How to Cover K-pop Fandom With the Seriousness It Deserves
People want to understand K-pop stans after their contributions to the Black Lives Matter movement. The first rule: They are not a monolith.
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On Monday, the Korean boy group Tomorrow X Together (TXT) was interviewed by Good Day New York anchor Rosanna Scotto about their upcoming performance at the KCON:TACT festival. Toward the end of the exchange, Scotto posed a question that seemed to catch them off guard:
“Do you know anything about that whole movement of TikTok users and K-pop fans getting tickets to President Trump’s rally and then not showing up?” she asked.
After the five members of TXT traded wide-eyed, befuddled glances, one of the bandmates, Yeonjun, responded diplomatically in his non-native English: “Yeah, we don’t know anything. We’re just preparing for KCON:TACT, and, yeah, we were practicing.”
Scotto was quickly criticized by fans and concerned onlookers for asking a group of young musicians to answer for a larger political moment in which they were not involved. But her question represents part of a massive issue, one in which mainstream media has by and large overlooked the realities of K-pop and stan Twitter and now appears ill-equipped to address or report on either.
It is a tenuous moment for K-pop stans. Right-wing talking heads now accuse fans of the genre of at once being South and North Korean foreign interference agents and claim their social media accounts are in fact bots. And online leftists often deem them mindless supporters of capitalist entertainment — a charge that could easily extend to fans of other music in other countries.
If the media—seeing stans’ propensity to shut down police apps, sabotage Trump rallies, and spread awareness of issues through Twitter—finally wishes to cover the enigmatic communities it has never taken seriously up until now, it will need to learn a few things immediately rather than continue to speculate on stans’ values based on shallow, brief forays into the subculture.
