K-Bops in K-Pop

One thing that I’ve kind of touched on a few times is the friends that I’ve made as a result of listening to Kpop. I think I mentioned it in passing in my Wings Concert Tour Experience and I’ve probably talked about it when I talk about how grateful I am to BTS, but I wanted to go a little more in-depth with this topic. After ending the week last week on such a serious note, I’d like to do something a little lighter and talk about the friends I’ve made as a result of Kpop.

Tumblr beginnings

My two main forms of communication when I first entered the world of Kpop were really Tumblr and Facebook. As Facebook became an outdated social cluster where your extended family could keep tabs on you, I migrated over to Tumblr. On Tumblr is really where my love for Kpop flourished, largely because I had so much access to content from a variety of different sources. On Tumblr, Kpop fans could post gifs, translations of interviews, subs for videos, and pictures of their merch all in one place. It made it easy to build a community for myself.

Even though a lot of my friends when I first became a Kpop fan were EXO-Ls, it was actually a pretty great segue for BTS. That was because–not to throw shade–EXO-Ls seemed to always have beef with ARMYs and I slowly realized that the people I was surrounding myself with were not that positive and not quite as unified of a community as I wanted.

So as I slowly grew to love BTS more and more, I started to follow more BTS blogs and I built a new community with ARMYs. There, I found the support and friendship that I hadn’t been able to before and I found that they were far more accepting of other communities than the group I’d been a part of before. (That’s not to say that all EXO-Ls are like this. But the particular group of EXO-Ls that I had gotten to know had been like this. Just to be clear.)

Peach migration

Then Peach came along and, for some unknown reason, Kpop fans migrated to it without looking back. There was an influx of users and a time where Tumblr was desolate and filled with tumbleweeds as people flocked to make Peach a thing.

There was really where I established my really close friendships with other fans. The Peach community was not exclusive but it was much more personal than any other social media platform I’d ever used. There was a sense that if you added someone on Peach, you had to interact with them or it would be rude. This made you decide who you actually wanted to keep and you could get away with deleting.

Where are we now?

Peach may be largely obsolete now, but I still retain a lot of the friends that I found there. We all sort of found a home on Twitter for the time being because of the flexibility and immediacy that we liked about Peach–although with a little more distance–but the funny thing was that we all stuck together. Most of my friends on Twitter I’ve never actually met in real life (with a few exceptions thanks to Wings Tour) but I still feel incredibly close to them. We send each other gifts, we Rabbit when we can, and we keep in touch nearly everyday. It is, well and truly, a family.

Shout-out to my lovely friends that I’ve met through BTS and other Kpop groups, you are honestly one of the best parts of my life.

Have you made any friends thanks to Kpop? Leave a comment and let me know!