I think everyone who's followed me since my Star Wars days knows this already, but I am not watching That Show (Ahsoka), I don't want to hear about it, I don't want to talk about it, I have everything related to it blacklisted (including "star wars" right now), I will probably unfortunately still know what's happening in it, but like...please do not come try to talk to me about it. No not even about [insert whatever exception you think counts here]. "But what about --" No. Leave me alone about it, I don't want to know, I don't go here anymore, the happiest day of my fandom life was the day I broke up with Star Wars. If you were not around then this sounds overly dramatic but it was Really Really Bad.
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I don't call myself army, just a music fan, like to follow grown up fans of kpop and other groups and honestly up until now I thought your characterization of kpop fans and multis behavior to BTS was very one-sided and overblown. But now I'd like to offer you an apology Bpp. I keep up with a bunch of kpop podcasts run by kpop fans and black women and I follow this 30+ black woman whose whole shtick is being in kpop for vibes, not engaging in fanwars and overall being above the gross behavior from immature racist armys. So imagine my horror when I open my Twitter today and the first thing I see is this:
https://twitter.com/SideShowShit/status/1647483768423464961?s=20
My heart is so heavy and burdened by this I don't even know where to start bpp. Just last week I saw a Shinee/taemin/multi fan say the hate against Jimin should 'show give those armys a taste of what they do' when Jimin has been the target of overwhelming hate from the same shinee fans since his debut. I'm thinking to just leave kpop completely because this kind of brain rot in adults over nothing makes me depressed as fuck. I sympathize more with armys now more than ever. I love Jimin and don't want to stop actively following him. How do you deal with all this hate? Seriously how do you do it?
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Hi Anon,
Your link.
Abridged answer: "I got no worries because you can't stop me lovin' myself" - reference linked here. :)
Long-form answer:
Like I've said before, if you've managed to make your way to the podcast side of k-pop stan environments you already have my condolences lmao. I won't state the exact reasons for that here but you're already experiencing a few of those reasons it seems.
That user is actually familiar to me - she's a black woman who works in the US entertainment industry, Hollywood to be exact, in a semi-administrative role. That person is a Blink who runs in the same circles as Ash - a k-pop writer/podcaster and multi in the US; Carrie - an Exol and Shawol in Toronto who writes K-drama/film reviews; Tamar - a Jewish Blink and multi who is a k-pop journalist; and a bunch of other k-pop writers, journalists, DJs, and otherwise 'grown-ups in k-pop' who can't seem to speak even in a neutral capacity about BTS, let alone ARMY, despite many of them deriving their livelihoods from the spread of k-pop in the West spearheaded in a large part by BTS. It's partly why ARMYs are extremely skeptical of k-pop journalism because oftentimes these content creators, journalists or reviewers are just stans of other groups with barely concealed animus for BTS. And also why the quality of critical conversations in k-pop fandom is so poor. I mean, how can you trust the opinion of an adult Black woman who should intimately know the implications of racism, calling Jimin, Oli London, unprovoked? It's all so comical but also kinda tragic lol.
You sent me this ask just as I was publishing this post so perhaps you hadn't yet seen what I've said about the dominant behaviours of k-pop stans in fandom.
I understand how painful it is to see things like that but I suggest you ignore them, report and block the account if it bothers you that much, but otherwise focus on celebrating Jimin and the things you love about him. I keep saying that hate does nothing but create more of the same. Many of the people who belong to rival fandoms, especially the fandoms that have a history of being abusive to BTS and ARMY since as far back as 2014, including fans of Shinee, EXO, Beast, Super Junior, and since 2018, BlackPink, many of the people in those fandoms default to hating anything connected to BTS, and it fascinates me even now how it's like a social contagion.
If seeing opinions like that really distress you, it's okay to step back from k-pop completely. In fact I recommend it for people who tend to get really emotionally connected to the artists they support, because none of those people are going to learn to do better, and chances are you could begin mirroring their behaviour if you get too attached. I'm friends with many people from those fandoms because they've known me since before I became ARMY, they know what I think, value, and tolerate, and they share the same values as me. But a few of those friends have been sort of 'excommunicated' from their fandoms because they refuse to engage in the hate towards BTS, and this happens far more often than you think.
