Wow! This took a little longer than I thought to introduce myself, and I will be introducing my interest in Boys Love in the next thread, before tying it all together with my work and current dissertation. 😊😊😊.

I began to explore this seriously when BTS began to be offered opportunities to speak at the UN, as well as their involvement in issues that arose during the pandemic, including the most recent meeting at the white house to address Asian hate crimes.

This coincided with BTS' break into the mainstream US market, which had me think about the overlaps between my work and interest. I have been studying queer & trans Asian experiences in the US, and I thought BTS' presence may offer alt explorations of identities in the US/"west".

Eventually though, I came back to K-pop. I first found EXO, and then fell deep into BTS' discography. Save Me was really the song that led me back to listening and watching K-pop again, as it sounded really different from the previous groups I listened to in my teenage years.

When I left for US, I stopped listening and watching K-pop for a while, in part because it was hard to find offline communities of fans at that time and I was also just trying to adapt to being in the US.

Growing up in SE Asia, I have been a long-time fan of K-pop! I have really grew up with many of the second-gen groups (e.g. DBSK, f(x), B2ST, Big Bang) and they were really important to my teenage years where I found friends and communities through stanning these groups. 😊😊😊.

Hello~ As I am working on my dissertation on fans, fandoms, and fan communities, I am using my twitter account as a way to document my thoughts, process, methodologies, and analyses. Before I share all of those though, I also wanted to introduce myself, so here we go~~!.