In his book Hegemonic Mimicry: Korean Popular Culture of the Twenty-first Century, Kyung Hyun Kim writes that idol culture is more similar to shamanism than Joseon Era court performance because the audience or fans in idol culture is seen as a participant rather than spectator. For myself personally, I got into BTS not from official broadcasts or products but through fanworks. In many ways, I’m an ARMY stan.

To celebrate ARMY’s tenth birthday, I wanted to look at ARMY’s chart a bit! ARMY is BTS’s fanbase and is seen as a separate entity with its own birthday and logo from BTS. ARMY acts and makes decisions in response to but ultimately independently of BTS. We’re a separate group of people with our own sense of identity.

Here is ARMY’s chart in whole sign houses:



And here is ARMY’s chart in Placidus houses:



Finally, Here is ARMY’s chart seen in relationship with BTS’s debut chart:

Cancer Stellium, Exalted Jupiter

ARMY’s logo is a shield. BTS’s logo is a door. It’s the same design but inverted. The idea is that ARMY is something that protects BTS.

The most obvious thing in ARMY’s chart is the Cancer stellium. Cancer is a sign that is represented by the crab. A crab has a hard shell. It’s very soft on the inside and it wears its own armor. I think that this aspect of ARMY will be the most noticeable thing to an outside observer who is not ARMY. A lot of the time, people who aren’t fans of BTS notice how protective ARMY is about BTS and the lengths that we will go to in order to shield the group and ourselves.

There’s a bad story about Jimin on some gossip website? ARMY trends “Jimin is cute” over and over again and no one can even tell what the gossip is about. James Cordon calls ARMY a group of fifteen year old girls in a tone that’s meant to look down on young girls? ARMY goes all out and declares war.

Within ARMY’s Cancer stellium is the Sun and Mercury. There’s also a domicile Moon and an exalted Jupiter. These are some strong planets to have in Cancer. This isn’t just a strong expression of Cancer as a sign. This is an expression of Cancer that is about strength.

I don’t know if you’re ever been at an ARMY event. Things are well organized. This is a group that statistically has a much higher number of queer people than the population at large. What I’m trying to say is that there are a lot of lesbians in ARMY and lesbians are well organized. The Cancer Moon really shows up in gatherings. You go see ARMY and you end up with a bunch of freebies, a ton of little handmade gifts and teas and snacks that fans spent a long time preparing for each other. You go to ARMY and you’re fed.

This culture of community care also shows up in some of ARMY’s rules. There’s rules about not throwing things at the members or carrying large signs at shows because signs will block the view of ARMY who are in wheelchairs. Usually, ARMY will allow each other to move together without trying to rush each other. This doesn’t always happen but it’s what usually happens.

And with the members? ARMY acts like a fucking Cancer with a crush. ARMY sees BTS at a restaurant or in a park and hides. We hide our faces. We freak out. We don’t want to be seen!

The exalted Jupiter in Cancer in ARMY’s chart really contrasts with BTS’s debilitated Jupiter in Gemini. BTS is a group that debuted under the song No More Dream—a song about cynicism and hopelessness. It’s such a debilitated Jupiter song. It’s a song about not believing in yourself and about being in an industry that doesn’t believe in you.

But ARMY? ARMY has a Jupiter in Cancer. ARMY believes in magic.

What ARMY does for BTS isn’t just about protection. ARMY actively promotes BTS. In the book BTS, Art Revolution: BTS Meets Deleuze, Chiyong Yi explores how ARMY made BTS a household name strategically through self organized means. ARMY researched ways to get BTS to rank in the Billboard rankings, sent radio stations samples of BTS songs, and rewarded the stations for playing BTS songs by organizing the fans en masse to stream those plays. We even sent gifts and flowers to any radio station that would play BTS’s music.

This is exalted Jupiter energy. This fervent promotion. ARMY believes in BTS and promotes BTS relentlessly like a well oiled machine. BTS has Jupiter debilitated. BTS is actually prohibited from promoting themselves freely both in their home market and internationally.

I think any strong Jupiter placement can create an air of fanaticism. This is in ARMY too and it’s enjoyable. As Creed from The Office says, it’s much more enjoyable to be a cult follower than a cult leader. We have fun with our fanaticism in ARMY. Sometimes people get hurt too. It’s just hard not to get carried away by something as strong as a 0º Jupiter in Cancer. Jupiter as a planet is about power. ARMY has a strong, angular Jupiter. ARMY knows our power.

Moon and Venus

ARMY is actually a Libra rising. This means that the strongest expression of ARMY’s identity will be through its Venus in Leo. This Venus happens to be less than one degree away from BTS’s Moon in Leo.

We already went over how Seokjin’s song Moon is a love letter to ARMY. It’s so cool to me how BTS perceives ARMY through this image of the moon. The moon is distant but always there. The Moon also rules Cancer and ARMY’s domicile Moon is exactly conjunct our midheaven. But to ARMY, BTS is the Moon that we perceive through our Venus.

Venus is the nocturnal benefic in astrology. BTS is an expression of Jupiter which is the diurnal benefic. While Jupiter is about power and truth, Venus is about aesthetics. Aesthetics is a mode of perception. The Moon is the physical body of an entity. If BTS and ARMY come together through BTS’s Moon and ARMY’s Venus, then ARMY is able to see BTS’s members through a loving gaze. This loving gaze makes the group itself more beautiful.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that so much of BTS’s message is about loving oneself. BTS tells ARMY to love ourselves. Maybe the reason why they do this is because there’s something about ARMY that shows BTS a path towards self love for themselves. I think so because they tell us this over and over again when they talk to us.

But what kind of love does BTS see through ARMY? Is that even important?

ARMY is a group that contains within itself a huge amount of variety. There’s different ages, different ethnicities, different religions, and different locations. Unlike what we might expect from a boy band, BTS doesn’t actually talk so much about romantic sexual love. This makes sense. They have fans who are elementary school kids and also fans who are old enough to be the member’s grandparents. BTS has songs about being of the same peer group, songs about loving someone you are competitive with, songs about loving your hometown, songs about loving and hating parents, and songs about loving yourself.

BTS is a boy band. We usually assume that young girls are into boy bands. However, BTS doesn’t paternalize their fans and only give us things that people usually think young girls will be into. BTS explores things like suicide, psychology, mysticism, loss, and globalization through their music.

BTS assumes that their fans are human.

This is the type of love that this Leo Moon and Leo Venus conjunction inspires. It’s not about shoving love into a closet and making it only romantic or only sexual for commercial purposes. In BTS’s music they talk about the toxicity of love as well as its healing potential. Everytime they talk about love they talk about love’s shadow. Self love coexists with self hate. Loving your hometown is also about escaping your hometown. Loving the world is also a desire to dominate the world.

That Leo Moon blends with ARMY’s Leo Venus. There’s trust here and the trust is about being able to be with both love and hate, accepting both, and accepting humanity. If BTS loves ARMY then I expect them to hate us too because love and hate tend to grow together. ARMY promotes BTS and can control it to some extent. I expect the members to have contempt for us fans because of that. If ARMY loves BTS, then we also envy them because these seven exceptional young men can do things that most of us and most people can’t do. They have exceptional power.

It’s through this love and through this hate together that we start to recognize each other as people. That’s love not as illusion or disillusion but real love.

Shared Mercuries, Venus and Jupiter

Even though BTS’s debut stage and ARMY’s formation happened about a month apart, our Mercuries are closely conjoined. This is because Mercury went into retrograde shortly after BTS debuted. On July 9, Mercury had almost come back to where it had been during BTS’s debut stage.

There’s something here about having a shared language. We share language with BTS even if we don’t know any Korean. There’s all these little inside jokes and phrases that we all know. We study BTS through their language, because the members are lyricists, and we read books recommended by the members.

Chua Beng Huat often writes about how pop culture Asia constructs a transnational identity using certain pop culture figures who all seem to exist in the same world. BTS and ARMY are a bit unique in all of this because there are a lot of ARMY who aren’t interested in other parts of pop culture Asia at all. In pop culture Asia, we see Hong Kong superstars interact with K-pop stars and with Thai actors like they’re all in the same world. BTS is part of that world but because they were limited in their promotions they actually constructed a world that is independent of pop culture Asia. Since they also adapted to their exclusion from pop culture Asia, it’s like they create their own world.

They have their own variety show. They have their own travel show and they built their own parallel universe. A lot of fans don’t know anything about pop culture Asia and you don’t get the feeling that you need to know anything about Asian pop culture to be a part of ARMY.

BTS is a Jupiter and Jupiter is a worldbuilder. BTS built its own world. Well, what about ARMY?

ARMY is a Venusian. In myth, the relationship between Aphrodite and Zeus is actually quite antagonistic. Zeus blamed Aphrodite for his tendency to have affairs and he kept trying to get her to marry. Aphrodite didn’t want to marry. Her power was competitive with Zeus’s and she wasn’t one of his kids. She was born from his grandfather’s genitals. Aphrodite is older than the humanistic gods and comes from the age of the titans.

BTS is Jupiterian and they have their magic. They care about dreams and about divination. ARMY has our own magic and our magic is also old. The fanbase ARMY is not the same as BTS and neither do we merely hang onto BTS’s ankles the way Psyche clung to Cupid. The phenomenon of BTS lives between BTS and ARMY. This is a phenomenon where ARMY is collaborator and not follower. If BTS expresses itself through dreams, then ARMY expresses itself through love.

Zeus and Aphrodite are sometimes in conflict in addition to collaboration. We acknowledge each other and they don’t try to vanquish one another. Jupiter is about power and Venus is about love. Jupiter and Venus very often challenge one another in helpful ways.

In BTS’s song We Are Bulletproof: The Eternal, they talk about being able to walk with ARMY. This implies that there is distance between BTS and ARMY because you can’t walk with someone who is enmeshed with you. There is distance between ARMY and BTS and that is why we can walk together.

There should be antagonism between a boy band and its fanbase. There needs to be. We share many interests but we have differences as well—class, gender, linguistic, regional differences. People join boy bands because they want to find themselves creatively. People like boy bands because we want to lose ourselves in mania. These are very different goals and it’s reasonable for BTS and ARMY to have different pursuits and boundaries.

Neither power is greater than the other—the power of expressing yourself or the power of enjoying someone who is not you. Rather, these two powers coexist and make a world by sitting side by side together. As a fanbase, ARMY is very powerful and there are even some fans who are more influential in the fanbase than even the members. This can happen because BTS accepts us as collaborators in what we do together and not merely as passive recipients. Our Mercuries are conjunct. We show one another how to speak and we imagine a world through mediation together.

I became interested in BTS through ARMY. The fic that got me was an abo verse about Namjoon and Yoongi. It was a riveting story about family, marriage, and desire. Stories about BTS by ARMY are collaborative in the same way that music by BTS for ARMY are collaborative. Maybe something in all of this is some kind of lesson about power and love in worldbuilding imaginatively.