Visibility That Bothers: #LoveInTheBigCity and Brazilian Fan Activism

Image by Hyo Lee. Adapted from Textile Design, 1957-59, by Alexander Hayden Girard (Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Gift of Alexander H. Girard); São Paulo Protest against Putin and Russia's Anti-Gay Laws (9579150488), August 23, 2013, by Ben Tavener (Wikimedia Commons); São Paulo Protest against Putin and Russia's Anti-Gay Laws (9576383675), August 23, 2013, by Ben Tavener (Wikimedia Commons); São Paulo Protest against Putin and Russia's Anti-Gay Laws (9579176722), August 23, 2013, by Ben Tavener (Wikimedia Commons); Flag of South Korea(Cropped), August 9, 2010, by J. Patrick Fischer (Wikimedia Commons); Brazilian Flag, November 4, 2023, by Boaventuravinicius (Wikimedia Commons); Protesto contra LGBTfobia no DF-2, October 10, 2014, by Anderson Riedel (Wikimedia Commons), II Parada do Orgulho Louco - - - Mad Pride parade, May 29, 2009, by Alfredo Mascarenhas (Wikimedia Commons); and Love in the Big City promotional still (TVING, accessed via Soompi).

Two gay men look out the window at the city. They are happy and toast with beer because they are dating and because, finally, they are going to live together. They have just finished moving and are tired and sweaty. In the background we see the Namsan Tower, a prominent Seoul landmark and one of the highest structures in the city.

This is a scene from the K-drama Love in the Big City (2024), based on the novel of the same name by Sang Young Park, who also wrote the script for the drama. Like the book, the K-drama follows the life of Go Young (named Park Young in the novel), a gay man who must navigate personal and professional challenges as a result of the social discrimination he experiences within South Korean society. In its matter-of-fact portrayal of gay characters as ordinary individuals with complex motivations and conflicts, Love in the Big City avoids stereotypes and constitutes a watershed moment for LGBTQIAPN+ representation in the South Korean media landscape. The show depicts everyday spaces such as gay bars, where non-heteronormative sexuality can be safely expressed, and gives visibility to mundane experiences like the use of dating apps, reflecting realities rarely shown on screen.

The frank portrayal of homosexual love and intimacy in Love in the Big City generated backlash from conservative South Korean groups. On October 14, 2024, a week before the series was scheduled for release on the Korean OTT platform TVING, more than 100 civic and parent organizations protested in front of both the TVING headquarters and the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism, demanding that the series be cancelled. 

The visibility that Love in the Big City offered for queer representation apparently struck a nerve. An essay published in Cine21, South Korea’s foremost film magazine, observes that many entertainment agencies do not allow their more famous actors to act in queer romances. So when Nam Yoon-su, who had achieved mainstream recognition in Extracurricular (2020) and The King’s Affection (2021), accepted the lead role, investors were reportedly worried. 

Far away from South Korea, Brazilian fans of BL (Boys Love) dramas had been excited precisely about the visibility that Nam’s casting would bring for the South Korean BL series. Those same fans had also expressed their desire to see Jin Ho-eun, who appeared in All of Us Are Dead (2022), play Young’s lover. And in response to the South Korean backlash, they got to work.    

In Brazil, social media has offered an indispensable venue for political action in the last decade. In 2013, Facebook and Twitter (now X) helped mobilize massive protests against the increase in public transportation fares. 2015 marked the advent of Brazil’s “Feminist Spring,” with hashtag campaigns like #MeuPrimeiroAssédio (#MyFirstHarassment) and #MeuAmigoSecreto (#MySecretFriend) designed to combat sexual harassment and everyday misogyny. In 2018, the hashtags #QuemMatouMarielle (#WhoKilledMarielle) and #MariellePresente (#MarielleIsHere) helped bring global attention to the political assassination of the black queer councilwoman Marielle Franco. Social media also played a decisive role in the impeachment of Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, with both her supporters and critics using digital platforms to disseminate opinion and mobilize large-scale support.   

