as a rotational group similar to Morning Musume; that means that older members would periodically be replaced with newer ones. To reflect that, Super Junior's original name was Super Junior 05 and they debuted with 12 members. In 2006 they began to add the next generation ("Super Junior 06"), starting with Kyuhyun, but fans were afraid that the older members might soon start to leave as a result. The fan backlash was so strong that SM Entertainment changed SJ from a rotational group to a static group. No one got kicked out, and Kyuhyun was the last member added for a while. However, many fans still get nervous at the mention of adding new members, so when Zhou Mi and Henry were added in 2007, that got a little...messy. (More on that later.)
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Ah, that's the hard part. Super Junior's huge and it can take you weeks, even months before you can identify everyone. It just comes with the territory. Be patient ♥
Click here to start getting to know all the gorgeous boys we keep talking about. This is another general pimp post that you may find helpful.
The fifteen of them are, listed in alphabetical order (parentheses = real (first or Chinese) name, click on the link to learn more about each of them):(Bonus: extra pimp post for K.R.Y. ♥ [locked])
- Donghae
- Eunhyuk (aka Hyukjae)
- Hankyung (aka Han Geng)
- Heechul
- Henry
- Kangin (aka Youngwoon)
- Kibum
- Kyuhyun
- Leeteuk (aka Jungsu)
- Ryeowook
- Shindong (aka Donghee)
- Siwon
- Sungmin
- Yesung (aka Jongwoon)
- Zhou Mi
(If you find any pimp posts for members who I'm currently using wikipedia pages for, or if you'd like to make a pimp post which I can link to, I would be incredibly appreciative!)
Heechul is on hiatus while he serves mandatory military service, and Kangin was on hiatus for military service, although he's now returned. Kibum is on hiatus while he pursues his acting career, and I'll get to some more special cases in a minute, but the remaining/active members of Super Junior (and most of the fan base) consider everyone on that list to be a member of the band. The band is very tight-knit and they often refer to Super Junior as one big family.
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02a. Subgroups and Super Junior-M
This is the part where I mention that, technically, Zhou Mi and Henry are not part of Super Junior. And neither is Han Geng. Let me explain.
To take advantage of their sheer numbers, SM Entertainment started breaking SJ up into a lot of smaller subgroups aimed at specific markets. These subgroups are called "Super Junior-[suffix]"; for example, Super Junior-K.R.Y., T, M, and Happy.
K.R.Y. stands for "Kyuhyun-Ryeowook-Yesung" and is all the "singers" of SuJu singing pretty songs. T stands for "Trot" and they focus on the particular (slightly strange) genre of Trot music. "Happy" is just...another subgroup singing happy songs. And M stands for "Mandarin" (among other things) and they target the Chinese market.
Super Junior-M was a big deal for SuJu when they announced it in 2007. It's the largest subgroup (at eight members), it's the first time they've targeted such a huge alternative market—even going so far as totry toteach the members Chinese—and was the second time they added new members to Super Junior: Zhou Mi and Henry.
Because SM Entertainment knew fans were going to flip tables if they tried to add Zhou Mi and Henry to Super Junior proper, they made it very clear that Zhou Mi and Henry were only being added to Super Junior-M, the subgroup. It didn't work; fans flipped tables anyway. By this point it's calmed down somewhat and they do both have fan bases, but they've still got a lot of people who hate them, called the "Only13" movement. Yes, it's about as lame as it sounds.
Getting back to Han Geng...in December 2009 he sued SM Entertainment in order to break his contract. He won his lawsuit and now is a solo entertainer in China. This caused a lot of trauma to both the members of Super Junior and the fandom at large, as you might well imagine, and SM Entertainment is appealing the court decision. So that's his story.
Anyway. If you're just starting your Super Junior adventures, I'd recommend starting with Super Junior-M. The reason I say this is because it's simply more manageable. SJ-M doesn't have as much canon as SuJu proper, so it's easier to read through everything. It'll also allow you to get to know Zhou Mi and Henry, who you wouldn't see if you tackled the main group. And once you've gotten the eight (nine, if you count Han Geng) SJ-M members down, you're halfway to learning the whole group! :D
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Oh, there are lots of reasons you should care.
- They are really talented. Like, seriously. As I mentioned before, some are amazing singers, others are amazing dancers and coreographers, there are actors, songwriters, TV show hosts and radio hosts; they basically cover every aspect of the entertainment industry and what the heck.
- They are really, really nice people, and it's impossible not to fall in love with all of them. They're amazing lovable dorks, seriously. The video clips of their show appearances, linked further down in this post, will help prove that.
