As someone who unwittingly fell in the K-pop rabbit hole last year around this time, I have come to learn a lot of things. There are somethings you just won’t understand unless you love K-pop. I remember bumbling around not really understanding what a ‘stan,’ ‘bias’ or ‘comeback’ was. After falling for these people who reside on a different continent, I felt the need to share my experiences with some others who may understand the struggle of being a fan of Korean pop music, but not really knowing the language.
Face blindness is an actual thing! I’ve read before that it is actually very common for people who aren’t familiar with a people group to think they all look similar. It can be frustrating when you’re trying to say how your favorite guy in your favorite group is so good looking and your friend says he looks just like the other members. Try not to get too upset, they genuinely don’t see the difference!
Every non-closeted K-pop fan has had an experience like this. They think they’re being funny, you think you want to choke them. Don’t fret, everyone has that one thing (or many things) they like that other people just won’t understand.
International fans will definitely relate to this one. Most of us can’t read Korean even though we sometimes follow artists almost religiously. On social media we keep up with their updates, but the automatically generated translation never really makes much sense.
Because automatic translations suck, we often struggle to find songs or videos with accurate subtitles and good quality audio/visual. The excitement people who don’t speak Korean feel is near comparable to the feeling a Korean fan may get when they go to a concert. If any international fan got to go to a concert, it would be another level of emotions.
This meme is only partly true. Any true K-pop fan knows that even if you don’t speak Korean, you will try to sing along syllabically and rhythmically to the best of your ability. One may even look up and memorize lyrics to songs they listen to on a regular basis.
I personally relate to this one a lot. I stan BTS (meaning that I am a big fan). I watch their videos and rewatch their videos, but really you can put any K-pop group here and the reaction is the same. I’ll reward myself after finishing my work with K-pop, but then I find that the next day I don’t really recall much. Brain. Wrecked.
*cough* every international fan *cough*
Haha. Yeah, we know we probably spend too much time obsessing over people that we may never meet and will never know about us, but it can’t really be helped. Some K-pop groups will just snatch away your soul and you really can’t escape them.
Look, let’s be honest, we get excited about them being in our country even if we live on the other side of the country from where they are going to be. Most of us either can’t see them due to location or ticket costs. When BTS went on the Ellen and Jimmy Kimmel Live, you best believe I was dying inside. Don’t even talk about the AMAs, they only performed one song, but I was on a high the whole night.
Ha, the joke here, for all you non K-poppers, is that EXO (EXOplanet), has two teams within the one group. EXO-K and EXO-M. EXO-K stands for EXO Korean, which- as you may guess- means that they sing in Korean and their performances are mainly in Korea. EXO-M stands for EXO Mandarin- they release songs in Chinese. So here, if someone is tired of Korean songs, one can always turn on Chinese versions of the same songs. When no one else gets it, it’s okay to dance alone. Once you see the dance enough, you have it memorized enough to do the movements. You go do your dance. We won’t stop you. There’s always some tension when someone has the same bias (favorite artist) as you. I’m not sure why. Really the person does not belong to either of us, but we feel possessive as if we were dating them. One who doesn’t watch videos of K-pop artists would not really understand this. Often times, our bias choices are influenced by how we see them interacting with the world online. Social media really does make us feel like we know these people.
As mentioned before, social media makes us feel closer with these idols that have millions of fans. As one starts to feel closer to an artist or group of artists, it feels more natural to call them by their actual names. It is kind of cringey to call them by their stage names when you can call them “taetae” and “joonie.”
Image Credit: Cover Photo Credit, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13.