Within the sphere of pop culture, fans have also used digital platforms to debate and advocate for social issues. For instance, fans of telenovelas, a genre that has significantly shaped cultural habits and values in Brazil, would fervently discuss how topical questions of education, social mobility, race, gender, and sexuality have been depicted on screen. Examples include the controversial kiss between Felix and Niko in Trail of Lies (Amor à Vida) (2013), which marks the first time Brazil’s leading television network TV Globo had broadcasted a kiss between two men; the representation of a transgender man who undergoes gender transition in Edge of Desire (A Força do Querer) (2017); and the depiction of black female protagonists in A Mother’s Love (Amor de Mãe) (2019) against the backdrop of decades of black erasure on television. So active are Brazilian fans on X that the platform’s suspension in Brazil on August 30, 2024 had even been compared to the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, as X temporarily lost access to one of its largest markets after it failed to comply with orders by Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court. During this period, entertainment agencies, record labels, and production companies must have missed Brazilian fans and the influence they wielded in promoting artists and a wide variety of cultural content.

The social media practices of Brazilian fans include creating and boosting hashtags, making memes, disseminating news, and organizing fan meetings and campaigns. In particular, the strategic use of hashtags has helped fans accomplish desired outcomes. For instance, fans successfully engaged the #ComeToBrazil hashtag to ask international artists to include Brazil in their tours. These campaigns have been directed toward popular artists including BTS, Lady Gaga, Harry Styles, and Taylor Swift and, in some cases, led to the inclusion of additional performances in the country. The hashtag was so successful that fans began to lack the financial resources to afford these extra shows and started to trend #StopComingToBrazil. 

Prominent fan engagement on social media also resulted in Brazil becoming, in 2023, the first country outside Asia to host fan meetings of actors who starred in Thai BL shows. In the first months of 2025 alone, the city of São Paulo has already recorded 10 of these events. Brazil’s influence within the global BL fandom can also be seen through Brazilian fans’ prominent presence in BL-related social media threads and through their frequent interactions with actors and screenwriters.

BL names a media genre that centers around the depiction of romantic and sexual relationships between men, and BL series produced in East and Southeast Asia have been hugely successful in Brazil. While Brazilian fans in general have a reputation for being passionate, fans of BL have a particular incentive for staying engaged, since they depend on the efforts of other fans for alternative access to streaming content and subtitles. In Brazil, BLs are rarely available on mainstream services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Star+. International streaming services such as Rakuten Viki, iQIYI, GagaOOLala, and WeTV provide a wider selection of BL shows. However, access remains challenging: many titles are unavailable, and viewers often need multiple expensive subscriptions to watch different shows. Additionally, some of these platforms lack Portuguese subtitles or localized interfaces. 

Brazilian fans primarily access BL shows through specialized fansub (short for “fan subtitles”) communities, which crowdsource fan translations and subtitles of Asian BLs and then distribute those shows using platforms like Telegram. To give just two examples of such communities: as of April 2025, Gatinho Fansub shares content with more than 72,000 subscribers on Telegram; it also boasts over 35,000 followers on Instagram and over 90,000 on X. Similarly, Brotinho Fansub has more than 84,000 Telegram subscribers, 43,600 Instagram followers, and 22,500 X followers.

A screenshot of the Gatinho Fansub platform

Through all of these platforms, fans discuss and advocate for the human rights issues raised by the shows that they have watched. In 2023 and 2024, for example, there was intense movement among Brazilian BL fans during the review of Thailand’s marriage equality bill. In addition to trending hashtags such as #CasamentoIgualitário (#EqualMarriage) in support, fans also posted and remixed videos that drew parallels between BL shows and what was unfolding in real time in Thailand. They engaged in similar social media practices during the legal battle over Japan’s refusal to recognize same-sex marriage.

Screenshot of a fan remix post on X, in which two videos play simultaneously. The video above is a scene from the Thai BL Not Me (2021), which depicts a protest for marriage equality. In the video below, street celebrations in Thailand erupt following the approval of a key legislative stage of the marriage equality bill, which came into effect in January 2025. The post states in Portuguese: “This scene has never been so powerful and meaningful as it is today.”

When conservative protests broke out against Love in the Big City, then, Brazilian BL fans were ready to engage. It is important to note here that Love in the Big City, which explores issues specific to the gay community, does not fit the typical definition of BL, since BL series have traditionally been created by and for cisgender and heterosexual women. Early BL dramas frequently idealized and even fetishized same-sex relationships, depicting relational pairings such as seme (active) and uke (passive) that arguably replicate heterosexual dynamics. 

However, recent critical work has highlighted evolutions in the BL genre toward more authentic representation while pointing to the role of BL media in “queering” gender and sexual norms. Thus, Love in the Big City can be seen as expanding the possibilities of BL rather than as being incompatible with it. Indeed, compared to their Thai and Taiwanese counterparts, South Korean BL series have tended to be more discreet in their depiction of gay intimacy, while Love in the Big City frankly depicts the sexual relations between its main characters. 

