Peak Performative Activism: K-pop Edition

By Jae-Ha Kim
Substack
April 23, 2024

Hello everybody! This will be a short one because I got sick at the tail end of my recent trip and am still taking things easy.

The past two weekends were big ones for three Korean music groups. The indie rock band The Rose performed on both Sundays at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. The girl group LE SSERAFIM played both Saturdays. And with their April 12 appearance (followed by another set this past Friday), ATEEZ made music history by becoming the first K-pop boy band to perform at the popular music fest.

Caught up in the excitement, I sent out a fun, innocuous little tweet:

And this was someone’s response:

😂 First of all, I am cringy. So? I don’t know if this person believes that I somehow escaped Logan’s Run to make it to 40 (BTW, thank you for thinking I’m 40), but what a crass attitude. Getting older isn’t a gift that everyone gets. And if you like music when you are 20, you’ll most likely like music at 30, and 40, and 50, and 60 and so on.

And it’s always the same: The people who can’t read or, if they can, who can’t comprehend the written word are the first ones to go off. When other people commented on this person’s weak reasoning skills, they doubled down and equated my relaying a wholesome anecdote with sexualizing a non-existent 20 year old in the group. They then resorted to name calling, referring to me and anyone else they thought might be a woman as a hag.

Oh, sweetie, that’s so 13th century. You may as well just call us pisse-mires.

Anyhow, this all leads me to the other day when another kind of troll emerged. You know what I’m talking about —the performative activist who pretends that they’re concerned about others and wants to protect them from, well, me!

The reaction was 99.99% favorable.

But there was the contingent that decided a post about UNICEF would be a great place to kickstart a hate campaign, because, of course it was!

And this is pretty much how all trolls begin their campaigns to harass people. Pretend to be helpful by declaring a lie as a fact and then take it from there. It’s so rote at this point that it just feels like Groundhog’s Day. It’s virtually the same commentary each and every time.

Then, too, is the oddly perverse comments from the trolls saying that I blocked them from my feed. If I did, so what? But here’s the thing, I just checked. While I use the mute button judiciously…

…This is what my block list looks like:

I could sit here and defend myself from every weirdo’s accusation, but why bother? At the end of the day, everyone will choose to believe what they want to. And the undesirables will continue to drum up fabricated and/or out-of-context “receipts” to suit their agenda. Never mind that those receipts would never hold up to a good audit.

The commonality between all these people is they (1) have no connections to the K-pop industry or (2) journalism for that matter, and (3) can’t fathom the reality of what actually goes on. So when they hear about something that they personally find distasteful — or don’t understand — they say it was fabricated. They create fantasy scenarios that the object of their rancor must be hanging out with all the other people that they despise. This is how they justify their dull-witted hatred.

And not for nothing, but do fansplainers like the above truly believe that life never changes over time? What kind of brain addled person actually believes that a company’s policy will remain the same in perpetuity? Is it not in the realm of possibility that a corporation can say one thing and then later change their stance?  Is it not plausible that a company may have — shudders! — lied?

Of course it is. 

Thankfully, the majority of people online aren’t delulu and are more than capable of figuring things out without some busybody ordering them around. Like this BTS fan (below) who essentially told the wannabe boss of all Baby ARMYs to stuff it. (Baby ARMYs refers to new fans of BTS.)

I will close with one last thought. When these types of things happen, quite a few people assume that these trolls are children. After all, who else would be so vile and dense, right? But it’s my contention that the majority of online antagonists are immature adults. Why? Children simply do not care about anyone’s opinions about pop culture other than their own.

And that’s exactly how it should be.

ETA: Right after I published this article, I saw this comment from a reader who read my review from … 2005! … and decided to share his ill-formed racist and offensive thoughts: