Lee Hyun-jun

BLGLFlix editorial view

Two of the five credited cast members of Fix the Error! appear in the cast list of His Man. That is not a coincidence, and it answers a question this site raised on the Yoo Jung-hyeok profile without being able to settle it.

Korea has no equivalent of GMMTV. There is no studio that signs young actors, pairs them, trains them and cycles them through a slate of queer series until they are known. Thailand built exactly that and it is why Thai BL has recognisable faces. Korea did not, which left the question of where a Korean BL web series finds its cast at all.

The answer, at least here, is His Man. A reality series that has run four seasons and fifty three episodes on a national streaming service has produced a group of people who are already on screen, already familiar to the audience a BL series is made for, and already comfortable in front of a camera. A director making a six episode web series with a small budget can cast from that pool. So he did.

It is an improvisation, and it is not remotely equivalent to a studio system. But it is a functioning pipeline built out of what Korea actually has, which is a successful queer reality format rather than a queer drama industry. The BL series is six episodes on two small platforms; the reality show is fifty three episodes on wavve. The tail is considerably larger than the dog, and for now the tail is doing the casting.

One more thing worth noting about this particular credit. The character is named Lee Hyun-jun. Casting a performer under his own name in a fictional series, straight out of a reality format where he appeared as himself, sits on a line that Korean web drama seems comfortable with and that this site is not going to interpret further than the credit allows.