From a reception perspective, the BL fan community in Brazil took up the K-drama’s cause as its own, mobilizing on social media in defense of LGBTQIAPN+ rights. When Nam remained committed to Love in the Big City despite investor concerns, fans expressed their support through social media posts like this one on X: “That’s it! All it takes is an opportunity, persistence, and determination to motivate everything else! And so we will make a change, a revolution, a new story, a new future. Be like this in your own life too, follow the good examples of your idols.” For Brazilian fans, the “idol” visibility that Nam brought to the show provided a crucial opportunity for gay rights advocacy, and now it is up to fans (“we”) to continue the fight. If the show’s visibility bothered conservative groups, then Brazilian fans were going to use their own conspicuous fan work to bring further visibility to issues that might otherwise go unnoticed by some. 

Screenshot of a Call to Action post from the Brotinho Fansub Telegram channel (original Portuguese text on the left and English translation on the right)

Within fansub communities and Facebook groups, as well as through posts on X, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, Brazilian fans promoted and amplified the hashtag #LoveInTheBigCity as a form of counter-protest against the conservative backlash that the show provoked. A call to action posted in the Brotinho Fansub Telegram community encourages fans to “give [the show] lots of engagement and views” and to “go to [X] and use the tags to increase your reach.” As the author explains, “We know how much this project was the target of boycott and we really have to hype it up and shut everyone up. . . . Now, it’s time to use the weapons we have and make this thing boom.” The strength of those “weapons” was to be found in the visibility that their sheer numbers would generate. “Here we are 35+ thousand people united by the love of BLs, let's do our part as fans,” an administrator urged in Universo BL+, a Brazilian Facebook group that currently has 37,000 members. The post continues: “For those who can watch it officially, the 8 episodes will be available on the Viki platform. . . . [And] those who can't watch it on Viki, comment a lot on social media, make posts and talk about it, spread the word, and don’t forget to use the Hashtag #LoveInTheBigCity.”

In the end, the conservative lobbying efforts to cancel Love in the Big City did not work. While TVING pulled the series trailer from its official channels on October 12, they re-released it four days later amidst sharp criticism from many, including the author and screenwriter himself. In a press conference, Nam reiterated his commitment to the show, noting that he “didn’t care about [the haters] . . . because those people were actually one in a 100. I got a lot of messages of support.” 

Brazilian fans played their own part in making that support visible. On the day Love in the Big City was officially released (October 21, 2024), the hashtag #LoveInTheBigCity became the second most trending topic on X in Brazil and stayed in the rankings until the following day, totaling 79,400 tweets. The hashtag would appear under X’s Trending Topics on other days of the month as well. Over on Gatinho Fansub, Love in the Big City has accumulated an average of 34,000 thousand views per episode. Worldwide, the series currently has a 9.4 rating on Rakuten Viki out of more than 26,000 reviews, with almost 600 pages of written audience comments and reviews.

Screenshot of a triumphant fan post on X

Thus far, we have relied on a nation-based framework (Brazilian fans, South Korean protestors, Korean BL series) in discussing fan engagement with media objects, but what has emerged in these border-crossing scenes is something more akin to “transculturality,” where fans experience affective affinities with a media object from subject positions other that of the nation. To quote Bertha Chin and Lori Hitchcock Morimoto’s adaptation of Paul Booth’s analysis of digital fandom,  “[fans] use digital technology not only to create, to change, to appropriate, to poach, or to write, but also to share [across national borders], to experience together, to become alive with community.” This opens up new ways for understanding identity and community formation within popular culture. 

South Korea currently does not recognize same-sex marriage and lacks laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. While an anti-discrimination bill has been in consideration since 2006, it remains stalled in the National Assembly. In 2023, 56% of South Koreans say they oppose the legalization of same-sex marriage. In Brazil, while same-sex marriage has been legal since 2013, conservative groups have been attacking LGBTQIAPN+ rights in recent years. These contexts inform the global social media activism around Love in the Big City. The production and reception of television fiction reflects realities that are locally situated by also shared across cultural and national boundaries. Engagement with these media objects, made possible by streaming technologies and other digital platforms, provides fans with the opportunity to reaffirm their own values while entering into solidarity with communities everywhere else.   Ə