- If you like slash—and I'm going to assume you do, just for a moment—you will love Super Junior (and most K-pop bands). The K-pop industry has realized that fan(girl)s, on the whole, really like slash, and so the members of k-pop groups are actually given pairing assignments and they have to act intimate with each other. It's called "skinship." A lot of the time it has awkwardly hilarious/interesting results. It can also be very...nice to look at, shall we say. At this point Super Junior has moved away from pairing assignments and has more turned into one big happy orgy where everybody inappropriately touches everybody else and it's pretty ridiculous and funny, negl. (For more discussion of the strangely symbiotic relationship that K-pop has with RPF and fandom generally, go here. You should also click that link if you don't really know what RPF is or understand its historical context in fandom.)
- Speaking of fanservice, oh my God, do they do fanservice.
- K-pop in general is a fascinating fandom because there's a lot involved. Besides the general RPF-ish points of interest (seriously, go read this post), k-pop (especially SuJu) encourages an exploration of cultural intricacies, such as language barriers or the beauty/difficulties of language, and the difficulty of fitting into a foreign country; there's fan difficulty in engaging with the "canon," which uses languages that not everyone understands, as well as difficulties within the group itself which arise from the fact that SJ members come from several countries and speak several languages between them. In addition, the k-pop industry as a whole goes out of its way to engage the fans on a level that is matched only by other Asian pop fandoms. The k-pop industry is intensely capitalistic, and entertainment companies such as SM actively/blatantly encourage destroying the "fourth wall" that separates idol from fan. They also expect their idols to give up everything for the sake of making the fans more emotionally engaged and devoted, and therefore more willing to spend their money. Idols are pushed to sacrifice their privacy, their personality and appearance (parent companies often strongly encourage their idols to undergo cosmetic plastic surgery, although the idols aren't supposed to talk about it), and even their health to "be closer" to the fans. It's...not really a good thing, this last point; but all this stuff leads to a fandom that's both complex and emotionally compelling, and that leads to some equally compelling fanwork.
- Speaking of which: if you love amazing writing, you will love this fandom. There are more good authors here than you can shake a stick at. When most people enter this fandom the fics eat their life for a good two weeks, often more, if they're not careful. There's just SO MUCH TO READ.
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04a. Songs/MVs
I broke this down into three sections: Songs, which are below, Videos, which are the section below this one, and Fics, which are the very last section. If you don't particularly like their music (and that's okay, a lot of people don't), watch their videos. If that can't convince you to love these boys, read the fics: it took the fics to get me involved in the fandom, myself.SONGS
(Super Junior-K.R.Y.)
(Super Junior-M)
(Super Junior-M)
(Super Junior-M)
(Super Junior-Happy)
(Super Junior-M)
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04b. Variety show appearances/Live performances/Fancams
This is the advice I got fromIn that vein, here are some links!remixied when I first started wading into this fandom:
"My best advice would be to start just searching random members on youtube and clicking through anything that you think looks interesting. They had a couple things like the minidramas, mystery 6, explorations of the human body (omfg so funny), Full House, Attack of the Pinup Boys (you can also find that on YT last time I checked). Look out for Heechul physically assaulting other member's mouths, that's always funny. And uh Sungmin singing on various radio shows/doing martial arts/performing magic/blowing bubbles, the most awkward Kangin/Leeteuk kiss, Hankyung demonstrating traditional dance, Han Geng/Heechul kiss, Eunhyuk falling ass over tea kettle out of a chair, Ryeowook losing his shoe during a perf, Yesung trying desperately to dance, Kangin giving people purple nurples etc. etc."
Click here for a collection of downloadable videos ♥!
SJMP/TheThirdChapter is also a great resource for SJ-M videos. Their youtube channel is full of good stuff ♥
Click here for a playlist of SJ-M videos that I've compiled. It's...just whatever I find and think I'd want to save, so it's really a huge grab bag and heavily biased, unfortunately. Variety shows are usually split into several parts; you can find the following parts by checking the "related videos" sidebar or by clicking "next video" after the video you're watching is done. Warning: each variety show is usually an hour long. Make sure you've got some time before you start watching!
For your convenience, however, here are some of the best ones:
Here are some hilarious and endearing shorts from Zhou Mi and Henry; there are more from all the other SJ-M members here.
SUPER JUNIOR
Click here for a huge collection of hilarious, endearing quotes from the members of SuJu.
Click here for a Super Junior video playlist. It's similar to the SJ-M playlist above, except it involves every member, not just the ones in the M subgroup.
