saw this thread earlier and decided to share

A really really long reflection 3/3

The riveting conclusion of my fucking multipart essays examining BTS/ARMYs in recent months, stan culture, and discussions of race within pop culture. In my conclusion, I’m gonna state my opinion on a recent incident that sparked this series.

Part one I went through a brief history of Asian/Asian American representation in American pop culture and the rise of kpop into the mainstream.

Part two went further into detail about the rise of BTS and their activities and the growing toxicity of the ARMY fandom.

Now we are currently in this timeline at 2018.

Before I continue with the history lesson, I’m gonna make a very important distinction here between the typical ARMY and what I’ll be calling an ARMY tribalist. The typical ARMY makes up the majority of the fandom: they follow BTS on social media, interact with the group’s posts and with other fans, stream MVs, vote for them on award shows and typical dedicated fan behavior. An ARMY tribalist takes the usual activities and behaviors and multiplies them in intensity to a million. A tribalist will put the fandom/group over everything else; over logic, over reason, over disagreement. Their loyalties are to their group of choice. Anyone can be a tribalist for a certain fandom that they are in, it’s not exclusive to ARMYs, or kpop in general. There’s Ariana Grande tribalists, DC tribalists, My Little Pony tribalists...the list goes on. So, I want to say that I don’t think all ARMYs act the same way the tribalists do, but the tribalists are the most active and the most vocal of the fandom and have influence over the average fan.

Now let’s get back to 2018. BTS had finished a wildly successful year in the United States. Thanks in part to their recent appearances at American award shows, stores such as Walmart, Target, and Barnes and Noble began selling their latest album, Love Yourself: Her. BTS merch also started to drop in Hot Topic. LYH had record sales for the group and for a kpop group in general thanks to this new audience or in part to loyal fans having access to buy albums without paying for overseas shipping. 

Despite this, scandal wouldn’t be too far behind. In May of that year, an article was published that discussed black ARMYs who were receiving racially targeted harassment from others within the fandom. Acts such as whitewashing selfies, making jokes about slavery, and calling them slurs were highlighted in the article. BTS/Bighit Entertainment were asked for their comments on the matter, but as of February 2019, there has been no public statement issued regarding this. 

The rest of 2018 was perhaps BTS’ biggest year: they were featured on the cover of TIME magazine, spoke in front of the United Nations as representatives for Unicef and their “Love Yourself” Campaign, released Love Yourself: Tear and Love Yourself: Answer to record breaking numbers, and had major shows in the United States for their Love Yourself Tour. Understandably, ARMYs were very proud of their favorite group.

As early as mid-2017, some ARMYs felt as though American media/artists did not take BTS seriously or were only using them for clout or extra attention. Pop culture tends to focus on whatever is popular at the moment, BTS being a popular group and kpop being a popular trend, of course American media outlets would pay special attention to kpop (although many outlets had covered kpop, though in smaller occurrences way before 2017). These outlets do need to make money at the end of the day and simply cannot be personally invested in every single thing they discuss. With that being said, I personally think it isn’t entirely impossible that some artists actually do like BTS/kpop. Kpop is appreciated worldwide by all sorts, so it doesn’t seem too out of line that celebrities do too. But obviously, it is music business, and some moves are only made to attract a new audience, which is fine. The fans also benefit from this newfound American fame BTS has: physical albums being sold in stores, more stops on their American tour, seeing them on a local television time at a reasonable time, merchandise at local stores. Of course, all of these benefit the providers because they get money, but that is the trade off of capitalism.

As I said, scandal continued within the ARMY fandom in 2018. With the release of his solo debut album, ARMY tribalists posted a fake translation of one of Mino’s songs with the lyric “baby girl” and accused the rapper from YG Entertainment group Winner of being a pedophile. Girl group Momoland was caught on camera laughing at something during an award show and Jimin coincidentally was singing at the time, ARMY tribalists took this as the girls were making fun of Jimin and proceeded to relentlessly attack the group to the point where they had to turn off Instagram comments for a time. The harassment of black ARMYs had not stopped and while some showed support for them, the fandom made major efforts to not let the group see it. ****** Trigger Warning: Suicide, Death ******  In December of 2017, SHINee member Jonghyun had committed suicide. It was a tragic day for SHINee World across the globe and many fandoms showed their support. Majority of ARMYs also showed support during this time, however, tribalists took the opportunity as a time to make jokes. This would become an ongoing theme in many other tragedies, that ARMY tribalists would be disrespectful and makes jokes about the recently deceased.

These are not all the scandals that ARMY tribalists were involved in 2018, but these are the most egregious to me.

And now we are in the present day. I’ll lightly touch on the incident that inspired this reflection and then get to my final thoughts. On February 12th, anonymous opinion blog, unpopularkpopopinions, had published a submitted opinion that stated “I feel like army created this bubble for bts where bts is huge in the west when in reality the american shows they were on aren’t difficult to get on, every meme these days can get on ellen so that’s not really an achievement, those interviews were all awkward and I couldn’t shake off the feeling that bts were simply weird asian gimmicks for the american audience, something they can’t and won’t understand but it’s weird enough to get views.” Initially, most users, who were regular followers to the blog, agreed with the opinion to varying degrees and the conversation seemed to have hit its point. However, on the 14th, the post started gaining traction once more with tons more notes. A disgruntled ARMY had reposted the opinion on Twitter, which attracted a new group to the post. Most ARMYs kept their response to Twitter with tweets such as “just ignore it and let’s prove them wrong next comeback,” but others took to the post itself to respond. 

The common points for contention were 1. The American shows BTS were on weren’t difficult to get on and 2. BTS being seen as an “Asian gimmick.” The common arguments were “if it’s so easy to get on Ellen, how come your faves weren’t on?” and “Calling them an Asian gimmick? That’s racist, OP. This blog and anyone who agrees is also racist.” I won’t repost my entire response to the argument, but here were my main points: “ “America uses BTS for clout” is something I’ve mostly seen ARMYs say. Which clout is the wrong term because BTS doesn’t have Drake or Beyonce levels of clout; they are being used for clicks, engagement, whatever, which is reasonable since America is a capitalistic economy and if there’s a demand or an untapped market (rabid kpop fans) then it makes sense to exploit that. Most people realize that. The whole “Asian gimmick” bit that is what most of y’all are here for. If you literally read very closely, OP said “[they] couldn’t shake off the feeling that BTS were simply weird Asian gimmicks for the American audience.” It doesn’t say that they think BTS is a weird Asian gimmick, it says that from the interviews and other things BTS did in America, they had a feeling, a vibe if you will, that the American audience only SEES them as Asian gimmicks. You can agree or disagree with that point however you’d like, but y’all are claiming that this is how OP and others in the notes feel when that simply ain’t it.” And I stand by those points and I believe what I said earlier on in this post supports my point. It’s also hypocritical that just months ago, ARMYs were basically saying the same thing that this opinion did, but now it’s racist to point out that BTS are being used and the racist attitudes behind it.

So there it is, the ENTIRE timeline and build up. What are my thoughts? I think ARMY tribalists are the fucking worst. I think the fandom has a lot of hypocrisy going on, particularly within discussions about race. Why is it that CupcakKe is only looking for attention or that BTS shouldn’t see their black fans being bullied by fellow fans or that any artist of color who works with BTS just wants clout but as soon as someone points out that American audiences may only see the group as an Asian gimmick, that that is a serious racist attack? Why is it that people cannot point out that the group has done racially insensitive things in their past? Because tribe goes first. Not saying that those who agree with one, agree with all, but it is still a problem nonetheless.

I think fandom culture can very very easily feed into tribalism, especially in kpop. BTS in particular have so much content, that one could easily become obsessed within a matter of a day. From music videos, variety shows, fanfiction, fanart and edits, web series, merchandise, albums, and video games, I find it not too hard to believe that an ARMY tribalist only interacts with fellow ARMYs on the regular basis. I also think Bighit Entertainment is a rather shit company for never speaking up/allowing BTS to speak up on these issues especially since BTS are supposed to be anti-bullying ambassadors. 

If you’ve made it this far, congratulations! I’m fucking tired. Do I still like BTS? Yes. I was just listening to Outro: Tear (the best outro in the LY series btw) as I was writing this and I think the group themselves are nice and talented. Do I hate all ARMYs? No. The fandom is too big to hate the millions of them, but I do find myself very very tired of them (and I’m sure they’re tired of An tiS like me). I’m just so fucking tired of all this bullshit with the fandom that I had to write down all my thoughts.

Part One

Part Two