I have been excited about writing an analysis for Hobi for a long time now. This is because his chart is one of the weirdest charts that I have ever seen.

I have to confess. When I first started stanning BTS, I was terrified of Hobi. I’m not sure why but there was something about him that made me pay a little more attention than all of the other members. For some reason, when I engaged with the image of Hobi, I had the sense that I was both looking at someone who was not who they said they were as well as someone who is exactly who they say they are at the same time.

I could never put my finger on what it was about Hobi that made me scared of him. Was it because he played the role of a mother in that skit they did and I have mommy issues? Is it because he looks too beautiful to be real? Is it because he laughed at Namjoon when he said that he likes to journal that one time? Or because he scolded Jin for forgetting their dance moves?

In some sense, Hobi is in the same boat as Namjoon and Yoongi. They were all in BigHit before BigHit decided to debut the lot of them as idols. They were all musicians who, through some off turn of events, had to become idols.

But Hobi is also not like Namjoon and Yoongi. Both Namjoon and Yoongi have detriment Venus. Hobi’s Venus, as we will see, does something very special in his chart. Hobi doesn’t handle the condition of being an idol like Namjoon and Yoongi either. In the vein of pop artists like Andy Warhol and Murakami, Hobi uses his idolhood as material.



Hobi isn’t just an idol—he is a idol so fluid and bright that he becomes sunshine. He became an idol so superflat that he wears Murakami jewelry. He wears the cliche of idol as a fucking keyring. He is an idol so self aware about who he is that he is nothing but exactly who he says he is.

That Fucking Venus

To really talk about Hobi, we have to talk about Venus.

Hobi has three planets in Pisces—Saturn, Mercury, and Venus. His Sun is at the anartic degree of Aquarius in its detriment. Usually, if you have any planets within 7º of the Sun, that planet becomes combust. This applies to planets that are in different signs than the Sun because it is a condition of being outshone by the the rays of the Sun.

Hobi’s Pisces Saturn and Pisces Mercury are close enough to the Sun to suffer under its rays. In a usual case, this would already be strange since it would mean that he would have two planets combust without being conjunct to the Sun. In an usual case, Hobi’s Mercury in Pisces would be in both its detriment and fall (it is also moving retrograde). However, Hobi happens to have Venus also in Pisces. And Venus exalts in Pisces.

Five days before Hobi was born, Venus entered Pisces. Four days before his birth, Venus transited Hobi’s Saturn. One day before he was born, Venus transited Hobi’s Mercury. When an exalted planet transited debilitated planets like this, they do something kind of cool. They pick the debilitated planet out of its misery. This means that despite the combustion, despite the fall, despite the detriment, and despite the retrograde—none of Hobi’s planets in Pisces will behave as if they are afflicted.

Hobi’s Venus is fucking powerful. It also rules his exalted Moon, strengthening that too!

When you read fan accounts of people who have seen BTS in person, I don’t think you can ignore Hobi’s Venus. People are enthralled by it. They say that he appears as if he is shining. People who used to slant towards Taehyung or Jimin become Hobi biases when they see the group in person. There is something bewitching about Hobi.

Venus is the planet of social expectations. It is the planet of beauty, of how you relate to what the world wants to see you as. It’s the planet of the image. When a planet is exalted, that planet wants it all. Hobi’s Venus exalts. He knows the power of the image. It's like he understands exactly how to manufacture intimacy—how to take pictures of the other members and himself so that we feel like we're all Hobi's BFFs. He puts our faces in it too. He’s a lover of pop art, of superflat imagery, as if he is saying “Look at me. Do you believe that I am anything other than what I say I am?”

Ego: Aquarius Sun

Hobi is also an Aquarius Sun. His Sun is a nodal bender, signifying that there is unfinished business having to do with his birth and existence. An Aquarius Sun is a Sun that works in adversity to its environment. It’s an alienated Sun. It’s a Sun that doesn’t quite know how to exist.



I find it interesting that Hobi’s solo song in Map of the Soul is Ego. In the video for this song, Hobi is resurrected from the dead after having fallen down. After he is resurrected, he shows us some childhood images of himself before showing some pictures of his own face photoshopped into the images of gods and kings. Then, we see him walking down the street into a store, putting on a suit, and then driving into a Bladerunnner-esque cityscape.