There's a lot of stuff you can't find on YT though, unfortunately, such as:
→ Intimate Note (scroll all the way to the bottom of the post for links)
→ Full House (13 episodes long, Super Junior being hosts for a homestay and trying to learn English, SO FUNNY)
→goe_ss is a WONDERFUL archive for older Super Junior work, but you have to join their community in order to see their friendslocked entries. Their fansubbing work includes:
- Super Junior tag
- Explorations of the Human Body
- Adonis Camp
- Mini Drama
- Attack On The Pinup Boys - EXTRAS ONLY; to see the actual show, you're going to have to trawl YouTube
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Shipping Names
Shipping names are made by putting one syllable of one person's name together with another syllable of the other person's name. Shipping names can sometimes imply "top/bottom" but they don't always. The main way a ship name is created is by putting the names together in whatever order sounds best. (Ex: "Eunhae" sounds a lot better than "Donghyuk".) Pairing names are usually reserved for OTPs and OT3s. OT15s aren't unheard of, but they don't utilize shipping names anymore (because that'd just be ridiculous).
The members of Super Junior know about the shipping, of course. And the fanfic writing. Some of them have feelings about it, some of them actively encourage it, and they all pander towards it in some way or another. It's kind of part of their job.
The following is a sampling of the more popular SuJu ship names, just so you get an idea:Eunhae: Eunhyuk/Donghae
Hanchul: Han Geng/Heechul
HenWookHae: Henry/Ryeowook/Donghae
Kangteuk: Kangin/Leeteuk
Kihae: Kibum/Donghae
Kyumi/QMi: Kyuhyun/Zhou Mi
Kyumin: Kyuhyun/Sungmin
Sihan/Shihan: Siwon/Han Geng
SiHanChul: Siwon/Han Geng/Heechul
Simin/Shimin: Siwon/Sungmin
Sichul: Siwon/Heechul
Yewook: Yesung/Ryeowook
General Fandom Terms
Fanclubs: Each member's fanclub has a different name and they call themselves different things. There are Fishes (Donghae), Jewels (Eunhyuk), Gengfan/Gengster/Knights(male only) (Han Geng), Petals (Heechul), Strings (Henry), Chamomile (fansite) (Kangin), Snowers (Kibum), Gamers/Secrets(fansite) (Kyuhyun), Angels/Feathers/Wingers (Leeteuk), Ryeosomnias(Ryeowook), Shinsfriends (Shindong), Shiwonest(fansite) (Siwon), Ming(s)/VitaMINs(fansite)/Pumpkins (Sungmin), Clouds (Yesung), and Mitangs (pronounced Mee-tahngs)/Honeys (Zhou Mi)
- A great deal of this information is from FY!SuJuFaces @ Tumblr.
E.L.F.: What Super Junior fans call themselves. From the name of the official SuJu fanclub, short for "EverLasting Friends." Technically, E.L.F. is an official paying fanclub run by SM Ent, and members get a lot of special things (pre-ordering albums, first dibs on live performance tickets, etc.). Anyone can call themself an ELF, though. ELFs can range from amazing sweethearts to crazy stans to antis.
Anti: short for "anti-fan"; a person who goes out of their way to hate on a specific person. Best left ignored.
Sina: Click here.
Weibo: Sina's blog site. Someone has a Weibo the same way someone might have an LJ; "have you read Shindong's Weibo recently?"
Baidu: Baidu is the Chinese Google. You'll mostly hear about this in relation to a "Baidu Bar," which are places on the Internet where fans go to hang out.
Suffixes: Korean uses suffixes when addressing or referring to others, much like Japanese. For more information on that, please click here.
Coordi/Coordi Noona: They coordinate an idol's outfit, so they're the costume designers, makeup artists, hair stylists, etc. who fuss over the band members backstage.
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06a. General comms
News/Update Comms
On DW:superjunior
Subbing Comms
"A Day" Comms
On LJ: Click here (from
On DW:
Pairing/Relationship Comms
On DW:
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06b. Fanfiction!
Rec Lists - I recommend starting here because it will help you quickly find good fanwork. Super Junior fandom, being huge, has a lot of good fic...and also a lot of bad fic.
Fanfiction Comms
On DW, we have
Many pairing comms also serve as pairing-centric fic archives, too.
Other
The Super Junior Fanfiction Archive Project
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I hope that this has been useful for you! If you have any further questions or comments, leave a note here or drop me a PM @
lark. :) Thanks for reading!Credit/Thanks:
chrysa for the gorgeous banners and for helping me find information I needed; ennie03 and tees2mai for picking at details I'd left missing and fact-checking.
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Oh my.
Hello there new obsession.
<3
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I have now been watching Super Junior vids on YT for the better part of 3 hours.
Dammit, I didn't need to read a new fandom!!
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(Anonymous) 2012-08-19 09:20 pm (UTC)(link)crying. who needs a life. that fanservice section