Stray thoughts about minhwa Trouble Maker
TLDR: they deliberately fucked with gender and in doing it they sent a big ‘fuck you’ to whoever wants to cage them in a particular role.
Disclaimer: as per usual, being a meta reading of a performance this enters the realm of rpf and is just my personal opinion. I’m not trying to state some truth, I’m just trying to explain why this performance blew my mind.
So, my brain is still stuck there. I got those damn 3 minutes and spares on loop all day long since day 1 of the fanmeeting. I got that whistling haunting me.
Because it was hot as fuck? Sure.
Because it made one of my favourite pairings finally a hot topic once again? Also sure. Love it.
Because Mingi pulled off some ballroom dance moves with a proficiency that left me mesmerized? (And I dare some other male idol to top that tbh) Oh yeah, hell yeah. I love the way he dances and once again he showed us he’s great at it.
Because the vocals were something else and I need KQ to release the studio version of them so I can bask in them? All the yes, they exceeded my wildest dreams.
Because for the first time someone in a boy group did an actual cover, full on performance, of Trouble Maker and not a parody of it for shit and giggles? Absolutely. Fucking finally.
But also because of the gender fuckery it was going on, and I don’t mean it in general, but in relation to Mingi’s and Seonghwa’s idol personas. Imho they made a statement with this performance about themselves and gender stereotypes, a really bold and loud one, and I didn’t think I could appreciate them more than I already did, and yet.
Think about it. They subverted the expectations the fans might have had for them if they knew beforehand about the performance. No really, think about it.
Mingi’s stage persona, FixOn, is the representation of the stereotypical fuckboy alpha male imaginary. We all know it’s drag, we all know it’s part of the performance and that Mingi is so much more multifaceted than that, still, since his stage persona fully developed, he never performed as anything other than that (aside from Mingi Wonka, but that too is not a feminine persona), so a lot of fans are prone to forget it, even if he has always been vocal about being different from his stage persona, both in pop lives and formal interviews.
On the other side, Seonghwa loves to fuck with gender becasue the male stereotypes are too limiting for him, we all know it because he said it himself, and he fucked with it so much that by now a lot of fans cast him by default in a female role (think about the pronouns used for him on socmeds and so on), but the point is that Hwa loves to fuck with gender, so I think that just as he doesn't like not being able to express himself beyond the classic male stereotype, he doesn't like being caged only in the female one either, finding it restrictive.
I understand why Seonghwa told Mingi he’d take full responsibility of the falldown with the fans if things were going to go sideways, because they literally took all the preconceptions and stereotypes the fans projected on them and threw them in their faces and that, in a job that relies on fans approval, is brave and bold as fuck.
That wouldn’t have been the message if they took the parody way like everyone did before them in fanmeets, but they performed Trouble Maker as intended instead, delving deep into their character’s roles and portraying them with a level of perfromanship that left me in awe. And that is what makes the performance a big ‘fuck you’ to whoever wants to cage them in a predefinite role. And that’s why I have so much respect for them.
