HOW I GOT RADICALIZED
I’m Not Rich Enough for K-Pop Fandom
Stan culture exposed how my loyalty to bands was measured by how much merch I could — or couldn’t — afford
Welcome to “How I Got Radicalized,” a new series at GEN that tells a story about a cultural moment that made you drastically rethink how society works.
If fandoms are meant to bring a tight-knit community together around a shared devotion, the irony is that for much of my life, stan culture made me feel like an outsider. As a lost young teen from Long Island in search of an escape, I fell hard for boy bands like One Direction in the 2010s, indoctrinating myself into the group’s fan base as a fully-fledged “Directioner.” But soon, the obnoxious whiteness of the famed fandom became overwhelming. Fans often used racial slurs and viciously defended the band when members were caught using the N-word — many fans flooded my inbox with name-calling and slurs when I dared to speak out. One Direction itself often illustrated the bland mediocrity of Western pop culture that’s wildly popular in ways that felt unearned. As Zayn, the only non-white member of the band, said in a 2015 interview with Fader, the genre was “generic as f***.”
