This is a journey that started five years with this post. Five years is a long time, considering that when a person makes a site, they're very likely to give up very quickly. I had tried making sites when I was in middle school when GeoCities or whatever the fuck it was called was out. I probably gave up after three hours.
Many people also said that I would go the route of allkpop and change the site drastically in order to derive ad revenue from the site after we got a surge in readership in the summer of 2011. However, I found other avenues to do other things. Along the way, I have seen people write that they want Google to close down AKF (Google owns Blogger if you didn't know). At this moment, I knew that whatever happened, I would be on the winning side. If crazy fangirls were successful in getting Google to close down AKF because the fangirls don't agree with what is written on the site, wouldn't that prove the whole point as to why this site exists? Obviously it never happened, so I'm still free to write what I want.
As a trip down memory lane, feel free to read some of these articles:
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Now I'll let some of the other authors chime in.
아저씨 says:
We originally started this site after often being forcefully pushed out of other communities for simply having normal opinions. Either from having both positive and negative things to say, or from not having the utmost purity in our affections for idols. There was this sort of all-pervading notion that everyone was trying to create a non-reality, or something better than real, and that being human in reaction to kpop was somehow spoiling it. That is, of course, absurd, and so we created this site as a reality check.
While in some respects we humans do indeed try to create a vision of a more beautiful reality with kpop, we are still just normal humans doing so. We get tired of mundane sounds, so we make nice music. We get tired of ugly ass fuckers on the street, so we get the hottest people to be idols. We get tired of polite moderation of expression, so we make elaborate dances and boldly expressed sentiments of all types. Kpop reaches into some things we all feel and desire and puts them on display, so it is kind of this part of ourselves we might stuff away and forget otherwise; it reminds us of some portion of what makes us human. That's great, but we can't confuse those who live out this manifestation as the source of all that stuff. It's really just stuff that's in all humanity, and the product itself is just normal human stuff.
For whatever reason we often want to pretend it is more, or should be more, or at least respected as more, or that there is some classification other than normal human expression it must live up to being. The thing is, there is a matrix of overlapping gradients and wherever you fall on it is still legitimately human and no greater than human and no less. We don't use van Gogh to wallpaper our houses, but interior design is still legitimate. We may not intentionally consider the artistry that goes into a hammer, but if you buy a hammer you'll intuitively think one is a bit awkward and another is wonderfully crafted. In these ways, art expresses itself through humanity in all ways. Sometimes deep, sometimes shallow, sometimes personal, sometimes deliberately crafted for a purpose. Different forms can be appropriate for different contexts of life and mind and mood, and none of it is lesser than the rest aside from how we receive it.
It's odd that people would forget these basic facts, that they would think kpop needs to be something specific or that they would confuse the performers themselves with the beauty or meanings of life the performers are merely trying to convey through their performances, but it does happen. So for both of these issues, this site exists as a reality check. Sometimes that is by just providing honest normal human opinions without any dressing, sometimes it is from deliberate trolling or mockery, but the basic idea is reminding ourselves that kpop is to serve people, people aren't to serve kpop. As we go on in years past the initial big hallyu wave, it may be more and more needed as people get used to kpop and start thinking of some specific way it is "supposed to be" rather than just being a world of potential for human expression to pour out into the world however it may for people to experience however they may.
I think in some ways we have continued this site even to be that check to each other as authors, and we have never been afraid to pull in new writers for fresh perspectives and give us more excuses to be lazy. I kind of want to apologize for that, but then again being lazy about making up opinions when you just want to jam to some good shit is kind of keepin it real, so maybe I'm not sorry that I haven't been up to date with all the latest bullshit spin as much. But while we may all have different feelings about all the different kpop out there, and while we may have many standing disagreements, I think we can all agree on two things: Yuna's boobs.
Yep. Those are her boobs. I love kpop.
Kpopalypse says:
Fany Pack says:
I appreciate that AKF gives people a place to post a variety of opinions and not immediately get shouted down by batshit crazy fans. Kpop needs a place like that. We can enjoy a group or a song by its merit and not merely because we are part of said group's fan cafe and thus financially and morally obliged to support the group no matter how half-assed the majority of their comebacks have been for the past four-plus years.
It's been fun discovering new music with our readers and collectively experiencing kpop's biggest moments, like this one:
