Ask AP529 | Episode 5: Ending Fairies
This post was written by Leslie Day
Welcome to Ask AP529 where YOU get to utilize OUR brain wrinkles to find answers to your most burning BTS questions. This question comes from @Li_ of the AP529 Discord Server. She asks:
What is an ending fairy? Did BTS start it?
Answer: No. They did not.
But they did help cement it as a popular music show gimmick.
I became ARMY when a friend took me to PTD night three in Las Vegas. It was an extravagant going away present when I moved from Texas to Idaho. As I researched to appreciate this gift she gave me, I became a full ARMY (I mean, who wouldn't?). But then I moved to Idaho in June and spent my first Festa, alone and with COVID, in my room with many questions. I voraciously watched all the Korean music shows, and when BTS ended their set of “Yet to Come” and “For Youth”, the cameras panned the group and I saw a series of cheesy facial expressions. JK cracking Yoongi up the most. I was confused.
I was a researcher way before I joined AP529. I looked it up. I didn’t even know what to search for. After a few failed attempts I was able to find some fancams that named it, and then I was off. I found this short compilation of their music shows from that year:
What is an Ending Fairy?
Though not the most reliable source, I learned more about the ending fairy from Allkpop.
Ending fairy, or in Korean, 엔딩요정 (pronounced: en-ding yo-jeong). From Cambridge dictionary, the word Ending is a noun which means the last part of the process. In this context, ending means the last part of K-Pop stage performance. Meanwhile yo-jeong in English means fairy. But why is it called fairy? Why not ending flower? Why not ending face? Why not ending angel? The word yo-jeong not only means ‘fairy’ but, according to namuwiki, is also commonly used in Korean daily conversation to refer to the title given to someone who stands out among others, or someone who is really beautiful. In namuwiki, the “ending fairy” is the person who gets caught by the camera at the end of a stage performance. It can also be addressed to the pose that an idol takes on the stage at the end of their performance.
I say that namuwiki is not the most reliable source because it can be edited by anyone. Their site even states that some information isn’t verified, but I found it interesting. (Information can be gleaned from unreliable sources if you take it with a grain of salt and continue to dig.)
But where did it begin?
According to International Business Times, the “ending fairy” tradition began with Xiumin, a member of EXO, in 2013. However, it didn’t get that name officially for another three years. The camera zoomed in on Xiumin at the end of a performance and he shook a piece of confetti out of his hair.
Xiumin claimed on an episode of Alcohol Fighter in September of 2022: “I was the origin of Ending Fairy. The camera was just focused at me, and confetti was falling and I was just *recreates the scene🥺* I only did that but... I was kinda... I was a fairy.”
Three years later, another Idol, (Chaeyeon, from I.O.I) gave us the moment shown in the video below. I am bewitched by her. It was at the end of the show Produce 101, and a camera zoomed in from the group shot to her. According to KoreaBoo, another less-than-reliable source, this is when the “ending fairy” and the official term for it started to gain traction. She was even asked to recreate the moment several times, and other girl groups began to mimic it.
Screenshot of ending fairy pose from EXO's Xiumin.
When Produce 101 filmed in Japan, every single ending fairy was the performer breathing heavily after performing their stunning choreography. That seemed to get a little boring for some groups because SHINee’s Key held up a note for their fans in 2021. This will turn into making fun of the “heavy breathing” fairies, which SHINee was very good at.
SHINee’s Key holding up a tongue-in-cheek note about ending fairies.
Enter BTS. Apparently there was a bit of controvers in October of 2023 when someone from another fandom found an interview with Spotify in 2022 in which j-hope claimed that ending fairies “didn’t really exist back then”. SUGA attempted to clarify, but his comment was a mistranslation of what he said. What he said was: “We kind of started it.” But he meant the full on “pose”, not just the facial expressions. Why things went haywire over on the Twitter/X TWO years later is beyond me, but here we are. It hadn’t been an “official” part of K-pop shows like it is today. (Music shows even post compilations now and “unseen footage”.) But I don’t want to get into that messy stuff. It’s not my MO. (And fandom wars are silly! We should combine our efforts and take down TicketMaster.)
By 2018, Mnet was using ending fairies as part of their promotional ads for girl groups. Members of all bands were told who was going to receive the close up at the end of the performance. It became the aspiration for many trainees in hopes that their moment on camera would go viral. What is clear is that BTS cemented the ending fairy as a “thing”. When “Boy With Luv” dropped in 2019, it received 74 million views in the first 24 hours. K-Diamonds and I-Lovelies world wide tuned in to the music show performances. Jung Kook pulled this (pssst: it’s the second one):
I LOVE YOU fingers, lip bite and all. If you haven’t seen j-hope breathing heavily after Dionysus, or Yoongi trolling us in a VLIVE, then you’re going to have to pay attention to the blog when Quince writes about them. They are something to see. We found an interesting post on Twitter/X that shows the progression of the ending fairies before and after BTS’s 2019 comeback. You can see the change from full group shots to zooming in on one member. (Editor’s Note: we’d love to link to the source, but the account has been deactivated. Images from the post are shown below.)
All in all, ending fairies are a fun way for members of a group to interact with their fans and it gives fandoms something to share, giggle at, simp over, and a myriad of other reactions depending on who gets the focus.
I’ll leave you with the ending fairies that started me down this rabbit hole. I could tell they were goofing around and I wanted to know what the joke was.
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CREDITS
YouTube/Web: Allkpop, @lpjm, International Business Times, KoreaBoo, @markednomin