Why Being a Kpop Stan is Hell
I am a former kpop stan, luckily I managed to recover and get myself out of there.
This is my experience of being a kpop stan.
It started simply, I was curious about BTS. I looked up stuff about them for a while, just a casual fan, and I didn't really know what was going on.
Then I got sucked into RPS (Real person shipping) specifically taekook analysis videos. I was very invested, and I thought they were really together. Through these videos I also came to learn more about the group itself and more of their songs.
This helped bridge the gap between "casual fan" and "hardcore fan", and at some point I started keeping up with their current activities.
I took in what the stans said. "You gotta work hard for your faves by streaming" "BTS are authentic and other groups are trash". "Liking BTS makes you a better person than those who don't."
I can tell you that everything you think about Stan twitter is true. I saw it all. I wish I could forget it. I was on twitter during my every moment free moment. I was so brainwashed that I ignored the fact that Stan twitter had had an ideology that I'd always been opoosed to. It did stress me out, but at the time I was so overwhelmed with content and tweets that I couldn't even think about it. My only goal in life was to be a good, loyal stan.
That's who I was at that time, a shell of my former self. I had abandoned who I was. I would stop everything I was doing to watch Vlives. I stayed up from 12am to 6am to watch an award show where BTS would perform for 5 minutes.
I was stressed, but I thought it was excitement. I just couldn't recognise it. I burnt out after a year and quit stanning. Somehow though, I ended up missing them, so after 6 months I started watching their content again, but this time I stopped using twitter and relied on reddit for updates.
Over the following couple of years, I still followed them, though I wasn't on twitter I had the unconscious belief that I had to follow most of what they did.
I feel like most of my interest in them finally left when Jin entered the military. It didn't devastate me or anything, i just felt kinda done after that.
There's also the fact they they ended up becoming even busier when military enlistment started, pumping out so many solo albums in a short amount of time. If I was still hardcore stanning them at that time I would've been exhausted.
I also realized that I didn't like a lot of their music. I preferred listening to the music I'd liked since before I got into kpop. I was somewhat deluding myself, making me think I liked all their songs when they have some hot garbage, especially the rap line (sorry rap fans but I think rap is trash music)
Kpop stans will support any release even if they don't like it, because it's not about the music. And if you don't like a release it means you hate the group (Even if the group had nothing to do with the music, which is most kpop groups)
If you value yourself, do NOT become a kpop stan!