✦Alien Stage✦

My Primary Source Focus - Alien Stage:

✦Although both Korean animation directors, VIVINOS and QMENG, are known by fans for their other previous works that consist of queer music animations, they have gained significant popularity after the premier of the Alien Stage series.

✦ In a post-apocalyptic world, where Earth has been colonized by alien invasion, this sci-fi series takes place where humans have been downgraded as a lesser species, seen as merely "pets" and alien entertainment. 

✦ The narrative focuses on Season 50 of "Alien Stage", a survival show where humans are entered as contestants in a deadly singing competition against other human peers and participants for merely alien entertainment and to win the possibility of regaining free will and freedom. The show consists of 7 rounds. In each round, two contestants are expected to sing against each other, and in the end, the alien audience will then pick/vote for their favorite contestant. The fewer votes a human contestant gets will lead to their elimination (in other words, death). This continues to go on until a mysterious group of people disrupts the show in an attempt to save the human contestants from their unfortunate fates.

"it's not that there hasn't been a music video that can tell a certain story, but I don't think there's ever been an intuitive and stimulating SF [Science Fiction] stuff like this. And I think there were many attempts like this in J-pop, but I don't think there were any attempts like this in K-pop. So, even with the slightly special music, the timing that people can comfortably listen to when K-pop is at its peak." -QMENG (Commentary, 9:04-9:42)

Scholarly Conversation:

As of now, there are no scholarly conversations relating to my primary source, Alien Stage, since it is still fairly new and ongoing. However, the topics of "queer information poverty" and "queer unhappiness" can be seen in this series, which are also talked about in many other examples of LGBTQ+ animations. The term "queer" throughout this research means both "different"/"strange" and is a term to identify individuals from the LGBTQ+ community. Notably, these two terms have the same meaning in terms of "queer deviation", deviating from the "straight" path that is expected to be followed(Ruberg).

Essentially, this "queer" animated collaborated work by both queer female creators (VIVINOS and QMENG are openly in a relationship with one another) was born due to the issue of "information poverty" that exists - meaning that there is a lack of queer entertainment media (animations, series, etc.) existing in the Korean media industry. When applying this term to queer theory, there has been a noticeable scarcity of media that includes queer representations, which then leads to many indie creators creating their forms of media that include representations of LGBTQ+ minorities to alleviate the existing "informational" void. This, however, has many limits when it comes to actual production and publishing. Many of the existing queer media that exist are published only if the gay characters in the queer media are unhappy which results in queer unhappiness - queer characters being unable to achieve their happy endings to avoid favoring homosexuality (Ahmed). 

Although there are many challenges and limits to creating queer entertainment media, many queer creators such as VIVINOS create homonormative worlds, making homosexuality the social norm, that have "unhappy queer endings" but unhappy as it is a doomed relationship that does not reinforce the idea to remove queer identities and demoralize them. This eventually leads to the satisfaction of creators and fans of finding queer entertainment media and queer representation, despite the queer characters having an unhappy and doomed ending, which applies to Alien Stage.