In this essay, author Giaae Kwon shares her early experiences with K-pop fandom online. Kwon’s debut essay collection I’ll Love You Forever — about K-pop and Korean culture — is now available for purchase.
When I was an adolescent in the late 1990s, my parents got dial-up internet. I would come home after school, dump my stuff on the floor of my room, and load up AOL, filling the room with the familiar clang and twang of the family computer connecting to the Internet, until that familiar male voice announced, “You’ve got mail.” I’d check my email, see if anyone I knew was on AIM, and go straight to Soompi.com because I had to hurry — I was in a time crunch because I needed to get my Internet time before my mom came home from work and kicked me off because she needed the phone line.
Soompi was founded in 1998 by Susan Kang, a recent graduate of UCLA and fellow K-pop fan. In a 2010 interview with The Korea Times, she said, “As a recent fan of both K-pop and the Internet (AOL was all the rage), I noticed that there weren't any English-language sites devoted to Korean pop music or TV dramas, so I purchased a book called Make Your Own Website with Microsoft Word '97, and the rest, as they say, is history.”
I don’t think Kang expected the website to grow as it did or anticipated the role it would play in advancing the Hallyu Wave, as the phenomenon of Korean media culture cresting globally came to be called, among the English-speaking faction of the world, but Soompi played a significant role in my life as a second-generation Korean American fan growing up in Los Angeles. I don’t remember how I found my way to Soompi, but the website became a kind of home to me during my high school years when I was a baby K-pop fan, known online as “tonyface17” for my bias in H.O.T., Tony An.
Growing up in Los Angeles, an ocean away from Seoul, I had to work to maintain my bbasooni — the Korean word for young female fans who follow idols in an especially passionate way — status. In those early years from the late ‘90s to the early aughts, K-pop was not nearly as widespread as it is today, a very niche interest that was deeply uncool even amongst swaths of the Korean diaspora. Not only that, it was also largely inaccessible. There were no dedicated Korean television channels available in the U.S. and the Internet was a fledgling thing, so we had to rely on physical media that would often take weeks to reach Los Angeles from Korea.
My family, like pretty much every other Korean family, would make weekly trips to the video store attached to the Korean market to borrow episodes of Korean dramas, variety shows, and music shows on VHS tapes, which would often glitch if we got an old tape that had been re-recorded over too many times. When my parents were grocery shopping, I would sneak over to Art Box or the music store on the third floor of Koreatown Plaza to buy CDs and magazines I would hide in my bag then stash in my closet at home. My family would wait until the hour every evening when the one Asian channel available on cable would switch from Japanese programming to Korean, so they could watch news programs that had been broadcast in Korea.
I didn’t have many friends who were as deeply into K-pop as I was, so Soompi became my haven. The site today is maybe best known as an English-language news site, but I remember it largely for its forums. It felt like such a novelty to be able to log onto a platform where I could squee with other fangirls I had never met in-person, discuss Korean dramas, and get gossip about various Korean celebrities. After H.O.T. abruptly split in 2001, I could go online to commiserate with other fans who were just as distraught, confused, and unmoored.
As the Internet became bigger and more accessible, fans with access to Korean sites like Clubbox would download drama episodes and music shows once they were uploaded in Korea, splice them up, then upload them individually to sites like Mediafire and post the links to Soompi for the rest of us to download, “glue” together with programs like WinRar, and discuss. Fans would volunteer to create subtitles, not only translating the dialogue but also creating the actual SRT file and timing the lines to match the dialogue, and they would also translate interviews, news articles, any media that could be accessed in Korea.
All this effort made for a strong communal nature to K-pop fandom in the 2000s. Korean entertainment companies might have been aware of the growing popularity of K-pop in niche communities around the world, but international fandom wasn’t a big priority for them. Many Korean fansites, including Naver fan cafes, required a Korean registration number to access, so there was always a divide between Korean fandom (K-fandom) and international (I-fandom), which still exists today, given cultural differences and ongoing language barriers. K-pop is still K-pop, a music industry based in Korea with its own unique sound and approach to pop music that are rooted in a kind of Koreanness, regardless of how badly a few industry executives (and some fans) want to drop the K.
