#visual hole

[ardinagrafate]

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[kihyunswrath]

Visual holes in kpop

... Seriously do y’all have the faintest idea how fucked up it sounds like when people are like “there are no visual holes in group x”?

 Just encountered one post saying it, but I’ve seen it way too many times in every fandom I’ve encountered recently and it’s getting real problematic real fast. 

You do realize that when you say your favourite group doesn’t have “visual holes” it implies not only that there IS such a concept as a visual hole, but also that there are those in some other kpop/you-name-it groups?

Visual hole quite literally means that someone doesn’t quite reach the standards of beauty and that their existence somehow “punches a hole” into the group’s visual appeal. As if it’s a “flaw” to the group that one or two of the members are not as “stunning” as the rest. 

In what world do you think naming (directly or indirectly) someone as a visual hole is the right thing to do? Do you really dare open your mouth and point out an idol in any group and say that they are the one? No kpop idol I have ever seen has been ugly "for real” (go figure what that even means), because kpop as a concept literally consists of beautiful people sold as a brand. Beauty, sex and wealth sells, and kpop, consisting of all those three,  sells Korean products and the image of Korea as a fresh, colorful, healthy and rich nation to the outside world. But would it matter if they were ugly in the eyes of every beauty standard possible? Maybe marketing-wise, if we stoop to that level with the industry. But then again, choosing any member to any group is undoubtedly a well-thought-out, manufactured project that sorts out the most competent people out of a big pool of candidates, so those that have already debuted in a kpop group have undergone a massive revising process anyway, unlike normal artists, let alone us normal people. Saying out loud that one of them is actually “ugly” is fucking nit-picking and like - have you ever seen real people at all? I think it’d be about time to lift your face from your fantasyland and start looking around yourself.

Yes, some people are more beautiful than others, even though I personally object sorting actual living, breathing human beings into that kind of shallow categories and rankings. Beauty, as a concept about proportions and arbitrary standards, still persisting among us and having such a strong effect on our decision-making, is bad enough. We should stay careful when we rank people by their outer appearance, because we unconsciously often make a connection between beauty and other socially accepted qualities such as goodness, purity, wealth and health, and that’s where it gets super shady. And when you say someone is super beautiful, that in itself implies someone else is not. (Sometimes it’s healthy to even ask yourself this: What do we even need beauty for? Why does aesthetic attraction have so much power, so much that it is painfully often mixed with romantic or sexual attraction? Some people, and I’m afraid especially many kpop fans, literally can’t tell those things apart from each other and that says a lot about how deeply ingrained this shit is in us.)

You might think kpop is all about innocence and artsy things and food for eyes and aestetics and shit, and guess what, I don’t care, but even then no one should be called a visual hole. Not one person on Earth should be given the hint that they somehow break, diminish or weaken the aesthetically pleasing view by popping up next to their more beautiful fellow members. That’s just morally wrong. 

It’s not bad that you think all your bias members are beautiful - of course they are. Every person on Earth is beautiful if they’re dear to you, and some people catch your attention faster than others. And just about every person on Earth can be turned stunning if enough fancy makeup and clothing is added on to them. Every person on Earth also turns fucking unappealing real fast if they stop washing their hair and teeth, eat junk food for several weeks and stops sleeping. It’s that simple, and there’s nothing more ethereal about any beautiful model-like angel baby you have ever seen in your life. But you don’t get to define who’s actually ugly. You don’t have a say in that. You don’t get to categorize actual people like objects.  

Kpop industry is shallow as fuck and it’s marketing tactics are sexualizing, objectifying, oppressing and discriminating real, actual human beings and we all are part of the problem. We all let it happen and happily enjoy the results. We let them to create us standards and social pressures, we let ourselves to be compared to them. We’re all a little bit of hypocrites when we say we’re there to “support” the idols. So the least we could do as a community is to stop talking about beauty like the lack of it can somehow bring down a group’s reputation. You’re not supposed to be fucking proud that your favourite group doesn’t have “any of the uglies” in it. You’re not supposed to feel bad that someone in your favourite group doesn’t “quite add up” to the smooth visual line you’d like to brag about. 

If you think it’s absolutely necessary to mention, you can say you think all your bias idols are good-looking and you can say you think one idol has especially caught your attention because of their ethereal looks, but that’s where you draw the line. That’s where the discussion ends. The term visual hole needs to be burned in a bonfire (and the term visual line goes so awfully close that, fuck, let’s burn it too for the same reasons) and we need to seriously re-evaluate our thought processes to realize why we created terms and concepts like these in the first place. 

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TL;DR: Don’t you dare use the term visual hole because it’s derogatory, objectifying and fucking rude. Don’t you dare use any other term that comes close to it, either.