Day 75: the surreality of the underlying metaphor

[freckles_and_doubt]

Well, my long years of hopeless fangirliness are certainly coming to a middle, which, it turns out, is useful amid the current geo-political ramifications. Clearly all these years of internet addiction, geekery and hanging out in fan spaces have been conspiring to prime me for the cultural moment in which it is essential to have a working understanding of the term "k-pop stans" in order to parse one aspect of the latest American political melt-down. Also, "#JUNGKOOK is the bat signal now".

(For those lacking the specific cultural context I have painstakingly acquired over years of dedicated frivolity: k-pop is Korean pop, which has a huge, vociferous, global, mostly young and female fandom with a highly communal concentration on Twitter and Instagram; a "stan" is an ultra-fan, or also a verb - to stan, to be slavishly devoted to/approving of. The Dallas police, hiss spit, incautiously advertised an app where you could submit videos of protestors doing naughty things, whereupon the k-pop fandom descended en masse and flooded it with fan videos, forcing it to shut down. They have followed a similar process in overwhelming nasty Twitter tags like #whitelivesmatter and other alt-right bullshit, flooding out the hatespeech so you can't find it among the joyous memes, videos and images of their k-pop idols. K-pop idols tend rather decoratively to the young male androgynous end of things, which I have to say must steam the homophobic right even further, heh. The most recent tweet I've seen was someone invoking the #jungkook hashtag to direct k-pop fans to spam Trump's twitter for his birthday. I live in hope.)

I am digesting my political news largely via social media, mostly Tumblr and Twitter and their wayward provision of links, and my curatorship of my feeds means I have a very left-leaning view of America's current horrors, but even so I am reeling slightly. It looks awful out there, in a bleakly inevitable sort of way, and I hope those of you who are unavoidably domiciled in the US are keeping safe, and sane. And that all this awful gives rise to something hopeful in the way of reform. And more instances in the k-pop category: people finding common ground in the unlikely Venn diagram overlap of hugely disparate groups whose point of coalescence is rooted in love for something rather than hatred.

#black lives matter.

Comments

surreality of metaphors coming to a middle

[torquetum]

respectful applause for dotting fandom injokes into your post illustrating the usefulness of intersectionality of fandoms

clapclapclap

I shall inform the young, female k-pop (more Felix than Jungkook, though) stan in my household of this interesting development. She'll appreciate it.

Re: surreality of metaphors coming to a middle

[freckles_and_doubt]

weirdly, there was never a conscious decision to pepper the post with fandom injokes, but I cannot deny the incidence is even higher than usual. I think my subconscious did it. I am happy to think you have a k-pop stan on tap to dissect where necessary. I am possibly overly delighted to report that the k-pop activity on nasty spaces has been joined by the furries, to general acclaim (except, obviously, by the alt-right), so it's clearly Fandom Movements Usually Deemed Irritating Instead Being Validated By Normies week.