In 2006, as Soompi started to feel too big for me and my socially anxious self, I found my way to Livejournal, a blog platform that became huge in the mid-2000s. Instead of today’s social media parlance of following people, on Livejournal, you became friends and engaged with each other’s content by commenting. You could customize your page’s theme and upload various avatars to choose from every time you posted or commented, and you had a profile page that you could also customize and populate with whatever information you wanted to share.
The thing that made Livejournal such a hub for fans, though, were their communities; you could start or join a community, where people (with posting privileges) could post news or gossip and everyone could engage by commenting. The comments could be threaded for discussions. One of the bigger K-media ones was Omona! They Didn’t, a riff of the Western counterpart, Oh No They Didn’t, but there were countless smaller, more niche communities — Livejournal is where I fell into Korea’s indie music scene, making new friends who listened to bands like Nell (when they were still indie), 10CM, 3rd Line Butterfly, Dear Cloud, and Casker. Several of the friends I made on Livejournal through these fan communities are still friends today.
I used Livejournal up to 2012 when I finally graduated from college, and the Internet cycled me on to Tumblr (before Tumblr sold itself to Yahoo, which proceeded to ruin Tumblr). Tumblr then led to Instagram and Twitter, and, over my almost three decades in K-pop and K-pop fandom, I have seen how fans will migrate platforms, but they will generally always find each other.
Because here’s the thing — these online communities were vital social hubs for me when I was a lonely adolescent who became an isolated, lonely young adult, removed socially from the world because of body shaming. Sites like Soompi gave me a space to connect with other people who loved K-pop and watched as many K-dramas as I did, then blogs like Livejournal and Tumblr gave me a platform to engage with fans, think more critically about pop culture, and develop a nonfiction voice. I learned how to be both a human and a writer through these spaces on the Internet, throwing my obsessions out into what felt like a void and hoping someone would see something I had written and think, Oh, hey, I like this, too!
Online K-pop spaces have unsurprisingly exploded as K-pop — led by the success of BTS and BLACKPINK — has grown massively over the last decade or so. What was largely inaccessible if you didn’t know Korean has blown wide open as media and entertainment companies in Korea have finally keyed into their massive international audience and started providing subtitles and translations. Now, we don’t have to go to the video store to get VHS tapes to watch our music shows and variety content; we can just go on YouTube. Idol groups tour the U.S. more frequently now, though fellow SM fans will share my angst over how we will apparently never get a chance to see Red Velvet or, for me, Taeyeon here, and international fans can now easily get updates via official social media accounts and interact with idols on platforms like Weverse or Bubble.
The main centers of English-language K-pop fandom have continued to shift. Today, I’m on Reddit everyday, browsing through posts on K-pop-oriented communities to see what people are chattering about. I check Twitter (now, X) because Koreans are still on Twitter, so I can get some insight into what Korean fans are liking and learn what slang they’re using. (Korean Twitter was also very useful for getting real-time updates during the December protests calling for Yoon Seokyeol’s impeachment and continues to be a good resource to tap into what’s happening on the ground as he currently stands trial.) I don’t really follow much that is K-pop-related specifically on Instagram, but I interact with other fans and have trained my algorithm to show me only K-pop content on my Explore page, teaching it to keep up with my interests as they have shifted from Bangtan to EXO and Doyoung from NCT.
Soompi remains one of the largest English-language resources for news related to Korean pop culture, and it exists now under the Rakuten Viki umbrella. The forums still exist, but they seem less active when I perused them recently, as I have not been a member there for almost twenty years. I refer to the site often, though, for news and updates because I still think Soompi is the best amongst the English-language sites available today in the coverage they provide and the quality of their reportage — and, yes, because of nostalgia. You always remember your first fandom space, even if it may one day be obsolete; fans will simply create a new one.
