Why BTS’s Jin, RM, V, Suga, Jungkook, Jimin, and J-Hope Weren’t at the 2026 MTV VMAs
2 min readTHE RUNDOWN
- BTS wasn’t at the MTV VMAs tonight.
- Jin, RM, V, Suga, Jungkook, Jimin, and J-Hope will continue their Arirang World Tour in Colombia on October 2.
- They were nominated for three VMAs this year.
BTS’s Jin, RM, V, Suga, Jungkook, Jimin, and J-Hope are days away from resuming their Arirang World Tour in Bogotá, Colombia, on October 2. Understandably, with their concerts about to begin again in South America, the band wasn’t seen at this evening’s MTV VMAs in Los Angeles.
BTS was nominated for Best Group, while their song “Swim” was up for Song of the Year and Best K-pop.
The boys began their tour in Goyang, South Korea, this April. They did their U.S. shows from late April to September. Their most recent performance was at Los Angeles’s SoFi Stadium on September 6.
In April, the group spoke to Rolling Stone about their comeback after all seven members finished their mandatory military service in Korea.
As they started making the album, the group confronted their relationship with fame. J-Hope shared his feelings then, telling the outlet that he asked himself, “Is getting all this love and attention actually a good thing? Maybe while everyone is clapping and cheering for me, I should just turn it all off. And I wondered whether I wanted this. All I had was a tiny flame inside of me, and it had just spread like wildfire. I felt a lot of pressure around that.”
He, like the others, chose to continue his public career creating art. “I realized it’s probably not something I can stop just because I want to stop it,” J-Hope said. “Personally, I’m very affected by the people around me, so I have to think about whether I can handle the emotional effect my decisions will have on so many others. In the end, I felt that keeping the flame burning is what I truly want, and the choice that’s most authentically me.”
Suga added that he always knew BTS would continue making music together. “There’s no way for me to know everyone’s individual thoughts and desires,” he prefaced, “but we all went solo because we couldn’t work in a group at the time. So before going into the military, I knew we were always gonna get back together. But I can see how it could be surprising from a foreign perspective. But for us, staying together just felt obvious. So, nobody really had opinions about that. I just thought, ‘Yeah, of course we’re doing this.’”