I write as much as I do about this topic because I get it. Nobody wants to see shit like that. But at the same time, those sentiments towards Jimin and BTS have always existed and Jimin is still happy, thriving, more concerned with knowing what his fans think about his music, so if he's the reason you're here, then focus on him.
For me it's really that simple.
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Okay my fellow ADHDers or whatever else is up with your brains that makes it hard for you to study and study on time and study in a way that you actually remember stuff:
How do you get yourself to actually sit down and study? For me, the "oh shit deadline/exam soon, we can focus for a bit in emergency mode" hasn't worked in a long time now, which leads me now to an exam last week or so I put off to February and another one I would have tomorrow that I'm almost positive I won't go to because I never was in the lecture (clashed with another mandatory one) and only just now downloaded the stuff the professor provided, and I'm about ready to fall asleep so I know I won't manage it in time anymore anyway. And I have two other things I'd need done by tomorrow and I already know I'll cry during christmas break because of being overwhelmed not only because of staying at my parents' and missing my friends but mostly because I'll be overwhelmed at the prospect of January coming up with all the presentations and exams etc etc to get done, next to preparing for my main translation exams in February and getting started on my thesis.
So. HOW do you sit down and actually make yourself study? I came home at 7:30pm today, it's now 3:40am and I'm queuing this so that someone might see and have some sort of advice, because in that time I have finished one sentence of a translation that I'd been putting off for two weeks - ONE sentence - and revised the translation but like, very half-assed. I did not study for the exam although it was RIGHT THERE in my brain the whole time and I KNEW it was the most important thing and still, my brain just went kinda "eh 🤷🏼♀️" and I naturally didn't get my bills or even something I'd enjoy doing done. Just did fuck all for several hours that I swear didn't feel that long.
So, yeah, any advice on how to get yourself to actually START working and then sticking with it would be very much appreciated.
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god i know that complaining abt fic which most of you haven't read, and which i won't, for politeness' sake, identify in this post, is a great way to come across as both dickish and boring—
but i've been rereading a very long, very satisfyingly plotty series that's a fandom darling and the thing is, when you read like 400k of an author's work at once it really starts to become painfully apparent what their priorities are, by which i mean two things:
holy shit they're obsessed with 'what if strong powerful men who could hurt you didn't (but did hurt Bad Guys) (and it was sexy of them),' which leads into
holy shit they do not appear to have thought through the implications of saying 'i will have my heroes take over the same power structures that have enabled abuse, make no real changes to those structures other than swapping out the leadership, and then claim that everything is wonderful now bc Good Men Are In Charge'??
like. i don't necessarily need every passing fantasy to present me with a coherent, revolutionary system of politics and ethics—sometimes things are just fun and sexy and not especially Examined and that's fine!—but by the time someone's written literally almost half a million words, and done a lot of worldbuilding while they were at it, i am going to start squinting if they seem to think a Good Man can e.g. become an emperor by killing off the leadership of multiple countries and installing puppet kings loyal to him and still remain a Good Man, even if the justification was that the original leadership was maltreating its citizens and deserved to be extrajudicially executed. like. this shit was a bad, autocratic move when the US did it in real life and it's still bad now that you're having our mutual blorbo do it in fiction!
and that's not even getting into the whole thing where like. they've got servants who the Good Man and his friends ""treat well"" but who very much remain second-class citizens in terms of how the story actually frames them and their concerns. [this was also a huge issue i had with foz m*adows' most recent book—everyone wants to write about fantasy nobles but they also want to make them good people and it's like. honestly i think it might be better to get comfortable writing about flawed people, but also—if your aristos aren't treating their servants like equals and your text isn't either, you haven't actually cracked the Moral Aristo paradox, sorry!] like, there's nothing that says your story has to depict a fully Healed World, nor should there be! but it's troubling if you seem to be convinced you've written one (and have your wide-eyed love interests constantly marveling at it!) when you very patently haven't.
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