Ask AP529 | Episode 3: Is CEO Jin an Edit?
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 Doc of the AP529 Admin Team. She asks:
Is the photo of CEO Jin real?
Answer: No. It is an edit. We’ve seen this picture floating around the internet, right? Some call it “CEO Jin” while others call it “Teacher Jin.”
Is this image of BTS Jin real? Our research says NO!
What is clear, by the watermark on the right side, is that someone with the username @mutuntun posted this really well done edit. I can find many reposts of this on Pinterest and many fanfiction writers have borrowed this image for their spicy tales starring our seven.
But, if it’s an edit, where is the original from? I went to my friends in the AP529 Discord, and we did some sleuthing. My initial research led me to what I thought was the original and came from the Love Yourself: Speak Yourself Tour when they performed at Wembley Stadium on Day 2, which happened on June 2, 2019.
So case closed right? Mystery solved. I thought so.
Until I went looking for the original fanfiction this was used on and came across the Tweet shown below, which was from six months before the Wembley concerts (remember, those were in June 2019).
Can you doctor the date on a Tweet? OR is the BU real? Did Jin wake up and change decisions, and did the tour happen earlier? I had more questions than when I started… and sometimes, that is how research goes.
But Jin had purple hair in all those videos, including the Wembley Day 2 video. That didn’t track, so I kept digging.
I searched for “short hair Jin concert with glasses.” That’s all I could think of, and Google supplied the answer right at the top. (Do you think they’re used to ARMY’s questions?) We got this major source of delulu on October 10, 2018, at another concert in London.
I thought this would be an easy research assignment. It’s a rogue edit of Jin. And I didn’t do this by myself. It was a team effort, but even the first conclusion was wrong, and I had to keep digging to find primary source documents. I stewed for a day and a half when I was positive this was Wembley Day 2 and not the London concert from 2018. I was seriously considering the BU to be real when I couldn’t explain why a tweet was posted before this concert happened.
So, to answer the original question: CEO Jin is an edit. It’s a good edit, but let us remember that not everything you see on Kim Namjoon’s internet is real.
Some things to remember:
Not all edits are nefarious
Some are damn good and well done
Take everything with a grain of salt
And, timelines are important:
For BTS, hair color and clothing can be a really important hit to finding originals and providing years and sometimes months
Is JK tattooed? What piercings does he have? (If you’re looking for other members, JK is often in the background)
What BTS lore is tickling your brain? Ask us! Keep our brain wrinkles busy!
Go to the contact page on the AP529 website to submit your own question.
CREDITS
YouTube/Web: Bajoi Williams; Twitter: @mutuntun; AP529 Volunteers: Leslie Day, Heather C., NoonaAmy, Joscelin