Three

A couple of days ago, I saw in the news about Onew’s enlistment date being set for next month. Initially, I was just sad that SHINee would be losing him for two years, but then I thought about seeing them promote with three members, and I’m not going to lie, it broke my heart a little. I cried when I saw Super Junior reduced to just four people on stage, but there is something so very much more heartbreaking about SHINee missing members.

Because that’s what it’s going to be like from now on. Assuming Taemin doesn’t enlist until he has to, it’ll be another 5 or 6 years until they can promote together again. It wouldn’t be ridiculous that at some point they’ll all be in the military except Taemin, or Onew after he’s back.

No doubt they’ll all keep busy in their personal careers. Hopefully Onew will go back to acting, and I’m sure Minho will before and after. Key has just launched his solo career so no doubt he’ll do more of that, and Taemin is already a well established solo artist. They all have back up plans.

To be honest, with the new laws in place, they have less time now, and less freedom. For Super Junior, they could defer until 30, and it didn’t really affect them before, but now, they’ve knocked two years off and added travel limitations. Onew may be cutting it fine enlisting 4 days before his 29th birthday, but Key only has 10 months until he is 28, and just over a year for Minho.

I’m assuming the 28 is in international age, because if it’s Korean age then they should all pretty much enlist right now. Except Taemin. Because he’s the baby.

They SHOULD all enlist together and then SHINee could just go on hiatus for as little as 21 months until they all come back ...

With SuJu, they could cope without pretty much everyone except Donghae and Eunhyuk - apparently - seeing as they didn’t do anything while they were away but revamped everything for their return. There were so many of them. With SHINee, its not so simple. I guess technically any combination of Onew or Taemin and Key or Minho would work, but that doesn’t mean I want to see it that way. I think I would rather wait for them to return together.

There’s already a massive empty space in SHINee, I don’t think I can handle another one.