Photo: @chaoticbyoec/Twitter

In just four days, more than 194,000 people have smashed the like on a now-viral tweet about two lesbian Korean billionaires marrying, becoming “the richest couple alive.” Putting your thoughts on the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few aside, the news is endearing! What a win for the queer community.

Anyway, it’s all fake.

On February 22, a Twitter user without a significant following took to social media to report some “BREAKING” news.

“Lesbian Korean Billionaires, Ha Soo Young and Kim Ji Woo, marry,” the tweet continued. “With a combined net worth of $170 BILLION, this makes them the richest couple alive.”

[BREAKING] Lesbian Korean Billionaires, Ha Soo Young and Kim Ji Woo, marry. With a combined net worth of $170 BILLION, this makes them the richest couple alive.pic.twitter.com/l5x2BPRIBz — rine 🦋💚 (@chaoticbyoec) February 22, 2019

In just four hours, the pace at which people praised the tweet accelerated at an exponential rate — but as it reached more and more people, a growing number of Twitter users started to call bullshit. While Ha Soo Young and Kim Ji Woo are real people, they’re not wedded lesbian billionaires; they’re members of the K-pop group Loona, who are better known as Yves and Chuu, respectively.

The person behind the tweet, a 19-year-old student named Rine, told the Cut that she “wasn’t really expecting” that it would go viral, because to her, it was an obvious joke. Ever since a fan of K-pop group Cosmic Girls tweeted a fake “breaking” news post about lesbian billionaires in April 2017, K-pop fans have been imitating the tweet with different fictional billionaire lesbians — a beloved internet pastime in which Rine innocently partook. But, for some reason unknown to her, hers went viral.

[BREAKING] Lesbian Chinese Billionaires, Meng Mei Qi and Wu Xuan Yi, marry. Making them the richest couple alive. pic.twitter.com/IEoMunC6s4 — abby (@Iuvizone) April 26, 2017

“I tweeted it with a blank mind,” Rine told the Cut over Twitter DM. “I don’t even know how it reached the local Twitter in the first place! (“Local Twitter,” as a teen recently told The Verge, refers to social media users who “like mainstream stuff and are probably uneducated on certain topics.”)

When asked why she had chosen these two K-pop stars in particular, Rine stressed that Yves and Chuu have “one of the most beautiful stories in the Loonaverse,” a term used by fans to refer to an elaborate and very confusing plot that plays out obliquely in Loona music videos. “Chuu yearns for Yves,” she explained, and then urged me to watch the video for “Heart Attack.”

Maybe two lesbian Korean billionaires didn’t join together to become the richest couple alive, but Chuu and Yves’s relationship in the Loonaverse sounds cute as hell!