Hobi’s presentation of himself, as a child in pictures taken way before he debuted as an idol and then as a fake god, is interesting. There is something vulnerable about showing childhood pictures. Childhood photos, especially of the variety that Hobi showed, film photos before digital images became ubiquitous, are nostalgic. They are authentic. However, when you show people what you looked like as a child, you’re not really revealing much. You present authenticity without actually revealing any information. Idols show childhood images regularly for this reason. It’s one of the things you do on variety shows.

Hobi layers this performance of authenticity with these super fake looking pictures of himself as Odin, then what looks like King Arthur, Zeus, and then Ra. These are old gods and kings, none of which are Korean. The photoshop job isn’t convincing and it’s not made to look convincing. Hobi, through the image, is not trying to make himself out to be a god or a king but trying to ask, with sarcasm, “is this what you want me to be?”

The next few scenes are disorienting. When Hobi walks to what looks like J Crew, he walks along a city street that looks as if it's in shambles. There are a few chickens on a wall. This isn’t the type of utopia, clean city that we usually see in Kpop music videos. It’s a dystopia. After Hobi dresses, he speeds through a car and we end up in Bladerunner. Bladerunner is a movie about replicants that disturb our ideas around what is human. It’s a movie about the posthuman.

Blue Side/Hope World

Last, Hobi has both north node and Jupiter in Scorpio. He has this in common with Namjoon. If you watch interviews and videos from BTS closely, you might notice that it’s Namjoon and Hoseok who are most interested in psychology. They’re puzzle people. They like to figure other people and things out.

Namjoon’s interest in psychology is obvious. He’s into Jung and he writes it into their concept and albums. Hoseok’s interest is a little more subtle and a lot more scattered. While Namjoon’s Jupiter is ruled by his fallen Cancer Mars, Hoseok’s is ruled by a peregrine Aquarius Mars.

In his album Hope World, Hoseok has a song called Blue Side. Blue side is not a real place but an imaginary place which Hoseok describes as “a place I consciously escape to avoid things. It’s a place I escape to that I could safely live in and be swallowed up by, but I don’t want to do that.” There’s a moment when they talk about their names in which Yoongi mentions that Hoseok should have been called J-sad instead of J-hope because he’s the saddest person that Yoongi knows. In a recent interview, Hoseok mentions that his biggest fear is the future.

Hoseok is the walking image of a bright and shiny idol and, yet, he says offhand things that you don’t see the other members really saying. I mean, the members and Yoongi especially have mentioned battles with depression and anxiety but selectively. The way that Hobi talks about his dark side makes it seem like an actual place that he goes to when he’s away from the cameras.

The idea of a world built on hope sounds optimstic, doesn't it? It sounds like the ability to imagine a more wholesome world.

If you actually look at depictions of hope world in videos and fashion shoots, it's gray. There's always an impending sense of danger. Things feel off and people look misplaced. Hope world is a dystopia.

In the Soop, Hoseok talks about his shadow self and about how he is exploring things that he resists attachment to by doing childhood activities. During the show, he makes a model airplane and experiments with science. He talks about trying out people who he never imagined himself becoming. On camera, Hobi has become less bright and sunny. He doesn’t wear as many cartoons. The discordant colors and textures he chooses seem less about a happy-go-lucky image and more about power. He’s saying—look what I can make into fashion.

Hobi is a little like Mang. Mang is known as a dancer, sure, but there’s a hidden element to Mang. Mang is cute and cuddly but there’s a horror to him as well. Mang wears a horse’s head but no one really knows what kind of animal Mang really is or what his real face looks like. It’s almost like Hobi, designing Mang, wanted to show us that we would never really see his actual face. He hints at the existence of the unseen face and he makes sure that we know it’s there but he never tells us what it looks like. He, himself, however seems to always be excavating this face, holding it up to mirrors in the dark in attempts to see it at another angle.



There’s a brightness to Hoseok. He’s kidcore, if kidcore were about processing childhood selves and childhood pain. He’s an idol who shows us that he was someone before he became J-hope but he’s also an idol who will never tell us who he was before he became J-hope.