Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It

by Kaitlyn Tiffany

The way that the media describes fans “tends to go from one extreme to the other,” she said. “It’s either hormonal oversexed teenagers to the polar opposite, Oh, they’re politically savvy! They’re activists! That doesn’t capture the culture or the fandom any more than the derisive or derogatory take.” Though, of course, many K-pop fans were participating sincerely in the Black Lives Matter movement, Morimoto felt it was somewhat overlooked that this was “an event that made particularly good use of skills that they happened to have, because they’re cultivated within that fandom.” It didn’t mean that K-pop fans were suddenly the most politically active people in the world; it meant that K-pop fans were the best in the world at flooding social media with easily repeated messages. “There’s nothing intrinsic about K-pop fandom that makes it somehow more socially aware,” she said. “It had everything to do with the material contexts of how that fandom plays out.”