Top 5 Misconceptions About K-POP Fans
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5 Thoughts Every International K-Pop fan Wishes You Knew

Can I just like something without being "obsessed?"

Kianna Nelson
Sep 28, 2018
Alpharetta, Georgia
216
5 Thoughts Every International K-Pop fan Wishes You Knew
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There are many misconceptions that people have when they find out that you like K-Pop or Korean TV. Time and time again we to have to break down why you like K-POP or how you can like something that you don't understand. All of this explaining is extremely tiring and a lot of us international fans are fed up.

We do NOT want to be Korean

Although there are some individuals who pretend to be 15% Korean and speaks broken Korean as if they aren't disrespecting an entire culture, the rest of us just like the music and the entertainment behind it all. There are so many extra features that K-pop offers that mainstream American music artists don't such as music shows, TV shows, and live streams. Learning about a culture does not mean eradicating your own from your life.

Listening to a language non-stop does not make us fluent

This statement, in particular, applies anytime you might here an East Asian language and ask me if I could understand it as if all east Asian people speak the same language. As much I binge watch Korean dramas and listen to every album that BTS produces, I'm far from fluent in the language. You do pick up common phrases, but I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't even survive a day in a foreign country if all that I could speak was "hello" and "that's good."

We are more than "obsessed" K-pop fans

We all have different qualities about us. There are probably a million other things that you could say to describe us when introducing us to strangers other than "she/he's obsessed with K-Pop and Korean culture." That not only makes us seem like a one-dimensional person, but it also makes people think that we fetishize and fantasize about anyone Asian. That's weird.

Yes. We listen to the music even though we don't understand it.

It still amazes me how this is such a hard concept to grasp when everyone I knew and didn't know would sing "Despacito" as if it was the national anthem. To us, the music sounds good and the music videos help us to understand what type of song they are singing. Music and art transcend cultures, and it has for generations. You don't have to understand something to appreciate it.

We don't all want to marry a Korean person

I'm not going to lie, the K-pop idols are very visually appealing, but it is very weird to base your future marriage upon that. It makes it seem as though we think that all Korean people are the same, which is far from true. Whether or not we marry a Korean person, it wouldn't be based on purely looks.

To sum it all together, we like K-pop because we think that it's cool and interesting. We don't like it because we want to be Korean or we are obsessed with their looks. Liking K-pop doesn't distance us from our culture, nor does it make us fetishize Korean people. At the end of the day, we all just want to have fun.

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